At the first intersection it dawned on me that I wasn’t exactly sure if the
brakes worked properly. Benny flailed and tumbled in the passenger seat;
praying in a pagan language to ancient deities that hadn’t seen the light of
day since the Spanish Inquisition. The music thumped a fast paced base
line with emphatic pulse rhythms that hit the back of my skull. Assuring my
companion that all would be fine, that our path was divine and righteous did
nothing to reaffirm his belief in me; doubt was significant here, doubt
would be our downfall.
We hit the highway at eighty miles per hour. I commanded the vehicle, passing my way through
and around idle pedestrian drivers that were obviously too afraid of their
lives to face death proudly.
“Benny!" I proclaimed. "There is nothing to
fear. Trust me. I know fear, I live with it, have sex with it, its there when I
wake up and there when I take a crap. Trust me. We don’t have to fear.” The car embraced the emergency lane to avoid a slow moving Chevy with a white
headed Presbyterian at the wheel.
His knuckles were turning white. “When was the last time you took you
meds?” The question came with a forced endearing tone of someone who’s horribly
disguising his true feelings.
“I’m
offended. You seek to have me sedated and tranquil in a pharmacological haze of
blissful ignorance?” I pulled the car out of the emergency lane in time to avoid
the concrete barrier.
Benny
began to recite his lineage and saintly patrons in a foreign tongue. “That’s not
it. You know that.”
“You
don’t understand, Ben, my boy. This is freedom! I will not be constrained;
nothing is getting in the way of freedom! If you don’t like the ride, keep in
mind you asked to come along.” In my vindication I was neglectful of the slowing
traffic before us.
The
car protested as I yanked it across three lanes and it jumped onto the off ramp. I cut the wheel to avoid the cars parked at the light,slamming on the brakes, the car raked a two-foot concrete curb and bounced onto a parking lot of an abandoned
meat market. With one foot on the brake, the car rolled and Benny screamed his wife’s name along with the rest of his pagan heritage.
The
car painfully crawled its way through the lot, a metal grinding noise burst from underneath. The steering wheel, turned to the farthest point
right, yet, moved straight line. My eyes fixed on the landscape
before me; witnesses on foot and in their cars watched from a rosy
perspective of normalcy.
My fingers peeled from the steering wheel with sharp intakes of breath as the joints
and muscles were snapped back into position; I hadn’t been aware of my own fear
till now. The engine had cut off somewhere after the jump. Throwing the
car in park abruptly ceased the rolling with a harsh convulsion. A homeless
man, stood a few feet from the front of the car, stared at us in
contemplative astonishment.
I removed my cell phone from my pocket, throwing it onto the Benny’s lap, removed the keys from
the ignition and dropped them to the floor. “Call your wife, whoever, you’ll need
to get home.” I stepped out and realized a dark puddle forming beneath the vehicle.
“Wait!
What are you doing? Where you going? You can’t leave this here!”
“Why
not?” A sense of neutrality over the whole situation washed over me,
why not indeed.
“Because…”
“Don’t
worry, I’ll be fine. It’s a good day for a walk.”
“Wait,
this isn’t right. We’ll call a tow, they’ll pick up the car, there’s nothing to
worry about, we didn’t hit anybody or anything…”
“Benjamin.
Go home. Go home to your wife and kid.” I looked around, nothing looked familiar. I took to the road on foot immersing myself
in the traffic and humidity of exhaustion.
