The Gas Station Diaries:

Spitting and gasping for air.


My first question was what in the fuck was that noise? It sounded like a pack of weasels with tin teeth gnawing on empty cans of Mr. Pibb. Was it a saber saw? And if it was who the fuck was running it at this time of night? My eyes slid open a centimeter. My second question was who in the fuck would drive a truck by my bedroom window with trees on the back of it when there wasn’t even a road in my back yard? I kept watching as more and more trees passed my window. This had to be one hell of a long truck. Maybe it was a series of trucks with a bunch of trees on them? This wasn’t making sense. Still more trees zipped by my window. I opened my eyes another centimeter. Had I done drugs before I had gone to sleep? No? I smelled smoke. My eyes opened another centimeter.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkk!” I yelled, as my eyes shot open.

Those weren’t trees passing by my house! That was me passing by the trees! I had fallen asleep at the wheel of my Chevy Cavalier. Sparks like flecks of illuminated dragon spit spewed into the blackness of the West Virginia night as my car ground up against the guardrail.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I yelled, as I jerked the steering wheel to the left.

Something else wasn’t right. The inside of the car was quickly filling with smoke. My first intuition was to suppose that the engine was on fire but then I noticed my shins were growing extremely warm. I looked down to see the discarded fast food bags in front of the passenger’s seat were on fire. My cigarette must have blown out of my mouth and landed there while I was dozing.

I frantically grabbed for my 42 ounce coffee and tossed it on the fire. The flames were out but now the car was so black with smoke I couldn’t see a fucking thing, nothing that is except the headlights of a Mac truck bearing down on my going about 200 fucking miles an hour.

“Mother fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckkkkkkkkkkkk,” I screamed.

I jerked the steering wheel right again and the Cavalier grinded against the guardrail like a great metallic whale cutting through a steel sea. The sparks were incredible and if I hadn’t feared so much for my life I might have gone on watching what for me was a private fireworks show.

“Whoa big boy,” I cried, thrusting the big fish left and then right. .

I began laugh feverishly you see for death was upon me, his bony heels dug into my sides, his dagger like fingers encircling my neck. “Blah, blah, Blah,” he screamed, spitting acid in my ears. In the rearview mirror I could see his steel rimmed eyes; how they spun like molten drill bits, coming closer and closer to penetrating my brain. I knew then, if only subconsciously that laughing in this demented way was but the only choice left to me for the other options were complete madness or the unthinkable five letter word that was spelled d-e-a-t-h.

I fought to pull the mighty whale back onto the road and as the great beast swerved once again toward the guardrail I noticed what looked like a discarded pasta maker on the side of the road. It of course was too late to avoid the wreckage and I plowed over it. One of my tires exploded.

“Ahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” I yelled.

I frantically stabbed at the breaks with my foot. Now sparks were coming from the left rear side where the tire had blown. Evidently I was riding on the rim. Stones and sparks flew from the tail end as the great blue beast finally ground to a most impressive stop in a patch of roadside weeds.

I flung the door open and grabbed the six pack of 16 oz. Budweiser on the passenger’s seat. Smoke billowed out as I made my way to the guardrail and sat on it.

My emotions had been stretched like the elastic waistband of a grade school nerd’s underwear under the duress of a wedgey by the class bully. I couldn’t do it anymore. Not only had I almost died in a crazed car ride but inside I was perilously close to shutting down too. How much could one human being take? Shortly this question would be answered.

I opened a can of Budweiser and drained almost the whole thing. I hadn’t slept for days and reality was something that at that point was an option not a constant. I didn’t even consider the fact that a police cruiser might come along, nor did I care.

The headlights of cars and trucks came at me in one continuous yellow stain that ate up the darkness and spit it back out in clouds of lung clogging exhaust. Behind me I could see the illuminated eyes of varying heights of woodland critter that were undoubtedly waiting for me to topple over backwards off the guardrail in exhaustion so they could consume me. The little bastards must have been starving for the landscape in this area looked as if a nuclear bomb had pulverized it, everything black and sooty, the plants growing back in twisted and unbelievable angles. I closed my eyes and thought…

Earlier that night when all the white trash were sitting on their leaning porches sucking in the viscous coal dirt skies, as the old Chevy trucks bounced over roads with teethed potholes--their springs creaking like the bones of old miners-- and as the trailer whores kicked up their dirty knickers for their nightly airing, I was south bound riding through a caffeine and nicotine gauntlet that sustained a four day sleeplessness. This of course was not a journey dictated by choice but a trek set in motion by circumstances pertaining to mortality and the edge. You see all this had been set in motion some two weeks earlier and all this time I’d been sleeping at roadside rest areas with a butchers knife on my lap; one couldn’t be too careful for the late night freaks rubbed up against one’s windows like rutting pigs, lewdness sewn into their tiny squinting eyes, their hoofs packed with the DNA of every toilet cruiser in the tri-state area.

