Pages Taken Out of a Journal Behind a Diner in Kansas

Monday

I left them a letter, so they’ll know why I’m going. I didn’t tell them where, though, so they won’t be able to follow me.

I first planned on just walking the whole way, but, once my original enthusiasm for the idea had worn down a bit, and once I started to get hungry, I stopped by the side of the road and held out my thumb.

Not expecting much of it, I was about to turn to walk back to the gas station I’d seen about a mile before when somebody actually stopped.

It was a big truck, with a big man sitting in front who had a big weird smile on his face, but I was getting really thirsty now, too, so I decided I might as well take my chances.

When I got in the truck, I heard Johnny Cash singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. I hadn’t known he ever covered that song.

“Sure did!” the man said, booming.

His voice, I thought to myself, was like a great huge whirlwind, unstoppable and overpowering. He drank coffee as he talked.

“He covered it on Carson! Or, actually might’ve been Letterman by then! He was doing it for this Dylan tribute thing--!”

Even his pauses were loud, and they made me feel uncomfortable.

I found myself looking out the window a lot, or down at the truck’s wheels. It was amazing to me that anything could support the weight of the truck and the man inside it at the same time. It was like we were floating on air, like that could be the only explanation for how such hugeness could resist itself from plummeting, suddenly, into the ground…

“Um?” I said, not knowing what it was he’d just asked me.

“Tornadoes, you know! Twisters! You know anything about them?!”

I told him that I knew they were dangerous, and that I’d seen them before in movies.

“So you’ve never seen one in real life, then?!”

“No.” I said. I hadn’t. Or at least I thought I hadn’t.

“Well--!” he said. “Interesting things, twisters! They come in, out of nowhere, and they spin around and they change things! They destroy things, and they change the landscape! They change the world…!”

He didn’t say anything after that, and it was quiet for the rest of the ride (as quiet as it could possibly be in the guy’s presence, anyway), and, when he left me on the side of the road, all I heard was the end applause, and, as it mingled with the roaring away of his truck, I heard the big man, yelling out,

“Don’t be afraid of the twisters!”

And then, he was gone. And it was quiet again.

And now I’m sitting in a little hotel lobby chair, writing this down because I want to express both the details of my trip, and the frustration I’m currently feeling towards that man who, after only about four minutes, dropped me off at a nowhere place where the only thing nearby was this dingy hotel.

And I’m thinking about a terrible wind coming and ruining the world, and I’m thinking that it’s my job to make it right again.

Tuesday

Woke up this morning at six AM. I actually had to wake up the guy who stands by the front counter, too, because he was still asleep in his room.

I felt a little awkward, afterwards, having realized that I also had woken up his wife and his daughters, who all slept in the same room with him, when I had knocked so many times at his door.

“I’m sorry I woke them,” I said, but he told me it was just part of the business, and that they were used to it.

I doubted that: they probably weren’t even used to having people sleeping in the other rooms, this hotel was so inconveniently located, and I wondered how much ‘business’ was really going on there.

I told him thanks, and gave him the room key. As I left, I saw him yawning through the front door windows. He was headed back to the room, and, somehow, for a moment, I actually envied him.

I set off again, but didn’t get very far, because it started raining at nine AM, and didn’t stop until six. When I got back on the road, it started raining again, almost immediately, and I resigned myself to staying at another place for the night.

For somewhere called ‘The Umbrella,’ though, they’re not too good with water: as I write this, rain is dripping onto my head from some very thin ceilings.

I think my pillow will be wet tonight.

Wednesday

“If they leak all over, everything will be black!”

The blonde woman behind the counter had just informed me, rather giddily, and more artificially than the man from the first hotel could ever have done, that there was to be a band playing at the hotel later today, and that that was the only clue she could give me as to who they might be.

There’s a bench outside, by the little pond thing in the front of the hotel, and I sat there in the sun, watching the ducks, after I’d talked with the blonde woman.

I wished I had some bread.

I found myself thinking about my trip, and, once I started to get all caught up in everything, I reminded myself, calmly,

It’s simple. I am going to find the thing that I need, and, then, once I’ve found it, everything will be right with the world again.

I hope that’s true.

At some point, a woman came and sat at the bench, next to me. She chewed gum, rather loudly, and looked at the ducks. She fed them bread from her hands.

She had black black hair, dark blue jeans, and very fair skin.

“You always chew gum like that?” I asked her after a while, not knowing what else to say. She looked at me blankly, for a moment. And then she smiled.

