The Damned Highway (5 page)

“Get him,” Koehler screams.

I hear Livingston's footsteps pounding toward me as Sherman crosses his arms over his chest and smiles. Then I notice that the door is locked.

“Gentlemen,” I cry, holding up my hands. “I'm telling you, this is all a terrible mistake. I don't know who you think I am or what I do for a living, but you've got it all wrong. If you'll just give me one second, I can prove it to you.”

Sherman's smile wavers. “How?”

“My identification is in my bag. Here, let me show it to you.” I stick my hand in the bag.

Sherman is clearly startled. “Don't you fucking move.”

“Relax. I'm not some gun-toting lunatic.” I pull out the can of mace and flip the top off with my thumb. “I am a different kind of lunatic.”

I blast him in the face before he can react, and then, holding my breath and squinting, I spin around and mace Livingston and Koehler, as well. Koehler, already red eyed, tumbles over again, and Livingston sinks to his knees, sputtering a string of profanity that would make a sailor blush. But I am not a sailor, and I outmojo him with my own inventive string of cursing.

“You pig-fucking, whore-hopping, jizz-stained little bastards better lie the fuck down right now. Move so much as a single goddamned finger, and I'll spray this stuff up your ass.”

Just to make sure they understand my point, I spray another blast at Sherman and then kick him in the testicles for added incentive. Wailing, he curls into a ball and cradles his nuts with one hand while wiping at his eyes with the other. Long strings of mucous drip from his nose.

“I've taken up enough of your time, and it's obvious that the senator needs your attention more than I do. Have a good evening. See you in the papers.”

First I run to Senator Eagleton. As a journalist, I shouldn't interfere. As someone about to be pummeled to death, I should just leave. As a human being, I should be thrilled to see a real-live United States senator stretched out before me, injured and helpless, his brain full of guacamole. But I am a merciful god above all else, so I do the only thing I can—push the two tabs of Kirby acid I have with me between his lips. Eagleton's aura instantly explodes in a coruscating nimbus of pure power and freakish black dots. He grins like a typewriter. Then I dash past Sherman, unlock the door, and run out into the bar. The bartender looks at me in alarm and starts to say something, but again I flip her the finger, barrel past her, and plunge out into the night. It isn't until I'm outside that I breathe again, and my lungs are on fire. The mace residue stings my cheeks, but I know better than to wipe at it. A horn blows, and then I hurry to the bus. I'm the last one to get on.

“Thought you might not be joining us,” the driver says as the doors hiss shut behind me.

“I thought so, too, but then I realized how much I'd miss your company.”

“You're an odd one, Lono.”

“You have no idea.”

I wonder for a moment how it is that the driver knows my new name. Did I reveal it while in Jack Kirby's trip? It is possible, I suppose, but anything is possible. Hitler's remnant Nazis could still live in Argentina and bus-station bums could have tentacle appendages and United States senators could get electroshock treatments in the back rooms of backwater bars. The world is a strange place, and it grows stranger every day. If one is attuned, one often gets the sense that some new rough beast, giant and bulbous and smelling of madness, surges to the surface rather than shambling toward Bethlehem to be born. In such a world, I can be forgiven for not remembering whether or not I gave the driver my new pseudonym.

The engine revs and the gears groan as we slowly start to roll forward. I take my seat, ignoring the suspicious glances from the other passengers. The Hispanic girl shrinks in her seat as I walk by, and I can't really blame her.

We pull away and too late I realize that I've made a bad mistake. I shouldn't have told the Committee to Re-elect the President about the bus. They already know my true identity. Now they know where I'm going, as well. Making up my mind to get off at the next stop, I lean back in my seat, pull out my Moleskine, and begin to write.

