colin spoelman

By Sunday night, I knew Brandi was about to crash out. Some bearded guy who works at the motel six was in there with her and he totes a bottle of mini-thins everywhere he goes so even though she was coming down, he was going up or was staying up. I got pretty fed up and said some things, but I knew they would be forgotten. Everything would be forgotten moments after it happened. I went out on the porch with a blanket and thought I might try to get some sleep, because I just couldn’t take it being in with them. Bear in mind it’s only like, seven o’clock.

Now you got to be some kind of idiot to think that the porch is a reasonable place to go to sleep when it’s storming out. But in all honesty, I wasn’t thinking about the rain when I went outside, or the streetlamp on the utility pole eight feet from the steps to the porch. That time of year when it rains, it doesn’t mess around. Even though it was dark outside with the clouds, you could see the rain charge down the street in waves. You could see it coming, this little lip of water rolling over the sidewalk, the steps to the porch and the house across the alley. To be honest, I felt like a real dumbass but I wasn’t going back in there.

Brandi had been tripping for two days. Jeremy gave her four hits of liquid acid on some ginger snaps for her birthday and since then she’d been out of her mind. She spent all day Saturday on the kitchen counter in her underwear with the fan pointed at herself alternately singing Dixie Chick songs and calling up benevolent relatives. I had been drinking hard the night before, so I wasn’t exactly in a place to hear it, but then again, I couldn’t call her out either.

I sat there stewing in my juices, mostly oblivious, but I do remember at one point a little Honda came down the little alley without its lights on. Probably some kids trying to smoke weed without being noticed. You’d think they’d have the sense to realize that the only thing more conspicuous than a car full of kids with the windows fogged up out in the biggest storm of the year is that same car with no lights on. There’s a lot of dumb shits in this town.

Bearded guy busted out of there not too far after that. He nodded to me and flipped the collar on his jacket up before hustling down into the street. I guess it was a gesture for the rain, or something. Like that was going to do anything; flipping his collar up. If he’s said one word to me, I’d have said, “Fuck you dude, you work in a motel.” But he didn’t, so I ignored him. I don’t trust beard guys, especially ones that wash sheets for a living.

***

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Bowling Green, Kentucky, but I highly recommend against it. Maybe you should go just to see how fucked up it is. First thing you’d do is get off interstate 65 in the middle of the country. There’s nothing but green grass rolling off to the sky and you might think it’s actually a nice place, or at least peaceful. But then you get off on Exit 54 and there’s eight lanes of fast food madness. It’s like the midway to some big corporate circus, I swear. Besides drugs, I would say fast food is the main industry.

But you get past that and the road just sort of peters out in this dumpy-ass little downtown, that looks like one of those old fifties photos with neon signs that never get turned on and corrugated aluminum everywhere. It’s a classic dump, complete with crazy-ass veterans wandering after little girls saying “Give me some sugar.” It’s nuts. There’s an old bombed out bank building and a couple of churches. I think the dollar store closed. A couple of little-shit trees around the courthouse that got planted for the gulf war. You see what I mean by dump.

And then beyond that is just dinky little blocks of dingy houses, built maybe eighty years ago, just rotting there, falling in on themselves. They’ve all been subdivided because of the college kids and the slum landlords know the kids will pay anything not to live on campus. It’s a dry campus, so you know, that’s a real motivation to get the hell out of there. So you have all these old houses, filled up with twenty year olds and once they get a taste of living by themselves and getting high without anyone to tell them not to, they drop out, get a job at a fast food restaurant, and settle into life. Work, eat fast food, do some drugs, and that’s about it. Bring some old furniture, put it on the porch, a couple of rusty grills in the backyard, and there’s a life. Actually, because of all the renovations, the alleys behind the houses become the real front, where people hang out. You have this whole world where you can smoke weed on the porch and greet everyone walking by, and play music, while somebody walking half a block away on the main street would never know. At night, when the sidewalk empties out, the alleys fill up. Jeremy says they designed it that way so the moonshiners could bust out easy when the time came. It’s unlikely but sometimes I’m liable to believe him.

And then if you’re still not convinced, there’s the fact that if you go into a sinkhole out past Advance Hardware down by Kroger’s, crawl into a crack in the rock and keep going, you can go all the way under the college, along Baker’s street, and come out by the gas station that sells the Bud in a bottle for $ 7.99. It’s Mammoth cave, you know, that runs under the whole place. The actual National Park is about a half hour away, but they already know that the cave stretches halfway here anyway, and they won’t let people explore it because they know they can’t buy all the land up for the park. Cheap bastards. That proves all that shit you hear about the government doing covert shit in the caves is bullshit. They won’t even fund people to go down and see how big it is. I went down there, once. Smelled like petroleum.

But on the upside, all those sinkholes make for some killer golf, so I hear.