A Big Black Chrysler
   

Albuquerque
    A big black Chrysler pulled up outside the hospital gate and a big black man got out. I wasn’t expecting to see him, but I was pleased enough to smile and hide the certainty that nothing would ever be right with me or the rest of the world ever again.
    “Hello Carlton,” I said.
    Everything was a little to the right or left of where it should have been. Traffic bore down on us; a deathly-slow parade of dark shimmering menace. The sun burned malevolently overhead.
    “Get a fuckin’ grip, Jon!”
    Carlton dragged me onto the pavement and out of the way of swerving cars.
    There was a deep, dubby echo to his voice; comforting and sinister at the same time. I felt like I was about to start laughing or crying - I couldn’t work out which, and neither seemed a good idea, so I kept my face straight and moved my eyes as much as I thought I ought to.
   
    On the first day of the Route 66 trip, I cut my elbow on a piece of metal under the driver’s seat. It didn’t even bleed, but it left a little scratch that over the next few days became infected and turned into a swelling the size of a hen’s egg.
    That is how I ended up in the emergency room of Albuquerque Public Hospital, being pumped full of morphine while a pregnant fourteen-year-old, next to me in the queue, told bad jokes to calm me down. At least I laughed (a lot) once the drug took hold, which probably made her feel better. After that, everything was a joke. I was so high that they could have sawn the arm off and I’d still have thought it was the funniest thing ever.
    I turned into a bit of a celebrity: as I was shunted between queues and treatment cubicles, every nurse and mobile patient who wanted to talk to a real live Englishman came over for a chat.
    “Hey!” said the pregnant fourteen-year-old.
    “Hiya,” I replied. “How did it go?”
    “Cool. No complications. I’m gonna, like, definitely be a Mom. Weird, hey?”
    “Weird,” I agreed.
    “Didya see what they took outa your arm?”
    “No. Scared to look.”
    “Aw dude, I was watching. It was, like, black.”
    “Black?”
    “Yeah, kinda... alien. They cut the skin off and then it sorta oozed. They put it in a bag.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah, like a sandwich bag.”
    I broke into a fit of laughter. The girl started to glance around nervously. Then a nurse came over to tell her that her parents had arrived, and she could go home.
    “Good luck,” I managed to say.
    “Thanks. See ya.”
    They started wheeling the casualties in. It was Friday night, and suddenly the place was filled with howling crazies, drunken victims of bar-room knifings. At first, they were funny too; everything was until the chemicals began to settle down in my system. Then I could see how much they were hurting. They weren’t howling at the moon, they were screaming in pain. I think one of them died, but I can’t be sure.
    The nurse came back and said that they were keeping me in overnight.
    “What?!” I said, horrified.
    “You think this is bad? Tomorrow night we get the drive-by shootings.”
    “But...”
    “You’re staying.”
    In the morning, it took a while to remember where I was. The same nurse was doing the rounds, and she gave me the basics: bad arm, antibiotic drip, go back to sleep. The guy in the next bed called the nurse over. He and the nurse were on first-name terms.
    “I want my wife,” he said.
    “You want to call her?”
    “Yeah.”
    The nurse brought a telephone in. He dialled the number and got no answer.
    “Aw, wait a minute,” he said, “she won’t be home.”
    The nurse folded her arms. “How do you know? She wasn’t... not again?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Did they bring her here?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Which ward is she in?” sighed the nurse.
    “Can’t remember.”
    “You’ve got to stop this,” she said to the man. “One of you’s gonna get killed one day.”
    “Listen honey, she took two guys out before she got hit.”
    The nurse left the ward, shaking her head. I smiled meekly at the man. He glared back. An hour later, the nurse returned with glasses of water for both of us.
    “Please let me go home,” I said.
    “You can go when the doctor says you can,” she replied.
    When the doctor came, I stared him straight in the face.
    “Please can I go home now?”
    “Well I don’t know. Your arm’s OK, but you still look stoned. You were on a high dose.”
    I stopped staring. “I’m fine, really.”
    He unhooked the drip and said: “I’ll be back at twelve - we’ll see.”
    By twelve, the comedown had started and everything was looking strange and nightmarish, but I’d been in front of the bathroom mirror half the morning, practising my Normal face.
    “OK,” the doctor said doubtfully, “you want the number for a cab?”
    “It’s alright, I walked here.”
    “I can’t release you then.”
    “OK!” I spluttered, “I’ll call someone.”
    I phoned the youth hostel and waited for Jacqueline to come and get me. I had met her the previous morning, and by the afternoon we had been kissing on a bench in Albuquerque’s Old Town. I thought we might pick up where we’d left off.
   
