Chapter 12 On the Road

By Gary O'Brien


I took I-95 North and didn’t stop until the Daytona Beach exit, despite the fact the family van was low on oil and had only half a tank of gas. I needed to get out of the county.
I knew it was a stupid move but I used our Mobile Credit Card to fill up the tank, and put in three quarts of 10-W40. I was actually surprised the card worked, so maxed-out was everything else. Being a former newspaperman I knew that someone would immediately trace that credit card and see that I was on I-95 heading north. I vowed to use cash for a while to cover my tracks but again, I needed a good head-start and I also needed a buffer for the cash. The gas card was a way to preserve cash until I found another source. Aside from which, using the credit card I didn’t have to go into the Mobile where I would be filmed. Which was more likely, my face registering a hit with the FBI or my credit card? Take your pick.
Now you’re thinking, man this guy is fucking nuts; he’s a paranoid psycho! And…yes, you are technically correct, but then, so am I! You try it, you get yourself into a situation where someone thinks you’ve killed someone in a hotel room with all kinds of drug evidence and other shit lying around and see how fast someone isn’t on your heels. You begin to see how hard-wired all this camera and credit card trace bullshit is. If someone needs to find you, and fast, well then by God, they will find you.
But anyway, back to what happened.
So, I’m sitting there all panicked and deranged, realizing I am still unbelievably mad at Chris Naughten and it occurred to me, that I am just about as exhausted as I have ever been in my life under any circumstances. I went right inside that damned Mobile and bought a pack of Vivarin and a jumbo coffee, putting myself on surveillance anyway. I even looked up and waived at the camera like a dumbass!
Hi! Howya doing?
The man behind the counter must have thought I was out of my mind.
At the South Carolina Welcome Center - Georgia was a blur of bridges over marshes and quiet, pine-sheltered communities - I stopped and passed right out like a baby.
I must have nearly died. It was a sleep of utter blackness, a cobalt pit of nothingness. No sound, no light, no escape.
Soon though, awareness seeped into my inner view-screen. For some reason I was leaning against the steering wheel so I raised my head a little there was a sound, a tapping noise on the window. The Welcome Center was empty but for a few cars. The man speaking was off to my right, sleepily I craned my head around for a look.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know what I have to say to him to make him stop this nonsense but this is getting to be a bit much,” he said.
“Look, I’ll try, sir. I’ll try. That’s all I can say at the moment,” he said and tapped on the passenger-side window again with an umbrella, without looking back.
The fellow had a fedora on, and a wool suit. He was speaking on the cell phone to someone with his back to me. He clacked it shut and flicked a cigarette butt down beside his car, a Bentley Rolls.
“Charles, keep the engine warm. I won’t be a moment,” he said.
I leaned over and opened the passenger side door for him. Damn it was cold out there; it must have been 40 degrees.
“I’ve just been talking to the Lord about you,” he said.
I leaned back in my chair. I was about to be schooled.
“What did the Almighty ghost have to say?” I answered.
“He said, lose the fucking attitude, for a start, Gary.”
“Brought in the cold with you, this time, didn’t you Graham?”
“I like the cold. It’s refreshing. Keeps the mind clear.”
“What is it this time? You want to admonish me with a lecture: Don’t kill your fellow writer? We’re a little late for that talk, aren’t we?”
“Do you hear me blaming you for that?”
“No.”
“Did I even mention it?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know it’s your fault?”
“Well, I….”
“Look, don’t muck about with fate. What’s done is done, okay? It is the basis for continuing this discussion, understood?”
Lord, he was pissed off at me. I remained quiet.
“First sensible thing you’ve said,” he muttered, searching for another cigarette.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
I woke at Midnight, covered in sweat. There was a light jabbing into the windows, raping my eyes.
“Gotta move along sir, or find a hotel, okay? Not safe to sleep here,” the voice said. I rolled down a foggy window. A South Carolina Highway Patrol vehicle was purring beside me.
“Are you okay, sir?”
“Yes, yes. I just fell asleep. Needed a rest.”
“You might stop up the road. Florence is about a half hour. Nice hotels there. Can you make it?”
“Yes, I’ll be fine.” I said. I went to add to that but stopped, deciding not to elaborate at all. “Thank you, Trooper.”
“Not a problem.”
If not for my little chat with Graham I would have tried to over-explain my situation with the Trooper, lying about fishing at the Cape and whatnot, alerting him so much with my ticks and suspicious behavior he would surely have run a check on my plates.
Taking the Trooper’s advice I pulled off about twenty miles north of Florence. It was a Highway-town: the generic collection of identical franchise outlets that sprout like mushrooms everywhere a state road and an interstate meet. It greeted me with all its neon-hued glory. I had to find a Waffle House, Pancake House, anywhere to get a huge stack of pancakes, some eggs, orange juice and coffee. I felt like I could eat the ass out of a dead whale and still not be filled up.
I settled for a Flying J Truck Stop. There you could sit for hours, watch the news or play Internet bingo on one of seven computers in a lounge, or even get a shower if you wanted to. A gigantic television was set on CNN.
The announcer, a smart-looking gal with coal-black eyes, was blathering on and on about this and that for a while as I ate my pancakes before suddenly...
“Police are searching for a Florida man in connection with the death of South African writer Christopher M. Naughten.
“Naughten, 42, was the author of the 1994 Pulitzer nominated and highly acclaimed book White Kaffir, an autobiographic account of growing up in white South Africa and serving in the army during the heyday of Apartheid.”