Thank God this was my last trip home from visiting the West Virginia State Mental Hospital. The trip had been too long for me to make every day after school and work without sleep, something had to give and as it turned out what was almost given was my life, quid pro quo…nearly.

With a pack of matches from the Dungeon, a local watering hole, in Morgantown, I lit a Camel Light and inhaled. I looked up in the sky and it started to rain. The drops brought me back a little bit, reminded me of standing her limp body up in the shower, trying in vain to hold her up under her armpits. Me still in my work clothes, her in her pajamas. It felt like I’d been standing in that shower all my life.

* * *

Upon arriving at the mental hospital earlier that evening I’d sat in my Cavalier drinking the last of my coffee, shaking, and looking. The hospital was a new facility, placed on top of a small mountain, which was corkscrewed with a road the followed it from top to bottom. It was new but somehow didn’t feel it, like an old couch with a new slip cover. Or maybe that’s just how all these made you feel.

When I was done with my coffee I gathered my things and went inside. Every time I entered the lobby of the hospital, and this time was no exception, it immediately struck me as some sort of pagan tribute to the bloated pig god of Italian Marble; Shooter I believe his name to be. Hell, I think even the lamp shades were made of some strain of the veiny rock. It was impressive from an overdone standard, something a whore master from some third world shitball country would build while his people were forced to eat gravel and drank brackish puddle water.

“Cocksucker,” I said under my breath for no reason other than it made me feel good.

The opulence left me feeling weak like a pitbull that had been chained to a running treadmill for days without food or drink. I stumbled forward towards the semi-circular receptionist’s desk, which of course was made of marble. A black woman with huge cans in a light blue sweater sat behind the desk. She smiled and glistening teeth like pearls floating in can of tomato paste appeared in her mouth.

“Hi darlin’,” she said. “You here to visit?”

“Right,” I said. “I assume we can rule out cavity searches and background checks.”

“You know what they say about ass-uming don’t you?” she said with a chuckle.

“Right,” I said, lifting only one side of my mouth to smile. I would have given her full smile, she seemed nice enough but I was running on a precious little reserve of energy.

Next to the receptionist’s desk, in a metal folding chair, sat a security guard with what looked like a gallon can of mace hanging from his Batman like utility belt. He shifted his weight in the chair, which was considerable, and the thing groaned like the Tin Man might if he was constipated and trying to force one out. The nametag on his shirt said: Chief.

“Let me see what’s in that bag,” Chief said, grabbing at me with his pudgy ham gravy soaked fingers.

He was an odorous SOB, with a tang to him that watered the eyes and seemed to be a combination of the sweat squeezed from a dirty sweat sock, copious amounts of Brute aftershave, and some rather toxic industrial cleaner. If would market this scent I would have called it Ode De Dirty Feet.

“It’s just magazines,” I said, stepping back. I hadn’t had to go through this before.

“Give me the bag,” Chief said with a snort, which was not unlike that of a rooting swine.

I didn’t want to state the obvious but I was about to…with my fists.

“Here,” I said, tossing him the bag a little harder than necessary.

“Watch it,” he said, unhitching his thumbs from his utility belt and catching the bag.

I tried not to stare at his physique but it was like trying to pass a gory car wreck and taking at least a teensy weensy peak. I had to do it damn it! I know I’m pedestrian, common beyond belief but he was there and he was something to behold. He was stuffed into a pair of excruciatingly tight blue polyester slacks and the area above his crotch, presumably part of his stomach, hung over his belt like a sack of wet dinner rolls.

Chief rooted through the bag, flipping open the pages of each magazine to make sure there wasn’t any contraband contained there. A nail file?

“He’s clean,” Chief finally said, thrusting my bag at me.

“Thanks,” I said, rolling my eyes.

After making my way through several doors and another checkpoint I finally found her room. It took me several minutes of psyching outside her door, my daily ritual, to actually enter and when I did I found her propped up in a bed amongst several large white pillows. Her eyes were cloudy and still, as if the electrical current had been cut to them. She looked so small and so far away.

