They say when you love something, let it go. I say when you love something, let it drive off a cliff in a convertible at 120 miles per hour to explode in a fiery ball of nail polish, coffee cups, and chewing gum. Let that shit really fly.

I’m going 60 mph, but I’m working my way up. The sun is hot out here; it beats like a demonic tom-tom. The highway smells like lizard fried asphalt. Caked red sand spits up prickly green bushes and cacti. There’s the white cattle skull; there’s the swarming buzzards; there’s the big rock. And Me, John S. Moneybags, driving headlong into the heart of it. Las Vegas via Death Valley National Park and other similar roads of egg-cooking quality. A pilgrimage through the heat of this spiraling world. Driving towards hell and back because I was getting bored. Taking a leave of absence from, well, all of it.

The radio stations here don’t preach gospel or advertise sales; they roll non-stop the songs you’ve never heard, tucked away and existing only to a desert culture that owes nothing to formal memory, only carnal. The frequencies tune into the wafting heat waves that blur the road into mirage sky trails: Cowboys 1866, those ghost testosterone riders; L.A peyote trippers a hundred years later. Lazy guitar licks smooth and whine from the speakers in static crackles. The human spirit, no matter how pure, requires moments of unadulterated exorcism and catharsis. It befits our circumstance.

You can’t help but think of Cowboy America when you are out here. It lives in the air like a muffled response after an argument. I took the long way through Death Valley for this. Before the spin of alarm-clock lights, rhinestone outfits and bathroom cocaine lines, it’s this sweltering dust day, this America. Air that chokes you and turns your skin into a leathered wind-burnt hide, not something you could pick up in the old westerns. Something real. If that’s not too big brained.

People say America is dying. Whose? There is no America, it’s a collective conscious, malleable and plastic. A term to be used interchangeably from situation to situation never placing its oil-slicked fingers on one tack. People yell and proclaim otherwise. They think their sweaty days are its heartstrings. Brother, drink your watered-down beer and reminisce. I don’t want to hear about it. Believe what you will but don’t be serious about it.

It’s all a jolted nerve; a live wire that you tap into and let run through you in its fresh and alien vibrations. Electrification that bounces you off the walls as your feet play Shirley Temple on the floor. That grit your teeth like a wolf and make your eyes pump water and inflate to Macy’s Day parade sizes, whistling “Hot damn” in TV-recitation lingo.

Holy hell is this heat something.

I reach into the glove compartment and take out the joint I hid there: a request for free ascent. Sparking it up, I lean back and laugh into the rear-view mirror that makes everything behind seem warped and fish eyed. Look at me now, Ma!

We are punching it. It’s time. My steel horse is a’ ridin. Man in industry, galloping pistons, motor juices spitting and sparking and screaming. The ankle tenses as I feel the ease in which the accelerator squeezes. I become aware of that space to the floor. The mere inches. The pedal begging me like some erotic fantasy. And with a wet spit and heavy lead foot, I take the piece of shit up to 70, 80, 100. Taking it where I need to go. To the heart of that live wire.

I’m spastic and paranoid. Area 51 talk fills my head with images of desert heat mines and pisshole-sized cameras dotting the desert grass. Is that a bird up there or Brian from Homeland Security with a RC remote? I need a glass of water and a cigarette.

Up ahead there’s a gas station. It’s been in my sights for a while across the landscape, forgotten to be noticed again, and again, and again. It sports old pumps from the 50s, Coca-Cola signs alight in a washed out pink. A slanted house covered in road signs and license plates sags and melts like a surrealist painting; it connects to the back of the station, shooting up wooden planks like teeth to a sky with no birds. Last call before death! Before you burn the last of your gas fumes and putter out to desert exile. One of the few spots, hidden across the country, surviving in inhospitable regions due to the pure necessity of their location. You either stop or you call the tow truck and risk being attacked by inbred mutants from the hills. They can charge whatever they want here. It’s pure capitalism. Some tan-hided, one-eyed, old man probably lives his days out here and has for over 30 years. Even a person with the lowest shred of justice won’t bat an eye at the price. They will give him a toothy smile and leave a few sticky bills in his hand. It’s just common human decency. This is the spot.

I pull in hard and wait a minute for the dust to clear before opening the door. My eyes itch. I walk up to the door feeling like I’m entering a saloon with each heavy-footed step that causes the boards to whine and creak, feeling like I’m going to battle. High noon shots and smoking guns.

I enter.

Inside the store everything is wooden trim and brown shelving. Every item is sparse and punctuated against the raw wood of the walls. Bumper stickers and candy bars surround the corner cash register. Warped straw hats and ball caps with slogans like “I survived the Red Eye Pass” and “Trucker Lover,” sporting old John Deer logos, hang withered on a metal rack. There is a small mini fridge with bottled water and discontinued soda cans. The owner sells cigarettes open faced but most of the packs are opened and half-smoked: offering to sell them by the stick. I’m in a time present and timeless.

Behind the items, leaning on a pseudo-granite plastic countertop that backs on a small kitchen which probably doubles as his own, is the One-eyed Willy looking owner of the station: called it. Next to him two slices of pie, a saran-wrapped brownie, and two dead flies spin slowly in a small glass faced display. I’d spill blood for a slice of cherry.

