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January 16, 2000
mark thomas My new computer is starting to lose its new computer smell. I am sick of re-downloading all the security patches. This whole process of breaking in a computer is genuinely complicated. I would crack open the old typewriter but you can't really do much Perl or HTML on a Smith-Corona. Three weeks ago I hired my first "Cleaning Lady." Today my second "Cleaning Lady" came through. The kitchen, especially the floor, is cleaner than I ever imagined possible. The bathroom smells antiseptic. Even the living room floor looks great. I don't think I am ready for this. People waiting on me and calling me "Sir" is so beyond me. It has been 2 years and I am not even up to the hazards of being called "Boss." This, I thought 10 years ago, was to be the nonsense of my 40s, not the prime of my
Men at forty I have not entered very many rooms. As every birthday approaches I imagine that the year ahead will be filled with strange rooms, creaky doors, foreign bodies and sumptuous sheets. I have not lived the Rod Stewart fantasy. I have not even lived the Elton John fantasy, and forget about the Steve Miller Band. I spent several, several minutes today tracing the paths I took. From places like a policeman's angry face outside of Naples, Florida; from getting fingerprinted in Fairfield, Connecticut; from pissing off an Interstate overpass in Chicago; from not having the nerve to drive a rented car into the Pacific Ocean near the Driftwood Motel; from the murderous dreams I've had for as long as I can remember; from Lookout Mountain in Georgia; from dodging 90-mph 18-wheel trucks along Florida Interstate roadsides. Some mornings it opens up. Before yesterday the last time I listened to the Steve Miller Band was 1985. In high school the "Steve Miller Band's Greatest Hits 1974-1978" was one of the 8-tracks I listened to in my Dodge Dart when I and my friends drove in spirals around the suburbs of Tampa, Florida. (I really liked reaching up for the "8" key up there in that last sentence.) In the late 1980s the suburban interstates of Tampa were not safe for driving alone or for aimlessly listening to 8-tracks or pissing across overpasses. But that is exactly where I spent endless teenage hours sucking up the hot Florida night air. If you ever drive across Interstate 4 or the real Interstate 75 in or around Tampa late at night you will probably dismiss those roads as endless wastelands. But there was a time in my life when I had every inch of those roads memorized. Every mile-marker, every exit, every sign pointing to Lake City 127 miles north. I used to play a game with myself that "If I drive 127 miles an hour, I will get to Lake City in 1 hour." And the game would obsessively-compulsively repeat itself however much closer I came to Lake City. "If I drive 45 miles per hour..." "30 miles per hour..." "1 mile per hour..." to the point where there was no way I could ever get to Lake City (or anywhere on earth) because it was always 1 hour away. I got to Lake City later in life, and it was uneventful. Lake City occupied 2 or 3 exits off Interstate 75 going north to Atlanta and, 15 years later, New York City. The circuitously ridiculous trip to Lake City was like the envelope I packed for myself in my bedroom when I was 11 years old in 1979, to be opened in 1989. I packed that envelope with $3 in cash, a picture of the B-52s, and who knows what else. October 11, 1989 was to be the day opened the sacred package, and when the day finally arrived I decided to leave the envelope shut. That is how the envelope sits in my closet tonight. Tonight is January 16, 2000, and the wind is howling through my bathroom window, through the kitchen window, through the living room window. It is cold outside, and windy, and I have headphones on. The Steve Miller Band's Greatest Hits are on, and though I have not listened to this album for about 15 years I still have the album and every song on it memorized in the way anyone I've ever asked has every last word to "American Pie" memorized. When it comes to the Steve Miller Band or Elton John or Elvis I am unapologetic to those who scorn me with their higher "taste" in music.
I ain't complainin', That's a good song. Right now I am bobbing my head back and around just like those Friday nights alone in the Dodge Dart when I was supposed to be going home but instead savored the time alone and turned the car around and around and around for another run through Brandon, or another run towards Lakeland, or another 1:00 a.m. trip along Bayshore Boulevard toward God-knew-where.