“Forty one-year-old former journalist and freelance writer, Gary O’Brien, of Brevard County, Florida was last seen with Naughten, Friday evening at an Orlando hotel bar. He is missing and wanted for questioning in the case.”
“Naughten was found dead in his hotel room early Saturday. Police have yet to release the details of his death, which they are calling ‘suspicious.’ They are waiting for the results of a toxicology report from the Orange County Medical Examiner’s office before classifying it, a spokesman for the department said earlier today.”
“Lyzanne Schnedz, Naughten’s Literary agent in New York City, could not be reached for comment. In other news….”
I finished quickly, left the rumpled bills on the table with my order ticket. In Lumberton I needed sleep again, so I found a grocery store parking lot and passed out on the floor of my van just as the sun was coming up.
I had a fever dream of Cuban dwarves torturing me under a hot lamp. They weren’t just Cuban, they looked like miniature versions of Che Guevara, Raul and Fidel Castro. Small pea-green uniforms, hats, beards and cigars completed the affect. It went on for some time. They were bitterly angry at my lack of pc awareness.
I woke covered in sweat to a grey sky.


*
I drove around town for a few minutes until I found a Huddle House, or Breakfast Hamper, or Stop and Chuck, or whatever the fuck it was; it was out near the highway, okay? Sheees! I had damned near driven all the way to the next town before hauling myself all the way back out to the highway to find a place to eat. I wanted breakfast again. The rage furnace in my belly would be fed its due: pancakes, sausages, hash browns, orange juice and the like.
Sugar, carbs, coffee, and juice.
Oh my!
Sugar, carbs, coffee, and juice!
Amen!
Sugar, carbs, coffee and juice,
Oh Joy!
This was getting to be too much. There on the television above the faux fireplace, beneath the fake head of a boar, was a news story about me. If not about me specifically, then, about the events I had set into motion.
Apparently, weekend news of Chris Naughten’s death had the unintended effect of spurring sales of White Kaffir. You must have seen the news. Suddenly, copies of White Kaffir were sold out all across the nation. Book giant, Colchester and Rhyme’s were selling them at a rate of one hundred copies per minute nationally on Sunday evening.
Publisher, Hastings Inc. agreed to do an emergency one-hundred thousand copy printing to keep up with the demand. And now everyone wanted to know where Chris Naughten’s killer had gone.
Well why not? The media was there to serve after all and so it did. A press conference began on the spot, right there as I am sitting down to Belgian Waffles, a press conference began in Orlando, Florida, all about me. It was held on the steps to the Orlando Courthouse, a logical port in the media storm now brewing.
An officious looking young man, a Lt. Brian Richardson, Public Information Officer for the Orlando Police Department, took center stage before the mic.

Richardson: Good Morning. Ladies and gentlemen I have brief statement I would like to read. Saturday morning at around 11 a.m., police received a call from a lobby pay phone at the Marriott here in Orlando. A man on the phone told police he had seen a dead body in the hotel and then named the room. Arriving at the scene we found British subject Christopher M. Naughten, 42, originally of South Africa, lately of New York City, dead at the scene. Mr. Naughten is a writer of some note, which is why all of you are here. We believe the man who placed the 911 call was Gary L. O’Brien, a white male, age 42, a freelance writer and substitute school teacher of Palm Bay, Florida. We also believe Mr. O’Brien was the last one to see Mr. Naughten alive and may have been collaborating or attempting to collaborate with Mr. O’Brien on an upcoming book. Mr. O’Brien stands six-foot-two inches, and weighs approximately two-hundred-twenty five pounds. He has reddish brown hair, green eyes and a moustache. He was last seen driving a white Dodge Van, Brevard plates northbound on Interstate 95. I’ll take a few questions now…John?
The Press: We understand there was a manuscript found at the scene that they were collaborating on?
Richardson: Yes, I said that. They were collaborating.
The Press: What can you tell us about the manuscript? We understand it had some blood on it?
Richardson: That something we’re looking into… that the manuscript had bloodstains on it.
The Press: So, it did?
Richardson: Yes…we’re looking into that.
The Press: What else can you tell us about it?
Richardson: Well, unfortunately it wasn’t very well written.
(Laughter) Mr. O’Brien wrote this part of it, or at least that’s how it looks. He was apparently very angry at the publishing business, and at his literary agent in particular.
The Press: Did it have a title?
Richardson: “The Dead Agent”
The Press: (laughter, amid low, barely-audible amid murmuring) Hey good title anyway. Whose blood was it, Brian?
Richardson: We’re still looking into that, there were other blood traces at the scene.
The Press: Was Mr. Naughten, Mr. O’Brien’s literary agent?
Richardson: No, and that’s something we would like to clear up so I’m glad you asked me. Mr. Naughten and Mr. O’Brien were represented by the same literary agent in New York City, the Lyzanne Schnedz Literary Agency, of Fifth Avenue New York. That’s L-Y-Z-A-N-N-E, Schnedz with a SCH and a Z at the end, otherwise, like it sounds.
The Press: (garbled here, several questions at once. A female voice prevailed over the throng but only one word made it over the air) ….publicity?
Richardson: (smiles) No we do not feel this was publicity stunt. (laughter) After all we have a body, a corpse here, a very real situation (pause) a possible homicide, we don’t know.
The Press: (woman’s voice exasperated) That’s not what I asked….(many questions at once)
Richardson: Doug, you had a question…
The Press: Was Mr. Naughten wounded, injured…?
