1-3-00 Soul Sold at the Crossroads

1-3-00 M 3:00 AM

We’re in Fort Stockton, Texas, at a Motel Six. I wrote three pages this morning at Gringo Pass on the Arizona/Mexico border, south of Organ Pipe. From there, we drove and drove in our rented Olds. Rochelle drove while I read The Arizona Republic and did the crosswords. A cold front has been storming through with crazy low clouds and sporadic showers over the Sonoran mesas and Apache shacks. We stopped in Tucson and had a hard time finding a map and a decent place to eat, though we did eventually find both. We ate at the Silver Saddle Steakhouse—had a couple of beers and a burger, Roch: soup and salad. I drove from there to New Mexico talking of past cross-country blunders. We listened to Metallica, the Violent Femmes, and to Nebraska beating Tennessee in the Fiesta Bowl. I put my joints under the seat because the CHP took twenty minutes to write my first ticket of the day, and I was sure when he ran my license and learned of my suspension that I was about to be taken to jail. But, all he did was write the ticket. I’m finally getting sleepy, drinking beer in bed. We should make San Antone by three tomorrow. Get a room. See the River Walk. Houston. New Orleans. Guess we’ll do a hostel a couple of nights. We’ve got to fly out Saturday.

1-3-2000 5:22 PM Mon

San Antonio, Texas.     We left Ft. Stockton, Texas, this morning at about ten o’clock.  It was barren wasteland for a few hours before transforming into a rolling country of chaparral, oak, and creeks.  One butte looked just like a tit with a nipple on it.  We stopped at a picnic area and had a beer.  We got to San Antonio around three.  We parked and found the famed Riverwalk, but the river has been diverted, and a sick ring of muck circles the shops and restaurants instead.  We ate a couple fat-ass plates of Mexican food at Casa Rio and downed a couple of margaritas before moseying on over to the Alamo.  We toured the mission and the museum.  Now, we’re sitting at Crazy Sam’s having a couple beers.  We’re going to walk around the rest of the Mudwalk when I’m done writing this, and then press on for Houston.  The trees are draped in strings of colored lights.  What else?  Rochelle [sloppy profile of what might be an ugly woman in black ink] is so beautiful.  She’s sitting across the table from me meditating on the fountain and waterfall in the hotel adjacent to the patio here where we’re drinking.  I had to borrow this pen from the bartender.

What else?  Rochelle thinks they ought to open a window or two at the Alamo.

I need a shave.  We need to find a couple of rings.  The bartender just traded me this nice silver pen for one that’s chained to a stapler.  I started reading the introduction to Blake.  Still haven’t seen a newspaper today.  I handwrote fifteen minutes in my trip-journal that serves as a surrogate laptop computer for my exercises.  I have to try to do a third-person page in Houston.  What else?  It’s beginning to get dark.  We can walk around the River Walk with our beers if I can think of enough to write to bet to the bottom of this page.  Blake thought of himself as more of a mouthpiece for God than as a writer.

They chewed beignets at Cafe du Monde, and he thought about how he hadn't written since San Antonio, two days earlier. They drove through Houston, couldn't figure out what to do there, and kept on driving to Winnie, Texas, where they stopped at Al T's and had beer and bourbon and chatted with the locals.

They stayed in a forty-dollar motel and slept until ten. They crossed into Louisiana with the radio off. Driving through the lonely swamps and bayous, he had a vague sense of unease, as if the land were haunted by the bloody ghosts of history. Every little town had a road crew whose purpose was not evident. He suspected their lower speed-limit signs gave the local constable a reason to pull over travelers and line his pockets with money from fines for not going twenty miles per hour in the bogus construction zones. More darkly, he pictured the orange cones as a highwayman's trap to rob and rape unwary wanderers. When they stopped for gas, he had to steel himself against an irrational fear as he entered the beat-up old service station.

As they neared New Orleans, he put a Robert Johnson cassette on the car stereo. "They say he's the original bluesman," he told her. "They say he sold his soul at a Mississippi Delta crossroads to be able to play the way he did. He was shot and killed by a man for messin' around with that man's wife."

She turned it off. She said she couldn't negotiate the Sugar Bowl traffic with the music on. Strain crept into her voice as he guided her down Bourbon Street packed with revelers. She was becoming tense and angry. He sensed a meltdown coming.