    “Where’s Jacqueline?” I said to Carlton, “I thought she’d be here.”
    Carlton glanced hard at me, then back to the road. “A few things happened last night.”
    “She alright?”
    “Yeah, but there was a guy at the hostel...”
    “Oh?”
    “She went with him.”
    “Oh.”
    “Well, you weren’t there,” he said.
    Then instead of sulking or worse, I got caught by another giggling fit which wouldn’t stop.
    “Ah, who cares!” I slurred between hiccups. “We don’t need women!”
    “No Jon,” he said through a false smile.
    “Come on Carl, let’s hit a bar!”
    “Jesus, you’re spaced.”
    He took me to the hostel and I went in through the back door, avoiding the kind-faced girl who worked the front desk. I wasn’t in the mood for sympathy - my reflection in the wing-mirror looked rough as hell, and she probably knew about Jacqueline, too.
   
    That night, I started to write some notes about the Route 66 trip.
    The road no longer exists officially. As far as I knew beforehand, it had been dug up, macadamised and turned into part of the modern interstate system - a motorway network like any other. In reality, there is plenty of it left, much of it barely-used concrete highway running parallel to the interstate. Petrol stations and roadside stores trade on the name, but they don’t get much business. The towns along the way can sometimes be sad and desolate, but often they - and their inhabitants - seem quite heroic as they go about their daily routine, battling against the decay that comes from obsolescence.
    A trip like that takes you out of time. The motion itself becomes the experience, not the sights you may see along the way. It was an extraordinary and beautiful six days, outwardly boring but completely hypnotic. Nothing happened. The most memorable thing I did was to buy a mandolin in a pawn shop one day, and to spend most of that night (in a motel room) teaching myself the rudiments of playing it.
    I have lost the notes I made, and as I trawl through my memory, I find huge gaps. The memories I have of the places I passed through have been wiped out by things that have happened since. St. Louis, through which I hurtled, was flooded a few weeks later when the Mississippi broke its banks. Some people were killed. A lot of others had their lives ruined.
    Then there was Oklahoma City. It seemed a large but unremarkable place, an overgrown western-American equivalent of a provincial market town. My experience? There was a tornado alert on the local radio, which frightened me; also, my arm was beginning to hurt quite badly and I was wondering whether I should see a doctor. I got my lunch at a sandwich bar and watched people milling around the city centre as I ate. That’s all. Doubtless some of those people are dead now.
    When the bomb was reported, it was as if Oklahoma City was an emblem of dumb middle-America. Sure, the reporters found a few overweight victims who expressed their shock in comically-broad accents, but they could have done that anywhere. Oklahoma City is just an ordinary town. That was the horror of it.
   