It’s a telepathic interaction. Daily, yearly, lifetime patterns home in like a movie soundtrack. Without asking, the old cowboy crosses over to the counter. He grabs a slice of pie and turns to microwave it. He takes down a dusty mug and pours a black cup of coffee. It’s too hot for milk and unheard of to ask. I cross to sit on a ripped red stool and we both fade out, assuming the positions that were decreed to us. I look down into the steaming coffee that tastes like metal. My body feels rigid but I’m trying to look relaxed, unmoving. He looks at me with both arms heavy on the counter. Staring down another waste-o, neo-hippie bastard, sitting goofy with pink-tinted glasses and a week’s beard. Attempting to head on some Thompson-esque exploration of the modern world long since dead at his feet; kicking the broken rig so it vomits up some dull-coloured concoction of peace flowers, acid tablets, and rock memorabilia that could be shaped into some rough proclamation that love is not dead! But that’s not me, that’s far from it … but he doesn’t know that, or does he? Is he reading my mind?

From my coffee cup, I sneak a slow, red-eyed gaze up at him. His sleeves are rolled up hard around heavy biceps and he just looks at me unmoving … and in an instance of gigantesque, shit-kicking American power, he shows me his soul.

He lost his eye in a knife fight. He’s bled, and fought, and roared through life, and it shows in his skin covered in prison and military tattoos, wind damaged, and dotted with scars. He is the land; it shows in his wrinkled blue eyes. He doesn’t need to explain. He has branded men, rode bareback, survived the desert nights, known women, has a trucker license and drove for years; he rides in a veterans’ biker group, does his own repairs, drinks hard liquor, and knows the peace that comes from being able to turn off his light-switch brain and coast off the deep carved furrow of canyon, trench, and hoof-trodden trails that exist in his mind. Everything is second nature, he is a god, a messiah, American shit, a film actor with a heavy jaw and slick hair. He wears a moustache, he has no hat, his pocket is a cigarette pack, his shirt is sweat stained and he knows it, and every once in a while when he can’t sleep, he goes out back, lights a cigarette, and plays the harmonica to the spirits of Wyatt Earp, Tom Joad, and John Wayne. His body is in imposition. He used to beat the shit out of other kids at school just like his father used to beat the shit out of him: belt, birch, or hammer? He puts himself where he shouldn’t be. When he drinks, he drinks it dry. Thick black ooze boring down the curve of his boney-cheeked face well the crowd screams hallelujah and ducks under the pews from automatic-rifle fire. When I see him, I feel a gag in the back of my throat like something has attached itself to the soft flesh of my trachea. I want to vomit and vomit, in self-mortifying exorcism, until all the contents of Me is splat on the operating table for investigation, rubber-gloved fingers sorting through the lot. “All the deceased has eaten in the last 36 years is a slice of cherry pie, a mickey mouse watch, a VHS of Easy Rider, and what appears to be an old ham radio.” I feel the need to scream, to cry, but it’s too difficult. I want to turn on a TV and stare into swirling colours until my eyes are swirling colours and there is no Me left to warrant wiping the drool hanging from my chin. I want to cut and crucify myself on the telephone poles in martyrdom to a freedom that looks like fascism with shiny, kinky boots, square dancing underneath my hanging corpse, while the Muppets sing, “Why Can’t We be Friends”, and the kids sing, “Spirit of the World” with a gun to the back of their heads, just waiting for someone to pull the trigger.

The microwave pings and he grabs the pie. I realize I have been staring the whole time. How long had it been?

I eat the pie but can’t bring myself to play with the red jelly like I normally would, pushing it around with the prong of my fork. I drink the coffee and my stomach feels like the Tin Man’s.
“That all?” he asks when I finish.
“And $40 on the pump.”
“Better make it $50.”
“Alright.”
I pay with cash and leave him to his little immortality.
My bones hurt and my jaw feels tight. I feel tiny in the old baseball-glove infoldings of the leather seat.
I spin out in a dust cloud back onto the road.

I’m back out on the pavement, hitting it hard. The sun is beating down. It’s … it’s bright, fuck where did I put my sunglasses? WOAH. Gravel spits up from my tires as they careen over the asphalt shoulder as I lean to look for my sunglasses.
Did that just happen?
Did I get enough gas?
Of course, I got a full tank. Fuck am I stoned. I may have to save the mescaline for later. Mesca, Mesa, Maize? like the old Aztec word for corn? Jesus, I know I haven’t smoked dope in a while, but this shit is getting me. They’ve changed it, I swear. Is this really what Tyler smokes when I catch him coming home after curfew? Are 13-year old’s just, like, handling this as normal? I really shouldn’t be driving. I take a swig from the paper coffee cup wedged into the cupholder. It’s little more than grounds and dark water at this point. Sweat begins to pool at the base of my back and an ache enters my ankle. No, nope, I’m not doing this, it’s desert time, Hunter S. Thompson and Dusk till Dawn time. I utter a superstitious prayer but I don’t know the words so it comes out in a loud:

“FUUUUUUCCCK”

My foot hits the accelerator to the floor and I’m flying like before. The haze of the weed is tunnel vision, the cacti and red rocks are lines of colour. I want to let out a massive howl: the big bad wolf is coming. My eyes flash to the rearview mirror, looking at my burning eyes, red as the Devil’s dick. I take a quick glance back to the fading mirage of the gas station. It’s half there, half gone: floating.

I grab the mirror by its base and rip it clear off the windshield. 80, 100, 120, running like a bat out of hell from whatever had come over me before. I throw the broken mirror out the window; my car is a blur past the shattered pieces of its reflection. It settles, or at least I imagine it, catching the glare off my license plate as I drive away, following me, wherever it is I’m going.