lost time on the purple heart highway

by greenhill

Posted to Stories on 2003-05-20 08:26:00

We had been making our way on up a winding road for approximately two hours. Two long hours without stopping once or commenting on the absence of an appreciable form of sunlight, the thick field-clouds rhythmically coughing on our ride with needle-like drops of rain. As I lit another cigarette and checked the incense, a green, diamond shaped roadside sign alerted me that some type of “Lennon” exit was coming our way. I had no clue as to what this was supposed to mean. The thing just thrust out “Lennon,” and I was intrigued.
I didn’t bother to see if the others had noticed it. I might have swerved a bit to the left at first, not necessarily out of a sense of discomfort or cooperation with the tenets of psychedelic displacement, but because my cigarette was poorly lit and part of the cherry had fallen underneath my lap. Because I was trying to maneuver my way on a strange highway, I was intent on paying attention to the road, but knew that yet another burn-hole in the driver’s seat of the car should be avoided if possible.
This folly had been going on during the duration of the whole trip. My companions weren’t smokers and didn’t carry lighters, and because I can’t trust myself to hang on to those things for a period of more than twenty four hours, I had stopped buying them years ago, resigning myself to using matchbooks snatched from glass bowls in relatively generous bars and restaurants, and of course those requisite built-in lighters that many car manufacturers still describe as a “special feature”; lately I’d noticed that many of my friends had hidden theirs away someplace, choosing to use the available outlet as a power source for those tedious tape-deck-adaptable compact disc players they’ve begun to sell even now in gas stations. But we were in my car; my discs
were neatly tucked away in a convenient changer in the trunk; it was just that the complimentary lighter of this particular make and model was having a rough time agreeing with the unfiltered natural tobacco cigarettes I’d received, in the form of a free carton, a week earlier.
I hurriedly moistened my finger tips with saliva and reached towards my crotch, under which the still smoldering cherry burned my fingers slightly, despite the prescence of my clingy spit. I was glad that my fingers were calloused from frequent guitar playing, and presently noticed that when they get really hard and dense you begin to long for that special feeling of dexterity and supple grace which allows you to handle tiny burning objects with great care and sensitivity, something, with my thimblesque fingertips being as they were, I couldn’t possibly accomplish quickly. But, naturally, without those same leathered hands, the cherry would have hurt me a bit more… At any rate, as I finally deposited the little beast onto the shredded shoulder of the Purple Heart Highway, and managed to properly light another cigarette this time, my thoughts flashed back to the diamond green reminder I’d seen prior to my smoking difficulties. I took a few deep puffs and tried to make sense of the situation.
Like any person who’s a fan of rock and roll music, or has even a passing acquaintance with rock-trivia related board games, the surname “Lennon” is a familiar one. It carries with it’s natural pleasant sound in the mouth the entire gamut of human emotion and yearning for a calmer, better world, the least of which is deep sorrow felt for a man whose life and continually evolving “message” were taken from him by a certifiable loony. I knew that John’s father had been some sort of sailor, and I speculated (only because he abandoned John and probably isn’t deserving of pleasant remarks) with an amusing amount of intentionally naive chagrin, that his daddy had, on some lame trans-atlantic voyage, somehow wandered inland and gotten stranded in eastern Michigan with a bad case of amnesia, and… you see where this is going.
It didn’t occur to me at the time that some Michigan folk, who were understandably impressed by such a trailblazing example of what it takes to rock the fuck out and mean it, might have named some post-“R.I.P., John” contrived little hamlet after the sometimes bearded man, who once, when asked how he “found America” replied “by turning left at Greenland”; it was also said that, when he found himself to be sitting up in the clouds on a sunny day (and it’s always sunny up there), that he “cried for reality,” which made increasingly more sense to me as i drove further up that road on a sunless day, not weeping for reality exactly, or even the random phrases this construct will often throw at you, as if you’re a goon in a dunk tank waiting for that perfectly thrown fastball. I definetly wasn’t crying.
And so, from there on in, my thoughts became scattered things, focusing their attention on the occurance of some singer’s last name placed empiracally on a piece of painted green metal, no more interested or disturbed by this than Lennon himself would have been; they (my thoughts) did drift along the lines of a noticeable theme though, but nonetheless were akin to the act of flipping through a magazine article about some one, and only focusing on the silly details of the photos, not the content of the article itself.
I began to wonder about many men with beards that I’ve seen or heard about, and tried to think of which one I liked best. And while I knew which one was for me and still know – in fact, I arrived at him instead of the others rather quickly and unanimously -I realize only now at the time of this typing that I made that decision becuase he’s literally a performer and has done his best to entertain, and encourage me to, among other nice things, “let go and forget about trying to be cool; if someone you know is hurtin, that’s when you should be cool; if you see that a riot’s going down in the street, you want to be cool and not add to the trouble; but hanging out at a _____ concert? No. Sing along if you know the words to this one, and if you don’t know ’em or you don’t wanna sing ours, just make some shit up! This is not a time to be cool.” I relaxed, and I took my eyes off the road in attempt to personalize these fine ideas.
I took my eyes off the road and examined my own face. I had shaved earlier that day, and had cut myself, accidentally on my neck, badly. I disliked when this happened; however, unless you want to grow a beard, it’s unavoidable. I stared closely at my neck, disgusted with the red welts and gruesomely shaped chapped irregular lines, very unconcerned as to the wiles of the unfamiliar highway we were bound to; when a fellow driver beeped his horn at me to remind me to snap out of it, I noticed we were almost to a bridge. Not a large one but one big enough to let you know. And this time a rectangular green sign proclaimed: “Looking Glass River”. I caught my own reflection again somewhere; another strange glance to my neck, precipitated, this time, by what I hoped would be the last strange green sign posted dumbly and ape-like and very self-righteously on the Purple Heart Highway. And from the open window, through which I had just tossed out that infamous but troublesome cigarette, I caught, through and above the echo of shallow running water, the beginning of some maniacal tirade from beneath the bridge, and unfortunately, I was forced by my belief in commiting to an idea to finish the rest of it in my head, after we had long since passed the river and the warbling voice:

“EX-BUTLER TELLS ALL IN SHOCKER!” (it warbled)
“As on those days when a feeling of utter mental fitness makes one careless, the razor slips and the lather froths red; yet the cut is quite painless and heals almost at once. Plantations, forests of rubber trees. From the edge of each viscous scar drips a filament of liquid rubber like a strip of spent chewing gum… It’s all very well taking risks and being afraid of nothing. But there are… limits. It’s a fool’s game and you can take my word for it. A bedroom with a woman, with shattered doors and transom windows, words, pride too caustic and normal to shock the folk-psychology of the unadventerous (parading around their experience as if it were only a bar code or cheap day dream)… these are the new conditions, and you’ve been expecting them for a while now. You will, I hope, appreciate our dilemma, and make allowances…”

(Now my mind is refusing to make allowances, refusing to be paid for it’s sincere and genuine, if not unintentionally maligned services; it furtively proposed nocturnal surprise parties complete with lanterns, garlanded hats, and morning orders: “Between bursts of moaning, yet we converse effortlessly”).

I sighed, and knew I was finished.