Why I Committed Suicide (16 page)

I finally got to drive while Jenifer took a nap. I smoked the absolute last bit of my pot and drove about 90 miles an hour across the Mexican plains. You can’t see the water from the road in most places but I can always smell it and it was amazing to be driving through sunbeams as they pierced the thick dark clouds rolling in off the ocean. The visual beauty of the scenery, the thrill of letting Jenifer’s car open up full throttle without any fear of police and being able to reach and caress the sleeping beauty next to me gave me such a good feeling of fulfillment and happiness. I was alone with my brooding thoughts, feeling groovily stoned, listening to “Licensed to Ill” on the stereo, singing along, driving fast and free. Very pleasurable. Jenifer woke up after while and got mad that I was drivingso fast, which I can understand, but the damage was done. The appreciation of the moment uplifted my sprits and rejuvenated my love, maybe I can learn to share that. If I can absorb it, shouldn’t I also be able to project people’s energy?

After a rather unpleasant argument brought on by mutual fatigue, Jenifer and I finally got to the specific part of the coast where the grey whales swim in for the season.

We can both be very stubborn sometimes. We were all set to check into an expensive motel (no mud!) that would also provide the tourist boat out to the best sites to see the whales when Jenifer started talking to the clerk in Spanish and found out the whales are a week late this year. After 2000 miles of driving they’re
late?!
Dammit! The clerk specifically told us in broken English “The whales, they are slow” enunciating his words slowly as if to infer that when they are swimming by Mexico they just sort of go along with the whole lackadaisical Mexican siesta groove thing. I supposed when they pass by L.A. they put on dark sunglasses too.

I can respect the whales for being late, but it’s still disappointing and frustrating, especially after driving into town with clouds of anger around us. There were a bunch of fucking German families milling around with all their fancy German explorer clothes and German RV’s. Since we don’t have a week to mill around we said “fuck it” and burnt out of town, leaving any bad feeling with the krauts behind us.

I really wanted to see those whales. After seeing Star Trek IV, I though maybe they might have something to say if I was willing to listen.

“This we know: The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

—Chief Seattle (c. 1786-1866)
Skokemish leader

We realized that we didn’t want to drive all the way down the coast to Cabo after missing the whales so we’re heading back up through wonderful Mexico and enjoying the sights just as much the second time around. We stopped at an area where there were all sorts of huge smooth boulders interspersed with lots of tall, skinny cacti. My perverted side thought it looked like lots of giant boobs with little dark green penises between them. It would have made a perfect location for an old black & white western if not for the spray painted murals on the largest rocks facing the road professing generations of love for Maria and Paco, Hernandez and Vasquez, the PRI political party etc. etc. We took the time to climb around, explore and play. Jenifer got naked for a little while, stretching her lanky body across the top of a huge rock that curved upwards, gently lifting her up and making her back arch as if she was having a subtle continuing orgasm. I polished off some Tecates and took pictures but when I tried to take a sexy picture of Jenifer naked on the sun heated rock she was too sly and slick.

We splurged in the evening and ate a great big Mexican feast at a restaurant with a jungle atmosphere in the small town. I ordered a margarita with my food, just because I could, but Jenifer and the waiter made fun of me in Spanish because there were two sizes of margarita, a “chica” and a “grande” or some shit, and I ordered the “chica” because I didn’t want to get plastered. Plus I drank all those beers earlier and I always forget how the rhyme goes. Is it “beer before liquor, never sicker” or “liquor after beer, never fear”, I can never remember? Anyway, I’m glad I got the small size because it was the worst fucking margarita I’ve ever had. I think the waiter just poured straight tequila in a glass and added some green food coloring, but I finished every drop, more because they made fun of me than anything. Yuck. The food turned out to be great but I think mine had some rogue Mexican parasite in it that didn’t agree with my stomach. Outside of town I made Jenifer stop the car and proceeded to projectile vomit all over the place, much to Jenifer’s delight. I got a sort of malicious sympathy from her with numerous references to the “chica” margarita, but I felt like I was going to die.

After numerous stops we wound up just sleeping in the car by the side of the road, fearful of banditos, but by then I was too sick to care.

