A Long Drive With Nothing To Talk About

The powder in the baggie isn’t just any one thing. It’s a cocktail of crushed capsules. I wet a forefinger and run it through the inside of the plastic baggie and rub the prescription speed into my gums. To stay awake. I hear a song I don’t like. I switch it off.

Before I see the rest of her, the first thing that knocks me out is those legs. Fucking ghostly pale in the headlights, they stick out, thick and marbled and you can just tell they lead up to a great ass.

The second thing is, Why is she wearing a wool skirt in the middle of a piss storm? So that’s the first thing I ask after I slam my breaks and she hops in. “Well it caught your attention, didn’t it?” She…smirks, but I don’t know how to say it exactly. In a sincere way. I get a good look at her, maybe a second too long and I think she knows this, and snap my eyes back to the road. Her own eyes, big and brown above a button nose. Round face, maybe half-Jap and that’s the second knock-out thing about her. Her fingers poke out from the long sleeves of a midnight-blue wool sweater in that cutesy way girls do. I take a stab in the dark and guess she’s nineteen, to which she nods her head. Ankle high socks that match the color of her sweater and high fur-lined boots that come off as soon as she’s settled. She messes her hair, her hands coming off slick with rain.

Damn. These were my last Levi’s that weren’t crusty. I partially roll down the window and let the rain in. The splash feels good and gets me unwound, the breeze and scent of concrete masking my creamed keks.

She hugs a Puma-brand backpack before sliding it to her feet.

Flickering between doe and fuck-me eyes, and settling on the former, she searches my face before turning them on the baggie open on the center console. I explain to her it’s prescription, that I just ground-up the contents of those little orange bottles the doc slips me a slip for and another doc slaps into my hand. She seems to accept this.

“Now how you wanna do this? Intro’s all around, or Last Tango in Paris – “no names?””

She politely laughs. “I’m open to being Maria Schneider, but then who might I thank for saving my ass from becoming mince-meat for some pent-up trucker?”  

I roll my eyes. “Kowalski”

“Like Vanishing Point?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Uh-huh. So you whippin’ around in a vintage Dodge is just a power move?”

“Power. Poser. Same difference. What I really needed was something with enough horsepower to outrun two smokeys and a helicopter.”

“So you have heard of it?” I can hear the sly grin in her voice.

“I’ve always been more of a Two-Lane Blacktop sorta guy.”

“But not Easy Rider?”

“Sucks” we say in unison. Though I gotta say, that shot of Jack Nicholson in that yellow football helmet havin’ the time of his life ridin’ the back of Peter Fonda’s Harley always cracks me up.

The banter dies down. She reaches out and pushes on the radio. When she starts humming along to “Sex on Fire”, I thought I was gonna hemmorhage out my nose like a fuckin’ Anime character. Really does feel like you’re dyin’. 

The rock station gets garbled. The song wraps up and we shoot outta range. A country station butts in with a twangy country song which is nails on chalkboard for both of us and I click off.

My eyes rubberneck a few sidelong glances. Those fuckin’ legs reach up into the dark of her skirt…

We let a few minutes pass before she reaches over and turns the radio back on.

She curls up and fiddles with the dial. We have a pulse.

Billy Corgan wheezes over a five-dollar techno-beat on “Eye.” She lights up. “Hey I know this – this was from that movie with the creepy pale-face guy. You know, he almost looked like a Geisha?” She holds up her hand, half-balled. “Where he holds a camcorder up to his face and tapes Bill Pullman?”

I do my best imitation of Bill: “Dick Laurent is Dead.”

“Tha’s the one.”  

“That was Robert Blake. The pale-face guy.”

“Didn’t he off his wife or somethin’?”

I shrug. “Supposedly, yeah. Though he was acquitted, for what it’s worth.”   

The song winds down and my hand’s already on the knob. She gives me this cutesy demure pout. My eyes flick between her and the road. “Try to find some real music.” She tilts her head forward and raises her eyes.  

An 80’s Jam station flicks by. Normally I’d let it go, but what I catch a snippet of makes me jerk the dial right back. “Headlights on the Parade” brings some class to the muscle car.

She reaches into the grey canvas and pulls out a thermos. While she knocks it back, we pass an advert for a circus. I make a lame wisecrack about sword-swallowers.

She lowers the thermos. “Like Heather Brooke?”  

And that’s how I wasted a second wad.

“Okay, my turn” she twists the knob before Mr. Mister comes on and fucks around until we get a faint signal from this century. t.A.T.u. comes and goes with the fading signal. She karaoke’s to “All the Things She Said”. Now it’s my turn to pout, which I do; and take another hit of Rx.

‘Virgin Speedball’ I call it. I sniff and turn to her, tears in my eyes. The eight-inch hard-on I’ve sported this whole time, pressed tight to my inner thigh by those circulation-hugging denims, is shooting a pain up my body I can feel in the back of my molars.

‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ is the phrase that comes to mind, seeing that half-breed bombshell groove in the green light from the dash; her sex pressed to the seat of the bucket. I clench my teeth and stomp the accelerator.  

As we pass the next mile marker, the DJ flips on “Closing Time”. A thought. As if out of a murk: attraction means faster heart-rate. Faster flow. Fast to drain.

Before she shifts over to me, and presses her nose to my nape, she screws the cap back on the container and disappears it into her travel bag. Something thick and red stains her jaw.

Lure isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.