21st Century Bogatyr: I Squinted and Stared Through it All

"There was nowhere to go but everywhere." Jack Kerouac

This is Part 10 of a fictional work in progress. Links to the rest are at the bottom of this.

by Zvi Baranoff

I drove south-east out of Chicago and left Illinois, crossing into Indiana. The hinterlands are dotted with cornfields and silos, the all-night juke joints with shitkicker bands and cheap corn whiskey, soulless diners with bland and tasteless food, low budget motels and even lower budget robot bordellos.

I pulled my car within sight of the hyperloop station and found an out of the way spot to just sit for a while.

I was in no hurry to jump down the hyperloop. Just thinking about it was making me queasy. I watched for rollers and other potential hazards and contemplated the situation.

I thought about the days before the hyperloop and the old Interstate Highway System. I tried to imagine a world without the hyperloop and I attempted to visualize it away. I felt a shimmering sensation as I wished the monstrosity to disincorporate. It shimmered for a while but it refused to fade.

I stared at it some more and it shimmered some more and then, it was gone.

I was driving an old Chevy with balding tires that badly needed a tune-up. The Chevy bumped and clunked and belched smoke and the car probably was down a quart or two for oil, as well.

The rain kept coming, on and off. The windshield wipers were worn out and long overdue for replacement. They scratched the windshield as they rhythmically flicked the water aside. My vision was extremely limited. I could still see the black ribbon of asphalt directly in front of me and I did what I could to stay between the white lines, which I could only see on and off.

The indicator needle for the gasoline was barely hovering near the bottom of the red. Neither my traveling partner Greg nor I had any cash and we had already squeezed all the loose change from the hitchhikers in the back seat, a nice hippie couple with backpacks, a guitar and a large smelly and muddy dog.

We pulled off the Interstate at the next exit. There was the Golden Arches of McDonald's on one corner and an ESSO gas station on another. I parked by the arches and told everyone in the car to see what they could do to rustle up some gas money, and maybe a bite to eat. We each took up a compass point around the burger joint and did the best we could to appear to be in need - which was the easy part - and also worthy of a helping hand, which was a significantly harder sell.

After more than a couple of hours of that, we had enough money for a little over a gallon of gasoline, and we had trash picked a few half eaten sandwiches. We gave the kid at the ESSO station a pile of coins and he squeezed enough gasoline into the Chevy to push the gauge up to the middle of the red.

I drove into the small town that was there by the Interstate. It was a town mostly passed over by time. There was a diminutive church with a steeple. There was a Main Street consisting of a couple blocks of stores. There were neighborhoods with wide streets, houses with yards, sidewalks lining the streets and cars parked by the curb. It was late and the town slept.

I turned off my headlights and I drove at a crawl and we cruised those streets, looking for the right combination of circumstances and conditions. On a through street lined with large trees, I pulled up to a car that was parked at the curb.

My buddy got out of the passenger door, but was back in a flash. "No good. Locked," he told me. I cruised further down the street until I found the next car with trees obscuring the view.

The second car I pulled up on, the gas tank was on the wrong side but the third car was a score. There, easy pickings, was a large Cadillac, ideally situated, with a very full tank of gasoline. We siphoned all we could into our Chevy, spilling very little and leaving that Caddy with likely a quarter tank. I spun around, put my foot to the pedal and turned my headlights back on. I tuned the radio to a rock station as we jumped back onto the Interstate.

I had the highway mostly to myself. I barreled on through the darkness and rain. The hippies in the backseat slept peacefully. The dog snored and farted.

The radio went static and we lost our signal and I turned the damn thing off. My buddy in the passenger seat hummed and sang songs for a while and then his head was weaving for a while and the sounds became less coherent and then he dozed off.

I drove on through the night, through the starless blackness on the unending ribbon of black asphalt. The windshield was fogged over. I squinted and stared through it all.

I couldn't tell you who was awake first. The car was no longer on the highway. We were in flight, somewhere within the bowl-like buffer between the northbound and southbound lanes. The hippies in the backseat were screaming and the dog was howling. In the rearview mirror they looked like floating cosmonauts more than bouncing balls because the time was stretched out and elastic.

The car rolled completely over and then righted itself. I hung to the steering wheel and stared in amazement and horror. The car did figure eights in the medium and then we were somehow back on the highway, rolling in the opposite direction that we were traveling before I fell asleep. I pulled the car to the right hand lane, slowing the car as I regained my bearings and stabilized my breathing. A highway rest stop materialized and I drove in and brought the Chevy to a full stop.

The windows on the driver's side were smashed out. The doors on that side of the car were sealed shut, smashed closed. The hippies and the dog exited the car from the opposite side. The hippie chick was throwing up and the dog was shaking and peeing as I climbed out the driver's window. Greg was already out of the car and smoking a cigarette.

