Road Trip

My boyfriend’s name is Iron, you just need to get over that, but Iron told me I’m a horrible person because I like sunshine and the beach and I tell Iron that’s fine then, but let’s at least do something, go somewhere. Let’s walk the railroad tracks at night, let’s get our tits out at a burlesque, let’s go to a theme park and steal children’s popcorn and smoke crack with the ferris wheel operator. Maybe your mom will die of a stroke when we’re halfway across the country. Maybe a natural disaster in an unknown city will hone our latent leadership skills. Maybe I discover dark truths about myself that can only be fully realized in the midst of a luciferian orgy, and you can go shopping that day. Iron thought about all the ways he could get cancer from those things and couldn’t come up with anything quite as bad as melanoma, and that’s really how the road trip began.

Iron had the brilliant idea to tell jokes to pass the time. All of his jokes were abstract. Sometimes they were silence accompanied by light bodily twitching. Sometimes he screamed in agony with his jaw jutting downward. Sometimes he just looked at me and told me every time I blinked. But my jokes included spoken word:

“Is there a place that exists outside of your loving embrace? I’m calling you fat.”

“Never go out with a situational comedian, they’ll make you wait nine months for the punchline. If you end up raising the thing, they’ll just claim you didn’t get it, and God forbid they feel the need to repeat themselves.”

“Baby, I think it’s time I formally meet your mother. It’s not right I only see her clad in nipple pasties and genuflect in Florentine nightclubs while unbuckling my belt with her teeth, but, of course, if you feel we’re not ready for that yet—”

But by the end of all the fresh fun of joketelling, we realized that he had forgotten to start the car, which honestly made us laugh more than anything else.

I made sure to make love to every driver we passed on the highway. Older men with furry eyebrows and thick prepuce. They swiftly left their oafish wives and docile children upon meeting my gaze. He punched my prosaic chauffeur and fingerblasted me into the fucking future. Once the kids left for clown college and my pussy fell down the stairs, Tom started asking for butt stuff and that’s when I knew we were as good as dead. I eventually got bored though and stopped looking out the window. It would be hilarious if the people in traffic were right all along and that the true meaning of life lies in getting to your destination the quickest, that would be really hilarious I think.

The theme park was flattened by a radioactive squirrel, burlesque is only something that exists in dream sequences, so we stop at the beigest motel for the night. Our room is made entirely out of dusty tweed, even the botanical arrangements and nuclear family of rats. I sit down on the closest protuberance that resembles a bed. Iron washes his hands with cucumber lotion and sticks his thumb inside me because he never really learned how to do anything.

“Have you been cheating on me?” he asks.

Mother Rat is combing her daughter’s tweed hair with a tweed comb in order to get all that tweed out. All three of us look at each other in girl code.

“No. Why?”

“Your pussy is warmer. Wetter. Tighter.”

Father Rat picks at a gray crumb while his son sniffs his butthole. Then they fist bump each other and switch.

“You’re crazy. My pussy is its normal big dry self.”

Of course, though, he’s out of the mood now, so I stick my own thumb inside my own juicy self and think about how many hijinks we’re going to get into on our road trip and then Mother Rat asks us to turn out the lights and get some shuteye and we all do as told.

The next day I fall severely ill so Iron rushes me to the closest hospital and plugs my veins into the nearest outlet. It doesn’t matter what I’m ill of, which I have to remind Iron over and over again, it’s just an important opportunity that he should not pass up. I transfuse an unattended blood bag into my breasts to be sexy but Iron is far too focused on the milk-flavored jello and television static which he mistakes for subterranean cinema. He sleeps on the green vinyl sofa while corpulent hookers dressed in nurse’s costumes take turns massaging his bunions. After Iron requests a champagne fountain and triple A batteries for the remote, I remind him we’re thirty minutes behind schedule so—we dine and dash.

I thank Iron for taking care of me once we’re back on wheels, but he gets so flustered, vomits hot tremetol in his pants, some people just can’t take a compliment, and that’s when it happens, his tiny little car breaks down… on the wrong side of the tracks. I scream with glee, mostly to attract a passing serial killer’s attention. Iron thinks I’m excited because of the railroad tracks part, as I mentioned earlier, and I have to remind him that we’re not actually at railroad tracks, we’re just in imminent danger, but he can’t see it, he’s always been a glass-half-say-when kind of guy.

Just as I suspected, a disheveled figure haunts the rearview mirror, yellow canines the size of hands, teeth not dogs, wielding a dirty corn broom, hoarding enough back hair to fix a motel room. I scream but at least try to pretend I’m scared this time.

“The Monster!”

The murky figure finds his mark and the audience sees once and for all that he’s actually a good guy, a heart surgeon, happily married, father of three boys, former recipient of a 1430 SAT score. And it wasn’t a broom, it’s a wrench, the kind for fixing things. He bends down, greases our wheels, and just like that our car springs into action while cartoon smoke billows out the tailpipe. Iron gives the good samaritan a thumbs up as we drive away and I ask nicely if he’d not flirt with the locals.

Iron tries talking about tomorrow’s weather so I jump face-first out of the moving vehicle and cheese-grate onto the hot pavement. What I do next frightens most—I kill the closest living thing I can see. A fire ant. A death is necessary when nothing else is happening, grief is technically a funhouse. Iron screams in parturient anguish. He says kind words about the departed. I stay mum out of respect. After the wake, I give Iron road head, although it shouldn’t count as praying since I wasn’t on my knees.

I swallow his boring pink cum and, like the greatest politicians do, resort to the emergency button: extract my pistol, heroin, and foot-shaped fleshlight from the glove compartment. As I chamber a round, Iron clears his throat and whispers:

“Would you mind telling me where I am? And if it’s no bother, could you tell me exactly why I’m there in the first place?”

I laugh and I assure Iron that he’s gotten much better with the joketelling, could work on the delivery, but anyhow we don’t have time for such tomfoolery now, not with our spontaneity at stake! He extends an open gelatinous palm, asking me to touch it, just once, any touch would do, and that’s when I get the sense that… Iron doesn’t really like road trips.

On the third day, I drive Iron to his mom’s house so she can take care of him. Fourth, I drive past the good samaritan, give him the smack. Fifth, give Mother Rat the gun and entertain a consensual and experimental amour with her for six weeks. No worries, I eventually find my way to the ocean. Takes a few years, but I needed those years didn’t I—glad I got them out of the way. Full and happy, I make for a poor houseguest, and the ocean starts crying upon my arrival. I feel for the ocean, I do. I pat the ocean’s back, like a fat grainy dog, and the ocean can tell what I’m thinking, and she tells me that she’s not crying, this is just what she is, can’t you see it, but, it makes far too much sense for me to understand. I still have my foot, put the vulval sole to my ear like a seashell. Everything already happened, the foot tells me, we’re just playing with our own placenta until the next tally light, until a pelican picks it up and flies away, and I don’t care at all. I can’t be a gamine since I’ve no striped shirts, too noisy to be a waif and too bored to be a siren, I haven’t the wit for shrewdom or the ass for war, least of all, the marketing for myth. The sky starts crying too, fat milky pearldrops, and I remind the girls, please girls, there’s only so much I can take, no one in the world has ever successfully looked after two children at once, besides, I’ve never wanted to be a mother, not once, not even now. They laugh and laugh and remind me hey, hey, hey, it’s okay, you can cry too if you want, but, as little girls often are, they’re just as wrong as wrong can be.