I think it was Elvis who said, "I'm itchin like a man on a fuzzy tree." That's the way I felt. My scalp was threatening to crawl down my face. I kept checking the rearview monitor, not that I could see anything. Only the occasional police robot and I knew they couldn't see up Madra's long, black dress. She puts up a cloak that even hides her turbulence. She just switches lanes and they whirr past. Flying dustpans. I wish they were. They could clean up some of the shit flying all around in my peripheral vision. I guess it was mostly just garbage but it was going by so fast and it's always kind of a blur. I wonder if all this travel is making my eyes go bad. I can't close them or I see a Junior Olympics of flying shit.
I use "she" loosely when I talk about Madra. There's a tendency to be a she. She rips hundreds of personalities from old tv and radio broadcasts. The effect can be fairly entertaining on a couple of hits of acid. She cooks up a reality soup, a kind of entertainment you can taste, you know, hits you in the gut. It helps make the long stretches of boring road bearable. And we just got to keep on getting down it. I hope she explains why one of these days. She can be ever so coy, thorny and enthusiastic. All in a half a minute.
So there we were, riding the Amazon trench, Madra, me and, of course, the rats. The backseat and floorboard belongs to them, which is cool with me. I don't go back there anyways, just throw my garbage back there. And You can hear them reading the packages and cracking jokes in those screechy little voices of theirs. Quickly enough, the trash gets incorporated into the maze, nest, art project Madra is helping them with. They're pretty inventive I'll grant the vermin that.
Sometimes I hear her cooing only to them in a June Cleaver uber-mom voice, "Caligula, give Titus back his Bazooka Joe comix." When the little thief protests, she quotes in the Nixon waver "I am not a crook. I've earned everything I've got." That stops them in their tracks. They huddle and discuss. Takes a while to catch, they laugh together, these rats. Like they everything, together. I hope they do inherit this goddamn planet.
The trench is a boring stretch of road no bumps, no hills, no people, mostly. Just the scrubby trees of all that yet lives in the Amazon Desert. And it is a trench, you are down in it. Hell, it was the mighty Amazon. Now it's part of the longest stretch of pavement in the world, stretching from Tierra Del Fuego, where we had been checking out some very sunburned penguins, on to Venezuela. Then we hop the St. Noriega Memorial Tollroad--the customs office and hospitality house is the best place to score in the hemisphere-- and jump the canal. They stopped dredging it years ago, so you'll be able to drive over it soon enough. There's a road of interconnecting ships there now. If it's still in neutral hands--read that as drugcartel, my friends-- they have every interest in keeping this road open and under their control. Eventually, we are to make it to the Midwest where we can find repairs, crash on some friends.
"Madra, could you pipe us a little commercial radio? Something?"
"Yes, sir, starting with the news channel, sir," she says like some over-achiever lieutenant. I ignore the dig. You have to in these close quarters. She knows how that shit bugs me. And I know I get on her nerves, or the equivalent. I just have to remember who does the driving.
"News is fine." More talk about sunspots. This flare-up could fry the atmosphere. "Good, then we won't have to worry about it anymore," I mutter.
"Speak for yourself," comes a raspy voice from the back seat, probably Cesar on his last lap of terminal car sickness. These rats have the worst little scratchy voices and relentless weezing little lungs. I swear they all have lung cancer when thy are born. I think the cancer industry bred them to have it upon birth so that they would get positive findings for whatever they were testing for. That's job security. And it's been keeping them in business to this day. Mad found these little buggers at some research facility before she found me. They've probably seen some fairly exotic pharmaceuticals. That's one thing we have in common.
Just thinking about it made my chromosomes cry out for a little damage, like having a billion baby birds to feed. And all I had is a little dropper full of food left. A dropper is all I need. Cheep cheep. Here comes your mama. A little in the eye, behind the ears, on the pulsepoints. Hehe.
"Hey Mad, you still got my 'Half Machine Lip Moves' tape?" Vintage wierdtrip music from the bad old days of San Francisco, Chrome. Set me back fifteen hundred hyperinflated dollars. So much paper. The sun had begun to set. I thought, maybe I could turn this little trip around.
