As I move from death-blogger to more genteel offerings, I’m putting up a continuation of my last post. If it’s been confusing, I’ll explain myself. My initial purpose of this blog had been to blow out some of the crud lying around in my head. It was also to at least attempt to clarify and inject some reality into a profession that is not served well when filtered through a pop-culture lens. I’d heard for years how “cool” and how “great” it must be to work in a Medical Examiner’s Office. I won’t deny that I find it both great and cool. I often find myself surprised at how privileged I feel to do such work. But, I also felt a deep compulsion to separate the reality of this work– and the work done in a secure psychiatric facility– that is so grossly misrepresented in shows like CSI and Law and Order, or films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This also includes the stuff offered as “reality” to eager viewers of the ID channel and Justice Network programming. I can’t help but feel entertainment value is greatly diminished when encountering such things first hand, and those “subject’s” whose circumstances are the basis of that “entertainment” have families that are looking you in the eye and hoping for answers.
After the last two years or so, I got it out, put it in book form (well reviewed, little purchased– C’est la vie!) and suddenly found a lot less crud in my head. The last few years of pounding this out and offering it up has served me in unexpected and wonderful ways. I truly thank all of you who have taken the time to read it, comment on it, and encourage it. At the same time, the compulsion and urgency I felt faded and granted me an odd and unexpected degree of . . . peace. Wow.
However (I say this in lieu of “but”, because all know what follows “but” means) I also found myself exhilarated by a sense of drive and discipline I thought I’d lost years ago, when it came down to putting words down and shoving them in front of the eyes of others.
I’ve written all of my life, but had lost the keen LUST I’d had for it sometime back. Found it again. So… I’m holding on to that drive and discipline and pulled a novel I’d been dicking around with for a long time. I’m putting it up if for no other reason that I can’t write one thing down without following it up with something else. I might just get it finished.
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Two hours later Will stopped. He’d left St. Paul almost two hours and ago, and the Interstate thirty minutes after that. It had been nothing but trunk highways and semi-trucks, and he’d been slipping into highway hypnosis since the sun went down. He pulled into a Cenex station to snap his brain back into focus. After topping the fuel tanks, and a stop in the bathroom, he stayed to eat a rubbery wedge of pizza from the faux deli in the back of the station. Before he left he bought some pop, a few bags of chips and a ball cap. He was in his truck and ready to pull onto the highway when he turned around and went back into the store.
“Gimme the cheapest lighter you’ve got and a pack of those Zig-Zags,” he told the teenager at the register, pointing to the rack of cigarette papers next to the cash register.
The look the kid gave him made Will feel like he was in high school again, buying a condom he’d never use. As he paid, he wished he’d had his sunglasses on. Will saw the kid in his rearview mirror as he drove away, grinning at him through the window.
He pulled over a mile down the highway from the station and rolled a joint. A truck would roar past him while he was parked on the shoulder and he would hunch his shoulders to hide his clumsy work. He felt like his dome light was the only illumination for a thousand square miles, and after it happened a couple of times he cursed himself for not being clever enough to at least spread a roadmap over his steering wheel to lend some legitimacy to his being pulled over. The stuff was making him paranoid and he hadn’t so much as touched a flame to it. When finished, he appraised his lumpy, illicit cigarette. His lack of practice was evident. Throw it away, he told himself even as he dropped it into his clean, shiny ashtray. Get rid of the whole damn works. But he closed the ashtray, put the sandwich bag back under his new, plastic girlfriend, and pulled back onto the highway.
The next few miles passed with one eye on the rearview mirror, on the lookout for an approaching sheriff’s department squad or the State Highway Patrol.
One hundred thirty miles away from his old apartment, Will turned south. A few minutes later, he crossed the Minnesota River. He climbed out of the river valley and soon abandoned his linear route, swinging onto county roads and trunk highways—south a bit, west a bit—occasionally slowing to lean over the steering wheel, as if it allowed him to get better bearings. How many years had it been since he’d been out here? Twenty-five? He’d made a couple of trips since his mother’s funeral. Twenty-two? Not counting Mexico, it had been at least that long since he’d been west of Minneapolis. There was a map in his glove box, but reaching for it would feel like defeat. He took the road markers he passed and turned them over to memory and instinct, and told himself he’d be “home” in an hour.
Will spent forty uncertain miles knowing he was moving in the right direction, and at the same time sure he was lost. Then, one road sign put him at ease. He smiled, hit the gas, and made another turn west and kept accelerating until he saw another sign. It flashed in his headlights after his truck crested a low hill and began the descent to the Wahpekute River. Will slowed and pulled to the shoulder a few yards before the bridge, the sign’s reflective background glaring in the blaze of the halogen lamps. He got out of the cab. A breeze blew from the West, damp and cold. He zipped his jacket and jammed his hands into his pockets. He walked up to the sign. It read: Limburg County. Somebody had tacked an “er” to Limburg with a sharpie marker, and below that added, “where life stinks.” Will smirked. It was an old joke. The first time he’d heard it was from his mother.
He walked past the sign and onto the bridge. In the middle of the span, he leaned over the guard rail and looked down. He couldn’t see anything, but he could hear the low rush of water as it flowed around the pilings. He stepped up on the curbing at the edge of the bridge. The rail came to his knees and he flexed them against it to keep himself steady. He unzipped his pants, reliving for a moment the exhilaration he’d felt almost forty years ago when his mother had encouraged him to do it, and peed into what she had described as the boundary between her home and the real world.
He went back to his truck, eager for the warmth, still wondering what the hell he was doing out here.