“I’ve got a prescription,” she said, still breaking off pieces of bread. “It’s for coming off cigarettes. I haven’t smoked in about a year now, but I’m still getting the hang of chewing with my mouth closed.” She laughed, and I started to apologize.

She didn’t seem to hear me, or just didn’t care very much, because then she gave me a piece of bread to feed to the ducks, and said she would very much like it if we got a coffee, afterwards.

Figuring I might as well, seeing as both the hotel doctor and the blonde woman at the counter had confirmed the fact that I would have to be staying at the hotel at least one more full day and night after getting sick last night (from the rain that dripped through their thin ceilings), I told the woman with the black hair that I would go get a coffee with her, to which she said then let’s go! and that her name was Marjorie, by the way.

There was this little coffee shop at the back of the hotel, and we talked and drank coffee there, at one of the tables.

We found out, through talking, that neither of us are particularly good at talking, and that, despite this, we can have a rather pleasant conversation, and that we both agree that Siouxsie and the Banshees are one of the best bands ever.

I made a point, while we were talking, not to explain where it is I’m going, and, when it came up in conversation, I either gave the vaguest possible answer or changed the subject.

She asked me, near the end, if I was going to the show at the hotel today, and, if so, if I’d like to go together.

I told her sure, and we headed over while the band was still setting up.

The band was called ‘The Sleepy Pen Bros.’ (which I never would have guessed, even with the clue), and they were, surprisingly, not bad at all. I learned, halfway through their first song, just where that vaguely suggestive clue had come from, because the chorus went:

We’re the Sleepy Pen Bros.

We’re the Sleepy Pen Bros.

We’re the Sleepy Pen Bros.

We’re so—happy to be back!

And if we leak all over, everything will be black!

They reminded me, I said to Marjorie during a break between songs, of ‘They Might Be Giants’, but sillier, and she agreed with me.

When the show was over, they handed out souvenir pens to all the people in the audience that said, on one side, ‘The Sleepy Pen Bros.’, and, on the other, the name of one of their songs, “Like A Rolling Pin”. As they left the hotel, I found myself wishing they could play an encore or something.

When the crowd dispersed, Marjorie said that she had so much fun but that she had to go now, and she gave me her number before she left.

I went back up to my room, after that, and watched TV and tried to rest for the remainder of the day.

They bumped me up to a nicer room after I got sick, so, if it rains tonight, it’ll stay outside this time.

Thursday

Woke up later this morning than I’d wanted to, and was checking out when Marjorie showed up.

“I’m leaving today, too,” she said. “Wanna hitch a ride?”

I saw nothing wrong with that, as long as it wasn’t going to be too out of her way, I said.

“It isn’t out of my way,” she said, which I thought was odd, because I hadn’t even told her where it was yet.

We listened to a CD of Siouxsie and the Banshees that Marjorie had in her car, and we stopped once at a little strip mall by the side of the road so Marjorie could take a piss and buy snacks.

While she did that, I checked out this small fortune-teller shop, which, I discovered when I went inside, actually had an old lady sitting behind a magic ball, and stacks of tea leaves everywhere.

“I will read the tarot,” she said, after I’d slipped her twenty dollars, and asked what my future held.

“Your future,” she said, lifting the top card slowly from the deck, taking as much time to make this as dramatic and magical as possible, “Is… unsure.”

I asked her, politely, what the hell that meant, and she just said

“The cards are never wrong.”

Not wishing to part with another twenty dollars to receive a Question Reading (she explained that my specific question, about a specific person, definitely fell under the category of Question Readings, and I had just paid only for the General ones, given the very general nature of my opening question), I left the fortune-teller’s shop, and, as I left, I could’ve sworn I heard her say, very quietly, “Good luck.”

Marjorie came back to the car with bags of chips and popcorn, and told me about her pleasant conversation with a convenient store employee.

I asked her, later on, what she thought of fortune-tellers and tarot cards, and she said she thought it was all bullshit.

“Nobody knows what the future holds, and a card isn’t going to tell you!”

I feel both justified and conflicted by this statement.

Friday

Had a long talk with Marjorie today. I asked her where she was going, and how it was that she knew where I was going wouldn’t be out of her way before I’d even told her.

“Because I don’t know where I’m going,” she said, honestly. “I’m just going. I decided I had to go somewhere, so I left my cousin to watch over my apartment, and my cat, and I just went. So wherever you were going couldn’t have been out of my way, because I… don’t really have a way, at the moment.”

