fumble for a cigarette

What a fucking day! I am so tired, but I feel that I must continue writing. I guess I should start at the beginning... This morning around 7 a.m., Dan Cokenhour and I grabbed the little luggage we had. I left the keys to my apartment with my trusted neighbor and we hailed a Taxi Libre to the border. After being processed by customs, Dan and I took the trolley to the 12th and Imperial station to meet this Larry character. Not thirty minutes later, as I departed at the station, a scrawny bespectacled kid in outdated '70s retro clothes one size too big approached Dan and me. We shook hands and said our greetings. "Hey", Larry said. "I'm really looking forward to this trip. Have you mapped it out yet?" "No...not really." Stated Dan flatly. "But, how hard is it to find New York?" I looked drearily around. "Where's your car?" Larry guided us around the corner to the public parking lot. I stopped in my tracks. "What a piece of junk!" I stared. Sitting in the bright morning sun was a multicolored '73 Oldsmobile. It had huge rust holes in the sides the size of my fist. The floorboards were missing and patched with cardboard, so if your feet went through the flimsy floor you would be doing that Flintstones thing on the freeway. The car was over-crammed with smelly junk and reeked of gasoline and burnt oil. Larry stood next to it, smiling. "Hey, it may not look like much...but'll get us to where we are going." Dan smiled and I rolled my eyes and just groaned. The Millennium Falcon it was not. Dan piled into the back seat, horizontal because there were no floorboards back there either. I rode shotgun. On this brisk day in December, we pulled out of the parking lot, and from a loud bang from the rattling muffler we were off. Weaving along the highway outside San Diego, we three joked and made light the situation. Finding Interstate 8, we decided to go east to Tucson, Arizona, and check out the scene there. Larry sat behind the wheel like a lazy predator. I asked him what his story was and he told me. He was aimlessly touring around the southwest from Ohio. He had a fascination with Indian artifacts and their culture. The fact that he was only nineteen made me wary. Or so he claimed. He had jet-black curly hair and looked like an emaciated junkie. I don't trust him Eventually, the trees of California gave way to countryside that was flat and arid. Beautiful mountain ranges feathered the horizon. Old cars rusted black among the brush, brick houses crumbling under corrugated iron roofs housing nothing but rattlesnakes and ghosts of cowboys from the frontier days. We passed long-forgotten gas stations rusting from decades in the unrelentless sun. Rest stops that varied from one western theme to the next; adobe, tee pees, forts. One thing that was constant was paper bags. The brown paper bag which is a staple of the highway vista is the only thing that civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place with nature. Crumpled into a wad of wrinkles, like the fossilized brain of a dryad; looking weathered; seeming slow and rough enough to be the product of natural evolution; its brownness the low-key brown of potato skin and peanut shell--dirty but pure; it's kinship to tree obscured by the crush of industry; absorbing the elements like any other organic entity; blending with rock and vegetation as if it were a burrowing owl's doormat or a jack rabbits underwear; a No. 8 Kraft paper bag lay discarded on the plains of West Arizona--and appeared to live where it lay. Of course, the brown paper bag faced extinction to its bastard cousin, the plastic shopping bag. And I won't go into the evils of that chemicalized demon and its contribution to nature. Along the way and very early on in this trip, Larry had become a very annoying person. Maybe it was his high-pitched nasal voice or the obvious lies he continued to spill forth. whatever it was it was irritating. Dan continued to make jokes of his mental illness and the fact that he left his medication back in Tijuana. "More lithium, please!!" Dan would yell out in intervals and then burst into uncontrolled laughter. Traveling through the vast expanse that is West Arizona; out where tall birds wade in a lake named after Indians. out where the deer and the antelope play. Out where the starlight had no enemies and the badland winds had no friends. Out where the boogie stopped and the woogie began. Late afternoon we roll into Tucson, Arizona. Under the blast of a vibrant blue sky and dazzling sun, the pueblo of Tucson hummed with hipster activity. Coffee shops, used record stores stood plastered with garage band fliers and notices of art shows... ...a three-foot fag with a blond pompadour stands in the entrance to a hair salon smiling moronically, wringing small stubby hands, "How do?"... Drunken Indians shuffle through Ronstadt Station waving away attacks of phantom cowboys under the red flicker of the Hotel Congress, the hub of homosexual hipness...homeless teens play hacky sack outside the Mayor’s Office as El Primo peers through closed blinds with silent insect lust...Tall cacti and angular rock formations set the backdrop for a Road Runner cartoon. We checked into the Hotel Congress, an ancient pile of stone dating back to the frontier days. For fifty bucks a room, we get no television. The three of us showered and went down to the restaurant and had dinner. It seems Tucson is teeming with queers, or maybe it's just this restaurant because they are making up a good percentage of the clientele. While I ate my chicken salad, Dan ordered a hamburger and Larry threw down an order of pasta, Dan asked what was next. I suggested let's follow Interstate 10 to New Orleans and check it out, we have plenty of time. So, after dinner, Dan and Larry decided to walk around downtown and here I sit in the computer room in the hotel. I guess all is fine. I am having my doubts. But, unlike Lot's wife, I'm not looking back. I kinda miss Tijuana...but, I think I will really love New York. And I think I will really get a kick out of New Orleans; I've always wanted to go there. But, tomorrow we leave early, so's I'm going to bed...