    Back to Albuquerque. The next day, Carlton took me to an Indian reservation. It had seemed a good idea over breakfast; getting out into the cool, high semi-desert around the city, driving the rutted backroads and seeing for ourselves the oldest living settlements in America.
    There was a fence which stretched to the horizon, and a gate, where a hand-scrawled sign said: “THIS PUEBLO IS DRY. NO ALCOHOL OR DRUGS.” We drove on, slowly. Isolated small farms lay by the side of the road. The road circled the pueblo, which rested in a dip. There were no roads in, only around. Carlton stopped the car and we got out. We sat on the bonnet for a while and stared into the village. The buildings were flat-topped and square, thick-walled, of mud and sand, bleached pinky-white.
    Of the people, I can only picture the children, loud and boisterous boys playing basketball with hoops set into the mud-brick. There must have been adults there, but I have no recollection of them. There was no connection between us and them, no excuse to walk down one of the paths that led between the buildings, yards and desert gardens. We stared as if we were watching a film - but felt self-conscious and guilty; more like watching pornography.
    As far as the locals were concerned - even to the kids - we were invisible. This I found hard to fathom. Carlton on his own cut an impressive figure, a bear of a man in sandals and flared Levi’s, his afro straightened then kinked into long curls which flowed over his shoulders. Next to him I was a bony, translucent creature, hiding under a big hat and behind thick glasses, cackhandedly scratching mosquito bites.
    “You still goin’ to LA?” Carlton said.
    “Yeah.”
    “It’s a bad city.”
    “It’s on the way to where I’m going,” I told him.
    “Well, don’t do this when you’re there.”
    “What?”
    “Don’t stare at the natives - we get restless.”
    “That’s just what I had in mind, Carl, a day trip to South Central.”
    He gave me a heavy-lidded look. “Be careful, that’s all. It’s crazy.”
    I thought for a minute - about whether it was right to ask. Then I asked: “Why?”
    “Why?! Every mother’s got a gun!”
    “But why?”
    “Because!” He bent his body into a rapper stance. “’Cause if you don’ got a fuckin’ gun, you gon’ fuckin’ die.”
    I paused, then said: “Or get out. You did.”
    “It’s not so easy. Shit, it’s not worth thinkin’ about. Listen, go to Venice and hang out with the fuckin’ Beach Boys - that’s all I’m saying.”
    He went silent and hard-faced. I shouldn’t have asked. He softened after a few minutes, and we climbed back into the car. We left the pueblo and drove into mountains, where the air was cold, crisp and had a faint tang that must have been cactus flower.
    The next day, we got out of Albuquerque. We went to Phoenix. Carlton was on his way to the Grand Canyon. I drove the first couple of hours, then gave up and slept most of the way. It was a long trip, but I simply missed it. One minute, empty desert and stately saguaro cacti; the next, downtown Phoenix.
    Carlton knew a special place, the best travellers’ rest in the city, so he claimed. He dropped me by the front porch.
    “You’ll love it here,” he said.
    “Thanks Carl,” I said, “you have a good time. You shouldn’t be going on your own - find a party or something.”
    “Hey, I’ll be the star of the show - ah’m the nigguh yuh c’n talk to.”
    It was my turn to be silent and hurt.
    “I didn’t mean it,” he said. “Look, I gotta go.”
    “OK. Well, good luck.”
    He drove off, like everyone else you meet. Goodbyes are always sour, and someone always says the wrong damned thing. At least it wasn’t me, this time. I knocked on the door and got no answer, then I sat down on the porch and fell asleep.
   
   

Brown Eyed Girl
   

Phoenix
    With my left foot planted firmly on the mute pedal, I clanked out the opening riff of ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ and glanced over to the settee where Rachel sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, hugging her long black skirt. The piano was a 1930s upright rescued from a school, black-stained, polished and tuned. Rachel was a slight, middle-aged Brooklyn Jewess with a glint in her eye that might have been a tear. I opened my mouth and a ghastly groan came out. My squeaky singing voice (which Rachel called ‘vulnerable and, like, so real’ the night before) had gone flat.
    It was a tear - she wiped it away - but then she started laughing at me. Since it was Rachel, I smiled back. I’d been there for close on a week and I was getting dangerously comfortable. It was time to leave.
   
    Rachel put people up in a barn behind her house and charged next to nothing for rent. It was the sort of place you had to know about. Carlton had been there before.
    After he dropped me off, I slept. I was still asleep on the front porch, with my feet resting on my mandolin case and my arms instinctively around my rucksack, when Rachel woke me up and said: “Hello. You want to stay here?”
    “Eh? Oh... Yeah. Please.”
    “You English? That’s great... old bean.”
    She kept a full house. I wandered into the kitchen the next morning and all conversations stopped. Ten pairs of eyes lasered my back as I filled a kettle and found a cup. Rachel broke the silence with: “People! This is...”
    “Jon.”
    “Jon!”
    I made an effort to smile. The others stared blankly back. They were young and aggressively beautiful. Rachel touched my arm. I tried not to flinch.
    “So Jon, tell us about yourself.”
    “Sorry?”
    “Where are you headed? That’ll be a start.”
    “West. California.”
    “Hey! Who isn’t?”
    As soon as I could, I fled the house. I waited until the evening before I returned.
    Phoenix has had a bad press. This is not surprising, as it is a malignant wart on the tough skin of the south-western desert. Nonetheless, a city exists for its people, not for the delicate sensibilities of tourists, and the people of Phoenix seem a decent bunch. They huddle in the shade, and when they’re not working they eat ice cream. Sometimes they talk to you. They talk about New York violence and Minnesota winters. The average age there is approximately how old I was feeling; worn out, with Grecian 2000 hair and the death-mask visage of too many facelifts. Still, no one wants to mug you and the bandstand in the park rings with big band jazz. There is a palpable sense of relief running through the city; relief at being old and still alive, insured, and in touch with an ancient destructive/constructive pioneer spirit which sprinkles the desert and paints the city an absurd shade of green. Not that anyone would admit to being old. They share a fixation for basketball; it is something to do with watching willowy black men being young and sinewy in a way that they can only now dream of. That, or they like the air-conditioning in the sports hall.
   