Richardson: Other than being dead (smirk) …?
The Press: …know what I mean, Bri’. C’mon….
Richardson: Mr. Naughten’s showed signs of having recently been involved in a fight of some kind, but no major trauma. A preliminary toxicology report indicates Mr. Naughten had quite a bit of alcohol in his system, as well as THC. He also had ingested several complex organic compounds. He was also taking a prescription painkiller which was also found...
The Press: What kind of pain medication was it?
Richardson: Oxycontin. Mr. Naughten was taking Oxy. Several pills were found.
The Press: Is there any truth to the notion that Mr. Naughten and Mr. O’Brien were lovers?
Richardson: Well, that certainly is something we will look into, something we would like to address with Mr. O’Brien. But unfortunately for us we can’t find Mr. O’Brien to ask him anything right now. There is a feeling that perhaps Mr. O’Brien suffered some kind of violent breakdown resulting somehow in Mr. Naughten’s death.
The Press: So in other words, he’s a suspect?
Richardson: That’s all the questions for now, thank you…
The Press: Has anyone asked his literary agent…?


But the question trailed off at the end. Lt. Brian Richardson, PIO of the OPD remained blunt and oblivious to it. Comment from the literary agent; something about that. Yes, that would be a juicy tidbit. There’s a good cub reporter, asking the question no one will ask.
“Hey, has anyone checked the literary agent to see if she’s alive?”
Damn that Chris Naughten. I could almost picture him laughing at me.
“Bloody awful; I love it. Look out world, Gary O’Brien is pissed as hell and now he’s on the loose!”
The report on CNN went on to detail the fact that police in five states were looking for me and that I needed to turn myself in; anywhere along the I-95 corridor, that’s where I could be found.
“O’Brien, seen in this publicity photo…”
Yes, that damned photo in particular; the obnoxious photo that was slated to go on the cover of Rape Flight; me in wool turtleneck, photographed at Indialantic Boardwalk in the middle of summertime.
How thoughtful they left the hotline number there at the bottom of the page for these good people to call, should they but turn around from the counter there and gaze into this booth and take a look at me, and I mean just one really good look would be all it would take since that particular publicity photo below the hotline number, also shows me sporting a three-day beard! Let’s not mention the fact that my van is sitting right there, the white Dodge, as described in the story, and the license plate there, is from (Where? Who? Can I get a What? What?) Brevard County. And look, you can clearly make it out if you look through this window here.
“Why, look Ma. There’s a Brevard County Florida plate right there on that white van! Something you don’t see everyday here in Lumberton, North Carolina. And why, looky here; Here’s a feller looks just like the man in that photo up on the TV screen.”
“Which feller, Pa?”
“Why, that feller that done kilt his writin’ partner, gay lover, drug buddy in that there hotel room down in Orlando, Florida?”
“Good God almighty, Yankee folk. What do you suppose gets into them, Pa?”
“Dogged if I know, Ma. This’un here looks like a sick puppy what hadn’t had a bath in ten days, is all I can say...”
“S’pose we should call the poe-leece?”
“Yep, them Yankees down in Florida. They deserve what’s coming to them.”
Well, at least I got my first national review of my work.
“…unfortunately it’s not very well written…” the bastard said. Right there on TV.
And where did they get the information for my weight? Two-hundred twenty-five pounds?! Not any more! I have been playing soccer with the kids, jogging the causeway, thank you very much. I am very close to breaking back down below two hundred pounds. I’m around 206 or so.
Jesus! Was there no mercy at all? Was it all about making me feel bad, now? Shit! At least get it right. Damn it all I can’t stand that! Beat the dead horse, set him on fire then piss on him when that’s done, take the ashes and spread them over a manure to make the daffodils grow. But when the buds start to rear back and reach for the sun, chop them all down with a machete, then stomp up and down on them.
On and on it went with no respite. Oh, the press were on this one, they were. They loved it. A former reporter gone just plain ape-shit; kills a Pulitzer nominee, threatens the life of his literary agent in some frothing rant of a manuscript with goddamned bloodstains on it, found next to the body of the dead guy he’s supposed to be collaborating with on a project! A weight name, no less.
Newspaper and television folks loved this. Lived for it.
Why? Because it makes them feel safe. After all, they had kept their nice, cozy gigs at their cozy digs at newspapers or in their studios. They had kept their jobs despite the downturns, despite the temptations that had come before the market and the world went haywire (can you say Internet?). They had fought that urge we all feel as writers, that impulse to run off and draft the great American bestseller. And now, here was validation in that safe choice in the form of Gary O’Brien that screamed “Be afraid. Be very afraid. That way lies eternal hellfire and damnation!”
“You hear about Gary?”
“You mean the guy that used to work in the bureau office who went nuts? Yeah, man I know…apeshit!”
“Jees, what are you gonna do?”
“Glad it wasn’t me that’s all I can say…and to think he killed CHRISTOPHER NAUGHTEN. I mean, how weird is THAT?”
“I know, right?”
Journalists of every stripe will want to pick that apart. They’ll want to examine that and figure out the crucial difference between themselves and the insane bastard on the run. The tidal pull of the “there but for the Grace of God Go I” syndrome, their active analytical minds will simply demand an answer to the riddle that allows them to dissimulate between themselves and that crazy person, who at one time, did the exact same thing they are now doing, day in day out. How did he go from here… to THERE? How did that happen? The pull of that story will be so strong they won’t be able to resist it; they’ll follow it to the bloodiest end of the earth, if for nothing more than the odd chance to grab hold the bell-tower freak for one question; “Man what the hell were you thinking?”