"Sorry, Henry, but I ate it."
"What? Stop the car. I can't do this anymore. I think I'm having an aneurysm. Mad. How could you-- Where is it?"
"Here ya go," the two pieces of the tape chassis came flying out trailing the taut trailing the tangled mess of metal-coated plastic film that was my favorite irreplaceable and almost sole possession.
"That's it stop the car, I can't do this. I can't go on. It's just not fair."
"Aww, shut up you big crybaby."
"I've had it from you, Caesar, you worthless--"
"You better get it together, Henry, there's a car approaching. Fast on the outside."
Now, there aren't many cars out on the trench, not since Brazil's economy collapsed. When they do show up it is almost always trouble. I gripped the steering wheel instinctively even though I wasn't driving. If I had control over this thing I would just race it up over the edge of the Trench and disappear into the desert where there was noone for hundreds of miles. Just the thought of having to deal with anybody at all caused anxiety to enter my body like a fibrous growth. My high split and crack like an old windshield.
"In the first position, it's the Five Cylinder Wonder. Followed closely by Mad Pack of Rats. Coming quickly on the inside track, it's Loathesome Stranger. Pulling up the rear it's Daddy's favorite, who looks like she's seen a little too much of daddy. Jockey Henry Histrionic glances back, as the Stranger approacheth, whipping the Wonder like a flag in a hurricane."
"Mad, what are you picking up?"
"Highway Log files tell me it's a private vehicle. Brazilian, local, got on 25 miles back. They've requested the next exit."
I glance over casually. It's some kind of late German model. The car looks like it's full of kids, wrestling. A laughing, pretty face, notices us and stares back. I give a three-fingered wave. She sneers, lifts up her shirt and presses her breasts against the window. The car races off, trailing it's own atmosphere like a comet vaporizing hash as it speeds around the sun. I wish I was in that car.
I must admit I was getting a little stir crazy, a little horny, and just getting a little tweaky around the periphery of my vision. There has to be something more. Something that would send me over the craggy hill to the peaceful valley. "Madra, you think you could kick down a little sexbox?"
"Anything for you, tall, dark and smelly. What setting?"
"You got a zoo monkey setting?"
"Right, here you go, Thumper."
I took the, I guess you might call it, the interface in hand, careful not to do too much damage. Mad started playing a little Barry White. The sun was heading toward that mellow redness of the late afternoon. The vibrations shook me me slightly.
"Mad, can I take the wheel please?"
"Can't let you do that, Henry, just wouldn't work, not in your state."
"I'm fine with driving with driving. I'm actually pretty good."
"Hmmm. No."
"Goddammit, give me the wheel. I want the fucking wheel!" My eyeballs popped out of my head and hung over the rearview monitor like fuzzy dice.
"Okay, okay, but the first sign of trouble and you back in the dugout, Honus Wagner."
"What? Who?"
"Nevermind, live it up. Awfully demanding today..." She trailed off like she was getting lost. Somewhere deep in her metal shell.
At first, I had trouble seeing the road. I stared hard and blinked to focus my eyes. I felt my lungs starting to work. My chest ached a little, but I felt pretty good. If only the road wouldn't keep jumping around like a tongue wagging. This acid comes on fast. The road is fairly straight so I probably wouldn't crash.
I started squirming in the seat and chanting a little tune that I wrote myself, "I get to drive. I get to dri-ive." That's when the feeling started. Metal hooves on concrete. Tatata. It took over, fusing me, sexbox, Madra, even the rats in the backseat. Mad was making snorting sounds, I grew long ears like a donkey, and the rats sang, "Wheeeeeee" in the backseat.
The road was a flapping piece of black ribbon behind us. Or a zipper. We were zipping the two sides of the road together.
