The blue bus

It started like all beautiful disasters do: in a haze of tequila, nervous sweat and the sound of Jim Morrison whispering some death-rattle poetry into a battered cassette player. It was three in the morning, the bats were back, and someone had slipped something unspeakable into the coffee. I was driving west on Highway 62 in a red Plymouth Fury with a cracked windshield and a glovebox full of amphetamines. The girl riding shotgun had a knife in her boot and sadness in her teeth. She was beautiful. Dangerous. Feral.

This is the end — Taped message looping through the static womb of the City. My only friend, the End — broadcast from a junk-sick DJ squirming in his own skin, antennae pulsing from the meat of his spine. He’s beautiful. He’s screaming. He’s telling you goodbye in every language you forgot in the womb.

“You there. You think you have a plan. You think you stand. You don’t stand, boy. You tremble in the wind like government paper. Burn, you bureaucrat of love, burn in your own file.”

We were chasing a rumour: some bastard’s idea of salvation out past the lights, out where the GPS stopped making sense. She called it The King’s Highway, a spiritual artery pumping madness out of the cracked heart of America.

“I need to get to the snake,” she said.

“The what?”

She lit a cigarette with hands that trembled just slightly. “The snake, man. The long one. Ancient. Cold as hell.”

I didn’t ask questions. Not because I trusted her, but because I had already taken two hits of blotter acid that tasted suspiciously like formaldehyde and was starting to see radio signals in the clouds.

Out there, everything was breaking down. Torn along the folds.

Kids were talking to their shoelaces. Preachers were overdosing in phone booths. Reagan’s America was blooming into a chrome nightmare and Nixon was grinning like Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys on a gig at the Grand Ole Opry.

All the children are insane, I scrawled in my notebook. Might use that later. Also something indecipherable about a man with no pants shouting about fluoride and redemption behind a Waffle House.

The elaborate scaffolding collapses. Offices fold into themselves like dying beetles. I watch men with typewriters for heads scream as they are sucked into fax machines. Surveillance angels moaning in orgasmic static.

No safety. No surprise. No future. Just the long drag of withdrawal from you.

A haiku pops into my head:

Blue-tailed damselfly on spathe of calla lily torn along the folds.

Your eyes, blank meat now. Two coins paid to a boatman who never came.

What Whitman said:

I was the man ... I suffered ... I was there.

This land is desperate — a sweating, twitching addict scratching at the locked gate of its own dream. Hand out. Shaking. Begging. Lost in spathe.

“Stranger, stranger, let me in, let me in, let me —”

Whitman collapses mid-sentence. Heart gone. Replaced with a red telephone that never rings.

The Roman Wilderness. Oh yes. Classical pain, genital architecture, endless columns supporting nothing.

The children chant backwards hymns and read Archie comics encoding Communist manifestos. Angel-headed hipsters dance on burning tires. A chorus of bikini-wearing Goldie Hawns appears with suggestive slogans painted on their bodies:

DANGEROUS CURVES AHEAD. HANDLE WITH CARE.

Or maybe that was a road sign.

Waiting. Waiting for the Summer Rain, which smells like napalm and tastes like artificial peach flavour.

Danger at the edge of town — always the edge. You can’t stay in the centre, which is everywhere, without bleeding. Or the circumference, which is nowhere.

So I ride the King’s Highway, baby — slick with ancient bile. Crawling with customs agents who speak in Morse code and inject you with forms.

Weird scenes inside the gold mine is a metonym. You dig it and all you find is reels of forgotten propaganda films and one screaming fetus labelled American Dream. Hungarian cinema for the rest of the Silent Era!

There was no summer rain. There would never be summer rain again.

We found the blue bus outside a laundromat in Yucca Valley. Parked. Engine running.

Windows tinted like a hearse. The driver had war eyes. Dead eyes. Eyes that had seen things in the Mekong Delta that God had politely declined to witness. God at the centre of the steering wheel that has no circumference.

“Driver, where you taking us?” the girl asked.

He said nothing. He had no face. Just opened the door.

We got in.

Ride the snake. Long bastard. Seven miles of slick government tissue, pulsating with sex crimes and office gossip. It whispers: “You signed me into law.”

One big, beautiful bill.

I ride it.

To the ancient lake — a congress of writhing roaches reflecting the void.

“The west is the best.” Bullshit.

The west is a theme park where the actors forgot their lines and the tourists shoot heroin through their eyelids.

The blue bus is calling us. I step on.

Driver’s face a government-issued hole that mutters radio jingles backwards.

The bus lurches forward like a dying lung.

Strangers licking salt off each other’s knuckles. A woman weeping into a suitcase full of VHS tapes. A man in a Nixon mask trying to sell us dried peyote buttons out of a Crown Royal bag.

Ride the snake. To the ancient lake.

Down past the rotting diners and used car lots. Through burned-out Indian casinos and forgotten war memorials. Freight yards full of old Black men and the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.

The snake is old, and its skin is cold. I could feel it, pulsing beneath us. Ancient. Coiled around the bones of this great American hallucination. Doin’ a blue rug.

Driver, where you taking us?

The killer awoke before dawn. He put his boots on.

He’s part human. Part code. Wore boots of dead preacher skin. Pulled a face from the Gallery — filed under “Suburban Incest + Abstract Rage.”

And he walked on down the hall.

Sister’s room: quiet. Brother’s room: ticking. Then the door — Father?

Yes, son?

“I want to kill you.”

No metaphor. No punchline.

Just raw, unfiltered American horror.

Mother?

Unfinished. But you know. You always know.

Come on, baby. Take a chance with us.

We’re on the bus. Ride the snake. This is Trump’s America now, baby. Take a chance with us.

Come on baby, take a chance with us Come on baby, take a chance with us Come on baby, take a chance with us And meet me at the back of the blue bus Doin’ a blue rug, on a blue bus, doin’ a Come on yeah Fuck, fuck-ah, yeah Fuck, fuck Fuck, fuck Fuck, fuck, fuck yeah! Come on baby, come on Fuck me baby, fuck yeah Whoa Fuck, fuck, fuck, yeah! Fuck, yeah, come on baby Fuck me baby, fuck fuck Whoa, whoa, whoa, yeah Fuck yeah, do it, yeah Come on! Huh, huh, huh, huh, yeah All right Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end It hurts to set you free But you’ll never follow me The end of laughter and soft lies The end of nights we tried to die This is the end