I left crumpled bills on the table and got in the van. No one from the diner bothered to check who I was, or my vehicle. The story was too fresh for that yet.
The real world was still in Disney disbelief on this one. That’s what Florida reporters used to call someone who went up to a huge bear in a cage going “cute bear, cute bear” in Disney disbelief that something so warm and cuddly like a big sour puss, sad-eyed bear with his Gentle Ben, droopy-smoopy lips would EVER do him harm. That is until the bear reached through the bars of a cage and dug a dirty claw into the guy’s bicep flaying it open all the way to the elbow with a big annoyed roar. A roar that sound suspiciously like “...so there, asshole!”
Then a reporter would show up and shake his head side to side while taking down words like; “…that bear just reached right out and grabbed that poor man. Most horrible thing I ever saw!”
The reporter notebook would read:
“H J re right out and GR th p man! M H th I ever saw!” The reporter would make a note to himself “What did this guy expect?” and circle it about a thousand times until the pencil scribbles ran off the page in widening rims of anger.
The world was in Disney disbelief.
A guy was on the run, CNN just said. He had a van, a white one. He was from Florida. He may have killed someone, true. But not this guy. No, that couldn’t be the guy. See, the perpetrator they were looking for was from FLORIDA, see? Not my town, here in North Carolina. And, and see, this guy here he’s, well, he seems like a normal guy, not like the monster they mentioned on the TV; the guy who left blood on a manuscript after killing his friend, see? A person like that would have fangs and claws and look more like a scared jackrabbit smoking crack out of a pipe while fornicating into dead sheep by the side of the road, see? Not this normal depressed-looking guy over here. No, this is a real human being here, see? He wasn’t on TV, running away, on the “lamb” as it were. See? Because when we see criminals on TV they turn and, uh, run, then climb a chain link fence while the police chick-a-wacka music plays. Then credits roll. Fade out.
No, a guy who just happened to match the description, with the exact make and model of the vehicle described which bears a license from the exact, obscure Florida county mentioned, just got up from the table, got in his vehicle and drove off. That was all that happened, see?
Disney disbelief.
I really needed to calm down. I couldn’t decide what made me more angry as I left Lumberton, that my first review was “not that well written” or that no one recognized me, to the fact that this was happening at all, or that no one thought I was dangerous enough to actually stop. I was on the run, yet, I wasn’t important enough to warrant an actual warrant.
Somebody stop me? Nawww, just some freaked out writer. He’ll wind down after a while and turn himself in. What an idiot.
So I took 41, east southeast then the connecting roads wending toward Jacksonville, or in that general direction. The rolling North Carolina countryside calmed me as the towns clicked by.
I remembered the first time I drove these roads five years ago with Leslie and the kids. Between Lumberton and I-95 and Camp LeJune there must be a hundred little towns amid two hundred miles. It’s farmland with corn and tobacco so green in the summer it’s damned near blue.
The homes are big but modest in that time-honored duality of rich farm living. Stolid, red brick, American structures, sprawling floor plans made modest again by the acreage of the plots on which they sit. No confused writers living inside homes like these. No broiling dilettantes wallowing in their own lassitude and moral ambiguity. These are large corn-fed Americans. I decided as much looking at the homes on my first trip here, and have agreed with myself on every trip since.
The ribbon of asphalt bounds and winds between Lumberton and Camp LeJune, like a graceful hound. Always down here, descending to sea level at about a ten percent grade over the space of four hours.
Come around one turn and find a gradually sloping plain of tobacco and corn rimmed with oak and pine, dotted with farm homes, feed stores, a church here and there, a tractor in a yard, a Ford F-350 in another. Here a bass boat, there a bass boat, everywhere a bass boat.
You can see where successive generations on the land have abandoned older barns and such to the rains and the whims of time, allowing them to wallow into the ground, as gentle, slumping reminders of deep roots, ignored but known by the dwellers of the modern homes which thrive a few hundred yards away, surrounded by loving patches of green dotted with plastic kid toys and lawn furniture.
Over the next rise, around a curve, avoid the oncoming truck, and down, down some more we go; crossing the cool verdant glade bordering the dark creek filled with ancient Indians whose spirits still haunt the shadows beneath the trees. Hear the thump of the rotting road over the iron bridge, up the hill, round the curve and down, down we drive again through another hypnotic field nearly identical to the last, with the same players arrayed at different outposts making it distinct from all the previous, in comparable beauty to many that will follow.
Onward we drive to the coast on a rainy, gorgeous North Carolina afternoon, a late summer afternoon filled with lamentation, regret and appreciation for all this beauty around me. Beauty like much of my life, I cannot, or simply will not, reach out and touch.
Graham’s words came to me here; “summon heaven and it will find you. The same goes for hell.”
*
I finally made it out to the Driftwood Inn on the very tip end of Cedar Island. It was around 6 p.m. and the rains had just cleared off. There’s nothing like those last few miles before you get to the Driftwood in the rain.
As a corollary to Murphy’s Law and the weather of late summer in eastern North Carolina, it is ALWAYS raining as you attempt those winding stretches between Moorehead City and Cedar Island, always. And as part of the syndrome, there is always someone in a Ford Bronco trying to drive up your large bowel, willing you to just go ahead and die, just drive right off the road into the marshes, or off the bridge rather than hold them up one second longer.
