(I’m going to begin in about ten minutes with the fourth draft of Adventures of Dying Young Man, and so yeah, I’m posting where I left off below. Cool. Bye. This Book has taken me almost two years to write, and more hours than I have spent on anything in my life. I’m ready…)
The dream was just right like ice cream melting on a hot flimsy paper-plate, covering apple-pie and coated with a layer of blueberries; berries and fruits that were picked from the fields during a Michigan summer, one of them days that lacks the dying-dog panting tongue of this southern heat. You know, just those fruits that taste like those days on Lake Michigan, blueberries that don’t have all of this southern humidity.
Man I’ll tell ya’ my unknown friends, in this dream of mine, in this dome of a head of mine, while I was really sleeping within the darkness of the bus, everything was just like it should be. I was dreaming about being on the beach barefoot. I was dreaming about naked skin and cool air on a hot august day. I was dreaming about smiles and high-fives and teeth sweating with joy.
The dream was perfect, but well, well, well the bus started its motor and tossed me up and down and my head slammed into the window.
And well yeah, the dream was over, the bus got back on the highway. I now was awake. I am awake. I couldn’t a hold it anymore, my bladder that is.
The bus was cutting across those lanes, striped with the glow in the dark lines of a two way traffic lane. We just kept driving passed thousands of roads that were next to one city after another.
As I slept and was at my dream-party well I guess the bus drove over the Mississippi River and then ended up in Dalhart Texas; a town bordering the Canadian river, just a town streaming through the handle of the state of Oklahoma, a state on the map that from my point of view, when “I asked where are we at now?”, cause it was still the night, and seems to be always the night when you’re on the greyhound, and even when you’re awake in the day you’re so tired and out of it, that you can’t even see with your daytime eyes, cause you’re so dang out of it and sleep deprived that nothing is light; and ah hell, even the Sun looks like a mean sun of a bitch. You’re like turn it down lamp, turn it down sun, I’m not ready for it, I’m not ready for your light yet, I’m a vampire, I’m a bat with radar and I don’t a take kindly to bright sirens and such.
But anyway, I asked the driver, “where we at now?” And the driver said, “Well, a while ago we got through Oklahoma.
The driver who actually seemed to like me, well he handed me a plastic map that could have been a placemat from a waffle house diner or something, and it even smelled like food, but well everything smelled like food to me at this present moment in time, cause well I haven’t eaten really alls that much since I left Florida, except for some raisins and a couple of tomatoes that this nice Mexican family had given to me.
So I opened the map and man oh man Oklahoma looked like the handle of a butcher’s knife er’ something. The bus driver looked at me and said, “Henry is this it? Is this where you’re getting off?”
“Well I don’t know” I said back
Adventures In American Writing 