——

There is no such thing as America, no such child born in a mansion on a hill. There aren't even two—not a white America and a Negro one, or an America of wealth and privilege held aloft by an America of the poor and twitchy. And even the dark wisdom of Richard Milhous Nixon, with his understanding of the great chasm between North and South, has an incomplete picture of this great experiment. Great, but not grand. Audacious, not enlightened. America is a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together from the corpses of the damned. The slaves of the Middle Passage, the raped and ruined red man, wave after wave of half-wit imbecile Scots-Irish not too different than the cats I've met so recently, swarthy Mediterranean inbreds, the insectoid masses of Asia, an electrified conglomeration lurching and howling in the frigid night. And in the abnormal brain of his monster, one so recently liberated from the brainpan of a criminal lunatic, there sits a single figure, a homunculus behind a bank of levers and switches, who dominates and controls us all. Nixon believes himself to be this entity, but he is not. Every candidate from the diabolical George Wallace of Alabama—he who perspires tear gas doesn't so much call Brazil nuts nigger toes as he actually chews on the feet of little black babies—to the surprisingly effective but ultimately delusional Patsy Mink wants their turn behind the console. But that is not a throne meant for a human posterior.

And speaking of posteriors, I met an old man in New York once in saner times, when tribes worshiped their totems of Democrat or Republican with an unwavering loyalty. When brats died to confront the swastika, and didn't even think to raise a peep for a part of the great franchise when they got back home. When the youth of America was as placid as a brace of well-dressed Negroes. He was an immigrant who came here as the free-range catamite of a Greek steamship, who painted the Brooklyn and Verrazano Bridges, and then sent back to his native island for a wife. Up to Massachusetts to find his version of the American Dream—a home, a fishing boat, and a little business of his own. The man was unused to the sheets of black ice that coated the region six months out of the year.

He broke his hip the hard way, against the thousand-ton anchorage of a suspension bridge, and now he slung hash at a luncheonette, huffing like a steamship as he moved from one end of the counter to the other, from the ever-rotating display of pies to the coffee machine—and why were they kept at opposite ends of the room? “The Jews,” he said by way of answer. “They arrange things to make us Greeks suffer.” He was good company, and as we shared pulls from my flask he told me a story of his native tribe: Once the parts of the human body had an argument over which was the most important. “It is I,” said the eye, “for without me the world would be unknown to us.” “No, it is I,” said the hand. “I manipulate the world and make it so that we can live, and eat, and prosper.” “You're all wrong,” said the brain. “I am the most important. I interpret the input of the eye, and I direct the hand. I am the most important part of the body.”

Then said the asshole, “Actually, it's me. I'm the most important part of the body. None of you would work or even dare move without me.” Shocked, the hand reached down and slapped the ass hard for its impertinence. And then the asshole shut down. The days crawled by. The hands clenched and twitched from the pain of the backlog of shit. The eyes watered and squeezed shut, trying without result to evacuate the body of its increasingly fetid waste through the trivial power of blinking. And the brain found itself choked by pain and anxiety, driven to distraction and finally unable to even think. Not one equation, not a single strategy to gather food or gain the sexual attention of another body, nothing at all except for one statement that seared the spine—we surrender!

And then the asshole gave way. And it accepted the surrender of the body, or most of it anyway. To the hand it said, gloating, “And because you struck me, from now on, you are the part of the body in charge of wiping me clean!”

This is what we were reduced to, he and I. Him, in a food-service establishment, telling stories of talking assholes puckering and unpuckering in a mockery of human speech, and me, stirring through my chowder and wondering if I'd seen something in the chopped meat and veg that no man should ever see.

After Kent State, after Watts, after Innsmouth, I cannot help but wonder if the old man had it right. The brain cannot be tamed; it cannot be accommodated. It can, however, be usurped. Will the Americans who live out here, in flyover territory, in Greyhound land, in the asshole of the country, be the ones to rise up? Will there be Freak Power?