These are folks trying to make it to the Cedar Island ferry over to Ocracoke where they live. They can’t stand you because you’re not an “Ococker”, you are a “Dingbatter.” They know this from your license plate and by the way you drive.
They could tell even if your license plate was a “First in Flight” special. They could tell because your driving displayed none of the life-be-damned carefree verve of the person who can wend the narrows of this lumping winding path in their sleep at 70 mph and a thirty-knot gale blowing, without ending up in the drink. You cannot.
I was exhausted as usual by the time I arrived. I opted for an early dinner at the restaurant. The chowder was warm and nourishing like mother’s broth. The color of it matched the water of the Pamlico Sound outside the porthole window. The gift shop and restaurant were done up in the nautical theme; designed out of the guts of an old barge buried halfway up to the bow in the sand. For all I knew, it actually was an old boat with the back part of the kitchen and the remainder of the one-story hotel added on.
The kids loved this place. It took a full day to arrive at this spot. On our trips we usually we arrived here around 7 p.m. Magically the rain would cease almost the minute our tires came to a halt in the gravel parking lot. The overcast would linger through dinner, but by the following morning the sun would come shining through bright as gold and the sky would be clear. It had happened every year for five years in a row. In the morning the kids would fill up on bagels, cereal and orange juice offered by the restaurant. Leslie and I would watch them bounce up and down in their booth in anticipation of the Ferry Ride across the sound after breakfast. The sunshine would come bursting through these faux porthole windows while we planned out the day. The ferry ride, where we would stop for lunch in Ocracoke, whether we wanted to go immediately on to Hatteras and the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, or visit Blackbeard’s Museum on Ocracoke. When I thought about it, no one could ask for better times than we had had here.
I ate in silence, thinking about everything that had happened to me in the last few days, about the news reports about Chris Naughten’s death, about how sales of White Kaffir were taking off as though shot to space on the back of a Delta rocket.
That was the trick then, die and they will love you for it. No that wasn’t the answer either. But it was close.
There was a hint to what it was all about in that little throw-away line by the Orlando PIO; that “no, we don’t think this was a publicity stunt.”
That was funny, a publicity stunt. It shut the press up immediately. I could envision the flummoxed reporter thinking “Damn, you, you moron. That’s not what I asked and you know it!”
All this scenery made me depressed. I missed the kids like hell, could see them in the walls, practically. That time Nathan fell down the little flight of stairs after going to the john. On one, trip feeling our marriage beginning to heal by just being here, after I had my ...stupid mistake.
I hadn’t called Leslie and I didn’t know if I should but I NEEDED to, needed to very badly. But how would I go about doing that? Obviously, the home phones would be bugged. Any collect call, even from a pay phone or the front desk, would nail down my location. I would set my mind to work on the problem as I sat there eating my Pamlico colored chowder and my flounder sandwich.
Leslie and I despise cell phones even though we had a pair of them for a while. Don’t ask me how we got on a “plan” as it were, other than it was probably some double the going rate deal peddled by a kiosk in the mall, where we had somehow gotten around the fact our credit was useless.
Sometime during that year, our year of trying out cell phones, at some point after my indiscretion had ended, the woman in question thought to dial our cell number and Leslie picked up. She must have been watching us or saw us out together. We were in the mall. Well, at least it was better than finding a rabbit boiling on the stove.
That one phone call sent our lives into a tailspin that took another four months to recover from.
I took them both out into the back yard, worked up the nerve with four large glasses of Shiraz, and with Nathan’s Louisville Slugger, I batted those damned things into the woods, sending a shower of plastic, LED crystals and circuitry over the fence.
As I did, I reflected that I would not miss them in the slightest.
“Brrrrrrr….rrring!” they chirp.
“Yes? Yes?….Oh HI! How are you….uh-huh! Right!”
Ever seen two parents on opposing sides of a soccer field bounce their impressions of the U-8 game off a satellite? Ever ask yourself why?
This is what we hear in the movie theatre, on line at the grocery store, in the men’s john as we squeeze one out…
“Hey Roger, buddy, glad I caught you man. Listen, yeah, Doug’s got our T-times for us, buddy…all set up. Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Uh-Huh? Yeah? She did? You gotta be shitting me man? No… ha hah. Unbelievable!”
On and in it goes, as we make love to our little ego pills with our lips, our smiles unseen, our ears, and the sides of our heads, while the rest of the world rolls its eyes. Leslie and I are convinced that ninety-nine percent of the time the people right beside us, be they total strangers or lifelong friends, are more important than the fifteen second conversations we have with our ego pills.
People are addicted to these things.
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp!
Could it be that special someone? The palms sweat. The mouth generates the extra saliva. Someone thinks I am so important they simply HAD to call me while I was out and about!
“Hello?”
The chirps, beeps, boops, songs and soft bing-bongs we give to ourselves serve a number of purposes. One is to break the up the normal flow of thought in the human brain. Like downtime for the muscles, the human brain needs time to hum, to digest the world around it, to better make sense of it all through relaxation and subconscious rumination. Yet the human mind never gets that time to reach the quiet level of calm with all these damned beeps and boops stopping progress.
Back down to earth it crashes for another inane conversation.
Brrrrrp!
“Yeah? Uh-huh…Oh shit, again? Goddamn, we just got that server! I can’t believe this is happening. Alright, alright, call the expert. Tell him we’ll pay him whatever!”
