Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

By the time I pulled into this completely unfamiliar town my radiator was shot to shit and I was so stoned and hungry that I tried to get the woman at the Taco John’s to sell me a sour cream gun.

I was headed for a seminar at a tanning academy, and that notion struck me as more ridiculous by the hour (I’d been dispatched by my very-soon-to- be erstwhile employer, Baked to Perfection, located in the historic Ho-Chunk Shopping Plaza in my hometown). It seemed like I’d been following cement trucks across three states, and I’d been having deep thoughts along these lines: What in the world do we mean when we say ‘What in the world?’?

After I gorged myself at the Taco John’s I went down the street to a bar called Hung Mike’s. I ordered a beer and asked the bartender if he could recommend a “promising motel” in the vicinity. I immediately regretted my word choice, and the bartender looked me over for a moment and shrugged. “This is hardly a town for engaging propositions,” he said. Without turning his head in my direction a guy at an adjacent bar stool chimed in: “Don’t get your hopes up.”

“They ought to just paint that on the watertower,” the bartender said.

This was followed by an awkward silence, made all the more awkward by the fact that it wasn’t truly silence. There was music playing from the jukebox, and the juxtaposition of songs was jarring; Fleetwood’s Mac’s “Landslide,” for example, was followed by a Dixieland version of “Camptown Races.”

Jarring juxtapositions seemed to be a specialty of Hung Mike’s. On the mirror behind the bar was a sign: “Only a fool says there is no God, and fools we are not!” Right next to that, another sign, hand-lettered, read, “What are all you fucking assholes smiling about?”

When he brought me another beer the bartender jerked his head toward the guy on his stool and said, “Why don’t you ask numbnuts over there about the time he tried to eat the air freshener.”

“Fuck you,” the guy said.

There was another prolonged silence, during which the bartender disappeared into a cluttered office next to the bathrooms. I could see him in there hunched over a desk and furiously punching the buttons on an adding machine. This appeared to be an obsessive behavior rather than something actually necessary and productive.

And then what? I don’t really know then what, to be honest with you. The night sort of got away from me. Nights seemed to get away from me a lot in those days. I do, though, have a dim recollection of wandering up and down the Main Street of that town. I no longer remember the name of the place or even what state it was in, but I remember that it was one of those anonymous and dying little towns that are strung out all over the Midwest, places where Dollar Stores and tattoo parlors are the main growth industries and where half the women are licensed cosmetologists.

The main thing I remember, though, is that I woke up the next morning in the backseat of my car, which was parked in the corrugated tin quonset bay of a do-it-yourself car wash on the edge of town.