Chapter 9 – No good deed

It was close to midnight, as the soft porn movie flickered across the screen, the cold winter moonlight reflecting off the blanket of snow covering the patio outside the sliding glass doors that never closed in summer, letting out into a wonderland where deer wandered across the yard, mere feet from the cosy TV room, where the floor to ceiling moving window behind the well-worn couch usually provided just as much entertainment as anything screened on the 300 channels of tripe that was pumped out 24/7 by the endless manufacturers of puerile shit that liked to call themselves production houses.

I was on a furlong, or at least a short and curly, kotched on the faded, cosy couch in front of the dying fire, trying to remain interested in the mindless nipples and moaning going on, on screen, while keeping my mind off the endless starry night creeping in through the window to peer over my shoulder, whisper in through my perked up ear, to my over tired brain about the demons that were creeping up on me from beneath the couch, smelling the fear in my soul, seeking me out, to gnaw through my last nerve and pitch me forward into the darkness of insanity.

I push up off my perch, to my feet, unsure of where I am going, putting the TV on mute as I tiptoe through the kitchen to step through the garage door.

And there she is, the Lincoln Mark VIII, my father’s pride and joy, in all her sleek and muscular glory, just waiting for me to pop her open and slip inside her sensuous leather interior.

I roll back out of the garage without switching her on, enjoying the sneaky crunch of rubber on gravel as she rolls backwards down the steep driveway and into the culdesac my family call home.

I don’t start her up until we’re almost out in the road, enjoying the promise of power almost as much as the surge of pure adrenaline as I rev her hulking super-charged V8 and she roars to life.  The grin splitting my face makes me look like an undead version of The Joker in the black-night reflection inside the car for a moment as I open and close the door.  There’s nothing more annoying than that binging sound of an improperly closed door, or unplugged seat belt.  Thank you Big Brother Nanny-State for treating us all like we are children that need corralling and cajoling just to keep us alive, like a row of ducklings following Mother Duck across the street.

I put my foot down, only throwing her into gear at the last minute.  My insane grin widens until it risks splitting my head in two like some over-sized broken Pez dispenser, spilling my brains all over the seat, as the oversized rear wheels spin and smoke before they grip for purchase, launching me out across the main road like a rocket, the nearly 4-ton chassis lifting completely off of the shocks as the road drops away and I take off across the raised road, touching down like a bouncer doing ballet on the far side of the two lanes of tarmac, losing and regaining grip, spinning and spitting gravel back and up until the traction control kicks in, and we are off again, racing mad through the night, Xenons piercing the tree-shrouded blackness ahead.

I flick on the radio, skimming the CDs until I come across my favourite, leaning back into the wide seat, placing my arm across the empty space beside me, and belting out my own out-of-tune version of Frank Sinatra as the great man himself fills the car with Bose surround sound quality, and my smile drops away as my happiness is swallowed by the aching great black hole right in my centre, where my soul should be.

I am not out to just refill my slow-suicide habit of chain-smoking Reds, or to get some beers, as my brain was now telling me I would need to counter-act the amount of nicotine already in my blood stream, not to mention the additional grams I was about to add in the upcoming owl-hours of bad-TV not-watching, and deep-soul not-searching, during the self-demon-fending Witching Hour.

I shake my head and swap over to Zeppelin, screaming out, ‘Hey Hey Mamma’ with the opening lines and flooring the car around a tight bend, enjoying the feeling of black ice taking the back end out, the crazy drift of a stupendously powerful, overweight vehicle with so-so handling at the best of time.

For this is when I am alive, pushing it right to the edge of life and death.  A friend once told me that the only time he feels alive is when he gets his souped-up Audi past 186 miles an hour, for that is when he needs to really concentrate, when he could lose the car with the slightest twitch of uncontrolled wrist muscles, and when losing the car was almost definitely fatal.  And right now I can see what he means.  The sense of impending doom is the greatest adrenalin rush ever.  Flashes of me bungee jumping or sky diving flicker across my mind as I fight the car back into the semblance of a straight line, grabbing the handbrake and wrenching the counter-intuitively away from where I want to go, feeling the back end of the vehicle swing left, before I pull the wheel complete-lock to the left; a forced fishtail that eventually brings me to a sliding halt against the curb outside the gas station and it’s shop – the only light in the dark, dark night.

There are only two or three people inside – I don’t really see them as I walk through the door like a gunslinger entering a saloon, in my mind’s eye I am the coolest of the cool, ignoring my soul’s sucking, screeching, self-destructive scream that I am nothing, that all of this is just me posing, an outward face, nothing but facade, with nothing behind it but my empty, lonely, pathetic, directionless self.  And I turn inwards as I step up to the short line to the counter, ordering myself some smokes, getting a kick out of being carded when I try to buy beer.  Beer at a gas station in a country where having an open beverage in the car is against the law.  Nothing like a bit of irony to keep the world ticking over.

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