The other purpose is for the alien lord and master to track us all over the planet. They are our stock inventory radio collars monitored via cell towers and satellite, proving that, yes, as a species, we are dumber than say Cheetahs or Mountain Lions in that we sign up for our implants and pay monthly bills to keep them. You have to chase down the Mountain Lion then pump his ass full of dope if you want to put a tracking device on him, and he gets damned angry when you do. He’s no dummy.
Cell phone envy: proof that aliens are here, controlling our lives. The notion that every month someone gets jealous of someone else’s implant because it has newer features and looks different. Do collared mountain gorillas do this? Are they that stupid?
They get slicker and sleeker every month. Every four weeks there’s some revolutionary upgrade in the industry. Now these things play games with you, they talk to you, they photograph people and spy for you. Just what the hell are these things? You wonder to whose benefit they are?
Everyman’s nightmare is to be photographed talking to some hot babe by one of his wife’s friends using a digital camera phone.
“Darla, I am so sorry. I don’t know what to say. I just saw Lewis at the mall. (sniff) Here’s what he was doing….(sniff) I’m sending it now.”
Who would come up with this shit? Jesus! Are we all now cameo players in some John Updike counter-espionage thriller?
It only makes sense if you consider the alien lord and master wants to put a crimp in the wild, random reproduction of the species. Weeded and bred like a crop. Tame, timid mankind. Corporate, doughy yes-gelding, content to pay the bills for wifey’s phone plan, so that the moment his eyes wander he’s sent to the knacker’s yard with a flag up his ass that reads, “Bad boy. Bad, bad boy, doggy!”
My hatred of these devices, these electronic manacles of cybernetic slavery, also has everything to do with reverse snobbery; I can’t stand being close to people who can afford to have a permanent upgrade plan for the latest and greatest grafted to their hips. That kind of person is so dialed into the Matrix, I just want to shit on the floor where they can see it and say, “Here, here’s something good and organic for your sanitized, electronic alien life. I want you to eat this. Save your soul! Eat my feces!”
Artists such as myself are seldom welcomed with open arms among this sort of folk, as you can imagine. So I disdain them first, they and their damned cell-phones.
Anyway, what happened to all those studies underway in the early 1990s designed to test whether or not all this microwave activity was giving us brain cancer? Anyone? Anyone?
Gone, that’s where all those studies went, filed under “whatever happened to that?” They’re gone; swallowed in corporate lawsuits and buyouts, that’s where. Locked in a netherworld of “hopefully none of the chickens on the farm will remember the farmer’s blade.”
I doubt there’s much to clean up once the target is identified these days.
So these are only a few of the reasons why I hate these invasive devices. And you can see how absolutely desperate I was at this point, to get hold of one by any means necessary so I could check in with Leslie.
Instead of waiting out the night at the Driftwood Inn, and having to leave my name at the front desk, I followed a family aboard the North Carolina ferry system bound for Ocracoke Island.
They were an attractive bunch from Virginia, by the license plate on their white Nissan Pathfinder with a boat hitch, no boat and a set of surfboard racks without the surfboard. Mom and Dad were in their early forties and looked so good they could easily have been reliving their late twenties. They had equally gorgeous daughters of about fifteen and thirteen years. And before you think I followed them for the purpose of engaging in some monstrous act of lechery, let me clarify. The elder of the teenage girls had a cell phone.
After I left the restaurant I watched them eat potato chips and the girl would not take the phone from her face. Dad was visibly annoyed to the point of coming unglued, as he paid the ferry dock-master and idled into position, but he bore it well. The phone bill must have been so high at this point, a number so huge and disgusting even acknowledging the phone or its use would have put him into a tailspin. He ignored the chatter as they disembarked and headed for the gift shop.
I followed them in and listened. Damn, could that girl talk! Deciding to make the best of it, I immediately went outside, hopped in the van, paid the $15 fee to cross Pamlico Sound and waited.
I was parked three cars back from the Pathfinder with the OBX sticker on the back windshield. In a few moments they ambled from the gift shop.
The lithe teenager swept strands of strawberry blonde from her face, giggled and continued to chatter into her ego pill while her sister rolled her eyes. Mom and Dad got in the front of their car.
The wonder of genetics, the girls were gorgeous copies of their mother, albeit with slight variations in facial characteristics and hair color.
Square jawed, stone washed jeans Dad had curly black hair, a hawkish brow and sporty Rolex to go with his good DNA and his dark polo shirt. The only bad sliver of luck in his life, apparently, was his first-born’s cell-phone addiction.
As the sunshine burst through the late afternoon clouds to our west, the M/V Silver Lake made her appearance through a wall of drizzle about a quarter mile offshore of the ferry dock like a grand dame of the theatre bursting forth for a curtain call.
It wasn’t long before the orderly departure of spent tourists filed in cars one by one and promenaded past us to the left. Each, in turn, pulling down their visors to beat back the setting sun shining in their eyes, each, in turn flipping on their lights in anticipation of the long, winding haul from Cedar Island to Moorehead City. One by one, they came, up and over metal gangplank onto terra firma again with a satisfying clang-clang. And soon, all of us were ushered forward with waves from the be-khaki, sunglassed crewmen from the Silver Lake, to take the places of those who had gone on, those to whom grand visions of the Outer Banks were now only jealous memories.
The Pathfinder was directed to port and I to starboard and by trick of the deck, I was given a slot near the starboard rail near the stern quarter, whereas they were directed all the way to the port bow.
