Outside Chicago

[This is something that I’m developing for an open mic night and isn’t a straight blog entry or essay but I figured that you might enjoy it.]

When I was 18, I moved to Arizona for college.

And I managed to fail out in under one semester. The only things I had going for me was that I was working at a Jack in the Box and I was dating a girl who was 17 and still living with her parents. To say that it wasn’t a real positive time in my life is sort of an understatement.

Now most people, when faced with similar circumstances, will stop and reassess where they are in their lives. Not me. I had $300 in my bank account, which was a goddamn fortune, and decided that since Arizona wasn’t working for me, I’d move back to Philadelphia.

I knew I had enough money for gas and I figured if I ate Fritos and Snickers the whole way, I’d probably have enough money for food.

But the real brilliance of the plan was that I’d sleep in my car in rest areas so I wouldn’t have to pay for motels along the way.

If you’ve ever done any long distance driving you’ll know this is a disaster. I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour before waking up sweaty and disoriented. And it was clear that I was coming apart. Every time I walked into a gas station, and out there it’s all long distance truckers and Midwestern families, you could just sense this cloud of failure around me. More than once the clerks had to ask me to put on shoes if I was going to shop there.

In the 96 hours or so I’d been on the road, I had taken to, and this is really embarrassing, but I’d gotten so bored driving that I’d started masturbating every few hours just to have something to do.

At first, the novelty was really exciting. But soon it lost all excitement and like everything else I was doing it became really mechanical. Sleep for an hour, get on the road, eat half a bag of chips, jerk off, drive for another two hours and sleep again.

I was outside of Chicago when things got really bad. I’d just finished pleasuring myself and I was so tired that I don’t remember if I was aware that I was trying to jerk off. In any case, the napkin that I was going to use to clean myself up had slid onto the floor and I’d come all over leg of my shorts.

This is when I realized that the my CD player wasn’t just skipping but actually bouncing up and down on the passenger seat. And the steering in the car had gone completely to shit. So I pulled over to the side of the road, tucked myself back into my shorts and got out of the car.

I have to say that I’m glad I finished when I did. Because there was this six inch bulge in my tire. And I’m sure that in another few miles it would have blown and probably killed me.

So I’m standing on the side of the road, barefoot, just staring at my tire and trying to work through what I need to do when this car pulls up behind me. The guy gets out, takes one look at me and gently moves me out of the way and spends the next ten minutes changing my tire. And as he’s doing this I’m leaning against the guardrail trying to keep from falling asleep.

When he’s done he comes over to me and, I’ll never forget this, he puts his hand on my shoulder and looks me dead in the eyes and says, “You’re going to be ok. Just get to wherever you’re going safe, alright?” I nod at him and he gets back in his car and drives off but I could see the concern in his eyes and I realized how fucked up my life had become. Not just the drive, although I was so dirty that my hair looked wet with grease and I don’t know if he noticed that my fingernails had basically gone black or that there was come all over my shorts. Maybe he just figured that I had spilled a diet coke on myself.

But I realized my life was fucked. I hadn’t told my parents that I was moving and I’d just sort of hinted at it with my girlfriend. And standing there I knew that I was just running from my problems, not really solving them.

What was I going to do? I was on the side of a highway outside of Chicago and I didn’t have enough money to get back to Arizona if I’d wanted to. So I got in my car and kept driving.

Immediately I knew I was in trouble. I couldn’t stay awake and I kept drifting out of my lane only to be woken up by the other drivers honking at me. I thought about pulling over and sleeping for another hour but I knew that wasn’t going to help.

I was looking around my car in just under a panic when I saw the cigarette lighter. And I still don’t know why I did it but I reached over, pushed it in and pulled the leg of my shorts up as high as they’d go.

When that lighter popped out, it sounded like a gunshot and I immediately broke into cold sweat. But I clenched up on the steering wheel with my left hand, gritted my teeth together and slammed the lighter as hard as I could into my leg.

The whole car exploded with the smell of burning flesh and immediately my eyes teared up. I think I was screaming but I don’t remember and it hurt so bad I threw the damn lighter out of the window.

But I stayed awake and managed to finish the drive and I’ve always wondered if he hadn’t taken the 30 seconds to talk to me, if I’d have made it.

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