“She told me and then I discovered it for myself’

—unknown

We are both exhausted but I can see from the gleam in our adventurous eyes that we are both spiritually more fulfilled. Mexico is behind us now, but the journey served to renew our limited communication with God. Even though Jenifer won’t admit to any metaphysical beliefs, she is too amazing of a person to be uninfluenced by the grace of a higher power. I’ve never really talked to her about my religious beliefs, at least any of my organized religious views that might qualify as classification. I’m drawn to how Jenifer can be so in touch with her soul without any practiced meditation. Is there such a thing as natural inner peace? There are just some things inside her that I look up to as if she’s a teacher, a prodigy or untrained genius. Somehow I always manage to attach myself to people I want to emulate and learn from, I just don’t know if it’s healthy to be that way in an equal relationship.

Right now, we are recuperating with a hot plate of greasy food and a cup of warm Joe at the same Denny’s restaurant we originally left behind, seemingly eons ago, in San Diego. Resting in traditional American surroundings, thankful to not have to live permanently off of street vendor tacos made with God-knows-what. We fucked around in Tijuana before we left Baja and had the chance to enjoy the city the way I originally wanted Jenifer to enjoy Juarez. I also bought a couple hip-flask sized bottles of liquor to drink on the way home since I don’t have any more weed. Drunk driving punk rock hard-core style, we defy you death! Still I would rather have the weed, it’s less dangerous by far, but the law is the law. I smuggled one of the flasks in my pocket and one in the igloo cooler in the back seat. Neither one of us is of legal drinking age yet so we smuggled booze just like back in prohibition days. We joined the mile long throng of cars waiting to cross the border and then crept along at a snails pace hindered by the border patrol keepers that periodically search cars for drugs and illegal aliens. I still can’t believe they even bother taking the trouble. I mean the ratio of people crossing into the U.S. compared to the number of cars they can actually search is astronomical. Any drug dealer worth his salt should know he can send twenty cars in a row filled with drugs and they’ll likely only stop 2 of them. A ninety percent rate of success is something any Fortune 500 company would be happy with. It took us about a ¡ hour to creep up to the actual U.S. boundary and of course as raggedy and strung out as we must have looked we got waved over to be one of the one in ten to be searched. Meanwhile ten cars got through filled with drugs I guess. No sweat, but it took another hour for “the man” to bring out their drug dogs, tap all the panels on the side of the car and yank out all our stuff along with ripping out some of the interior upholstery and checking all the tires. Ironically they went to all that trouble and never bothered to look in the cooler and didn’t even care about checking our ID for the liquor they found in the back seat. After we “passed” their inspection they told us to leave, without bothering to pick up all of our clothes that got tossed onto the oil stained parking area or fixing any of the interior panels that they pried off. It was just a quick fucking in the ass from the U.S. government thanks to our profile and shabby appearance.

So we’re glad to be back in our native land but sad at the realization our vacation is at least half over. Sunny California is the Promise Land for free thinkers and we spent the evening acting like kids in love. We held hands and ate pizza at a transplanted NY pizza parlor, complete with wonderfully gruff employees who all had rich Brooklyn accents. We walked down around the beach, checked out all the head shops, and then sat on the seawall and watched the sun set over the Pacific. We enjoyed what will likely our last day on the ‘Left Coast’ for a while. We walked down and looked at the waves hitting the ocean in the encroaching darkness, while the local druggies and dealers were just starting to emerge. I thought it was romantic in an urban decay kind of way. I mean, on the one hand there was a timeless sunset setting over the beautiful silvery eternalness of the cresting waves on an angry ocean with streaks of crimson clouds slashing the sky, and on the other hand there were desperate people, temporary members of society, each with an individual story of pain, clinging to life and dealing in the short term every day business of pursuing the smallest pleasures. I thought it was a beautiful collection of opposite images that accented each other. Like I said, I was feeling loved and my body was comfortably numb with fatigue and romance.

We bought some Christmas gifts for our friends back home at some of the head shops. A sealable water bong and a couple of cocaine bullets. Those are little portable vials with a one-hitter attachment on them that some of our wilder friends might enjoy. Obviously not items for our families and even though it’s likely not in the true spirit of Christmas to give paraphernalia, they’re decent souvenirs for our friends. We’re planning on sleeping in the car near this Denny’s again, where the cop told us to sleep last time. I am going to miss being here with Jenifer but I look to the future. It’s being with her that’s important, not the invisible whales or our location.