We were sitting on the top of her car, eating chips and popcorn, and, as she told me about her recently tenuous relationship with her mother, and about how she just had to find someplace else to be, I thought about my own parents, about how I had left things at my house, about how I had to go out and find something, too.

“Maybe you’re not looking for a place…” I said. “Maybe you’re looking for a person.”

She paused then, for a moment, her hair covering her face so it was all a black wilderness. I became nervous that I had said something wrong.

That’s when she let me see the tears, let me see her eyes all wet and everything, and the smudged eyeliner, and, then, she got really close, and, then, she kissed me.

We didn’t say much after that.

When we got back in the car, we put on the Banshees CD again, but it didn’t feel the same anymore. It felt like we had crossed a line, like, once we crossed it, there was no way to go back to how it was before. And I just felt awkward.

We decided not to stop anywhere to sleep tonight, and to drive into the night. When I was awoken for my turn at the wheel and saw that we were really low on gas, I pulled over at a gas station.

While I was filling it up, I got a good look at the back of Marjorie’s car for the first time. There was a decal, on the back, of a twister.

“Don’t be afraid of the twisters!” the man with the truck had said.

By the time I came back in the car, and turned to ask Marjorie about it, she was asleep.

Saturday

Marjorie got a coffee, and glared at me from over her scrambled eggs.

She glared at me while I asked for water as if she had expected me to order something else, and like it was very stupid and ridiculous that I hadn’t.

Even the waitress started glaring at me, at the end: to be exact, she glared at me, gave me the check, looked at Marjorie and smiled a heartwrenched, understanding smile, then glared at me again, and left our table saying

“Good luck, you too.”

I don’t know why everyone, all of a sudden, thinks it is so necessary that I have good luck.

As we left the diner, I said that I’d like to drive, if it was alright, for the rest of the day.

“Fine.” Marjorie said, cold and distantly, as she got back into the car.

She hasn’t been chewing her gum loudly today at all, and, sometimes, when I’m not paying attention, it almost feels like I’m alone again.

And I don’t want to be alone.

Sunday

Marjorie finally got me to tell her where we were going this whole time, and she said that she thought it was really stupid, and made some kind of analogy about cigarettes and letting things go.

It was nighttime when we got to the house, and we sat there, in the car, for a moment.

It felt like we had finally reached somewhere, like, reaching adulthood, and realizing it wasn’t at all what you had expected it to be. I didn’t feel quite the way I imagined I would feel, coming here, and I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I would be.

“This is it.” I said, looking at the house through the window and the darkness.

“Oh, shut it.” Marjorie said, and she put a new stick of gum in her mouth. As I began opening the door, she said

“You don’t actually want to be here.” Her chews were loud between words. “You just think you have to be here, because you think you need something to be happy that, from where I’m sitting, looks like it’s guaranteed to make you miserable.”

She motioned to the pack of gum on the console between the seats.

“…but go ahead and make yourself miserable, then, if that’s what you want. I’ll just chew my gum.”

“Alright.”

I grabbed something, then, left the car, and started walking up the walkway, there in the dark. I stopped halfway, and did something.

When I came back to the car, I think Marjorie was surprised.

“You’re back already?” she asked, after I’d opened the car door.

“Yeah,” I said. I looked back at the house, one last time, and saw that someone was opening the door.

I put the car back into drive.

“You wanna get a coffee?” I asked Marjorie, and she just looked at me, for a moment, not understanding what had just happened.

“What’d you do?” she asked, as we started to pull away.

I saw, for a moment, Rose, standing at the front door, kneeling to pick something up from the front step. I didn’t look back, once we’d started up the road again.

“I wrote her a note,” I said. “explaining that I think it’s best we both see other people… We have been broken up for almost a year now, anyway.”

Marjorie was quiet, but I could almost feel her smiling. And then I heard her chewing, quite loudly. It would never really be quiet again, I thought, with her around.

But that was okay.

“A coffee, you said?”

“Yes,” I answered, and I kissed her on the cheek. “There’s a great diner around here, if you’d like to write down the name for future reference…” I took the pen out of my pocket, and handed it to Marjorie.

She put her head against my shoulder, as we drove away, and Siouxsie started singing

Over we go, diving for pearls

Over we go, from the edge of the world

Somehow, I think that’s the perfect song for tonight. I think we probably are on the edge of something. But then, we’re at the beginning of something, too.

And coffee’s a nice way to begin something, I think.