I had two or three opportunities to make this work, as I saw it. Once free of the dock and out on the sound, people would emerge from their vehicles and wander forward for a look at what lay ahead. It was only natural. Those on the bow would quickly realize that the best view of the sound was above them, just beneath the wheelhouse. There a flying bridge stood just forward of the passenger’s lounge. If the people in the Pathfinder went together for the stairs topside, and Dad had finally put a kibosh on the cell phone, I could probably find the phone on the dash or on a seat and snatch it.
It has been my observation that for some reason, people seldom lock their doors or even roll up their car windows once aboard a North Carolina ferry crossing to the Outer Banks. Perhaps it’s the excitement of crossing the sound that makes them so carefree, or the sea air. Whatever it was it shamed me that I was about to take advantage of the one last foothold of innocence left on earth.
But the little family did not cooperate with me. Mom and Dad excited the vehicle but were not about to budge from it immediately, locked in an embrace as they were. So I grabbed my camera bag and headed for the observation deck, to roost on them, and see how things developed.
Mom and Dad stood at the rail next to their Pathfinder with their hips to the left front quarter panel, and Megan and Marsha, as I began to think of them, walked to the stairs. Marsha was still on the phone, still twirling her strands with the finger of her free hand. If she only knew how much I coveted that phone at that moment. The girls disappeared beneath the flying bridge. I was sure they were headed upstairs for the view.
I continued to watch Mom and Dad through my fishing sunglasses, confident that they had not taken any notice of me. I envied them in that moment, a moment that Leslie and I have lived, perhaps in that very spot on this particular ferry.
Mom’s sandy-blonde head rested on Dad’s shoulder, his strong arm behind her enveloping her in sweetness. It was then I noticed the boat hitch again and the empty surf racks. This would be the end of a day trip for them, then; a quick hop over to Cedar Island for a look-see then back out to the banks to the summer rental.
Marsha and Megan were at my side now, mewling down to Mom and Dad with waves and smiles. Marsha called again for Daddy to notice her, which he did with only a backward wave. He couldn’t even look up, because, yes, she still was on the phone, he knew it and hated it.
Miraculously, the girls switched and the phone was handed to Megan.
Marsha screamed down to Mom. “Hey, what’s wrong with Dad?”
Mother was replying but not to the question. What was that she was saying? Oh yes, nice one.
“Welcome to our vacation, dear. That’s the first time today we’ve seen you without that damned phone in your hand.”
“It’s Charley, Mom! We’re telling him about yesterday!”
“Tell Charley you’ll see him when you get back next week,” hollered Dad, still not bold enough to look up.
“Charley needs to get a life, honey and so do you,”
“Good Gawd,” went Marsha. “Well alright then. Ain’t y’all a couple of doo-doo heads…”
Two things. One, I loved these parents. And two, the ‘doo doo’ heads part was delivered sotto voce. There was no way in hell Mom and Dad heard that. The girls giggled and went off into the passenger lounge, handing the phone back and forth like a football in a post-final-second, Hail Mary play.
“You say it for me!” “No, you tell him…”
I sauntered in after a respectable four-second pause and made myself a cup of coffee inside the lounge, listening for a break in the action to make my move.
Marsha, Marsha, Marsha was sitting close to the coffee machine with her feet propped up in one of the booths next to the starboard window. Her little sister excused herself and headed back toward the ladies bathroom.
“Charley, yeah…I’d better get off. My Dad’s getting pissed…”
And so began an “I love you” session that I thought would never end, with undying vows whispered again and again. “No, I love you more, silly.” “ No, you are” “No you…” “You first.” I stalled for time searching for a rumpled bill to put in the kitty, then I gazed absently out through the forward window at the blue horizon filled with ghostly, fast-moving squalls.
Mom and Dad were coming topside and were almost all the way up the stairs now. An opportunity was evaporating. But suddenly they stopped and turned northwest to watch the sunset.
The young lady finished her call, rose from her bench, crossed over to the coffee machine and began to pour a cup for herself. I moved around her like a dancer and with the most graceful move I have ever made, lifted the cell phone from the tabletop and plopped it into my camera bag.
Mom and Dad were looking! But were they? Had they seen me through the window? NO! They did not!
Once outside I realized why. The reflection from the sunset made a perfect mirror of the window. But that had been close.
The cell phone was squirreled away in my camera bag. I moved around the happy couple and down the stairs. I wasn’t two steps onto the landing when the phone began braying like a lost lamb.
I pushed buttons frantically to get it to shut up before I realized I had answered the thing. Some random spike of curiosity had me. I needed to see that my suspicions were confirmed. I waited for a voice and was rewarded finally with…
“Lisa?”
It was said as a prayer. Well, that had been my next guess. I really was close there on the name.
“Lisa?” the voice of a puppy-love-smitten youth begged again.
I bluffed it.
“Charley, is that YOU!?” I demanded in my best J. Jonah Jameson voice.
“Mr. Hendley?” he asked sheepishly. I said nothing.
“Mr. Hendley?” he cracked again.
“Charley, for the love of God will you PLEASE let Lisa have a vacation?” I lambasted.
“Mr. Hendley?” Apparently all the boy knew how to do was beg using names.
“Who else in blue blazes would it be, Charley? The Pope?”
“I’m sorry, sir. It doesn’t sound like you…it’s just…”
I said nothing.
“Mr. Hendley? Mr. Hendley? Hey, this isn’t Mr. Hendley’s voice. Who the hell is this?” he said at last, his voice dropping a full octave.
What kind of stalking freak was it that memorized his girlfriend’s father’s voice, I wondered?