    I stayed in the barn as much as I could. I spent my days downtown, and slept twelve hours a night. By the time I would get up, everyone else was out and I could sneak into the house for breakfast with only the cat to stare me out. On the fourth night I got back to the barn and found that I wasn’t tired. I was still on antibiotics, so drinking wasn’t an option; but even if I could have drunk, there were no neighbourhood bars and downtown was too new, too lacking in ambience beyond the relentless heat. I would brave the house.
    Entering the living room was like falling into a cliché of a dream, somewhere between a womb and a half-remembered great-aunt’s sitting room. Chiffon hung from hooks; fabric billowed from the walls. Assorted Victoriana stood loosely on shelves and on the floor. Rachel sat like a gypsy Madame at the far end of a long mahogany table. Beautiful People encircled the room.
    The only reasonable movement would have been to waft, and wafting is not one of my talents. The poreless marble faces of the Beautiful People stared at my clumsy entrance with undisguised pity. Young, immaculate, cleanly sexual and perfectly-coupled; at the same time their faces gave an impression of sterility, like a party of ancients who had discovered the fountain of youth.
    At last they started talking again. I let my breath out and found a sofa to sit on, in a corner on my own. Safely ignored, I craned my neck to read the titles on the bookshelf: vegetarian cookery, three editions of the Kama Sutra, various examples of feminist chest-beating, Buddhist navel-staring, self-awareness, self-nurturing, self-actualisation, and the Tao of most things you could think of. I took out a coffee-table book of American Indian portraits that was tucked behind the cabinet.
    There was something about the pictures, something imperfect and off-centre that made them compelling. These were real people, the artist’s parents and friends, not the romanticised Noble Savages that Victorian Europeans used to portray and new-age white Americans still do.
    “Aren’t they fantastic?” said Rachel, and I nearly hit the ceiling. “Sorry,” she added, “did I startle you?”
    “Er... yeah. They’re great,” I said.
    “Aren’t they! Their faces say so much, the lines...”
    Rachel was the first person I’d seen that day who had grey hair; not all over, but enough to convince you that she didn’t even think she was twenty-five. Slowly, throughout the next hour or so, she eased me into the life of the living room. Everything happened between couples, each pair acting as a single unit, yet everything revolved around Rachel; every discussion, every decision.
   
