By Ed Staskus
“The end is always near,” Greg Smith said, sinking back into the firm as Jell-O bench seat. Flying bugs recently alive littered our windshield. One of them left a big yellow blob behind him the instant he hit the glass. It was a fine summer day. Jimi Hendrix’s song “Stone Free” was playing on the car radio.
Greg’s driving hand was easy on the steering wheel. His other hand was wiggling in the outside air. He was driving well enough to keep us on the road, but his eyes were like pinwheels. The magic mushroom he had popped into his mouth a half hour earlier was working its magic. I couldn’t tell him to slow down because he was going slower than a horse-drawn buggy. I reached for the seatbelt, anyway. When I did I found out the top drop Chevrolet Impala SS didn’t have seatbelts.
I had taken a Greyhound bus from Cleveland down the hillbilly highway and hooked up with my friend Greg in Athens. It wasn’t Greece. It was southern Ohio in the northern Appalachians. I called him Jonesy for fun, even though he didn’t think it was funny. “I don’t like glibness,” he complained like an offended grade school teacher.
SS stood for Super Sport. There was nothing super about the car anymore, which came off the assembly line in 1961, except for the engine. It was still super when it had to be. The rocker panels were rusting out, the front of the hood was gashed, and the tires were bald as baloney skins. The car was Roman Red on the outside while the interior was scuffed black leather. I reached for the grab bar attached to the padded dashboard.
“Do you know this car was built by union labor right here in the United States?” Greg asked, apropos of the Japanese and German cars we had been seeing here and there.
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said.
“It’s got a V-8 engine. One of my uncles might have built it.”
“Is that right? By the way, what do you mean the end is always near?”
“Like they say,” he said, “the future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”
At the moment the Chevy Impala SS was running on one of the V-8’s and none of Greg’s car-making relatives were in sight. What was in sight was the future. There was a flashing red light behind us. It was the kind of light that always looks makes you feel blue. The Meigs County policeman didn’t have any trouble getting on our tail. He had some trouble pulling us over, however, even though the road was straight and narrow as a preacher. The manual steering took several turns of the steering wheel to go from lock to lock. In the state he was in it took Greg a few minutes and a mile-or-so to master the mechanics of pulling off onto the shoulder.
The policeman didn’t bother asking for his driver’s license. “Step out of the car, son, and let me smell your breath,” he said.
Greg didn’t like being called son. He scowled patting himself down for his wallet. He huffed and puffed in the policeman’s direction.
“You smell all right,” the policeman said. “It don’t seem like you been drinking or smoking stinkweed.” The Chevy had a vacuum powered ash tray that sucked ashes to a container in the trunk. “Why are you going so slow when you got that power horse under the hood?”
“I know this road doesn’t go anywhere but I’m looking for the end of it,” Greg said. “I don’t want to miss it.” The policeman wasn’t fazed by the nonsense. “It don’t go nowhere but it always brings you back again,” he said. Greg was flummoxed for a minute. The policeman looked the Chevy Impala SS up and down. “This is the car the Beach Boys wrote a song about, son.”
The song was a big hit in its day. “Nobody can catch her, nothing can touch my 409, giddy up, giddy up, my four speed dual quad 409,” Brian Wilson sang in his big falsetto while the rest of the boys layered the harmonies. The fired-up 409 was fitted with a 4-barrel carburetor and a solid lifter camshaft. The pistons were made from forged aluminum. The heads and engine block were made from cast-iron.
“Those were the days, boys. Make no mistake, that Impala is a real fine car. Try to put some giddy up into your driving. And keep it on the yellow line.” He got back into his black and white Dodge Coronet patrol car and u-turned, going the way he had come. He drove away in good order.
I was along for the ride on Greg’s ride that day. I had spent the spring, summer, and fall of the previous year in a nearby town called Carpenter living with Virginia Sustarsic in an abandoned general store. She wasn’t my girlfriend, but we got along, even though she was a dyed in the wool hippie and I wasn’t. She rolled her homegrown delicately and deliberately. We kept two goats, gleaned plenty of food, and brewed our own beer. I drank most of the beer. A stray kitten made us his crash pad. The town wasn’t a town so much as a whistle stop. The railroad had long since abandoned the place, though. There were maybe a dozen residents, including us. There were dust balls in all the corners of the crossroad. At night every star in the universe twinkled in the nighttime sky.
Carpenter was in Meigs County. It was named after Return Meigs, Jr., who was the fourth governor of Ohio. The county is on the Appalachian Plateau in the southeast corner of the state. The Shade River and Leading Creek drain into the Ohio River. Leading Creek ran right through Carpenter. In the 1970s the county’s population was less than 20,000. As far as I could tell there were no Asians, Native Americans, or African Americans anywhere. There were trailer trash on every other hillside.
Greg was a friend of John McGraw’s, who was Virginia’s on-again off-again boyfriend back home. They both lived on the bohemian near east side of downtown, near Cleveland State University. John was a part-time writer and drank whiskey straight from the bottle. Greg came from a more polite class and drank from a glass. He and John had planned on sight-seeing Meigs County, but at the last minute John bowed out. Greg went anyway, cruising all the way from one end of the state to the other in his big Chevy SS.
Virginia dressed like it was still the Summer of Love while John more like the Age of Beatniks had never ended. Greg wasn’t any better off than them, living half on and half off the American Dream, but he dressed like a preppy. He read the classics. He was studying Latin so he could read Ovid and Seneca in the original. Nobody ever suspected he kept magic mushrooms in his wallet.