“Hey,” I said, which was about as poetic as I could be just then.

She smiled and focused on me somewhat.

This wasn’t the time to ask WHY, that I knew, although I wasn’t quite sure what exactly the correct protocol was. I’d stumbled through the last two weeks with the words, they hadn’t come easily but I’d managed and she seemed to be doing better.

“I brought you some magazines,” I said, handing the bag to her. She took it and laid it on the bed in front of her and then beckoned me toward her. We hugged. Emotions were swirling in my chest like the foamy water in a hotel hot tub. I could smell the nicotine from the two packs a day of cigarettes I’d been smoking seeping from my skin.

”Ahum.”

I turned. It was the fat security guard Chief. The cocksucker had followed me with his foldout metal chair and had positioned himself squarely in front of the door.

“What’s the deal with him?” I asked turning to her.

“I told them that if they didn’t release me I was going to have you break me out of here,” she said.

“Right, that would explain his interest in me. I was worried there for a bit. I thought he might like my choice in cologne.”

On her forehead I saw the tiny green veins pulsing; memories squishing in and out of her head? Her up there, us up there, all of it swirling down the shower drain, all of it almost erased.

“Turner, how’s it going,” Chief said to a thinner balding security guard that had joined him with a foldout chair.

“It’s going fine,” Turner said.

I could tell right away that Turner was a boot licker, a third string nothing on Chief’s short list of friends. Chief was a loser and he needed someone to make him feel big, someone to fill his coffee cup and kiss his fat ass whenever he made some mundane political statement like, “People kill people, guns don’t kill people.” Ho fucking hum. He was the kind that searches for power in the only kinds of places where he can get it, in a place like this where the adversary is drugged to the gills and incompetent.

“I sure could get into a fight tonight,” Chief said as he cracked his knuckles. It was a horrible haunted house sound like brittle wood on a rotted staircase giving way under your weight.

“I ought to rip that cocksucker’s head off,” I grumbled.

“No, babe don’t do it they’ll throw you in here too,” she said.

She was right. They’d strap me to a board and pump me full of elephant tranquilizers. They’d have to because there was no way I wouldn’t kick the living shit out of both of these backwoods goons.

“Yeah, I sure feel like a fight tonight,” Chief said again, his fat lips growing redder as his blood pressure increased.

“Babe, don’t let them take me away,” she said.

“Don’t worry I’m here for you,” I said.

“Hi there,” a doctor said, said as he entered the room.

He was wearing a white coat which was a bit dirty and looked somewhat disheveled but who was I to tell a nut cracker how to crack nuts? I was just a bystander.

“There are some weirdos in here aren’t there?” the doctor said, looking down at his clipboard.

“Yeah, there are,” I said, relieved that someone was finally admitting it. “Some of the staff seem as bad as the patients.”

“I want to get out of here,” she said.

“Well, you certainly seem sane enough to me. What was it they brought you in here for?” the doctor asked. He was bald on top but had greasy red bozo hair on the sides which he twirled.

“A drug overdose,” she said softly.

“So you’re not like the others, that’s good. Everyone else in here is crazy…do you see that Picasso on the wall?”

We both gazed at the picture which was a landscape and definitely not a fucking Picasso. I looked into the “doctor’s” eyes and I saw two lemons and a cherry. This guy wasn’t a fucking doctor he was a patient. I stepped between him and her.

“Edward, what are you doing with Doctor Casper’s jacket on?” a nurse said as she walked into the room with a tray.

“I’m trying to worn these people so you don’t try to take over their minds too,” he said backing up.

Chief stood but he wasn’t staring at the loon claiming to be Picasso’s son. He was looking at me. With every fiber in my body I wanted to strike that cocksucker but I wasn’t going to get thrown in a padded cell and loaded up on Thorazine for the pleasure.

The nurse looked out in the hallway and motioned to Chief and Turner. They rushed into the room and jumped on top of Edward and then threw handcuffs on him.

“Real tough,” I said. I couldn’t help it.

“What did you say?” Chief said, as he wrestled with Edward.

“You heard me you fat cocksucker,” I said.

She grabbed my arm and pulled me towards her on the bed. I brushed her long brown hair out of her eyes.

“Don’t say those thigns,” she said, pulling on my arm.