    The next morning I got up with everyone else. They were chopping fruit into muesli. I had a craving for egg, bacon, sausages, black pudding, tomato and baked beans on fried bread served in a transport café by a waitress named Doreen. I said this. Someone laughed, I think. With muesli and banana inside me I headed downtown again. Along with several thousand others, I headed for the park and sheltered from the noonday sun under an expansive evergreen, next to which someone had plugged a sprinkler pipe so that water rose up in a mist, cooling the air. The crowd in the park were younger than before, and on the bandstand a Joni Mitchell soundalike was strumming something sensitive and nurturing on a twelve-string guitar. An ice cream man arrived. I bought a double cone and sat back and licked and let myself be nurtured into numbness. To be fair, the girl sang like an angel.
    That night a guitar appeared in the living room. Only two of the Beautiful couples remained, and a new batch had arrived to take the place of the others. I found myself gravitating to a corner with the old hands, trying to stop myself from giving the newcomers the same cold stares that I’d been greeted with. The guitar did the rounds slowly. Everyone managed a song or two, usually of the Scarborough Fair type. As the night went on, I was badgered more and more into singing. I dug deep into what I could remember, from Johnny Cash to the Specials to the Lemonheads. When I played ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, Rachel went outside.
    I got talking with a Danish couple who were on their way to Los Angeles. They said I could go with them if I did some of the driving.
    On the night before we left, I was given the guitar straight after tea. I refused. The guy who had brought it wasn’t even in the room. When he arrived, he picked it up and started noodling away on it quietly in the corner. I sat with him and listened; everyone else talked. The newcomers were not all in couples. The guitarist was another Greek-statue specimen, but he lacked an adjoining goddess. Sure enough an almost featureless brunette made her way across the room. I started to get up to go and talk to Rachel, but Rachel got up and came to talk to me. I was trapped between the musical statue and the landlady. The goddess was reduced to sitting at our feet. With some effort I turned the attention back to the guitarist. He was showing off. He picked his moment then handed me the guitar and tried to draw the brunette to one side.
    “What do you want?” I asked Rachel.
    “‘LA Freeway’.”
    I knew the song. Rachel joined in on the choruses. The brunette didn’t move, ignoring her suitor. I handed the guitar back to him. He took it with some irritation and played a blues improvisation.
    “Hmm, that’s cool,” said the brunette. “Jon, do another.”
    I sang ‘Stir It Up’, after which Rachel came out with the compliment about my voice. Again I handed the guitar back. This time the guitarist headed into jazz territory, fingers flying around the fretboard.
    “Yeah, OK,” the brunette piped up, “but that’s, like quiet stuff. Why don’t you play songs, like Jon does.”
    Before the ground had a chance to open up and swallow me, Rachel put on a BBC accent and said: “I believe tea is in order, don’t you agree?”
    “Nice one,” I said, “I’ll make it if you like.”
    “No no, dear boy, you entertain the masses.”
    With that, I found the guitar back in my lap. I sang ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, and the brunette joined in on the line about ‘making love in the green grass’.
    “See,” she said to the guitarist, “why can’t you sing something like that?”
    He began to redden.
    “Hang on,” I said quickly, “I’ll show you it.”
    He picked up the tune straight away, and was soon mumbling the words.
    “We need a bass,” he said after a couple of tries. Then we were at the old piano, playing together. The brunette had disappeared. There was no sign of the tea, either. I went to see how it was getting on. The brunette was with Rachel in the kitchen.
    “...so goddamn competitive, singin’ stupid songs like they’re for me or something. Hey, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. Yeah, right! That macho stuff really...”
    Rachel was grinning and nodding.
    Fine, I thought. I considered telling the guitar player what I’d heard, but then I thought he’d rather not know - he had pretty much pulled the brunette by then. I went back to the piano and said: “I’m getting tired, you carry on.”
    “Nah,” said the guitarist. He put his guitar away. Rachel and the brunette came in with a tray.
    “Your tea, old chap,” said Rachel.
    “Thanks,” I said. And stop taking the piss out of me, you two-faced bitch.
    We four were the last ones up. The guitarist took his tea to bed. He looked beaten. The brunette soon followed - to her bed or his, I don’t know.
    “Awfully nice evening,” said Rachel, “fancy a drop of wine?”
    For Pete’s sake, pack it in!
    “No thanks, I’m tired.”
    “No, you’re not,” she said, finally returning to her own voice.
    “Eh?”
    “You’re angry. Don’t you like me doing the English voice?”
    No of course I bloody don’t!
    I shrugged my shoulders.
    “Listen, I’m sorry. It’s just, well... come on, have some wine.”
    “No really...”
    “Look, I just do it out of habit.”
    I got up, but Rachel fixed me with an intimidating glare.
    “You want the truth? OK, I was in love with an English guy... like, married for ten years. He’s dead.”
    Oh hell.
    She softened. “All I’ve got is the accent.”
    “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
    “How could you know?”
    I sat back down. Rachel poured out a glass of wine for herself. I put my hand over the glass that she put in front of me.
    “Jeez, what else is wrong?”
    “Nothing. Rachel, what is this?”
    “Are you freaked out over that little princess?”
    “Not really.”
    “Leave her to the beefcake. She’s a sleaze.”
    “I know,” I said.
    “Huh?”
    “I heard her talking.”
    “Oh,” she said.
    “You were laughing.”
    “No I wasn’t, I was smiling. She’s not...” Rachel grinned “...my cup of tea.”
    I sniffed. “I bet she’s good in the sack though.”
    “Yeah, and guess who gets to wash the sheets.”
    The cat jumped onto my lap.
    Throughout the night Rachel told me about coming to Phoenix from New York, about the Englishman, about a son whom she hadn’t seen for a year, and about the piano. She had restored it. Her husband had played it.
    “He was an old-fashioned guy. He used to sing me love songs.”
    I smiled awkwardly. She stared closely at me. “Check out the eyes.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    “Well, it’s a good song.”
    “Honestly Rachel, I’m sorry.”
    “Yeah, he used to apologise for breathing, too.”
   