May the Lord forgive me for the dragonflies I killed as a child. Graceful, silent shimmering predators whose only crime was their abundance and innocence. The highway is my Church and my penance, engineered to help me move beyond mere instinctual (re)actions. I will be more than the sum of my parts, more than human. There are foxes in the land of the wolves sometimes.

Something bad happened today. Troopers fat on the excess of power given to various States in the vain attempt to eradicate drugs, bullied us at a checkpoint along I-8 in Arizona. Another blood clot in America’s veins of freedom. We were totally and unnecessarily hassled just because some bitch with a chip on her shoulder is trying to make her way up the pig career ladder. We were just cruising along innocently and our car (of course) was chosen to be the 1 in 10 routinely checked for drug smuggling. No problem right? We just got shook down by the U.S. border patrol yesterday and came out with a clean bill of health. The cunt said she stopped us in particular because my hat with the Grateful Dead patch on it (from the shows) was in plain view on the dashboard and apparently (according to her anyway, believe me we would totally have gone if it was true) there had recently been some Dead shows out in California. I’m thinking,
“cool, she thinks we’re acid heads with a hundred pounds of dope in the car or some shit, let her do her worst because I’ve been searched by U.S. customs and I’m clean as the Pope’s bathroom.”
It seems I didn’t factor in the small town Mayberry mentality of wanting to punish people different from “us”, which in this case the “us” turned out to be a bunch of inbred, redneck, faggot asshole motherfuckers! They brought out a giant dog and did this trick where they pretend to “accidentally” drop the leash and let their nazi German Shepard practically attack and jump on me. That’s their slick way of violating our rights and letting the dog sniff us for concealed drugs since they can’t technically do anything without probable cause. Then without asking if they could search the vehicle she opened the car doors and let this huge dog climb and sniff around inside our car. At this point I’m aggravated by the blatant display of constitutional violations and abuse of authority but I’m still trying to be nice because I know we don’t have anything on us. In America the innocent are presumed innocent right? Apparently not, the dog smelled some clay pipe that Jenifer had bought during her trip to Vegas several years ago and lost in her glove box. The pipe was empty, it literally hadn’t been smoked in several
years
and whatever incriminating residue that was still inside it wasn’t even enough to be detected by the border patrol. It had been buried under a bunch of shit at the bottom of her glove box and I would have thrown I out a long time ago had I known about it, after all I threw away my own marijuana when we went
into
Mexico. The bitch-lady emerged from our car with this evil triumphant shit-eating grin on her face as if she had just happily burned down a Vietnamese village full of children. What could we say? We tried mumbling an apology and I told her how we forgot it was there and explained how it obviously had not been used anytime recently since we had just come from Mexico and their border patrol dog didn’t even smell it. I was desperately trying to appeal to some sliver of coolness we still innocently believed all people must have somewhere, after all, I was raised on that Star Wars “I know there is good in you father” mentality. She wasn’t having any of that. Finding the pipe gave her the authority to trash our car and belongings, which she
enthusiastically
did. She systematically threw our clothes on the ground and stepped on them, ripped pieces of the seats out of our beloved RedOne and threw all the insurance papers and tire receipts from the glove box onto the highway where they got blown into the desert by passing semi-trailers. She found the bottles of liquor, another evil triumphant grin, and then found our presents from the head shops and confiscated them, though they were still in their unopened packages. When I protested that the bong was for tobacco and the vials were empty of anything that might suggest they were criminal, she launched into a tirade of how such and such “Buttfuck County Arizona” has zero tolerance laws and just possessing liquor underage gave her the right to auction off Jenifer’s car and blahbitty blahbitty. The evil lady spent several hours tongue lashing us and destroying our various belongings for some reason or another while harassing us over needless bullshit because she was disappointed we were NOT transporting drugs. I was getting really pissed and Jenifer looked like she might cry from frustration, which made me even angrier, but there was nothing to do except bend over and take a reaming in our ass because Arizona decided to give some lady with personal issues the right and power to abuse her authority if she chose to do so. True to Southern tradition, it’s likely that Arizona even encourages or rewards her for harassing the hippies and getting them out of the State.