On the Lost Highway

         “Alright! Alright! Alright!”

         “Jesus Christ, Cecile!” Ben said as he sat himself up on his grandmother’s cheap suede couch. “Can you wait until I wake up before you start in on me?”

         He cradled his greasy blond head in his hands; half listening to his grandmother go at him once again for smoking pot in the house. It was a routine he had become very accustomed to living with since he first started crashing on her couch six months ago.

         “You’re screwing up your life with that shit,” Cecile said as she turned and walked out the garage door, “It’s time for you to grow up.”

         “Cecile, you are a real piece of work.”

         The woman was pushing seventy-three and she still acted like a freewheeling liberal hippie. She was all about fighting for a cause, the tree hugging, bra flailing, make love not war kind. She allowed Ben to move in because she liked his “damn the man!” lifestyle towards life, a lifestyle none of her children ever attained. He thought she’d be cool about the weed; hell, that was why he moved in with her in the first place.

         Head still cradled in his hands, Ben groaned loud enough to agitate Cecile’s poodle to start barking from the other side of the house. He had recently returned from Portland where he spent all of his life savings towards being parentless, jobless, and stoned with his friends for a year and a half. Naturally, his parents were never supportive of his decision to forego college and run off across the country without any plan. He didn’t blame them, either. When his friends asked him to move to Portland with them, his only reason for going was because he was told drugs were cheaper and better out west. Once the money ran out, he had no choice but to return home, but his parents weren’t keen on the idea of him moving back into his old room. When he called them to break the news that he was ready to come home, his father simply told him, “If you’re old enough to be a man and move across the country without your parents and waste your life savings because your idiot friends told you to do so, then you can find your own damn place to live.” And hung up on him.

         The doorbell began to chime “Daydream Believer,” startling Ben out of his state of melancholy and causing him to look up towards the door. His mother was on her toes peering through the stained glass window searching for human life roaming around on the other side. She took it upon herself to come over at least once a week bearing gifts and food to make up for her inability to be strong enough to stand up to her husband’s decision to deny Ben his bedroom. She wanted Ben to move back in, but she knew it would be less stressful for everybody if he didn’t. She felt like she was protecting Ben by backing her husband’s decision. In a sense, she felt like it was her fault Ben ended up the way he was. Not because of her parenting, but because of the influences she allowed around Ben. Cecile with her unrealistic and extreme liberalist lifestyle and Olly with his burnout lifestyle, lived a mile up the street. Neither of which were positive influences on Ben, but Marian knew being around them made Ben happy. Ben was never bitter about not being allowed to move back home, at least not towards his mother, but he knew that if he pretended he was distraught by it, his mother would shower him with money; money he could use to fund his vices. He lethargically pulled himself up off the couch to open the door for his mother.

         “Marian, you’re early.”

         “It’s 9:30, Benjamin,” Marian replied, “I thought I’d stop by and make you breakfast.”

         Ben made his way back towards the couch as his mother helped herself to the kitchen. He pulled out his guitar and began to play “Lost Highway,” an old Hank Williams tune, Marian’s favorite. He would always pull it out when she came over knowing she’d hum right along to the tune and do a little dance in place, forgetting about lecturing her son about his burn-out lifestyle and how he would end up being like his Uncle Olly. Marian wasn’t humming along this time, nor was she dancing. She wasn’t even smiling. She stood in place breaking eggshells into a Teflon frying pan.

         “Benjamin, I’m going to cut to the chase,” Marian said. “I’m worried about what you’re doing with your life.”

         She started in on a tangent about how the kid sleeping on her mother’s couch was not her son and how he was too smart and talented to become a poster child of wasted opportunity. He’d heard the same lecture all before. Nothing changed. After she was finished with her concerned mom act, he’d tell her how he didn’t want to be the person he had become and how depressed he had been because he “missed waking up to his parents.” The clincher was saying how depressed he was. It never failed. It had worked so often, he’d stop listening to her and just waited until her voice disappeared to begin his monologue.