    My last morning in Phoenix; I was sitting on the toilet, idly reading the paper when I looked up and saw a spider the size of a small dog staring down at me. It was covered in thick black hair. Very slowly it made its way over the top of the cubicle door and then along until it was directly facing me.
    It sat back, grinned and lit a cigar.
    “Howdy,” it said.
    I eased the door open until it was just wide enough for me to squeeze through. I jumped clear of the door, then pulled up my trousers and hurtled towards the house.
    “There’s a tarantula in the bog!” I yelled.
    Rachel came to the door. I told her what I’d seen and she followed me to the toilet. When we got there, we found the cat crouched on the floor, batting the spider across the tiles. Rachel slapped the cat. “Bad kitty!”
    “What do we do?” I said. “Hang on, I’ll find the bucket. I can trap it.”
    “Calm down, Jon! It’s harmless.”
    “Oh?”
    “Watch this.” She bent down and made her hand into a spider shape, then chased the spider around the floor. It cowered and scuttled, always keeping a safe distance. “It’s a wolf spider. Poor thing’s scared half to death.”
    “Hmm...”
    “They’re good,” she said, “they eat cockroaches. C’mon, I’ll make you breakfast.”
    I spent the next twenty minutes watching a Jewish vegetarian frying bacon and eggs.
    “Oh, wow!” I said. “Thanks.”
    “English chicken soup, right?” she said.
    When I’d finished eating, she sat me down at the mahogany table and started lecturing me about how to make the best of myself, how to look good, how to become... I don’t know, like one of the Beautiful People.
    “If you’re going to LA...”
    “Leave off,” I said.
    Then she asked me to play the song again.
    “Are you sure?”
    “You played it for her, you can play it for me,” she said in large quotation marks.
    “Well... OK.”
    I sat at the piano and put my foot down heavily on the mute pedal. The keys moved a little to the left.
   
   

Dennis Hopper’s Party
   

Phoenix to Los Angeles
    I kissed Rachel goodbye. Then I picked up my rucksack and my mandolin and walked out to the car. Three of us were going to Los Angeles together: myself and an outrageously-perfect Danish couple - minor deities on a weekend break from Walhalla, whose sole activities were bicycle-riding, eating salad and having sex, ridiculously often.
    As I got nearer the car, I stopped and gaped. The Danes were in the back seat, feeling each other up. No change there, but it meant that they weren’t alone. Driving the car was a fat ginger nightmare; I had met him that morning.
   
    His first words to me had been: “Let me in, shithead!”
    I had ignored it. I shook my head and went to sit in the living room. Whoever it was, I was too full and satisfied after a huge breakfast to let him spoil the mood. The door wasn’t locked. He barged into the hall.
    “Thanks,” he sneered.
    I had no more gestures besides a continuing headshake, and anyway I was alone in the room, so I sipped at a cup of tea and listened.
    “Well hi!” he said into the phone, with singsong sarcasm. “Yeah, it’s me!”
    Then he started mumbling.
    - Mumble mumble, uh-huh, grunt, mumble mumble.
    - Pause.
    - Mumble mumble, loud grunt.
    - Pause.
    - WELL TELL THE FUCKIN’ BITCH I’M COMIN’ TO GET HER!
    - Pause.
    - WELL FUCK YOU THEN!
    - Slam. Ding.
    - Stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp.
    The living room door burst open.
    “GODDAMN BITCH!” he screamed, then he stamped out again and slammed the outside door behind him. I raised my eyebrows, snorted and grinned archly - but there was still no one there to grin back.
    He returned an hour later and went through the same routine. Then he came into the living room and said: “I‘m goin’ to LA.”
    Not with me you’re not, I thought.
    “That bitch ain’t keepin’ my kid from me. Got a pen?”
    I handed him a pen and wondered if he was about to stab me with it. He marched out again. Later I had a look at the notice board. He’d put a sign up, asking for a lift. I considered tearing it down, but decided that he’d know it was me. It would be OK; the Danes were downtown all morning.
    I spent the afternoon with Rachel. The Danes must have come back early and seen the notice.
   
