The highway was spilling out before me like a million miles of concrete intestine. My car traveling through the tract of the west, passing the bowels of the Rocky Mountains and onto my toilet destination of Kansas City. I had to fetch some papers and some money. My boss was too cheap to spring for a plane ticket. He gave me his car, a hundred bucks for gas, and told me to be back in ten to twelve days.
I wanted to tell him I was a construction worker, not the mailman. Instead I told him sure. I was supposed to have done this a few years ago. Road trip across America, see the sites, have a good time. It was supposed to be fun.
This trip wasn't all that fun. It was only proving that my boss either A) only trusted me out of all the guys on crew to do this little task for him. Or B) Proving that he was too damn lazy to drive all this way on his own and figured he'd get one of his lackeys to do it for him. My money was on B, but you never know just what someone thinks of you until they tell you. Or unless you ask.
The radio broke a mere four hours into the drive. He once sat around at lunchtime bragging about his killer system and even bumped his speakers for everyone. The guys that were into that kind of thing sat around over his setup. I ate my sandwich and pretended to care. All that money and it magically stops working when I wasn't even blasting the volume.
Snap. Crackle. Pop.
Silence.
For two days the only thing I had to keep me company was the sound of the engine humming its fine quality American made tune.
Your mind does a lot of things to keep itself occupied in such a sound depravated environment. Your other senses have their own little tasks to accomplish. The sunlight occupies your eyes. The odors outside occupy your nose. The steering wheel under your hands, and the car seat hugging your ass occupies touch. Your ears have nothing to play with.
You make clicking noises with your tongue. Gargling sounds in the back of your throat. Sound effects and re-enactments of movies or TV shows. I'd make up songs, or have full-fledged conversations with no one there. Your mind does anything to keep itself occupied. When I stopped at a motel in Utah I think I was still talking to myself because the manager of the motel asked me if I was an escaped mental patient. I told him no, and he still warned me not to hang myself in the bathroom with the bed sheet. I asked if that had happened before.
"Once or twice," he said.
When I entered the room, the air was stale and smelled of Lysol. The carpeting was plush, and the walls were covered in cheap paintings of flowers and happy looking birds. An old air-conditioning unit rattled away on the windowsill, reminding me of the engine hum. I turned on the TV and was thankful for sounds that weren't generated by the car or me.
I watched infomercials and ate noodles in a cup until I was tired. The sheets were stiff but after getting my legs cramped from sleeping in the car last night I was glad I had a bed to sleep in. I closed my eyes, listening to the rattle of the air-conditioner and the clicking of my tongue.
The humming and singing got worse as I drove on, but it was better than having to sit there listening to nothing, watching the kaleidoscope of the world spin by from my driver side window.
I was a construction worker not a mailman.
I entered Kansas City another day after stopping in Utah. I had a hell of a time finding out where my boss's brother lived. The directions I was given were to his old house. My boss didn't tell me he moved. I had to track him down through his company. It ate up an entire day of my ten to twelve day schedule.
I got the papers and the money. I drove all this way and the guy basically threw them out of his door and told me to tell his brother he said hello. That night I stayed in a not so stiff-sheet motel, ate more noodles and watched more infomercials. My eyes were still locked in tunnel vision from the road. I kept bumping into the beds and dresser. I closed them for awhile to try and shake it off, but it didn't work. I took a shower with my little bottles of shampoo, brushed my teeth with my travel-sized toothbrush and mouthwash.
Tiny versions of life-size products.
Tiny like my life was becoming.
The drive back was tedious. My tongue was sore from the constant clicking, and my throat was rough from the gargling. My eyes grew as dull as the pale yellow strips on the road. My ass was sore and my hands were chaffed. I started to hate the road.
I considered jerking the wheel and plowing my boss's Lincoln town car into the side of a barn or a mountain. Driving off a bridge and becoming plankton for the little fishes to eat. I wanted to be decomposed organic matter rotting at the bottom of a lake. I wanted to be a scrape off the asphalt, a bag and tag procedure for the highway patrol. I wanted to be impaled with the heart of America's hard working farm family's barn. I wanted the loneliness to end.
Another day, another chorus of random thoughts and clicking sounds. Highway lanes blurred together like peanut butter and jelly. Got milk?
Billboards pass like flashcards for capitalists.
I saw a guy with his thumb out standing underneath a billboard telling me that Cathy's Cafe has the best pie in the west. I pull over. I ask where he's headed.
"California," he says.
Same here, I tell him. Hop in.
He throws his briefcase into the backseat. I notice he's wearing these spit-shined loafers, a Hawaiian shirt, brown leather jacket, and these huge Elvis glasses. I don't comment. I've worn worse. I ask him his name and he hands me a card.
It says "Paper Street Soap Company." His name it says, is Tyler Durden.
He makes soap for a living. I tell him that I've never met anyone that knows how to make soap.
Tyler laughs and says that with enough soap you could blow up the world.
I ask him if he really wants to blow up the world.
He says, "Not today."
He doesn't ask why the radio doesn't work. He just stares out the window and taps on his legs. I stare straight ahead, every once in awhile looking at him out of the corner of my eye. I want to start up a conversation, but I don't know what about. Talking about the weather would be lame. I don't think talking about soap some more would be too interesting. Instead I ask where in California he's heading.
"Some little shit town I can't remember the name of," he says. "Sunnyhell or something."
I ask if he means Sunnydale.
He says, "Yeah, Yeah I think that's it."
I tell him that's where I'm going. What a coincidence.
Tyler says, "Life is full of coincidences."
I don't ask Tyler why he's going to Sunnydale, though the curious little cat inside can't stop wondering why of all places in California he'd want to go there. Instead I ask him where he's coming from.