         “I’m serious, Benjamin. I’m not going to support your decision to continue this lifestyle anymore.”

         “Okay, Marian.” Ben replied.

         Exasperated with Ben’s attitude about the situation, Marian added, “That means no more money, either,” as she slid his breakfast across the kitchen table. She picked up her belongings and stormed out the door before Ben could react. He didn’t even know how to react. His typical reaction was to go get high, but he didn’t have the funds for that, though he knew Olly did. He also knew that Olly was scheduled to work today.



         Ben had been sticking his nose through the vinyl blinds of his grandmother’s living room for the past fifteen minutes waiting for Olly to rise from his slumbers. It was 11 A.M. and a Friday, so he knew for a fact that Olly should have left for work by now because Olly had an unwavering work schedule at Major Taylor Skate Park: Mondays and Wednesdays 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM, Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM. He had had to memorize his schedule if he was going to be efficient and not get caught trying to steal from Olly’s secret stash. Completely losing patience, he walked towards the sliding door leading to the mud pile of a yard that would eventually lead to a piss-poor excuse for a shed on the outskirts of his grandmother’s property where Olly resorted to hiding out when he grew tired of dealing with his mother’s constant bitching. “Man, he has to have left already. Maybe I just didn’t see him?” he said to himself as his frosty blue eyes peered through the dusty cobwebbed window of the rugged, run down shed. PBR beer cans towered over half the window, so Ben was going to have to risk it and just go on in. “Goddamn it, Olly! How the hell do you open this door?” he grunted as he struggled to open the awkward door, stiff from the precipitation damage from the bipolar weather of Indiana. He yanked and pulled at the rusted handles until the door lodged into his face, “Son of a bitch!”

         Whatever. It didn’t matter. He had to get in and out before anybody saw him. As he entered, he had to take a step back as the aroma overwhelmed him: a mixture of cigarettes, stale beer, mosquito repellant, and marijuana. The shed looked like a piece of shit before Olly moved himself in here and Ben thought maybe he would have done something with it, but no. It looked like an even bigger piece of shit. Beer stains sprawled all over the wooden floor, clothes thrown everywhere, and empty beer cans lined the walls, stacked up by columns of three. With no time to spare, Ben launched himself into the boxes of his uncle’s old pretentious jazz/blues vinyls: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Tom Waits (Christ reincarnated to Olly), Django Reinhardt- nothing. He then peered over next to the stack of CDs next to his CD player- sifting through each case: Son House, Robert Johnston, Jeff Buckley (really?), more Tom Waits… If Ben ever was fixing for music, he’d know where to look, but he had an itch for something else this time around, so he continued scavenging through Olly’s belongings. Underneath the cot, In between the window, in the pocket of the jeans he wore for the past three days- still nothing. “What the Hell? Where does the son of a bitch stash his shit?” Ben took a frantic 360 around the room and it hit him: the dingy ass refrigerator. The same refrigerator that sat in the same corner of the shed for the past thirty-odd years, collecting dust and rust. He hurried over to the refrigerator, rusted from the precipitation that leaked through the poorly constructed roof and pulled on the door, half ripped off and barely holding on by two bolts. Ben grabbed the plastic sandwich bag when he heard a raspy, deep voice half inebriated and half fucked up from the Tom Waits diet- Jameson, coffee, and cigarettes. “I see you found my pot, dude man.”

         In walked Ben’s uncle, Olly, the burnt-out thirtysomething still living with his mother. He didn’t keep track anymore of how ancient he had become, not because he was trying to beat the clock, but because he was too high to ever really try to figure it out.

         “Olly! You’re not at work!” Ben said anxiously.

         “It would seem that way, wouldn’t it? I woke up too drunk to get on a skateboard. Old farts like me gotta watch that shit. Oh, and some kids got in a brawl with some psychotic parent, so the skate park got shut down until the situation gets resolved.” Olly replied.