Keep on a rockin' me bay-bay... Right now, all those nights feel like a dream. Then, all the feelings were clear. I could feel everything. The hot nights, the humidity, the 1980's. I have not been able to feel much of anything since then, and lately I miss it.
Some People call me the Space Cowboy I had a girlfriend in high school who tolerated my ridiculous elliptical drives. She never let me drive her to Elfers, or Lake City, or much of anywhere else except her house. But she had the sentience to sit and hear me talk about those places while we drove from Point A to Point B. I told her about the drives to the porno stores outside of the city limits, where I saw 14 year olds pouring beer out the driver's seat side and racing to beat Amtrak trains across the light. I talked about New York and London and Sydney and all those places I had no idea about. She sat stage right in the passenger seat and grunted "uh-huh" and occasionally nodded whilst I blathered on like a self-absorbed sack of shit. We heard the Steve Miller Band Greatest Hits 8-track. Together in my car we might have heard it 2 or 3 times to my 500-600 times listening to it solo. Those nights with her were a snapshot of how I would spend the next 20 years trying to get girlfriends or just women in general to listen to the music I listen to without rolling their eyes and feigning sleep. 20 years ago it was the Steve Miller Band, just today it was Schubert, Beethoven, and Busoni. One night in 1985 we were driving toward her house in Brandon when the 12th song of this Steve Miller Band Greatest Hits album came on. Somewhere along Interstate 75. The song started
My Grandpa he's 95 I pulled the car over to the emergency lane and reached over for her hand and asked "Do you wanna dance?" She pulled back her hand and quickly asked "What?" "C'mon, let's get out." "Whaaat?" I put the car in park, opened the driver's side door and leapt out onto the road, right as the song went
I'm a hard workin' man, I danced, danced, danced right out there in the middle of the slow lane on Interstate 75. It was after 2:00 in the morning and even tonight this song makes me want to live forever. I danced like a dumb-ass toward the back of the car, planning to make my way to the passenger side so I could open her door and do the dance-dance-dance right there in the emergency lane and then down the grassy hill along the roadside. Dancing left toward the back of the car a wall of metal and gasoline stormed at me. A Mercedes truck with headlights and a loud horn it was. In the fraction of a second that I had to live I leapt from the pavement toward the grass, both my feet buckling, the right slapping the left and the left shoe flying north under the force of the 18-wheel disaster. My body spun every way it could, the force of the truck under my feet and legs was so strong, and I screamed and my body slobbered down the hill. In less than a second I saw that there was just about no distance between myself and being hit. From underneath as my face scraped the hillside I saw my Dodge Dart seemingly lift off the ground as the 2-ton truck raped the road right beside it. The truck would drive on anyway, and once this fall of mine down the hillside ended it would disappear into the north and one way or another I would live forever. There is a scream that people give out when they wake from nightmares. It is helpless, child-like, and pathetically even-pitched. While falling that night into the grass off of Interstate 75 I screamed that scream. When the scream ended my teeth were full of wet grass, my right side hurt like hell, and at the top of the hill sat my Dodge Dart. In the passenger seat sat my girlfriend, her face buried in her right hand and profiled by the light of the moon and the dashboard behind her. Her throat muttered on and on about how embarrassed she was, how she just wished this night would end. I grabbed the grass beneath me by the roots and pulled myself back into walking (or was it dancing?) position. I still felt a sprig of ridiculous 18-year-old energy, but decided not to waste it there. I climbed up the hillside toward the car. If she thinks about that night at all any more I have to assume that she still has no idea why I opened her door and asked her to get out so that I could slide into the driver's seat. That Steve Miller Band song is two minutes and 10 or 12 seconds long. I fell down the hillside during the guts of the song, and when I reclaimed the driver's seat he was singing
Come on darling It happened so fast. I could hear the song a' sangin' but while savoring the seat under my ass and the steering wheel in my hand and the air in my lungs I was not listening along with it any more. I drove her to her house and never saw her again. A few minutes later I pulled the car over at the corner of Highway 61 and some other highway and rocked my head into the headrest and keeled up and sucked up the air and screamed and pounded the steering wheel like a living person for so many hours that to this day I do not know why the sun did not rise on me.
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