She couldn’t have me go down too. I was her island, without me she would be cut adrift at sea with no land in sight. I looked at her face and remembered the charcoal they’d made her drink, the stuff that had made her puke up all the death that had been floating in her belly.

“What?” Chief said, acting as if he hadn’t heard again.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You’re going to have to leave,” the nurse said turning towards me.

“Leave?”

“She’s being transferred to Pennsylvania in a few minutes,” the nurse said.

“Okay, one second,” I said.

I bent over and kissed her on the forehead.

“I’ll call you as soon as I get there,” she said.

I nodded.

“Come on you have to go,” the nurse said.

I left but as I walked through the maze of doors and desks I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to go down.

When I hit the lobby Chief and Turner were waiting. I brushed passed them. They followed me out into the parking lot, where I was parked around the side, out of site.

“You think you’re some kind of tough guy,” Chief said when I went to put my key in the door lock.

I turned and slid my key chain back into my pocket.

“By asking me if I think I’m a tough guy one would suppose that you already think yourself to be a tough guy or else you wouldn’t be asking me that question in such a fucking condescending way,” I said.

They didn’t need anymore prodding. Both security guards started towards me. Chief reached for his oversized can of mace. I knew the cocksucker wouldn’t fight fair.

It was comical the way Chief walked, like he was holding an Easter ham between his thighs, it looked painful. I guess he didn’t see the pothole because he stepped in it and his knee buckled horribly.

“Awe God my knee,” he screamed falling to the ground, his can of mace rolling under a pickup truck.

His sidekick, Turner, fell to his side in such a melodramatic fucking manner that it seemed he was rehearsing for a Broadway musical.

“You okay, chief?” he asked grabbing his fat arm.

I took a step toward them.

“Hey, can’t you see the chief is hurt?” Turner said. He was shaking.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I said. “You two were getting ready to unload that mace on me. And then I suppose you would have beaten the shit out of me with those billy clubs and you want me to back off?”

“Ah, Hell my Goddamn knee. It’s done for. I’ll never walk again,” Chief cried. “I had a knee injury like this in high school. It kept me from going pro.”

The only thing Chief had a chance of going pro at was being an asshole. This was perhaps the most pathetic scene I’d ever witnessed in my life.

“Do you want me to help you inside, chief?” Turner asked, wiping at Chief’s forehead with a handkerchief.

“I don’t think I can make it,” the fat security guard said.

“Can you help me get him inside?” Turner asked.

“Help him inside? I don’t believe this,” I said.

“Come on he’s a good guy,” Turner said. “He does Santa Claus every year for the Salvation Army. He coaches his niece’s softball team--”

It was without a doubt like being dropped in an episode of the Twilight Zone. What could I say? It was too weird to just walk away from.

“Okay, stop, I don’t need a fucking resume” I said.

I walked over and knelt beside Chief.

“On the count of three,” Turner said, “One—two—three.”

We hoisted that fat fuck up and I damn near ruined my back trying to hold him upright. Of course I got his bad knee side, his right, which meant the brunt of his weight was mine to carry back to the lobby. It wasn’t so much his weight that bothered me but his odor. He grunted and pissed and moaned and made us stop seven times before we got him to a couch.

“I’ll call the ambulance,” Turner said.

“Don’t call a fucking Am—bu—lance you horse’s ass. Do you know how much they cost?” Chief said.

“Well how do you get there? You can’t drive and I can’t drive you there. At least one of us has to be on duty.”

They both turned and simultaneously looked at me.

“Uh, you know I really have to get back—”

“The hospital’s on the way back to the interstate,” Turner said, as he rubbed Chief’s shoulder. Chief swatted his hand away.

Yes, I drove the fat bastard to the hospital and then I waited for him because his wife was out of town. Afterwards he insisted on taking me to Kentucky Fried Chicken, where I watched him devour a family sized bucket by himself. I was still too hopped up on nicotine and caffeine to eat much and picked at a biscuit and a wing.

The whole time, as Chief rammed gobs of chicken in his mouth, despite the surreal quality of the day, the only thing I could think of was her. What if I had stopped off for a beer after class? What if her heart had stopped in the shower? What if the ambulance had come two minutes later?

“Are you crying?” Chief asked.

“No,” I said, “when you ripped that piece of skin off that drumstick some grease squirted in my eye.”

Chief looked at me and then at his chicken leg. He looked back at me and sighed and sucked the last of the meat off the bone and burped.