"GUESSWORK"
- Chapter Three -
"On The Road Again"
Once I got out of town, I headed south on 295, letting the miles melt away like butter under the Honda's screamin' engine. For the first couple hundred miles, I want to put as much highway between New Jersey and me as the law'll allow.
The Law … thinking of "Tritter" here …g'bye forever, you moron!
It's getting on toward late afternoon, and I intend to be across the river and into Delaware by the time darkness hits.
A bunk at a truck stop over there somewhere is beginning to feel like a good idea. It's been a long time since I've taken this baby on any kind of road trip, and I'm a little weaker than I thought I'd be. Six weeks cooped up between the four walls of a looney bin doesn't do much to keep a man's muscles limbered up, especially if some of them don't limber up at all.
Yeah, I'm stiff and sore, I admit it. My leg is buzzing like hell, and the lightning strikes that keep hitting at the rim of the crater make me flinch every time one of them lands. The rest of me isn't faring much better.
Forty-five freakin' days of sitting my crippled ass on lumpy furniture and hard straight-back chairs, drinking inky black coffee, couldn't even keep me awake … much less interested. Spitting stupid slogans and platitudes back and forth with a bunch of dead-eyed, slack-jawed idiots, did nothing but put that crippled ass to sleep … along with my brain.
I should stop bitching though. I'd planned for this trip every day of those six weeks, ever since the quality of the drunkalogues during group sessions went downhill, commensurate with the mental acuity of the halfwits spouting them.
A lot of the group therapy meetings … which were held twice a day, with a combined NA/AA meeting in the evenings, when they allowed recovering people from outside groups to visit … turned into profane, accusatory screaming matches that made the color of my own blue language seem lily white by comparison.
I stopped listening to that shit after the second day, and started counting in my head all the ways I could think of to get the fuck out of there and off somewhere by myself.
But you don't get to be by yourself much in rehab!
I longed to return to the sanity of "Earth People".
God, how I missed my little TV and my GameBoy! Even my yo-yo.
But I voiced it only once.
"Not allowed! You're here to get clean and sober."
Fuck you!
I remember sitting and staring at the walls … or what you could see of the walls! Most of the space was plastered full of posters and slogans. Twelve Steps. Twelve Traditions. Serenity Prayer. Lord's Prayer.
"Live and Let Live" … "Think, Think, Think" … "One Day At A Time" … "Let Go and Let God" … "Keep It Simple, Stupid" …"I'm a Friend of Bill W. and Dr. Bob." (It took me a month before I found out who the hell those guys were!)
Everywhere you looked, the damned posters covered the walls; smaller ones stood on little placards at every dining table and on the tables that held the ubiquitous coffee urns … even on the nightstands of every two-man bedroom. By the end of the first week, the crap was plastered to the insides of my eyelids until I wanted to throw up!
But today I'm out of there. I'm on my bike and getting the hell away from as much of humanity as possible. Today is liberation day. Today I'm … like old Marty King said once … "Free at last!"
If the whole thing weren't so pathetic, I would laugh my ass off!
Right now, I'm celebrating the road.
The sun is sliding down across the sky to my right as the bike eats up the miles. It's cold as hell in Jersey at the beginning of March, but the wind that whistles past my face shield is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
Nobody is ratchet-jawing in my ear about the miracle of "The Program". Nobody is lecturing me about my lack of "Spirituality", and nobody is calling me a "Loser" because I sat and stared into space, having quickly learned the value of keeping my mouth shut.
I'm on the road again, aiming straight for the balmy breezes of the southern states, and a chance to lose myself in the North Carolina Mountains … and maybe check into a place that was mentioned in an article I read in JAMA … a pain clinic near Raleigh.
I have to laugh when I think of the way some of the wet-brains in rehab would look at me when I stood against the wall of the dayroom, hip-sprung, twirling the cane between my fingers and looking at them as though I was about to chase them into the street with it. None of them knew that I couldn't have chased them across the room … let alone any further than that. So much of my life is ruled by the damned leg! But they didn't know that either. I kept 'em at arms' length with "attitude" … and plenty of it.
The huggy-feely crap they try to hang on you makes my skin crawl, and I made sure not to get caught up in it. Hugging people tends to throw me off balance anyway if I don't watch it, and there's only one person on Earth I let get away with it. That's my Mom.
In rehab I never hurried anywhere, and while walking slowly, I was able to minimize the limp. I guess some of those morons believed I couldn't be trusted not to club them with the cane, because they thought I carried it only with that purpose in mind. I didn't do anything to let them think otherwise.
I never talked voluntarily in group sessions, but sometimes one of the therapists would call on me, and I would have no choice. I usually said something or other off-the-wall, about how their "Higher Power" would make a great character in a science fiction story, but not much good for anything other than that.
Unless you had an IQ of fifty-seven.
I never said: "Hi, my name is Gregg, and I'm a drug addict."
Once I said: "I'm Gregg, and I hate this fucking place!" They didn't ask me to speak much after that. They don't care much for foul language in "group" … and yet they tell you to say what you're thinking.
Hmmmmm …
Nobody sat beside me on purpose at the dinner table, or beside me in "group" unless ordered to do so. With all the bullshit going on, those suspicious looks they gave me turned out to be a little empowering, and I loved that. It made the slugs keep their distance.
I did nothing to convince anyone that I wasn't contemplating suicide. That bugged the shit out of 'em.
Homicide, maybe … but never suicide!
And then it was all over but the shoutin'.
Today I was out of there, and I knew they were glad to see me go. They thought they had not reached me, and I did nothing to correct that assumption either.
Damn them!
I'd taken great pains to ignore the posturing and the polly-parroting, and the insincere prayers, spoken only by rote, and the chanting of platitudes … most of which anyone with half a brain could see through.
But the things they were trying to instill within me kept roosting in the back of my brain and stuck fast like shit to a blanket, whether I wanted it to or not. I "got" it!
That's why I said, awhile back, that I could recite most of that crap in my sleep.
Maybe that's why I'd rather be dead than take a goddamn Vicodin.
"A Day At A Time"! It's a matter of pride! Proves the validity of that phrase of denial: "I can quit anytime I want …"
Sure you can, Ace! Fuckin'-A!
Getting darker now. Car lights coming more visible through the dusk, light standards along the highway flickering to life. The sun is almost down, and it's getting colder. Only a few more miles to the bridge, then into Delaware.
Maybe I'll hole up in a motel for the night. Stand under the hot water and wash some of the stiffness down the drain. I'm feeling really weak. My vision is blurring a little. I have to keep blinking the shadows away. My hands hurt from gripping the handlebars for so long. The heavy gloves don't help much. I may have a small amount of swelling in my fingers. They ache.
I know it's the side effects from these damn meds, but there's nothing I can do about it. Need to get these boots off too.
If I want relief from even a small amount of the pain, these meds are what I have to learn to rely on. For now, anyway.
I need to try to sleep, although that might not be possible.
The pain in my leg is bad.
Wish I had a Vicodin …
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