"Around," he says.
I nod. Most people come from around.
Tyler talked about a lot of interesting things. He told me that when you make soap a layer of glycerin forms at the top of the tallow you boil in water. He says that you can add nitric acid to the glycerin and make nitroglycerin.
I ask him if he's ever done that. He just smiled at me and scratched the back of his hand. I looked at the big lip-shaped scar on the back of it. I felt an eyebrow quirk but kept the cat inside.
"You can mix the sodium nitrate with the nitroglycerin and add sawdust to make dynamite," Tyler says. "Or you can add more nitric acid to the nitroglycerin and add paraffin to make blasting gelatin."
You can really do that? I ask.
"One can make all kinds of explosives using simple household items," Tyler says.
Really?
"If one were so inclined."
I stare back to road and Tyler goes back to looking out his window. I'm wondering if he really knows what he's talking about with all the explosive stuff. I'm wondering if I really want to know.
"Nice car," Tyler says, bringing me out of my tunnel vision.
I tell him it's my boss's car.
He tells me that an old buddy of his used to work for a car company. He said that his buddy would go around photographing catastrophic accidents caused by simple malfunctions. He'd write up reports and determine if the accidents were severe enough to issue a recall. He tells me more than half the time no recall was issued.
I asked what company his buddy worked for.
Tyler said, "A big one."
My chaffed hands start to tap on the steering wheel, some beat of some unknown song in my head. Tyler asks me why I do that.
Do what? I ask.
"Try to distract yourself when there's nothing to be distracted from," Tyler says.
I tell him that sometimes I don't like the quiet.
"You should appreciate it," Tyler tells me. "You know how many minutes of self-satisfying silence a person can get these days? Five or Six minutes tops," he says. "Twenty-fours hours in a day and that's all you get. You have cars, busses, and airplanes chugging out as much noise as exhaust. You've got people with their questions and demands. Complaints and statements of self-gratification. Speaking just to speak, not caring if they're heard. Noise pollution man, is worse than toxic waste and nuclear power. People want to save the environment. I say let the environment save us."
I tell him that's very deep. He says he didn't catch my name, but wait. He doesn't want to know. I tell him its Xander. He shrugs. I don't think it was very important to him. He doesn't ask what I do for a living. He doesn't ask why I'm driving a luxury car dressed in a flannel shirt and beat-up blue jeans. He doesn't find it strange. He tells me there's nothing like the open road. One of the last few places we can really be free. I tell him that it started to make me feel trapped. That the road was going to swallow the car whole and spit me out somewhere like a knocked-out molar.
"You are looking at it from entirely the wrong perspective," Tyler says.
For another day we drove and talked about interesting things like shit jobs we didn't care about and pulling pranks. He was a waiter. I was an ice cream man. He was a movie projectionist. I was a pizza delivery guy. He tells me of his clam chowder and tomato soup escapades. I tell him of having a crush on a teacher that turned out to be a giant bug, having friends that were witches and vampires. An entire reality of devils and demons the rest of the world turns it's eyes away from.
"At least you see it," Tyler says. "You could be one of the ignorant little drones passing through life without really looking at it."
I tell him that sometimes I wish I were.
He says, "No you don't."
The Lincoln cruises through the California desert set on a cruise control of seventy miles and hour. Tyler is passed out, his head resting against the window. I take the opportunity to look closer at the scar on his right hand. It's a big pink-puffed set of lips. It looks like someone kissed him with their mouth on fire.
"Chemical burn," Tyler says scaring me and sending my eyes back to the road. "Hurts worse than you've ever been burned. Worse than a hundred cigarettes."
I ask him why he would want to give himself a chemical burn in the shape of lips on the back of his hand.
Tyler says, "Just one of the steps to hitting bottom."
We didn't talk much on the last stretch of highway before getting home. I was still weirded out by the burn and he knew it. Most of the way he just sat there smiling. When we got into Sunnydale he guided me to one of it's many luxuriously abandoned mansions. I never knew why Sunndydale had so many palaces left to rot. I never thought about it. I guess I just chalked it up to the hellmouth situation.
Tyler gets out of the car and tells me thanks for the ride. I tell him he is by far the most interesting guy I have ever met. He asks for the card he gave me and scribbles a number on the back of it. He tells me to call him. We'll tear the town down.
I say sure and drive off to my apartment.
A blinding score of emergency lights flash before my eyes as I pull onto my street. Sirens blast from incoming fire trucks and I pull over to the side of the road. I get to see a towering inferno of orange and yellow flame erupting from the ground a few hundred feet away. Right where my building should be. I run up to the police line and ask what the hell is going on.
"Gas main," one officer says. "The super was out back smoking a cigarette when the pipe burst. Poor bastard never saw it coming."
I take a minute to feel bad for Russ the super. I bet when people told him that smoking would someday kill him he never thought of this. I realize that all my worldly possessions were in that building. My couch, my bed. That new TV I just bought. All gone because Russ couldn't smoke in the building and had to go out back.
"They should be able to put it out in a few hours," the cop tells me. "I sure feel sorry for anyone inside."
He doesn't feel sorry for me. I'm on the outside looking in. Watching my salvation from my parents go up in flames. I don't tell him I live there. I walk down the street to the payphone on the corner and pick up the receiver. I roll of the list of names of people I could call. Buffy, Willow, Giles. They would let me stay with them. They probably already know it's my building. I see the local news van parked next to the Lincoln. My fingers hover above the buttons, my three friend's numbers coming inside my head. I dig for change and pull out Tyler's card.
I don't know why I called him.
After a few rings he picks up. "That was fast," he says.
Listen, I tell him. You're not going to believe this.