Something came over him the minute the policeman was out of sight. He fired up the Chevy SS. He spun gravel getting back on the asphalt. The next minute we were doing eighty in a forty. The Doobie Brothers came on the radio belting out “Rockin’ Down the Highway.” I took a peek in the rearview. There was nobody behind us. I looked through the windshield at what was in front of us. All the danger was in front of us.
“We should maybe slow down,” I calmly suggested as loud as I could.
The Chevy SS was a four on the floor. She wasn’t good on gas and burned some oil. Greg picked up speed. We were doing a hundred in no time. There were no more gears to shift up into. His eyes weren’t pinwheels anymore. They glinted like icepicks. He leaned over the steering wheel. The car wasn’t sloppy, nor was Greg’s handling of it sloppy, but we were headed for trouble. We were blasting down a back road. It was cracked and rough and more gravel than not. Meigs County didn’t have the tax base to keep its roads in any kind of Daytona 500 shape.
“I’m not asking for a miracle, Lord, just a little bit of luck will do,” I whispered.
“Every minute counts,” Greg shouted above the wind noise.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” I shouted back. “You never can tell what’s around the corner.”
He waved at the outdoors with his left arm. Southeastern Ohio on a sunny day in the summer is beautiful. When we roared around a blind curve there wasn’t anything there, to my relief, until there suddenly was. It was a roadhouse with some cars and pick-ups in the front, which was a small parking lot full of potholes. The sign said Frank’s Roadhouse. There were worn-out antlers nailed to the outside wall above the front windows. We pulled in, skidding in three or four different directions. A long-tailed weasel ran the other way. There were half a dozen bungalows in the back.
Inside there was a bar, a kitchen, some tables, a dance floor, a riser protected by chicken wire, and a pool table. A man and a woman were having mashed potatoes with pulled pork at one of the tables. A bottle of BBQ sauce stood at the ready between their plates. There was some action going on at the pool table but none on the dance floor. Before I knew it Greg had found unexpected action at the bar, where a cute brunette was sitting, a lowball glass half full of red wine at her elbow and a paperback book in front of her.
There was an oblong mirror on the wall behind the bar. It was too smudged to see into. There was a hand-written warning on a greasy piece of cardboard below it. It said, “Don’t eat the big white mint!” I didn’t ask what it meant. I didn’t want to know. What’s a simple man to do? I looked around for something to do. I put a dollar on the lip of the pool table marking my turn in line. There were two men playing nine ball. It was the middle of the day on a Thursday. Neither of them was on union soil. Neither of them was being especially efficient. There were seven or eight bottles of Burger Beer on a small round table behind them.
One of the men looked me up and down. “I’m a pretty big man around these parts,” he said, flashing a Mighty Mouse grin. He had sharp yellow teeth. He was shorter than me, but I knew what he meant. “I thought you’d be bigger,” I said. He didn’t laugh. He had the sense of humor of a circus strongman. The other man laughed his head off. My man broke the rack. He was no Minnesota Fats. When my turn came I ran the rack and took my dollar back. I collected a dollar from the local yokel. He tried his luck two more times and paid me two more dollars. He didn’t know, and I didn’t tell him, that I spent more time than I wanted to admit, even to myself, shooting snooker at Joe Tuma’s Pool Hall back in Cleveland.
I bought them both beers, they clapped me on the back, the circus strongman harder than he needed to, and I went back to the bar, joining my friend and his new friend. He wasn’t paying any attention to her book. He gave me a wink, suggesting the main drag from the eye to the heart doesn’t go through the intellect, or words to that effect.
Her name was Annie. She was a third-year student at Ohio University in Athens, 20-some miles to the northwest of where we were. She was majoring in English. She wasn’t enrolled in classes that summer but had stayed in Athens instead of going home to Cincinnati. She spent her spare time exploring. She had found Frank’s Roadhouse by accident, liked the looks of it, and stopped in for the afternoon.
“What do you like about this dump?” I asked.
“It looks real,” she said.
I was willing to grant her that. When the bartender approached I ordered a Vernors Ginger Soda. Between the earlier psychedelics and shots of roadhouse whiskey stirring up my tour guide, I knew one of us had to stay on the wagon.
“Who is Frank,” I asked the bartender.
“There ain’t no Frank, at least not no more,” he said.
“What happened to him?”
“Nobody knows,” he said.
The middle of nowhere is as good a place to disappear as any.
I reminded Greg we had promised our farmhouse friends where we were staying we would stop at the grocery store in Pomeroy and pick up milk, cheese, and toilet paper. Toilet paper was like gold where they lived. Greg’s eyes had gone soft and fuzzy in the meantime. He needed reminding. I had to remind him twice. He finally slid off the bar stool glowing like a full moon in a clear sky.
Annie followed us out to the Chevy SS. “I like your car,” she said. Greg asked her if she wanted a ride back to college town. She pointed to a VW Beetle. “Fontasse postem infantem,” she said, jotting her name and phone number down on a scrap of paper. She pressed it into his open hand. She rose up on her tiptoes and gave him a kiss on the cheek. I never saw a man go head over heels as fast as he did that day.
Once we were in the car, humming along Route 143 on our way to Pomeroy, I asked him what Annie had said.
“Maybe later baby,” he said. “That’s what she said.”
The Milky Way was in his eyes. “Keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel,” I reminded him for the last time. I didn’t have to remind him to keep his hands off the magic mushrooms in his wallet. He was riding high on a different kind of magic. Love may not make the world go round, although it can make the ride around the world worthwhile.
Photograph by Elaine Mayes.
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”
“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus
“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books
Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Revenge is always personal. It gets personal.
A Crying of Lot 49 Publication
Made in Cleveland 