——

When I'm finished, I am cool and calm and collected again. Tired, though. Very tired. Writing often has that effect on me. I do my best work at night, sequestered in my kitchen and surrounded by a cacophony of television and music and copious amounts of alcohol and caffeine. The bus offers none of these amenities, but nevertheless, I am happy with the outcome. My muse is a Kentucky racehorse, sleek and slick and powerful, and at last, I am getting a grip on things. I see now how this journey should unfold. I understand where the search for the American Nightmare must truly begin. Until this point, I've only been sniffing around the ages, wandering haphazardly and waiting for the story to find me. But that is not how journalism works. Instead, I must find the story.

I've written before about the Ibogaine Effect, just a month ago, in fact. The story was a simple one—candidate Edmund Muskie had been acting a bit strangely, and rumors were that his handlers had summoned a doctor from the Brazilian rain forest to bring forth “some kind of strange drug” for the candidate. Ibogaine, from the plant
Tabernanthe iboga
, had been a part and parcel of the CIA's pharmacopoeia since the 1950s. The Frogs used it as a diet pill, all the better to oink away on rich desserts and buckets of red wine. Just the thing Muskie needed, really, even if his candidacy could have done without the scurrilous and utterly untrue rumors. The source of those rumors was, of course, myself. I created the rumor and then reported on the rumor. The Effect was that the rumor was quickly accepted as a fact and made the daily papers. That evening, news anchors in forty markets simply read off from the articles. In the bar at which I was drinking with the rest of the pool, my esteemed colleagues dutifully transcribed the material into their notebooks and then marched as one to a bank of pay phones to make the next morning's bulldog editions. It will be interesting to see how that impacts his campaign through the rest of the year.

Ibogaine is said to encourage introspection, to allow one to determine one's place in and path across the universe. The brave Pygmies were the first to harness the active elements of the plant, and they use it to pick their way across the otherwise-trackless jungle. To the Pygmy every puff of wind through the vines is a street sign, every leaf a traffic signal. My hope was, really, that a few of the more ambitious reporters would put down their bourbons, even for a moment, and try some Ibogaine themselves. It would only take one to dip his head into the Great Known—no
un
typed here, no
un
meant—and come out the other side ready to deliver a burning bushel of fragrant truth. But the little nerds just copied their notes from the blackboard and collected their A-double-pluses from their employers and the marks. Me, I got a good eight and a half minutes of fame, and a mission. I am untouchable now; even Nixon can't pull the strings like I can.

The media were too easy. I could do it to them again at any time. Even the marks that finally wised up would have to report something—
Deranged Lunatic Insists Mind Parasites Control Election Outcome
. One could prefix the words
deranged lunatic insists
to any headline, and only increase its accuracy. It's practically implied, and the reading public would hardly read the little phrase as a disclaimer these days. Success comes easy at a time like this; to really accomplish something I'd have to cut through the underbrush of ink and wires, to get to the real center of Americanus Assholius.

It occurs to me that Innsmouth is close to our final destination in Arkham. Yes, Innsmouth, home of the most violent and weirdest race riot of recent memory. Not an inner city, not don't-call-me-nigger-whitey rage, and oh so close to those dark New England woods where Muskie first went mad with wild tears, in New Hampshire, if not in Maine. That is where the American Nightmare truly started. That is the dark source. And that is where I'll start my own campaign, a campaign to save the world.

Weird Memories . . . A Final Judgment on All Mankind, Hastily Rendered . . . John Lennon Is AWOL . . . We Don't Have Negroes, but We Do Have “Cannocks” . . . Something Fishy around Here . . . Bob Dylan Was Right in “Ballad of a Thin Man” . . . Fun Guys Go to Hell, Revisited; or, I Dose Heavily with a Fungi from Yuggoth . . . Tentacle Sex with a Z-Grade Vixen

——

Riding this bus has me thinking of other bus trips I have taken. Political buses are the worst. Anyone can follow a campaign, month to month, whistle stop to whistle stop. But if campaigns are wars, and they are, the real story is in the aftermath, when strange things grow from the scorched earth left in the wake of the candidates' passage. It is time to plant a seed. Luckily, my bus has a bathroom, and it is a very long trip, so I position myself toward the back, where the smell is the rankest, and make conversation where I can. What I discover isn't very shocking in its presence, but its intensity unnerves even me.

