JOURNEY ACROSS AMERICA A FIRST LOOK AT THE LATEST BOOK BY WALT CURTIS I FREAK IN WASHINGTON, D.C. George wants to find the President’s house. The traffic congestion is horrible, the streets are ill-planned. We drive around and around in circles. Which house is the President’s? The one on Pennsylvania Ave.? or the White House? Again distinctions foul us up. George is driving. No shocks on the van. I am riding like on a bronco or brahma bull, which stops and starts, jerking me back and forth. I lose my head, I lose my equilibrium. I am beginning to freak. How the fuck are we going to find the President’s House in this traffic congestion, in this heat unbearable?? Whose turn is it to use the roadmap? Goddamn I’m tired of driving!! Riding!! George, I know it is your turn to choose what to do, but I am getting sick, sick! We are never going to find the President’s House in this fucking stupid way!! I went to pieces. I imagined George was doing this on purpose, this senseless erratic driving, to screw with my head. He is trying to dominate me, push me around, something like that. He is trying to bully me, just because he is in the driver’s seat. We never do find it. I get upset, so does he kind of. We decide to get out on the freeway. How do we get there? You go this way. No, you go that way! George yells, “ Don’t you trust my driving?! Don’t you think I can read a roadmap as well as you, huh, huh?” Silence. “ Yeah, I think you’re bright enough to read the map. I ’m just hot and bored, tired of driving.” Meantime, my camera broke in D.C. Fitting. The transistor radio we brought along, to occupy our heads, has gone on the blink. There is no way to divert your head, except monotonous highway, endlessly and stupidly winding in front of my eyes and out the windshield. The van is too close. George is bullying me. I want out. Fuck it! I want out. I am going to jump out and hitchhike back by myself rather than endure this sullen, silent trip. That’s what I will do! We don’t speak for several hours, at least. We are in Virginia. “ Sweltering weather, air. Black day. G. and I at each other’s throats. Monotony of road. ‘Virginia is for lovers’ on the black and white license plates.” George stops at cider and fruit stand, confederate flags hanging on washline to be sold. We are still not speaking. He is still driving. He will drive for a long stretch. Guzzling cider. Somewhere near West Virginia the black mood dissipates, a little. (George tells me later that he wasn’t trying to bully me. He just wanted to drive and get us started on our way back. Most of the mood was in my head. He didn’t even realize what I was feeling at the time.) W. Virginia lots of Baptist churches with kids smoking cigs on steps. A bad accident: They didn’t make a curve, speeding up coming on freeway lost control rolled the car over and over. One body under blanket with face covered must be dead. Other fellow, looking close to death, being administered to. Something to talk about, or not to talk about. Enter winding mt. roads. Freeway ends abruptly. Winding roads so crooked, back-tracking and twisting, made me want to throw up. W. Virginia reminds me of Northwest. Stop for beer at fishing resort. Kids mention the murderer was caught. He had been put in asylum for murder. His aunt gets him out of asylum, saying she will take care of him. He murders her. They have caught him. The manhunt is over. W. Virginia is showing signs of heavy industrialization. Bad factories in W.V. like New Jersey it looks. Green and blue and piss yellow smoke, tubings, foul smells, eerie death lights of industrialization. No wonder one of Rockefeller brothers is governor of state. Good business he brings to exploit impoverished people. “ Snookie” on john wall in restaurant where we eat fried chicken. Touching thing to write on wall. Reminds me of junior high, W. Virginia boy who is dishwasher is unselfconscious, innocent, like Oregon junior high boys. Adolescence is more to it than just Holden Caulfield, tho he is evocative of that sweet, confused time, which youth wants to escape. Years later wish had back. I think of the word snicklefritz. ROAD FANTASY. Traveling in a small space with someone, George or me, tensions build up. Irrational irritations. The slightest gesture, toe wiggles, the way his hands hold the wheel — these inflame. Constant primping of hair, black curly lengthy luxuriant hair when my mine is falling out, going brittle, gray. His constant nasal, whining Arabic-Greek humming, idiotic, empty- headed. (The one mistake: the radios are on the blink. We have to look at & listen to each other after 3 weeks, it’s almost too much to bear.) All you can hope for, to pick up a pleasing hitch-hiker to intervene with his/her body space, world view. Personality. I could put up a curtain so as not to see the driver’s side of the van. Thoughts like: creep in: Cut off his singing head. Chop off his big dumb feet, with crooked toes. another auto accident Mr. &Mrs. America at a roadside park, watering the toy poodle. I say to G. “ Will you be like that, when you grow up?” He replies. “ Maybe. It’s not so bad. I t’s better than being a wino on some lonely fucking skidrow.” I answer, “ At least you’re realistic!” He laughs like a duck, shitting down its bill. And then I add. “ Not very imaginative, but at least realistic.” I think of G. Like a dog, like a zombie, a hunk of red raw meat with its tongue hanging out — fuck it, fuck me. Cut off his sausage dick & stuff it in his mouth. Like a Turk would. I don’t know if any of this makes any sense, at this stage. I don’t mean any of the violent psychotic passages, rampages. Repugnant. George says to me, he knows, pointing his finger at me. He says to me: “ Bremer said to Wallace, as he shot him. ‘A penny for your thoughts!’,” Walt Curtis is a Portland writer. His work includes Mala Noche and Peckerneck Country. Journey Across America will be available soon from Out o f the Ashes Press. © Walt Curtis 1979. 34
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