"Over the river and through the woods," Mad sang, a sang, a child's voice in stereo. She laughed and kicked up her heels. "And I don't know why, I feel like a horse." She sang a duet with Iggy Pop. She started a little echo up of all these good things. We travelled through time like that. Mad is like my little time machine. Slipping back through something moist and wholesome like an orgone sandwhich. I felt I could be happy, if I could find a little piece of sod somewhere. Maybe Kansas, hell, I don't know. Isn't that where we're going?
I lit a cigarette and exhaled a thin stream of ink. When I tapped off the ash, it rolled in the ashtray like a crowned head. "Bonny, bonny, Prince, Prince Charley." Mad sang. The bees in my head started to get angry from the smoke and awoke in me hivesound, tree teachings, I saw that everything had a name, even things that you wouldn't expect to have a name, like the ridges on the top of a bag of peanuts or the hole that a straw fits through. But I can't tell you the names because they're in different tongues, and it wasn't my tongue to start with. It was actually a fish that came to live in my mouth sent by the guys who live a the center of the galaxy and make the glue that binds everything together.
I heard them only seconds before they hit. Mad hadn't seen them. She was too busy pulling grandma's sleigh. They must have smelled us coming. Sexbox puts off a gawdawful stench- cumin, rotten grapes, mothballs, motor oil.
With a howl, they jumped down into the trench across two lanes and jumped in behind us. Three coyote boys on hula bikes. A big tire surrounds the rider with his knees jutting out the sides. A fin juts up to steer the thing along with the rider's lunges. They looked like rolling donuts with coyote filling. The bikes maneuver poorly and are hard to stop. The coyotes like them because they were protected on the rear and front by a fender. That way they could chase you down and you could only hope to shoot off an elbow, until they pull up along side. By then, it was getting pretty late for you.
I looked in the rear monitor. The three bikes grew on the fuzzy screen. I saw two swing to the left and one to the right. Pretty stupid of that guy to put himself between the car and the wall. Probably didn't expect a fight out of a clunker like Mad. Maybe he was blind with lust.
"Poon tech!"
"Oh my god we are gonna die. Game over man, I'm serious. They are gonna hunt us down and kill us." Madra was hysterical, like a fisherman on a boatride down the river Styx.
"It'll be all right, just take the controls and outmaneuver the fuckers. Madra! Answer me, Madra!"
"I'm not Madra. Call me Gamera the flying turtle. Fwooshshsh!"
"Shit, she's a basketcase. Rats. Dudes. Kings of Holy Fucking Rome. Help your buddy out."
"No way, man."
"Yeah, you hate us."
"Always have. Since day one."
The Coyotes were kicking the back of the car, motioning us to pull over.
"I'll make you a deal."
"No deals."
"I promise to be nice to you. All of you. However many of you there are." A Coyote gunned his throttle and swung up beside. He kicked the driver's window and sprayed high impact safety plastic all over me. Mean kick has that mutt. He recovered quick and steadied his trajectory back up the side of the car. I swiveled a gun at him that pivots off the front fender. No sooner than that, he has a chain wrapped around it and is pulling it out of its socket.
"Ouch. That hurts."
"It's only going to get worse."
The pup stared in and growled, "Pull over or die slow." His eyes were framed by red circles, from weeks of crank and dust and road burn. His breath blasted me like old Kawasaki. Yamahahaha. "We want your techno twat." And I knew there wasn't gonna be no rear axle grease.
"Ok, Caligula, listen to me, I can work it all out. You get the fuzzy Ratfink testicles hanging off the rearview mirror, um monitor." The pooch reached in a tried to grab my neck. I did a little creative steering and accelerator business to avoid it.
"No trade." said" said Augustus, with authority.
"I wasn't talking to you. Caligula, you're a rational rat, help me out here. Remember how you put a horse in the Senate? Well, we need some of that thinking here. I'll give you my ketchup packet collection and the fuzzy 'nads."
"Veni, vidi, fuck you," Caesar croaked.
"How about the testicles, the ketchup and a week on the sexbox. I think I can safely assume that I can grant you all that."
"Deal, give me a lift up to the window, Nero."
"Stand on my head, get your paw out of my eye."