“What do you think of McGovern?” I'd ask the barrel-shaped man next to me, a Joe Lunchbox type that supposedly makes up the base of the Democratic Party electorate in the Midwest. “He's the Democrat, right?” the guy might say. “Ipso facto, he's a cocksucker.” Then, as his eyes suddenly turn beady, he adds, “Are
you
a cocksucker too?” I ask about the other Democratic hopefuls, but he can only remember “that nigger lady.” Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, none of these fellows even ring a bell. I long for stronger drink.

And it's the same along the whole trip across the ironed-over territory of middle America. “Is it an election year?” one old woman responds. She clutches my arm with her taloned fingers as if I've just casually mentioned that the Schutzstaffel would be boarding the bus in a few minutes to measure noses and brows with ice-cold calipers for signs of Yid contamination of the local germ plasm.

Nixon is on everyone's lips. Nixon has a secret plan to end the war, so he says, and the people I've met actually believe it. Nixon had a secret plan to end the Negro menace, and that was understood to have been said only between the lines, said with secret words filled with secret meaning, and the people I've met actually believe that as well. Worshipful, trembling lips, eyes swimming with blood and honor: “Nixon will do it. He will, he will. We believe in him. Nixon will bring change. Nixon offers hope.” Hope and change are what the people want. The last few years have been tough—war, assassinations, unrest, bell-bottoms, the demon weed, and colleges full of unrepentant Marxists—but Nixon is finally going to set things aright. History is on the man's side. Lizard-brained LBJ scuttled back under his rock in disgrace, didn't he, “after trying to buy off the coloreds,” as one precocious nine-year-old named Annalee puts it. Her curls are mathematically perfect and her voice soulless. She is going with her grandpa to Ohio “to start a new life.” Grandpa sleeps heavily near the front of the carriage. As he snores, his dentures rattle in his mouth. LBJ is gone, vanished into the ether. Haven't all other obstacles to Nixon's ascension been
handled
so easily? Even a blood-soaked mobster like Joe Kennedy couldn't protect his kids, and then Martin Luther King was shot too, the Vietcong were just violent enough to keep their names in the papers, hemlines went absolutely crazy, everyone was tuning in and turning on, and angels wept. Nineteen seventy-two is just a bump on the carpet. Nixon will smooth that bump. Clean sweep, it will be a clean sweep. A fifty-state victory, and even the mongrel Puerto Ricans will agitate for statehood to make it an even fifty-one.
An even fifty-one!
That's what the heifer of a waitress says as she slams down a slice of blueberry pie, prefrozen but warmed on the spot, in front of me at one of the rest stops. Whatever New Math she learned, it doesn't make much sense . . . Was her geometry even Euclidian? Was there even such a thing as non-Euclidian geometry? As I eat the pie, juice leaking from it like dark purple ichor, I have visions of cities full of abandoned buildings with angles like something from a bad mescaline high. But never mind that. Hasn't Muskie already been seen broken and crying, weeping like an ugly woman? The many-fingered hand of Nixon is surely behind it all. That's what I'm told over and over again, and this is not something the housewives and bums and button-down young men I met on this bus trip view with any sort of suspicion at all. Not dread but glee. They are feverish and eager, their palms and loins wet with anticipation. All save one.

I meet my first Cannock at that same rest stop. He's made me somehow, in the manner of his secretive yet perceptive people. “Uncle,” he calls me, “glad to see you here. I dig your work, especially your stuff for
Scanlan's
and
Rolling Stone
.” There is no fooling him, I see, so I decide to confide.

“Keep it down,” I say. “I am undercover and behind enemy lines. Call me Lono.”

“That's cool. You were Lono before, though you didn't know it, and will be again.” He was drinking tea in his coffee and licked his lips wildly. “It's all pretty interesting, what's been going on, eh?”

