This was way too much commotion to deal with at this absurdly early hour - 9:30 - and even more absurd was trying to figure out exactly what had happened and why.
Scrib had awoken blacked out, grabbed Fernweh by the throat and held him off the ground, screaming and spitting incoherent belligerence at his face for a while before coming to his senses. He soon apologized for what he claimed not to remember doing.
Scrib had always had anger problems, but prior to this morning, his anger had always been directed to himself. He used to punch himself in the head or cut himself when he was feeling upset, but things were different now. The Road has a tendency to change people - it weakens insecurities, heightens an individuals sense of self (having to live for yourself for so long will undeniably do that) and, whether in subtle or obvious ways, bloats a person’s ego. Scrib had definitely let the Road get to him - his ego had stretched far enough to allow him to take his anger out on the people around him, as opposed to internalizing it. We had hoped that it wouldn’t continue this way, but it looked like things were going downhill.
Once our heartbeats had settled, we recalled our day’s agenda. We had to make thirty more bucks before we could pay for our rideshare, and we only had a few hours to do it. To the highway!
We reached our super spot (exact locations will remain secret in accordance with the Hobo Code). The three of us made a most profitable team. Two of us would shred some strings on one of our instruments while the other sauntered up and down the side of the highway with a sign proclaiming our perverse desire for pennies and dimes. Not only were we thrown the thirty bucks that we needed in less than an hour, but we found an awesome opportunity to smoke a bowl of weed with a dude passing by in the oncoming traffic lane. As we passed him back his pipe, he sped off towards a stagnant green light while we grew slant-eyed and slack jawed.
We headed back to Marcellus’s house and sat around waiting for our rideshare to arrive.
Only two hours late, our short, gruff east Indian chauffeur rolled up in a car which was much smaller than any of us had anticipated. The look on his face said that we had much more shit to pack with us than he’d anticipated.
After a good twenty minutes of rearranging the useless contents of his trunk (empty bottles of tire lube and washer fluid, etc) which he seemed determined to keep, we finally managed to shove a couple of our bags in with them. The rest was destined to sit upon our laps as the four of us climbed into the car.
Scrib and I, packed to the point of immobility, sat in the back accompanied with two baby chairs, my huge military backpack, and a guitar. Fernweh sat in the passenger seat with his own backpack and his mandolin.
As our new driver (hereon known as Habeeb) pulled out of the driveway, we found ourselves on the road again. Unable to move any part of our body except our eyeballs and our mouths, the three of us wore sly smiles as we hit the highway on our way to Toronto. We bid good riddance to Regina, and thus began our extremely painful, irritable and unsavoury journey towards Ontario.
No comments:
Post a Comment