Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Float Me Away, Floodwaters
34
Yuma, Arizona. Driving down the dusty main street — old cars parked in front of vacant storefronts, windows soaped white, signs that read: “We Have Moved,” “Sorry We’re Closed,” “For Rent.” A mannequin woman — naked and without hair, armless, leaning in the second story window of a red brick building. On the radio the DJ says, “Whut up, y’all! Iss y’girl Karen Kay! KTTI Yuuuuma! Gon be a hot one today. High of 105! Awready 80 and iss only 9:30! Keep cool, drink lotsa water, Yuma. Up next we got Reba. We got Garth. We got Kenny Chesney and Alan Jackson and Faith Hill. Keep y’dial on KTTI Yuma, Country Hits of Yesterday and Today! Don’t go nowhere!”
35
Don’t go nowhere.
36
I won’t.
37
Driving. My phone sits on the seat next to me — dead, black screen, cracked. Battery ran down two days ago. Won’t hold a charge.
38
Driving. The pillowy sand dunes and the sunbaked rock flats. The blazing yellow sun and the great piercing sky, blue and empty of clouds.
39
Stopped again. Dry wind cooling the sweat in my hair, rattling tin signs nailed to the old gas station façade at Crossing Snake Junction where I pull over for a fill-up and another bag of Gardetto’s for later. Getting back in my car my brain says, Don’t go nowhere in the voice of the KTTI DJ and then I say it out loud in my own voice to no one in particular.
40
Don’t go nowhere. Low hills — blue and dim like strips of faded construction paper. Jagged stone ruins of wasteland settlements.
41
Don’t go nowhere — go somewhere. Hot asphalt and silver pools of heat mirage wriggling on the road up ahead.
42
Sand dunes as far as you can see. Sand like yellow-white soft serve ice cream, rippling out in all directions, rising in great waves of mounds, dipping into smooth, soft valleys. Driving with my knees, I roll my red bandana into a thin strip and tie it across my forehead to keep the hair and sweat out of my eyes and I think of Bruce Springsteen. Bruce with his red bandana headband, his Fender Telecaster slung low, his cut-off sleeves and some sort of black leather vest, one fist punched in the air, singing about blowing away the lies that leave you lost and brokenhearted, about tearing the pain right out of your heart because you are done fucking around, you are done hurting yourself, you are fixing what’s broke. Out the open window I yell “Bruuuce!” and it feels good to yell it and —
43
— and out the open window it’s tan-yellow desert flats passing. Hills in the distance, absent of feature, boundless south to Mexico. I want to yell “Bruuuce!” a thousand times. I want to claw into my chest and rip out all that’s been darkening my eyes.
44
Rip it all out. That feeling where it’s like you’re excluded from everything. Where you’re disposable to the people you love. Where you’re here on the edge fighting like hell to break in, but you can’t get through. Where no one wants you to get through. Where there’s something wrong with you and everyone can tell there’s something wrong with you and they keep their distance. You don’t sleep enough. You always look tired. You say awkward shit that makes you sound stupid. You’re bad at keeping in touch. You’re weird in a way they don’t like. They smell it on you. They see it in your eyes.
45
Rip it all out. The hard days where you smash your head into a wall from dawn to dusk and stay up all night worried sick with awful gnawing thoughts. Rip it all out. Thoughts like But you will DIE someday.
46
Rip it all out.
47
Rip it all out. This stupid fucking book tour I’m on and three days ago in Austin where only two people showed up and they were drunk. They sat in the front row and talked to each other about how much they loved movies about whales the whole time until I adlibbed a part in the reading where I said, “I fucking hate whales, I wish they would all get their asses kicked,” even though I actually love whales, and have always loved whales. The two people got up and one of them said, “Bro you are the worst person in the world,” and they left and there was no one to read to.
48
Rip it all out.
49
Rip it all out. How you never know what to say and sometimes you say something and you’re like, “Ugh, no, why did I just say that! I am the dumbest person who ever lived. I should be in jail!”
50
Rip it all out.