I know what I need to do now: nod and occasionally grunt in a manner the Cannock will perceive as interesting and affirming. That's three-eighths of the journalist's trade right there—know that the crazies want to talk, and they especially want to talk to a reporter, and they especially want to talk to a doctor of journalism and fellow brain-damaged geek, for which I qualify in spades.

“They say,” he murmurs, glancing around to make sure no one is eavesdropping on our little tête-à-tête, and then plunging ahead as if he doesn't care, “that this election is going to be different. No more ward bosses, no more precinct-by-precinct street fighting, not even a single busload of old fogies being driven back into the inner cities where they were last registered. It's going to be about the young people, about issues, about the
Movement
!” He bellows with laughter at his own claim, slaps the Formica with a pancake hand. I notice that there are six fingers on his hand. “More like
bowel
movement, if you ask me, which I know you didn't.”

“Listen, Mac,” I say. “Get a grip on yourself. What's this all about?” Mentally, I weigh the saltshaker, the napkin dispenser, and the big glass silo of what is surely a solid hunk of sugar. My own coffee is only tepid—it would barely blind him if I flung it in his face. Unarmed and defenseless, I am a naked babe before this lunatic. I think about reaching into my kit bag for a weapon, but don't want to make any sudden moves. The silo comforts me; I pick it up and try to shake some sugar into my cup, but only a few wayward grains fall from the container. Mac doesn't notice.

“What they don't know,” he continues, “what fancy dancers like you don't realize, is how deep the grassroots grow for the right. Muskie knows, but we took care of him already, eh?”

“We? You don't mean . . . Canadians, do you? Those rat bastards.”

“Close, close, oh so close. You know the letter—of course you do. People like you feed on tears, but people like me, I'm the very father of tears.”

“Well, you did just say
eh
—I know a . . . Canuck . . . when one's right in front of me.” I grasp the silo of sugar for dear life. There is nothing more disconcerting than being trapped in a rest stop with a crazed Canadian. Especially a French one.

“Not
Canuck
,” he says, still giggly. Everything is funny to this man. Perhaps he isn't Canadian after all. “
Can-knock
,” he says. Then he knocks on the Formica counter, and even answers, “Who is it?” in a creepy falsetto. Then laughs again. But in a flash I know what he means: that infamous letter by Paul Morrison of Deerfield Beach, Florida, which claimed that Muskie had laughed when Mr. Morrison asked him about the plight of the American Negro. Hailing from distant Maine, where there are few blacks, how could Muskie understand the needs of the Afro-American? Well, some nameless aide said, “Not blacks, but we have Cannocks.” Every copy desk in America helpfully corrected the seeming misspelling to
Canucks
. Another blasphemous lie. The epistolary machinations of the Cannocks, hitherto a secret race of humanoid known only to the most discerning travelers of the New England backwoods, had simultaneously revealed their existence to the public at large and derailed the Muskie campaign, leaving the candidate a gasping, salt-spattered wreck and the Democratic machine a pile of steaming slag and the Cannocks themselves ready to launch a new offensive.

I put my sugar down. I notice that Mac has managed to crack the countertop with his most casual slap—the impression of his six-fingered hand left behind like the footprint of some long-forgotten specimen of megafauna. I'll have to talk my way out of this one.

“You know Morrison? I'd love to talk to him. Get an exclusive; maybe measure the lead content in his blood. I hear his penmanship is utterly awful.”

Mac laughs and makes as if to pat me on the back, but he sees me cringe and at the last moment just points at me instead. “Aaah!” he says. “Aaa-ha!” He sounds like an attic door. “Looking for a scoop, are you? Undercover, indeed! But you can't get one from me, not about me, anyway.” He points to himself with his meaty thumb. God, his mutant hands are huge—like someone took a cookie cutter to a baked ham. “I'm a member of the silent majority.” A chatty little bastard, nevertheless, he is, though I choose—wisely—not to mention this.

“Listen, boss, I am a professional writer. What's this all about? I have little time for one of Nixon's stooges. I can talk to the old man himself, any time I wish to,” I say, and I believe it.