    So there he was, driving their car. I could do nothing about it. I put my rucksack in the boot and sat in the passenger’s seat beside the freckled misogynist.
    “HEY!” he yelled, his mouth six inches from my ear, “HOW’RE YA DOIN’?”
    “Alright,” I said.
    “ALRIGHT? YEAH? COOL! LET’S GO! CITY O’ FUCKIN’ ANGELS!”
    He leaned his full weight onto the throttle until revs were on red and the automatic transmission had no choice but to change up a couple of gears.
    “WADDAYA THINK?” he screeched.
    Ginger’s voice was like the sound of a tin can being scraped with a rusty nail, miked up and fed through a Marshall amplifier with feedback. An hour or so later, without prompting, he announced that he was Canadian. After that, every sentence ended with ‘eh?’, following which he would stare at me - for minutes at a time - until I gave a reply. There never was an appropriate answer to his ‘eh’s, so I groaned at different pitches. It seemed to satisfy him.
    After a while he calmed down to the point where it didn’t judder my bones every time he opened his mouth. Sometimes I even spoke the odd monosyllable. We drove on until Ginger said - relatively quietly: “I’m gettin’ tired. Wanna drive, eh?” I glanced back; the Danes were asleep, or pretending to be. We pulled into a truck-stop. Outside the car, it was the start of a freezing desert night.
    I went inside for tea and an all-day-all-night breakfast. The Danes followed, looking bleary and almost vulnerable - rather how mortals look when we’re fully awake. Ginger went to the toilet, and I whispered to the Danes: “What made you bring him?”
    “Aw,” said the male, “he’s cool.”
    “He’s a lunatic,” I said.
    “Eh?”
    “Don’t you start.”
    “What? Sorry, my English...”
    “Never mind.”
    Ginger returned.
    I drove to Los Angeles. There’s not much more to say about it. Driving through the desert is an exotic idea from where I’m sitting now, but when you’re there it’s long, dark and flat. What did happen is that the Danes could hold out no longer and appeared to be making love on the back seat. Then Ginger turned into an Australian.
    “YOU KNOW WHAT’S THE BEST CITY ON THE WHOLE FUCKIN’ PLANET, EH? DARWIN! THAT’S WHERE! YOU KNOW IT, EH? DAAAHWIN! I’M TELLIN’ YER! BEST FACKEN BARS IN THE WORLD! FIGHTIN’ EVERY NIGHT AN’ NO FACKEN POM GETS OUT O’ THERE ALIVE!”
    “You’re not Canadian then?”
    Around this time, Ginger told me his name, but I didn’t bother to remember it.
    Los Angeles suburbs started to appear about a hundred miles from Los Angeles itself.
    “ELL-AY? I KNOW IT LIKE THE BACK O’ ME HAND!” Ginger bawled.
    A couple of hours later we were somewhere else in Los Angeles. Nothing had changed. We were in another suburb. I pulled in for petrol and let Ginger drive. Whatever he knew of Los Angeles, it was more than me or the Danes, who were asleep again. We sped along freeways and backways, heading towards somewhere ill-defined. The names I recognised from countless films and songs: Mulholland, Santa Monica Freeway, Sunset Strip, Hollywood Boulevard.
    I’d been awake a long time.
    Saturday night is the same in any city; booze and drugs, sex and fighting. It was like that. Except that it wasn’t Saturday.
    The sun rose to reveal a choking smog, halfway up a hill in Hollywood. I got out of the car, stared out at a never-ending vista of the city, and peed on a hedge. Ginger drove off. I was wearing football shorts and nothing else. There was no point in getting angry - not even with myself. I waited for fifteen minutes - either Ginger would come back, or I would remain half-naked in Hollywood with no possessions, no money and no ticket home. I was already breaking vagrancy laws by standing at the side of the road. I tried to remember the car registration number but it was gone. Too tired.
    Finally Ginger returned, and sat doubled up behind the wheel.
    “Move over,” I said through the open window, “I’m driving.”
    “HARHARHARHARHAR!”
    “I said move over.”
    I dragged the door open and shoved him across the front seat.
    “DON’T TRY TO PUSH ME AROUND, ASSHOLE!” he howled.
    “Give me the keys, lard-arse.”
    “LAWD-AWSE! HARHARHARHARHAR!”
    “Shut up and tell me where we’re going.”
    He told me - Venice Beach. Then he told me lot of stuff about Jim Morrison and God knows what else. I wasn’t listening. Depressingly, I’d been forgiven for pushing him across the seat. He got me to stop at a phone box. I thought about driving off but I had his rucksack. The Danes were passive behind me.
    Ginger returned to the car, shaking with red rage. Whatever else, this was real; perhaps, as he protested, a wife who wouldn’t let him see his child. Or maybe he’d been talking to thin air and his own demons.
    He knew the city well enough to reach Venice Beach. All four of us got out to walk on the crowded sand, and this time I took my possessions with me.
    “We go for a walk,” said the female Dane, beating me to the punch.
    “Well,” I said to Ginger, “it’s been nice meeting you.”
    “HEY! YOU DON’T GET RID OF ME THAT EASY!”
    The Danes disappeared in the other direction. I stared longingly after them. Then I carried on walking, ignoring Ginger, but he just followed, keeping up an endless rant about how great Venice beach was, then going on about the city, and finally going on to rate the people of the world. To sum up his views, he disliked niggers, chinks, queers and bitches; also abbos, eyeties, wogs in general, layabouts and losers. Most particularly he hated his wife, although how she differed from other bitches was not clear.