         It was a wonder he could keep his job. Half the time he showed up too drunk, too high, or too something. The other half of the time the park was closed for some goddamn reason: some gang fight, vandalizing, noise violation, and etcetera. Everybody knew the local government had wanted to shut that place down for years.

         “Y’know what I realized this morning?” Olly looked back at him with a half-smirk on his face like he stayed up the whole night for this one epiphany, “Billy Joel’s ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’ could easily be turned into one of those hip-hop songs: ‘Bottle of white, bottle of red, perhaps a bottle of rosé instead. Bottle of red, bottle of white, bitch you going home with me tonight.’ Hey, pass me the bag.”

          Ben passed Olly the bowl and bag of pot he swiped from the refrigerator and watched as Olly went to work- he was known for being able to pack a bowl in under thirty seconds.

         “Time me. I want to see if I can break seventeen seconds this time.” Olly demanded.

         "On your mark, get set, go!”

         Olly began throwing his hands around like the Tasmanian Devil in one of those Looney Tunes cartoons. He wiped his hands, picked up the bowl and lighter to his face, which in Olly’s body language meant, “Time.”

         “Twelve seconds.” Ben said, half irritated, half amused.

         “Championship packer!” Olly incoherently exclaimed mid-cough as he passed the bowl through the smoky barrier between the two burnouts.

         As Ben grabbed the bowl from Olly, he studied his uncle’s face. He had always been told he was a spitting image of Olly and he used to be able to see it. They both had the same blond hair, Austrian nose, and blue eyes, but looking at him right in that moment in that run-a-muck shed, he didn’t see the resemblance anymore. Olly’s blond hair was now brushed with silver, his face was raisined, and his eyes were so empty, you forgot they had a color. “This is what I have to look forward to,” he thought to himself and sat down on a pile of dirty clothes and studied the beer stained wood panels.

         “So why are you swiping my goods, kid? That’s out of character for you.”

         “Shitty morning,” Ben replied. “Cecile was giving me shit all morning and Marian decided to come over and add on to it by cutting me off. I didn’t have anything and I knew you did”

         “Eeeh…I’d just shake it off, man. We both know Cecile is bat shit crazy. As for your mom, she’s had her Silkies up in a bunch since she started reading those Danielle Steele novels in the seventies.”

         Ben let out a forced laugh as he continued to stare down at the beer stains. His eyes were fixated on one in particular. It resembled the face of Jerry Garcia or Charles Manson. “Captain Trips and the most infamous psychopath to ever live. Well, that’s ironic,” he thought. Bad decisions and too many drugs caused both of their ill fates. Olly was working at a run down skate-park and living out of his mother’s shed for those same reasons and Ben wasn’t too far behind in joining the ranks of all three of them in the great human tragedy.

         “Damn it, Dan! Quit being such a fucking Diddy and pass the damn bowl!”

         “Sorry, man. I was just wondering…” Ben said. “Do you ever regret being such a fucking bum, like maybe this is why we’re as fucked up as we are?”

         Olly stopped in his tracks and looked up at the leaky ceiling, licking his lips as if he were tasting for the right thing to say to him. Ben knew this wasn’t necessarily a subject you’d bring up to a burn out, but he knew he had been traveling down the same path as his uncle for the past two years. It was obvious the path they’ve traveled was a dead end and that dead end was becoming less distant for Ben.

         “Listen, man. It’s okay to be fucked up. We’re all fucked up, drugged up or not. Now, as for regrets, I don’t have time to regret what I’ve done to myself because it’s too late for me to change my ways, but you need to be careful.”

         “What’s that supposed to mean?”

         “You’re twenty-one and you’re not in college. You don’t get an extra four years to act like a jackass and get away with it. That is where you screwed up. You should be in class right now, not bumming around with your old fart uncle. I don’t even know why you insist on living like this. It’s a bitch of living.” Olly responded.