“You think we're insane, but we're not. It's that gang on the other side, the Democrats. You and all those long-haired intellectuals are thinking of voting for them, and you don't even know who you're voting for yet—”

“That's the democratic process. We've come a long way since ward heelers and the animated dead shambling toward the ballot box.”

“So you think!” Mac says, his voice shrill again. “So you think! But you've read the
Berkeley Barb
, you've checked out the
East Village Other
. The Reds have it right, but backward. They think both major parties are the tool of capital—industrial capital for the Democrats, and finance capital, well, that's supposed to be us.”

Mac waves his hot-dog fingers at the diner. I notice for the first time that it has cleared out. Fear squeezes my heart. My bus is gone. Even the vending machines are unplugged. My sandwich has turned stale and green. For God's sake, how long have I been sitting here talking to this madman? I wish for a moment that the rest stop had a jukebox and that the jukebox had Bob Dylan's “Ballad of a Thin Man”—one of my all-time favorites—because something is happening here, but I don't know what it is, do I, Dr. Lono?

“But,” he continues, “you already know we serve another Master. You were very adept at figuring that out. What you don't get, my friend, is who the Democrats serve.”

“Oh yeah, who'd that be?”

“Moloch!” Mac shouts. I think he's about to break into a recitation of “Howl”—had the world shifted so far to the left that even that angry old poem was being repurposed for the Nixon campaign? But no, Mac has something more Biblical in mind. “You have lifted up the shrine of Moloch and the star of your god Rephan, the idols you made to worship,” he says. “It's all in the Good Book, and I don't mean
The Naked and the Dead
. You know the Nam was always Kennedy's war, and that rat bastard from Texas who had him killed—”

“Whoa, whoa, LBJ killed—”

Mac waves my words away. I find myself unable to speak. Juju, bad juju, swims in the air. “For whom do children die in fire? For Moloch. And you shall not let any of your seed pass through Moloch; neither shall you profane the name of your God: I am the Lord.”

“Wait, wait, who is the Lord in your equation? You're not making sense, man. And what's this about LBJ? He had Kennedy killed?”

Mac leans forward. “And had sex with the bullet wound while the corpse was still fresh.”

I find my voice. It's a proud American voice. “That's obscene. Granted, I've known Kentuckians and Puerto Ricans who would do such a thing, but—”

Mac shrugs. “He needed some way to occupy himself onboard Air Force One while they were sitting around at Love Field Airport in Dallas.”

The sugar shaker is still in reach if I need it. I debate reaching for my Moleskine. It's in the kit bag, along with my other weapons, but I'm afraid that if I did, Mac would lunge forward and suck the eyeballs out of my head. Instead, I repeat everything back to him, trying hard to get it down in my own mind. “So Kennedy started the Vietnam War as a child sacrifice to the hungry goat god of the Phoenicians, and you Republicans are just a bunch of happy Quakers looking to reclaim America for the Secret Race of six-fingered Cannocks. Is that what I should lead with, then? Write it up and tell the world?”

“It ain't what you think,” Mac says. “This ain't what you think at all. This is no scoop, Lono. This is a warning. Stay out of our business, chum, and we won't have to cork you. The old man likes you; he's been following your career since the back pages of
El Sportivo
. He's a fan.”

“If he's a fan, then he should know that I don't cotton to threats. Not from anyone, least of all some brain-damaged mutant half-wit from the foothills of New England.”

Mac leans in close. “Well, sir,” he says in a whisper, a whisper of paper sliding against paper, “if it'll make you feel better, you can put a bullet in my head. Reach into your bag and pull out your gun. I know you must have one in there. You've been glancing at it since we started speaking. Go ahead. Kill me. Work your aggressions out and whatnot. It's all fine and dandy with me. A new world awaits, for thee as well as me.
Ia, ia Cthulhu fhtagn
, ain't that what all the kids are saying? Well, who're you going to believe, me or them?”