I pushed the “end” button and hurried back to my van. That had not been a smart move on my part; one of many stupid things done in succession leading me to this moment.
Never mind. Just keep moving.
Once in the van I dialed my home number. Leslie and I had a code back when her brother Stan was living with us. When I was working at the paper, I would call pretending to be a bill collector. She would pick up and practically scream within earshot of Stanley who was usually in the kitchen soaking up our stores; “I’ll dial star 69! I’ll find out who you people are! My brother Stanley does not live here. Who told you that?” then she would run next door to Larry and Verna’s and place a call. We would laugh about the look on Stanley’s face when he thought they had tracked him down. It took three weeks to get him to move out. He was having major problems. Anyway I hoped she was on my wavelength. There was no way to tell whether or if she would even pick up.
The answering machine erupted in a familiar, cheery greeting made by your’s-truly about a million years ago, in a previous life.
“Leslie, pick up. Pick up, pick up, pick up,” I said. Why we always say it three times, I still don’t know.
The phone came off the cradle. She was there and she was on my wavelength.
“I’ll Star 69. I swear I will. I’ll find out where you are! Don’t bring all this trouble here. You know better,” then bam. Down went the phone.
Now, there was no way to tell whether that was an act or the real thing. The reference to Star 69 was what I was hoping for, though. I hung up and waited.
Meantime, damned if the family from upstairs didn’t come down stairs fanning out like a task force. The unbelievable had happened. They were somehow onto me. It only took a second to figure out how.
Mr. Hendley was on his own cell phone at that point and he was sputtering, “Charley, Charley …calm down. She’s fine. She’s right here.”
Then to his daughter; “He says he called your cell phone and a man answered. The man knew your name. Now how did that happen? Lisa, talk to your boyfriend before he loses his mind. We’ll find your damned phone later!”
This Charley would not quit. I wanted to hang him.
I crawled to the back of my van and dug into my suitcase. Finding my electric day razor, I hurriedly, and quite painfully, trimmed and shaved off my moustache. I changed shirts, put on my Jacksonville Jaguars sideline NFL cap, and my sunglasses. Then I jumped in the driver’s seat, leaned back and acted like I was asleep. But just as the family had fanned out and began searching the faces aboard ship, their bleating little phone rang so loud I thought surely they had heard it.
“Hello?” I said leaning beneath the dash and praying like hell it wasn’t Charley. It wasn’t.
“Gary?”
Thank God, it was Leslie. That voice was like morphine.
“Hi honey, you at Larry and Verna’s?”
“Yes. Gary where are you? This place is going nuts. Our home is crawling with police! What is going on?”
She was frantic, set to go off any second. I had to tread carefully.
“They have the phones wired?”
“Of course they have the phones wired. Gary, there is an FBI agent in our home! Reporters on the front lawn! What have you done? I have an attorney from New York calling me night and day threatening us; they think you’re going to kill your agent, Gary. Gary? Gary?”
“Did you erase the caller ID? Did you erase it?”
“Yes, I think so…I don’t know, Gary. Jesus, tell me what is going on?”
“I didn’t kill Chris Naughten. But I don’t know if I can prove it.”
“What are you doing, Gary? What are your plans?”
“I need time to think, Leslie. I have no idea. I am just out here sort of wandering. I’m going to go to …”
“Should you tell me?”
“Probably not. You don’t think they bugged Larry’s place do you?”
“I don’t know, Verna thinks I’m calling my mother. I’m in her bathroom, Gary. I’m sitting here at the neighbor’s, in Verna’s bathroom, on Verna’s john, talking to my fugitive husband who is …God knows where, and who the hell is this woman from Virginia, this Lisa Hendley? Who is this chick, someone new, Gary? A new conquest?”
It was only a matter of time before she lit onto this. Our lovely little Lisa had herself listed, naturally, so that cute, perky little name jumped right up on the caller ID when I dialed home. Wonderful.
“Leslie no, she’s a teenager!”
“Oh great, perfect. Well, I guess you won’t be teaching anymore, Gary. I guess that’s out the window now, too, along with everything else…”
“No, Leslie I can’t explain now…I stole her phone”
“Yeah, likely after you HUMPED her. You know, damn you, Gary. God damn you to hell for putting us through all this. I am here LOSING my freaking MIND Gary and you are off, humping teenage girls and stealing their cell phones to call me. Why not pour some salt in those old wounds, huh Gary? Couldn’t find a boy teenager to steal from? And what are the odds? Another chick. A Lisa, no less!”
I knew what was next. I would say something and she would run right over it. So I waited.
“You know they found your wallet and your ID, some chick named Robyn over in Orlando. Found it at that bar. Tried calling me about a dozen times until she heard those reports then sent it in to the police. How’d you like them apples, Gary! How about that! You WEREN’T lying about that after all. What, did you hump that one too, this Robyn with a ‘yn’ ? You bang her also, Gary? Have sex with her in a car or a bathroom somewhere? Huh? Didja!?”
This part of the dance required my input.
“Leslie, honey, calm down. Please baby!”
“You are going to jail for so many years, Gary and I want you to know something; lined up head to toe all those years would not equal what you have now put me through, do you understand?”
“Leslie…”
“You think about that! You just think about it! Do you UNDERSTAND ME, WHAT I AM …..SAYING TO YOOOOOOOOO? Do you HEAR ME Gary?!”
And that was that, for now, anyway. She hung up.
I tossed the phone out that window into the brackish waters of the Pamlico Sound willing Charley to go ahead and dive in after it.