It looked bad in Minneapolis. The rain came like thick sheets of cellophane, and something ugly dipped out the clouds for just a moment before returning skyward. It would’ve been fine except Karen’s cat, Parachute, was doped up on anti-anxiety meds and decided to sleep under the brake pedal. No one likes crashing cars or breaking cat spines, so I did what I could. But when I tried to swat him out of there he just lazily pawed at my shoe the way stubborn, doped up cats do. America! Even our fucking pets flaunt their neuroses.
Following I-94, we were spared the urge to gawk at Rushmore and make snarky comments like: “Ah yes, the ballast afterthoughts of a dead-eyed nation” or some such bullshit that surely would’ve gotten us pelted to death with souvenirs. Beyond the craggy chasms and sprawling flatlands where T.R. played dress-up, we spotted fenced-in bison, a lot of them, staring dumbly into space. They looked resigned. Forlorn. Like maybe extinction wouldn’t have been the worst fate after all. So when we stopped for lunch, I ordered a bison burger, because, I mean, what the hell?
We ate crushed up diet pills and drank econo coffee until Missoula. It was the Fourth of July, and we celebrated with malt liquor and ooooh’ed and ahhhh’ed our way through city streets while shitty kids with rat tails threw firecrackers at our feet. When we passed out in a stranger’s front lawn, he didn’t even bother to wake us up. Maybe his hospitality got the better of him. Or maybe, like us, he was just too drunk to care.
“The West,” writ large, is a sentimental sinkhole, but it all seemed so apropos that final day, as I, sunburned with blood-speckled gums, had sex in a tepee on Vashon Island. When all was said and done, I would’ve surrendered myself to the Sound and floated along until the ocean swallowed me whole, until I breathed my last breath or washed up on some foreign shore, bedraggled and bronzed, limp with languor, ready for a new life, a new language and lover, but the water was too goddamn cold so instead I drank wine in a lavender field and burned some more.
