nanowrimo 2k9

Riding a vespa down the coast does not take genius, only patience. A wise man said that once about mathematics, but i think it pretty much applies to everything, except for maybe being a genius. Nickles had made some good time getting up on the main highways, but his vehicle was not suited for driving on the freeway, plus he was usually tanked out on malt liquor, so it was a lot easier to stay passing through smaller towns and staying off the main roads. A local cop won’t hassle a big dude on a vespa, because he could barely even hurt himself. Sure, he might take down an unlucky dear, but if he hit a raccoon, the bike would pretty much stop. Lucky for him, he managed to find a few shops along the way that could still make a  “hand carved” sandwich, but the best part of it was that most of them wouldn’t oblige his custom orders, they all pretty much had two flavors: standard and local.

A standard “hand carved” sandwich was the meat on a toasted bun, with some cheap vegetables thrown on it, mostly squash since that was the cheapest, bulkiest thing you could put on them. The locals were what reallly shined, most people were sick of the squash and had decided they knew some slighly better way of making it, but no one was industrious to come up with a full menu, they had one from a recipe card they would get from an errant trucker, and one that they came up with themselves. This was truly wonderful, because most of them just used barbeque sauce and spray cheese, the difference was the brands and flavors. Nickles was delighted, because he got to try new flavors of canned spray cheese that he never knew existed, most of them traded to truckers for covering up some kind of illicit smuggling. Such were the crumbling old highway towns of the west coast. Nickles being such a huge guy, he had to go a long way on his “hand carved” sandwiches, so he would usually order 3 or 4 to get him over the next 20 to 50 miles to the next town. On a fully loaded albeit customized vespa, this could take hours, but he was still long in the moonshine and had no shortage of his own monies to make the trip comfortable. When you spend most of your time in a shack in the woods, the chance for saving is pretty tremendous. Especially when you are an ageless preservative zombie like this guy.

Nothing against him, though, he was just the american man, living his dream. If your dream is living in the woods and getting drunk all the time, you should definitely be jealous of this guy, because he is such a stand up drama queen.

To make the long haul on the road easier, he drove with a tape player blasting in his face, mostly old mix tapes he had made of bad company and the j geils band, be cause he totally fucking rocked. Occasionally, he would pass through and make some other things go but thats not really important. What was important is that he often listened to the radio when passing through small earmarks of civilization, thats a good thing to do incase you drive in to a zombie town, because the radio will just be a bunch of moaning and clanging, maybe screaming “braaaains”, stuff like that, though.

In any event, he was pulling up, just for a minute, at small town. Woodvale, the sign in friendly cursive letters said as he rode past, kicking up dust past the weeds, still blaring his rad 70’s music, the remnants of his last “hand carved” sandwich stuck to his ever growing beard. Yeah, he was pretty awesome.

I should probably mention the stench. Spending all day everyday in leather pants with heavy exhaust from a slow moving bike and also sweating too much from sitting on top of an overworked engine is not really pleasant after 5 minutes, but he had been going like this without sleep for 3 days and close to 117 miles. Day, night, day, night, only stopping for gas, liquor and sandwiches, he held them all still in his gut, growing more and more bloated, his clothes fitting tighter, and his sweat starting to smell like congealed booze and cheese. There wasn’t anything more than that. He was just a drifter, trying to hunt down a trail of lost sandwiches.

The town seemed nice and boring. It was around the weekend, he had lost time, probably a saturday or sunday morning. The sign rode up to a worn concrete paving, and modest suburban dreams sat in the background. The cloistered houses and cloustered lawns, transparent wire fences and a few had some generic children in striped shirts playing beach balls. The roads carried out in the hills and there were a few large houses out there. There were hunters, a small merchant, a few other people who just managed to live off the land, a few other pieces were always falling into place.s There were two competing gas stations with identical prices and really only favored the side of the road you were driving on. They had the standard vending machines and other carnival faire. Souvenirs, shit that didn’t matter but cost too much. Things people could buy when they were stranded there, from a breakdown or just having to sleep.

Between the transparent fences, the housewives in their sundresses chatted idly about the ones who weren’t there. A few bored teenagers sat outside the gas station, waiting to hassle or spange the people that came through. There was a small dingy motel 8 as well. Woodvale was a town that had been built up while the freeway was being developed. There was a heavy traffic detour, and the locals gathered to supply the town needs. The buildings next to the gas stations was lined with decrepit closed down bats and one ailing strip club, that couldn’t find any strippers. There wasn’t a lot of migration to the area, and most of the people didn’t need enough money for that. There were the occasional prostitutes who would cruise by the stations when trucks passed through, but even that had been diminshed recently. The town was in a state of depression. The sandwiches had dried up, but so had the rest of their commerce.

Even with the situationist drivel, there were still more parts to be had, nickles pulled in to a service station, the one where the bored teenagers weren’t hanging out, and walked up to the malt liquor vending machine. He still had plenty of money, and pulled out his sweaty wallet, putting a twenty in and buying another armload of forties. He had a pretty good swerve going already, but was super thirsty from the mass dehydration he had been subjecting himself to. He quickly pounded half a forty and stumbled back over to his bike to strap the rest in. The teenagers seeing his drunk, stumbling manner, rushed over to try to scam some beers off of him.

“Hey mister, you wanna help us out, man? C’mon, give us some.”

Nickles quickly sprayed puke over all their shoes and started roaring incoherent gibberish…

“Fucking vending machine you punk pussy motherfuckers fuck your goddamn beggin adss fuck fuckkers fucking kids today, when i was your age i was fucking my own malt liquor.”

He stopped for breath, took a big swig of a forty and sprayed again at their general direction.

“Punk ass wallaby stew motherfuck-”

At this point the kids just took off, he was way to disgusting and belligerant for them to even bother trying to get something from. Plus, none of them wanted to take anything he had touched. The smell was truly overpowering.

Nickles slammed the rest of the forty while deftly tying down the rest of his baggage. From the pocket opposite his wallet pouch, he pulled out a packet of koolaid and a packet of instant iced tea.

“SUPPLIES!” and stumbled back to the water dispenser. A quick trip later he was slamming some water for what felt like the first time in days, he could feel moisture returning to his eyeballs and throat, and his general coherence returned. He had been cranked on energy liquor, bum poison and preservative laced sandwiches for days without rest and this seemed as good a place as any to stop off for the night.

He didnt want a hotel, of course, there was no good reason to waste his liquor money on a hotel when he could just as easily sleep in a ditch brandishing a knife. Generally the police didn’t bother him as long as he stayed out of sight.