51
Rip it all out. The weight of fear. The weight you’ve let hold you down like a huge rock chained to your leg, and you’re just below the surface of the water fighting for breath, trying to swim up to the air. You can see the light above and the bottom of your boat floating on the surface, but the stone and the chain hold fast.
52
Rip it all out.
53
Rip it all out because it feels good. It feels like a sun rising inside you. A lovely yellow flower opening like a gift in your heart.
64
Driving up into the hills of Devil’s Canyon before the descent down the pass into Pine Valley, the road twists through the Jacumba Mountains to the summit, boulders strewn on either side, the land hard and irregular like a great handful of rocks dropped from the sky with no semblance of design. My car struggles with the incline as big rigs pass and disappear up the grade, the road twisting through sharp switchbacks. Below me in the canyon crevice is the rust-blacked carcass of an old van on its side. I look down at it as I drive. My dry throat feels like the metal of that van — coarse, hard. No way anyone survived that fall. It must’ve rolled a quarter mile, tumbling end over end before it came to rest. Maybe it’s fine. Maybe they pushed it over the edge then walked away. Can someone push a van off a cliff? How many people would it take? Ten? They’d have to be weightlifters. Ten weightlifters pushing a van until it tips and rolls tumbling down the cliff. I imagine the weightlifters celebrating after they push the van off the cliff. High-fiving. Flexing. Showing each other their muscles. Maybe one of them is Arnold Schwarzenegger and he’s their leader. He says, “Hasta la vista, baby” to the van and his friends high-five some more, flex some more. Maybe one of the weightlifters claps Arnold on the back and tells him, “Don’t go nowhere” as a response to “Hasta la vista, baby” and maybe Arnold has a moment of clarity, maybe Arnold thinks, Don’t go nowhere means don’t die. Don’t go nowhere means don’t go to the place that is nowhere. Live, stay alive, pump iron until you’re Mr. Universe, make movies, flex your muscles so everyone can see, smoke cigars, take vitamins, crack jokes about killing your enemies in the action movies you star in, drink mineral water, travel back to the past and try to terminate someone, do a sweet family comedy that makes everyone cry and also smile, tell them “Hasta la vista, baby,” tell them “I eat Green Berets for breakfast and right now I’m very hungry,” tell them “I’ll be back” and then BE back, pump more iron, be a governor, be great, be fantastic. For some reason it makes me want to eat all the spaghetti in the world. I don’t know why but it does. I think of a giant plate of cartoon spaghetti with red sauce on top and a couple meatballs and a fork sticking out of it.
65
Driving.
66
Driving alone and you get weird thoughts and you realize it’s because you’re alone and you tell yourself you’re a complete and total dumb-ass for doing this tour alone and that no one should ever tour on their own. You can’t even point out interesting garbage on the side of the road or make up in-jokes or share a hotel room and order pizza and watch TV shows you would never watch in real life. TV shows about angry men who own pawn shops and yell at each other or ugly women who are rich or people who hang out in the jungle naked and fight.
72
The air is cooler now, but it’s dry — the kind of dry that stings your nostrils, that gives you nosebleeds.
73
I roll my window down, but it gets stuck halfway. The fuses in my car are dying one by one, blinking out like the tiny lights of a town at night as seen from far away. I try the passenger window. No luck.
74
Years ago, in the valley below, my parents and a few of their friends took all the kids on a trail ride. An hour in, the guide turned his horse around and rode back to us. He told us not to panic but he’d been watching a mountain lion on the ridge who’d been following us the past twenty minutes. He said, “I figured she’d quit after a while, but she’s kept on. Just turn your horses around and we’ll all act calm and ride back the way we came. I’m sorry to end it this quick. That lion’s stalkin’ us — she wants the little ones.” The lion, he called it a lion, and she, he called it she, wanted the little ones, which meant us kids. Quiet and orderly we rode to the stable and at the lodge the guide gave our money back.
75
As I descend into the valley I can smell the pine trees and the dry grasslands and something beyond that, something like water, a lake in the midst of the pines or a pond somewhere I can’t see. I imagine a mountain lion standing at the lakeshore, dipping its head down to take a drink.
Order Float Me Away, Floodwaters here.
