The Damned Highway Read Online Free Page B

“I’ll fuck for horse.”
    I thought about rummaging through my leather kit bag and pulling out my tape recorder, but I had a head full of acid then, too, though not the quality of Jack Kirby, and my fingers felt like tiny sausages.
    â€œI’ll fuck for horse .”
    By the time we were three blocks uptown, everyone in the bus could hear her, though many of her fellow commuting citizens tried not to. “I. Will. FUCK. For. HORSE.” Her affect never changed; she could have been reading from a phone book, but she cranked up the volume with every iteration, stating a fact as plain and obvious as the times of the tides, or the black, ichor-drenched heart of President Nixon. This girl, this sweet young thing who was probably not even three years removed from Girl Scouts and 4-H ribbons and maybe a summer job at the movie house—a theater that would never even show a restricted film—was ready to spread for anyone who could bring her some heroin. Not only that, she had obviously already burned through every connection she had, the phalanxes of eager would-be boyfriends and pimps who’d make sure she’d get fucked for horse three times a day, and fucked for pay seven additional times just to keep their own lights on and their own drug supplies flowing, had been chased out of the wretched alleyways of the Lower East Side and the needle-rich parks of Greenwich Village and found herself on a city bus, offering to fornicate with any of the elderly ladies who might just happen to have some black tar nestled in with their Entenmann’s crumb cake and Hotel Bar unsalted butter.
    Heroin is a useless drug, and I don’t endorse it. I don’t endorse any drugs, actually, though there are many who say I do. That’s one of the problems with being me. People read magazine articles about me, and they believe them. Half the things attributed to me are things I never actually said—or don’t remember saying. And when it comes to drugs, all I’ve said is that they have always worked for me. But horse is not my bag.
    By the time the bus pulled up at Union Square, the girl had found a taker. She didn’t make eye contact with me when she stood up to allow his big canned ham of a hand to clamp down on her shoulder and lead her off the bus, but he did. He wasn’t a young guy, but instead looked like pretty much any regional assistant manager of a savings and loan might. He could have been a Rotarian, or an Odd Fellow, or one of the Knights of Columbus, or the guy who has a dolly in his garage just in case someone on the block needs help installing their new combination washer-dryer. His eyes glittered, and he smiled a tight little smile over his teeth. If I’d had my .44 magnum—I left it in the hotel safe, along with some loose bills, half a gram of cocaine, and a Moleskine—I would have put him out of my misery right then and there.
    But never mind that, eh? Now here I am again on a Greyhound bus, the sort of bus young girls take to reinvent themselves as junk-addled whores in Manhattan or Los Angeles. And I am going the wrong way—into the wilds of the New England hills, instead of screaming away from them. But that is where the trip’s taking me in this search for the American Nightmare. It’s enough to almost make me long for the bum I met at the terminal back in Denver, if only so I’d have some conversation. There are few people on the bus: a driver who looks like he ate his own weight in pancakes this morning, a Hispanic girl hugging herself and staring out into the faux star field of the parking lot and its flickering lamps, a skinny little guy with his hair slicked back with pomade and a flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a few random and shadowy shapes sitting in that extended last row by the chemical-smelling lavatory.
    It occurs to me that we all have something in common, my fellow passengers and I. This is 1972. There is