Semi-fictional Friday

This is neither purely fiction or purely journalistic. Some is true. Some is untrue. Some of it is both.

Into lives of no consequence friends come and go with the burning scream demon chemicals in our blood. Me and Andrew, friends of convenience and shared appetites for waifish addicted women and crystallized rocks of pure superman power, were of no consequence. We played with life and death as pathetic toys in the hands of giants. We were supermen, immortal in our young minds. The screaming noise of his 3/4 ton Ford truck cut through the dry and cold air.

The truck slewed around the turns down into the dry gulches of Mancos Shale that you used to be able to get by crossing the East Bridge over the EOM Canal at C 1/2 Road. We never knew how to drive our nearly identical behemoths without getting them a little sideways around the turns. How we survived cranked out and drunk and driving our souped up to all hell trucks, I still don't know.

As we cleared the bottom of the hill, a washed out section of road launched us skyward. In the cab we both hit our heads on the roof and crashed back into the sagging seat laughing like the morons we were. The truck slewed right on the rutted clay road into the side of the hill, rotating against the resistance. He laughed maniacally and gunned it sending the nose straight up the soft shale hill. The roaring truck cleared it easily dumping us down into another draw. The truck flayed into the creek sideways and tipped onto two wheels. We continued to appreciate the hilarity. In my hands I held a new Kenwood CD player jacked into a tapedeck adapter fed into his cheap stereo gaping out of the bare metal dash with wires swaying from underneath it. A band that shall not be named raged through cheap speakers we drilled into the doors.

I blame the artist for our manic attempts at proving mortality. Living fast and loose. I reached with my spare hand through the open back window of the truck and fished in the cooler bungeed to the front of the bed for more beer. I threaded my hand back through the gun rack and handed him a beer and repeated the process for myself. We were being dumb. I blame it on the artists invocation to live to win. I don't know why.

The shuffling CD player, held more or less steady in my hand as we rocketed out of the draw and back onto the road, found its next song about the time we were done gunning down the beers. The cans found their way back into the bed. We were not good people, but we did not litter.

Andrew shouted from his place behind the steering wheel, "God, I love this fucking song!"

I signalled my approval over my next beer. "Yeah."

"Listen to those drums!"

Andrew like to pretend he could play the drums.

I forget why we were out in the desert that day. I think it had something to do with shooting prairie dogs. I don't know, we were high. Lately I have rediscovered that particular artist and I always have semi-fond memories of that thoroughly retarded summer. We found our way in and out of trouble, living on whims and promises we did not keep. Everyday was an adventure in craziness and adolescent desire, but we eventually had to stop. He ran from the cops out to Nevada and I found my way into another desert far away from prairie dogs and Ford trucks. We both wound up with blood on our hands less than a year after this creek running. My hands covered in the mass killing of more or less innocent people I never met, his bloody hands eventually removed him from the dust of the chase. At least they never caught him.

He rolled into a speed metal high beating invisible drums with his foot burying the throttle into the floorboard. I see it in your eyes, take one look and die.

The truck departed controlled travel some time around there and my head hit the gun rack. The world exploded into white and jostled and quaked and gravity and mud could not come to a consensus on which part of the truck was facing the earth. The white flickered and revealed the brown clods of desert soil pressed into my window and then the sky and then the dashboard racing toward me. I was aware of a crack and burst in my nose, but I felt nothing but drunk and high. The truck eventually stopped. My feet were cold and wet. The door would not open and Andrew was gone. I crawled out of the open back window. Beer cans were everywhere. As was the remains of his .22 rifle and the gunrack.

I stepped up out of the bed and onto the dirt. I sat hard and looked at his truck half submerged. Andrew sat on the hood. Laughing. I laughed too, at the smeared and sticky blood on my face and the blood still running down his face. He smiled around a missing tooth, more blood pouring out and pointed up stream.

"Dude, the road washed out. That was fucking cool!"