    I gave up, walked into a bar, and waited for him to buy me a drink. He did. I drank it quickly, said nothing, and he bought me another. I drank that.
    “What’s wrong with you?” he said (rather than yelled). “All the way here, you were rolling your eyes when I was talking, looking the other way. Don’t you like me or something?”
    “No.”
    He bought me another drink. I drank it. Then he started off around the bar. People said ‘Hi’ to him. They knew him. They asked after the wife and child, then said how sorry they were and what a fuckin’ bitch she was. He was gone for a while, but I was too tired to run for it. He came back with another drink. I drank it.
    “Get this,” he said, “now keep it quiet, but we are going to a party at Dennis Hopper’s house. All the coke you can snort and all the pussy you can handle!”
    I laughed at him.
    “I’M SERIOUS!”
    “Of course you are.”
    He brought back more drinks, shorts this time. I drank two of them and said: “I’m off.”
    He followed me back to the beach, and to a hostel where I booked a single room.
    “Why can’t you leave me alone?” is what I think I said. I was drunk and tired.
    “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
    I went into the room and he followed me in.
    “We’re not friends,” I said, “I don’t like you.”
    I put my rucksack down and walked out again, holding the key in the door until he followed. Then I went downstairs and sat down between two women. He stood bulkily in another corner of the foyer. Heaven knows what I must have looked like by this point. The women got up. Ginger sat down next to me. I clenched my fists and prepared to hit him. I couldn’t do it, but the adrenaline sent me running out of the door. Outside, I realised I had no shoes on, but I kept running anyway. Ginger caught up with me near the beach.
    “Look, is this a sex thing?” I said.
    “What?”
    “I’m not gay, you’re wasting your time.”
    “Are you calling me queer?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “HARHARHARHARHAR!”
    I stood and stared. He grinned.
    “What does it take to get rid of you? Eh?”
    “No need,” he said breezily.
    “JUST FUCK OFF!”
    “No. This is cool,” he replied, “I like you.”
    “I CAN’T STAND YOU!”
    He laughed, and I was broken. I wanted a bus to run over him, but I still couldn’t hit him. Then I saw two men sneak a kiss and disappear into a doorway.
    I grinned.
    “Please,” I said, “come with me. I lied to you, I’m sorry.”
    I took Ginger’s hand and began to drag him to the door.
    “What is this?”
    “Don’t be afraid,” I said coyly, tenderly. We got to the door. It was dark inside. Bad disco music was playing. He tried to pull his hand away.
    “JESUS!” he yelled.
    “Come on.”
    “YOU SICK BASTARD! I THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS! YOU’RE A FUCKIN’ QUEER!”
    The Australian accent had gone. He got free of me, and ran.
    I went into the bar. The beer was cheap and I won a game of pool. The music didn’t get any better, but I had a bit of a dance to celebrate getting away from Ginger. I drank until I could hardly stand up, then staggered out and fell over. Eventually I got to the hostel. On my door, neatly in red marker pen, was written the word ‘faggot’.
    I slept through the evening, the night, and the following morning. I woke at noon and found the kitchen. Some people were talking about leaving for San Francisco that day. I asked for a lift.
    “Yeah, sure,” one of them said, “be here at three.”
    I hung around until three o’clock, listening to people talk. A couple of things had happened the previous night. First, there had been a minor race-riot on the beach. A gang from South Central had taken the evening off from their usual warfare, to come down and beat up some rich white kids. There had been casualties. Second, ‘some weirdo redhead dude’ had taken a carload of hostellers up into the Hollywood hills for ‘this amazing party, man! I had so much coke, I ain’t never goin’ to sleep again. And the women! Jesus, they was hangin’ out naked by the pool, musta been fifty of ‘em. You know that guy out of Easy Rider? Yeah, him. It was his party, I think. Might not have been. Who cares!’
    That’s what some kid said over the dinner table. He didn’t look well, but he looked pretty pleased with himself.
    My lift arrived and I set off for San Francisco.
   

Three weeks later, I’m back in Arizona, way out in the desert on a bus trip. The passengers have been up most of the night, having a party. There is only me and one other guy left, sitting around a fire in the middle of the night, talking. I’m telling the one about the spider. He’s playing the guitar. I’ve told him all about the trip to Los Angeles. He didn’t think Dennis Hopper’s party was real. I’m inclined to agree.
    One of the women wakes up. She comes over and joins us, then starts coming on to my friend. He gives me the guitar, and I can’t think of anything else to play but ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. I grind through it, thinking about Rachel, then claim tiredness and leave them alone.