The problem with going west was that eventually the land gave out. For months the west had always loomed ahead as the promised land, beyond the filthy streets of Kensington, where the stars rolled over beautiful prairies and sparkled like jewels in the night. Justin saw himself brooding at the end of an illuminated street with sweet smell of dew in the night. Off he roared from his family spending a long night watching the blurry white lines of the road passing daylight into red evening to purple darkness and back into new morning again.
All around him scenery change and silhouetted into wonderful new towns to be explored. He was far from home. Far from the reminders of the haunted life out there on the perimeters of America he was a ghost and seemingly happy for one of the few times in his life. Being so far from home every new sound and smile was ceaseless miracle and everything ordinary stood out from creak of wood to the echoing footsteps of boots the beautiful smiles of mid western children coming home from school and leaves of autumn gold blew and twisted in afternoon wind. The great deep laughs of rawhide as boots clanked on linoleum floors in a small cafeteria in Texas. Justin did not have a care in the world. He felt like a strange and ragged observer who walked the land at night with a dark word but the words could never form fast enough to match his experience. All the memories and roads blurred into sweet dreams and stunning reality. The burning horror in his stomach subsided some to a nervous irritation of excitement. There are fractures of memories such as standing on golden fields that stretched forever in front of him as no skyscraper blurred the sky Justin thought if indeed he had mistaken the swaying of the golden wheat for the rustling of angel wings.
The distant memory of the first sight of the Mississippi River for along time he just stood and listened to the wine of the dark river moan beneath riverboats. Wild, reckless, and dangerous he had burst upon the streets from the bar at midday in Butte Montana to call his grandfather and tell him for the first time in years that he loved him. Justin left it all behind because there was something else he wanted that he did not know what it was and that he would never have. Something abandoned and lost and really forgotten by someone, something majestic and beautiful he saw which brooded in his heart’s restless and unknowable depth. The patience of the eternities he did not have, he left the night blessed with the immeasurable pricelessness of the present belonging to no place or a restlessness to be anywhere. Soft spring flowers scented and cool echoing with a muted far off sound of some new town. So vast and mysterious and exciting he felt like the hero and the lamb all rolled into one. Wanting to confess everything, all that was dark and lonely and crazy and fearful in his heart.
This was the roads end of aspiration- the great and good mystery of being. He saw the sky sown with stars alone and hidden in the land. Eyes of wonder. So ghostly and lost in the skies tonight the inescapable haunted ghosts of a past life. Soft fading nights street drunk with places of raw simplicities that had now gone into the night far beyond the incomprehensible sprawl and the cancerous smoky suburbs.
So easily forgotten became the turmoil’s of city and time. The long dreariness lay spread out empty and glistening before him. So mystified the saccharine wonder of his own heart he carried with him to the opposite end of night. Why was life so short, so hard, so furious with men, so impassably mortal, so cried for, restless, so sweet and so deadly. The print of a thousand memories. He sees what time has done it was something waning like the fall- something was fading from the sun. America is the strange and immediate, massive and instant he stood and watched in beer fog flashes of drunkenness. Sure Justin wished for woman who would understand all he wanted to say without words and beyond his loss and sorrow who would show him the visions of the golden future in a new land far off and shining.
The simple visions of streets blazing – the countless and rich lights of Nashville. There were many lonely towns and casual voices. Ohio, Kansas, Indiana, Iowa- a vast and sultry river where he saw himself in the river’s bottom. His incoherent personality gave way to a fantastic transformation in his memory. This was life the life he spent on the rode remembered.
He remembers the rage and fear that over took him Moab, Utah it broke his heart to think of his mother: Why couldn’t I have protected her? Why wasn’t God watching over her? Why couldn’t God give me the strength, the courage? I want to die for everything, for all the failure, for all the shame for this horrible life.
One night Justin was in a bar in New Orleans and following around a beautiful girl he had met earlier. Their he stood stupid and lost to the inside jokes she told to her friends as Justin hoped for sometime alone so maybe he could finally tell someone what he was doing but the time never came. This night in New Orleans became almost identical to every other night he spent traveling across the American highway. In New Orleans, at four o’ clock in the morning Justin returned to the small room he had rented high and drunk and alone. As Justin lay on the bed the hot southern night outside choked the room of oxygen as Justin sat there with the image of that young girls face and he could no longer remember her name. He could no longer remember his own name or why he even left home. It was to late to call his mother and tell her he was okay so he wrote a letter that conjured up all the magical excitement of the unexplored road ahead.
Justin noticed that he was falling into a pattern every evening after the sun went down he found himself in a bar. It was the satanic inspirations from the dark. Amazingly how time had gone back to him fully realized. For years he watched the workingmen of his neighborhood dirty from industry roll into the bar and drink beer when the workday was done. It was this romantic idea of the bar he had watching from the outer wall as occasionally the door swung open and just for a moment Justin could see into the darkened doorway the brass of the rail the wood of the bar top and the shiny bottles glistening behind the bar. But now Justin was older he had drank in the bars and lulled himself in shadowed corners drinking to the music of his father. The novelty had faded and Justin tried to leave the heavy wooden door and escape out into the world.
Something however seemed to pull him back. When the sun went down and people disappeared from the streets Justin was faced with the nothingness to do. Back into the bars he went because loneliness is heritage. Justin left everyone but he never went straight. Sitting alone most of the time clouded, suspicious and unclear in his mind he was lost joined together in corrupt defenses the lost streets rotting out. Gone now was faith and youth- long gone was the passion for living everything vanished in smoke. Justin was the moth towards the blue flame of the cities- in the tongue of darkness of America safely tucked in the catacomb of stone and brick barrooms he fell into strange and terrible problems. For Justin alcohol became the bosom of God. Their came an invisible strings of vices that tangled Justin in the night and drug him deeper into himself past a point of no return.
