And that should have been that—end of story, end of me.
Around 11 a.m., speeding east along the tabletop-flat highway that unspooled through the baked Sonoran Desert somewhere outside of Palm Springs, the temperature already closing in on ninety degrees, I nodded off behind the wheel. Waking up an instant later, I found myself in midair, the car having jumped a soft curb on the passing lane and soaring at eighty miles an hour into a cloudless blue sky, heading into the gulch that divided I-10.
Nanoseconds unreeled in a kind of stop-action slow motion. I had what seemed like an eternity to size things up and consider my alternatives, even though, of course, I had no time at all. As my car made its descent into the median, I resisted the urge to do what my reflexes were imploring me to do: jam on the fucking brakes! I knew that would cause the Town Car to barrel roll the moment the wheels touched down and then throw me or crush me.
Instead, I hit the gas the second the car landed in the gulch. I let it run for a moment until yanking the steering wheel to avoid a berm that serves as a turnaround for emergency vehicles and the police. The car spun into the westbound lanes—the same direction as the oncoming traffic. Miraculously, there was a gap in the traffic until my car stopped dead in the emergency lane, hissing and coughing. It rested on four flat tires, with cacti and scrub brush wrapped around the undercarriage.
I don’t remember how long I sat there. It seemed like forever. I blinked behind sunglasses that had somehow stayed on my head. The luggage in the back seat was now scattered all over the front; the car’s interior looked like a war zone. I was shaking, still amped up from being in the middle of my twelve-day roll. Two police cruisers whizzed by without so much as tapping their brakes, like I was somebody who’d pulled over to take a leak or a tourist who’d stopped to ponder the roadside’s ceaseless, featureless panorama.
I called the rental company and told them that somebody ran me off the road. The tow truck didn’t arrive for a couple of hours, and when the driver looked over the car, I told him that I’d wound up in the gulch. He shrugged.
“Happens all the time,” he said before hauling me back to Palm Springs, where I climbed behind the wheel of another rental and continued on to Sedona.
Then things got weird.
I stopped for gas somewhere in the high foothills while driving north through Arizona, rolled back onto the highway, then didn’t realize until two hours later that I’d pointed my new Jeep Cherokee in the wrong direction.
Back on the right track, I found myself navigating a winding mountain road beneath a moonless sky well past midnight. There were no lights anywhere. Some sections had guardrails, some did not. I was determined to keep moving rather than pull over and wait until morning. I had called Grace Grove before leaving Palm Springs and arranged for Joey and Morgan, an ex-cowboy who managed the place with Puma, to pick me up at the rental car office in Prescott, an old western town about an hour and a half’s drive from the wellness center.
As the high-desert wind rushed and whistled through the wide-open windows, I played an album of remixes by Mississippi bluesman R. L. Burnside as a kind of propulsive soundtrack. On one song, “It’s Bad You Know,” Burnside growls those words over and over. I played it almost continuously, like a gonzo incantation. I was out of my fucking mind.
To stay awake, I chain-smoked crack and cigarettes, kept the windows down, and leaned into the bracing night air whenever I felt myself nodding off. At some point, the crack lost its oomph, but I kept lighting up anyway, out of force of habit. Sometimes I just slapped myself in the face.
As I peered ahead into the pitch blackness, at times hunched so far forward my chest bumped against the steering wheel, an enormous barn owl suddenly swooped over my windshield, as if dropped straight from the inky night sky. I looked on in stunned wonder. It glided over the car’s hood until it was caught in my high beams. I didn’t know if it was real or a hallucination, but it sure as hell woke me up.
Then, as abruptly as it arrived, the bird swerved off to the right, just out of range of my headlights. I swerved with it to stay on the road, and it led me cleanly around a sharp bend. It disappeared for a few minutes after that, as the road straightened, before reappearing again with its massive wings tilting first one way and then the other, guiding me through a series of tight, bounding switchbacks. I just kept following. It did the same thing four or five more times—disappearing, returning, gliding through dips and rises and hairpin turns at full speed, like a stunt plane at an air show, all but beckoning me to stay close behind. I’m not sure how long I followed the owl before it finally led me straight into Prescott. As it flapped off into the star-smeared sky, I shook my head and mouthed a soundless, still-disbelieving “Thank you,” over and over and over again.
It was 3 a.m. Joey and Morgan had waited on me for hours. When I pulled in, they weren’t amused.
“You won’t believe what just happened,” I exclaimed, still dumbstruck by what I’d witnessed.
I wanted to recount everything. How I shouldn’t even be there. How I’d lucked out in Nashville with a crack dealer who didn’t take everything I had at 2 a.m., including my life. How a hustling music impresario wannabe and his girlfriend looked after my best interests and pushed me to clean up instead of robbing me blind.
