Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality

“Jonesy?”

Jones gave the thumbs up. “Hell on fucking wheels, man! Nobody lives forever, so let’s roll!”

“Hardcore,” Ruben approved. “Squared-fucking-away goddamn die-for-decon outstanding.”

“Let’s kick ass!” Bock yelled.

“Decon!” Jones chanted.

Ruben handed Jones the grid. “Get this twin-tracked Detroit coffin rolling, Jonesy. Hammer down.”

Jones revved the throttle, whooping. The track’s turbocharged Cummins V8 roared. Bock strapped in behind the commo gear. Ruben had enlivened them, but for how long? What was happening out there? What’s waiting for us? he wondered.

“Proceed to target perimeter positive,” he said.

***

How powerful is the power of truth?

It was more a motto than a question. It was all that motivated him.

The writer didn’t believe in God, for instance. Now, if he saw God, then he’d believe in Him. He believed in nothing he couldn’t see, but that’s why he was here, wasn’t it? To see? Behind him, the bus disappeared into darkness. I see that, he thought.

Ahead, the sign blazed in blue neon: CROSSROADS.

“I see that, too. A drink, to help me think.”

But then he heard a word, or thought he did. It was not his voice, nor a thought of his own. He heard it in his head:

SUSTENANCE.

So he was hearing voices now? Perhaps he’d been drinking too much. Or, Not enough, he considered, half-smiling. All great writers drink. He could not dispel the notion, however, that he was entering something more than just a small-town tavern.

Dust eddied from the wood floor’s seams when he trod in and set down his bag. Yes, here was a real “slice of life” bar: a dump. Its frowziness, its cheap tables, dartboards, pinball machines — its overall Vacuus spiritum—delighted him. This was reality, and reality was what he sought.

Seek, he thought, and ye shall find.

“Welcome to Crossroads, stranger,” greeted the rube barkeep. The writer mused over the allegorical possibilities of the bar’s name. The keep had a basketball beer belly and teeth that would compel an oral hygienist to consider other career options. “What can I get ya?” he asked.

“Alcohol. Impress me with your mixological prowess, sir.”

Only three others graced these eloquent confines. A sad-faced guy in a white shirt sat beside a short, bosomed redhead. They seemed to be arguing. Closer up sat an absolutely obese woman with long blond hair, drinking dark beer and eating an extra-large pizza. Her weight caused the stool’s legs to visibly bend.

You’re here to seek, the writer reminded himself. So seek.

“May I join you?”

The blonde swallowed, nodding. “You ain’t from around here.”

“No,” the writer said, and sat. Then the keep slapped a shooter down. It was yellow. “House special, stranger.”

It looked like urine. “What is it?”

“We call it the Piss Shooter.”

The writer’s brow rose. “It’s not, uh… piss, is it?”

The keep laughed. “‘Course not! It’s vodka and Galliano.”

The writer sniffed. Smells all right. “Okay, here’s to — what? Ah, yes. Here’s to formalism.” He drank it down.

“Well?”

“Not bad. Very good, actually.” He reached for his wallet.

“Uh-uh, stranger. That there’s a tin roof.”

“What?”

The keep rolled his eyes. “It’s on the house.”

“What’cha want in a dull’s-shit town like this?” inquired the fat blonde, chewing. Her breasts were literally large as human heads. “Ain’t nothin’ around for fifty miles in any direction.”

Isolatus proximus. “I’m a writer,” the writer said. “I travel all over the country. I need to see different things, different people. I need to see life in its different temporal stratas.”

“Stratas,” the fat blonde said, nodding.

“I come to remote towns like this because they’re variegated. They exist separately from the rest of the country’s societal mainstream. Towns like this are more real. I’m a writer, but in a more esoteric sense… I’m…” He thought about this. He thought hard. He lit a cigarette and finished. “I’m a seeker.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me!” the guy in the white shirt shouted to the short red-haired girl. “You’ve slept with FIVE OTHER GUYS this week? Jeeeeesus CHRIST!”

She sipped her Tequila Moonrise reflectively, then corrected, “Sorry. Not five. Six. I forgot about Craig.” She grinned. “His nickname’s Mr. Meat Missile.”

“Jeeeeesus CHRIST!” White shirt exploded.

“He must be in love with her,” the writer remarked.

“He don’t get her pussy off,” the fat blonde said.

The keep was polishing a glass. “What’s that you were sayin’? You’re a seeker? ”

“Well, that’s an abstraction, of course. What I mean is I’m on a quest. I’m searching for some elusive uncommon denominator to perpetuate my aesthetic ideologies. For a work of fiction to exist within any infrastructure of resolute meaning, its peripheries must reflect certain elements of truth. I don’t mean objective truths. I’m talking about ephemeral things: unconscious impulses, psychological propensities, etc. — the underside of what we think of as the human experience.”

“I’ve never heard such shit in my life!” White Shirt was still yelling at the redhead. “Those other guys don’t love you! I love you!”

The redhead doodled indifferently on a napkin. “But I don’t want to be loved,” she said. Then she grinned as intensely as an indian devil mask. “I just want to be fucked.”

“Jeeeeeeesus Chriiiiiiiiiiiiist!”

“You gotta tune ’em out,” advised the fat blonde, now halfway done with the pizza and starting her third dark beer. Grease glossed her lips and chin.

“The seeker,” said the keep. “I like that.”

“But what exactly do you write about?” asked the blonde.

“What I write about isn’t the point, it’s how I write about it.” And then, with no warning, the thought returned: How powerful is the power of truth? The writer smoked his cigarette deep. “Honesty is the vehicle of my aesthete. The truth of fiction can only exist in its bare words. Pardon my obtuseness, but it’s the mode, the application of the vision which must transcend the overall tangibilities. Prose mechanics, I mean — the structural manipulation of syntactical nomenclatures in order to affect particularized transpositions of imagery.”

“Oh,” said the fat blonde. “I thought you meant, like, fucking’n shit like that.”

The writer frowned.

He swigged another Piss Shooter, another tin roof. The fat blonde’s pizza lay thick with extra cheese, anchovies, and big chunks of sausage beneath a sheen of grease. Her stomach made fish tank noises as she voraciously ate and drank.

“Why, why, why?” White Shirt looked close to tears, or a schizoaffective episode, staring at the redhead. “At least tell me why I’m not good enough anymore?”

“You don’t want to know,” she nonchalantly replied.