Caligula jumped through the window and caught the Coyote by the ear. That rat scrambled all over his head, taking chunks out of it and leaped back to hood before the bike lost control. Sexbox is that good. The other two coyotes howled and raked the car with chains.
Madra cried, "Ow, ow, ow. Don't worry, Caligula, honey. Hang on to the windshield wiper, Mommy's got everything under control."
"Will you shut up if you can't help, Mad?" I started to swerve wildly like a crazy horse shaking the flies off. I bumped the cyclists on both sides. The bike on the left veered off and gained control. The one on the right, drove straight at the sides of the trench. The momentum drove him up the wall. The bike lobbed up in the air and crashed behind us as we drove through the arc.
I sweated stingers, thought I might lose my eyes. How was I supposed to get rid of this last guy? He's obviously the meanest, horniest, piece of roadtrash in the Hemisphere. He grinned at me like the deaths of the other riders were for his amusement.
"You're all mine, sweetmeat." he pointed at me. We got an extra kick of power from somewhere in Madra. I felt us lifting slightly off the ball joints, like she was really running for dear life. It was like we lost a little ballast, and maybe we could take off like Chittychittybangbang.
Even so, those hula bikes can really boogie. And, in spite of Mad's new-found quickness, the pup was gaining again. I looked back like a nervous jockey. A cloud of red dust followed the pup like an animated blood stain. I thought, maybe, this would be a good opportunity to say a prayer or something. Although I've never been good at this sort of thing, I thought maybe a prayer to St. Jude might help.
So I started to pray. I said, "St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes, best friend to gamblers and losers and people like me, I promise, if you get me out of this one, I'll never do acid again. Not even if someone offers it to me for free. Except maybe on my birthday and the fourth of July. Amen."
When I was done with my prayer, the coyote was closing in on my window once again. We must have travelled ten or fifteen miles in that short span of time going at the numbing speed, of heck, I dunno, you figure it, Madra's speedometer is broken. And I don't know what to do except keep trying to bump this hellhound. And he'll just keep recovering until he either he figured out something dastardly or we ran out of fuel.
So what the fuck. Maybe we'll both die. So I gave the steering wheel the most radical turn I could. The steering wheel comes off in my hands. Broken piece of...
Shocked, I looked out at the dog. He laughed at me, knew he had me. Pulled back his hand to give me a mouth full of fist and fur. I ducked back in the seat, only to feel an incredible inertia forward. My entire body snapped forward and shot back in the seat with an elastic twang of seatbelt, splayed across my chest like webbing, knocking me breathless. Where did that come from? My brains vaulted a sawhorse and did a double gainer.
Mad had braked and stopped on a postage stamp, popped the door open, and unhitched the belt. I fell out of the car onto my face, with my nose practically over the edge of a cliff. I was just in time to see the tiny puff of smoke at the bottom of the Angel Falls that was the Coyote. Actually, I added that part later. Remember those hilarious cartoons they used to make. Meepmeep.
"Are you all right?" asked Madra in sweet voice.
"I-- yea, what happened? The cliff just appeared."
"The Coyote couldn't brake. So he just went sailing... Byebye."
"Uh, so you knew what was going on the whole time?"
"Somewhere along the way, we slipped onto this tributary of the Amazon. I was going to show you this scenic overlook anyways. There it is, world's highest waterfall. Don't you wish there was some water?"
"So why did you pretend you were helpless?"
"Because I knew you would respond best if you had control. Otherwise, I would be cleaning the shit off you."
"Isn't that neat?" I mumbled. "Just like a tv show."
"Where do you think I learned my psychology?"
It didn't dignify response. I thumped my head back down on the ground and then it hit me. I had been tripping the whole time. What a way to ruin a high. I savored the last rushings of pomegranate tweakings.
"Shall I administer first aid?"
"No, leave me alone."
"As you wish."
Then I heard it. A giant metal watch with a bad case of flatulence. A movie projector fucking itself. I opened my eyes and peeked out into the air over the cliff. There it was, the fucking exploding Tao.
No time machine can do that.