         Ben didn’t know why, either. Why did Jerry Garcia continue shooting up Heroin knowing his friends were dropping like flies from overdoses? Ben knew he was blessed to have every door of realistic opportunity wide open for him gleaming like those doors leading to “Heaven” in those “Christ is Lord” infomercials he caught on the late night television stations. He was pretty sure there probably still was room for him to slide on through. Regardless, he’d still run for the unrealistic doors of opportunity. He’d swear it was nailed shut with neon lights beaming through the crevices with a “come hither” gleam like those shops in the red light district of Amsterdam. He had continued yanking and pulling on the doorknob of unrealistic opportunity and temptation for so long in hopes of breaking through and embarking in on what was going on the other side; so long, he’d forgotten how to surrender and turn back around toward reality.

         Ben lifted himself up and pulled out a tattered box of American Spirits from his back pocket and fumbled around searching for a lighter before finding one in a pocket of the dirty pair of jeans he was sitting on. He lit the cigarette and took a long drag as he laid himself down on the pile of dirty clothes.

         “Well, dude man. I think I’m gonna go on a skafari for an empty pool. Wanna join?”

         “Nah, I promised Cecile I’d clean out the garage for her last night, so I better get started on that before she starts up again,” Ben said. “Later.”

         Ben pulled himself up and put his cigarette out on the doorframe of the shed and flicked it out into the yard as he treaded through the mud toward the house. He walked up the wooden stairs of the balcony, scraping the caked mud off of his tattered Sambas with each step. He slid open the door and flicked off his shoes onto the doormat.

         “Don’t bring those muddy shoes onto my clean carpet, Benjamin Michael!” Cecile roared. He rolled his eyes and threw his shoes across the deck. “Happy?” he grunted.

         He headed toward the garage door and gazed into the abyss of shit Cecile hoards in the garage before he made his way down the stairs, Rusted patio furniture, election memorabilia from the Clinton campaign, boxes of old photos, old protest pickets with slogans written in sharpies that said “WELL BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY!” or “WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB” were thrown everywhere. “You know, I should send in a submission video to that Hoarders show on A&E.,” he said as he shut the door. He didn’t know where to begin. “Jesus Christ, I need a cigarette before I start in on this.” Ben said and walked back into the house.

         “Your mom left something here for you,” Cecile said.

         “What is it?”

         “I don’t know, Benjamin. How about you open it and find out.”

         He grabbed the manila folder and walked into the kitchen. “I love you” was written in capital letters with a red permanent marker in his mother’s pristine handwriting. He opened the envelope and pulled out a folder. There were 4 young adults of diverse ethnicities on the front with their arms wrapped around each other. They were wearing the exact same crimson shirts that read “inspiring excellence” in white blocked lettering. Inside the folder was a business card embedded on the right side.

LouAnne Winslow

Admissions Advisor

[phone]

1400 East Hanna Avenue

Indianapolis, IN 46227



         He flipped over the back of the card. “[e-mail]” was handwritten with a red inked pen. Ben continued looking through the folder filled with scholarship information, work-study information, a pamphlet about campus life, a neon flyer about extracurricular activities, and the dreaded thirteen-page application. He closed the folder and shoved it back into the manila envelope and set it down on the island. He drew in a deep breath and clasped his hands over his head. The sun was beginning to shine through the kitchen windows, beaming a celestial light down towards the recycling bins. He grabbed the manila envelope and threw it in the paper bin of his grandmother’s recycling system and looked out into the backyard towards Olly’s shed. A fluorescent light was piercing through the crevices of wood. He headed out the sliding door when his grandmother yelled, “Don’t forget that you promised me you’d clean that garage for me!” Ben stopped in the middle of the doorway for a second and looked down at Cecile’s newly cleaned carpet. “Yeah, maybe later Cecile.”