I felt a jolt and I heard a sound that reminded me of a freight train. As soundly as I was then sleeping, it woke me and disrupted my dream. I opened my eyes to see what certainly appeared to be a tornado crossing between me and that Indiana hyperloop station.

I saw cars and trees and sheds and building supplies and bicycles flying through the sky. My car was shaking and moving in reverse. I clung to the steering wheel, simply out of habit.

My car was blown backwards and crammed between the mangled wreckage of other cars, a delivery truck and a very large, and seriously damaged, tree.The entrance to the hyperloop still stood in front of me, unmoved and without damage. The shaking of my universe and the demonic howling of the wind had stopped. I had just enough space to open the driver's door, so I did. I climbed out scratching my head and looking around at the chaos and debris that surrounded me.

The tornado had left a significant mess in its wake. I was alone with all that mess. I suppose that everyone else in the bars, restaurants, motels and robot bordellos were either sleeping or drinking or fucking or eating through all that damaging wind.

I surveyed my situation. My car was, to all outer appearances, relatively undamaged. A few small dents and some new scratches didn't much matter to me. The car's computer was working normally and the display information declared all electronics to be functioning. Nonetheless, the car was wedged in pretty damn good and needed to be disentangled, preferably before cops or anyone else added their influence to this pandemonium and balagan.

I bounced and wiggled the car from both the front end and from the rear. Then, with a combination of the hydraulic jack, a cable and a winch, the electric engine whining and me cussing and pushing, I untangled my car from the pile.

I rolled forward twenty or so feet and put it back into park, approximately in the same place where I was before the tornado blew through, and before that dream about that accident so long ago. All told, I am not sure if the dream hadn't disturbed me more than the tornado.

It had been Donkey Ears since that night, decades upon decades and then some more. The memory had been long buried. The dream was as if a reenactment of the night, a total replay as vivid as the original experience.

I felt thoroughly cooked in the time soup, this stew of circumstances, the jambalaya, the goulash, the cholent of space and time. How did I end up at that place at that time to take a spin through the blender like that and live to think about it after all these passing years? Life certainly has its twists.

Perhaps high school was too easy. I was able to get by without trying. Although I didn't excel, I certainly did well enough to go off to college if I had been so inclined, but that path lacked appeal. Jobs weren't very appealing either, but there were plenty of them back then with very low entry bars, particularly part time work, and everybody needs some money.

I found myself a gig in the pressroom of a weekly newspaper outfit in the Jersey suburbs, sometime towards the end of the first summer after I escaped high school.

Newspapers were printed on paper back then. Forests were clearcut and wood pulp was processed into paper at large smelly and fuming industrial plants.

Large rolls of this low cost and low quality paper were shipped to printing presses all over the country. What passed for news, and sometimes real news, and the advertising that paid the bills and provided a rationale for all this industrious behavior, would be printed on this paper and circulated to homes and businesses on a daily or weekly basis. All of the newspapers, of course, were just excess after a day or so, only good for wrapping fish or lining bird cages, not that it served much of a purpose even when hot off the press.

Thin metal plates would be made for each edition. They would be installed by hand on rollers. The paper would feed through the rollers as ink was steadily being injected and the paper would be imprinted with content.

A printing press for such an operation was large and the process was loud and dirty and the air was filled with dust and ink. A printer and a couple of assistants ran that particular press, with a couple of flyboys at the very bottom of that pecking order.

I worked three or four nights a week as a flyboy. The flyboy would catch the papers as they came off the folder, which was the last step in the printing process. The flyboys jostled the papers into a bundle, tied them with twine with a machine that stood at his side and stacked the bundle in a rolling bin. I worked on one side of the folder and Greg worked directly across from me, with the folding machine spitting out newspapers and us trying to keep up.

This operation printed multiple suburban throwaway weeklies with slightly varying content, so the press would be stopped and a few plates would need replacement. The rolls of paper needed to be replaced as the paper was used up. Sometimes the feed would tear and the press clunked to a stop and the paper needed to be refed by hand before starting up again. Occasionally, a paper would jam in the folder and that would grind everything to a halt while they troubeshooted the whole kaboodle.

While the printer and his henchmen took care of such, Greg and I would sit in the break room drinking bad coffee and eating junk food from the vending machine.

We soon learned that it was easy enough to flip a paper into the folder whenever we wanted a break. We took turns doing this and I suppose we had gotten somewhat cavalier about it.

I don't remember which one of us got caught but one of us got fired and one quit and we took our last checks and bundled ourselves into my piece of shit Chevy and set off to see the world.