The Great American Road Trip has its high points, when there’s nothing but you, the car, the music and the open road, but it can also lead you down weird, twisted alleyways that you never wanted to know were there. There are inherent dangers in long distance driving, and one of the worst is road fatigue. I once drove from Minneapolis to Seattle, and, rather than spend a night in a motel, I decided I’d take along an old truckers’ cure for sleep known as methamphetamine.
This drug can turn you into an obsessive machine, causing you to start some activity and keep going for hours without realizing that any time is passing at all. This can help you drive long distances, but it can also make you do something stupid like rearrange objects on a table for six hours straight.
One drawback to this disregard for rest is that, while you can force your body to stay awake, you can’t stop your brain from dreaming, whether your eyes are open or not. In my case, I’d been driving for so long that trees were sprouting faces in hallucinatory landscapes that melted away when I focused my eyes on them. Eventually, I decided I should at least try to sleep before navigating the Cascades in the dark, unable to see through all the extra-dimensional creatures that were leaping out of ditches at me as my skull opened up to the dream world of sleep deprivation.
As I lay awake under a blanket in the back seat at a rest stop, I resorted to the preferred method of getting to sleep for most clowns: masturbation. Unfortunately, the drug had shrunken my shween to the size of a small prune that was utterly unresponsive to my advances. I tried and tried, working at it with a speed freak’s obsessiveness, to no avail. I started this project at about 9:30 at night. When I finally gave up, I looked at my watch. It was 1:30 in the afternoon. Could this be possible? Could I have masturbated unsuccessfully for 16 FUCKING HOURS!?
I’d like to think I dozed off, but by the time I pried myself out of the car, my hand looked like it had been soaking in the bathtub all night, my knees were rusted shut, Little Jimmy was rubbed raw and my wrist felt like it was broken. It seems I slipped into the same meth-induced automatic mode that allowed me to drive for days, and I’d yanked my shriveled nozzle in an open-eyed REM trance all night long.
Tourists gaped in horror as I emerged into the daylight. Apparently, they don’t get many clowns out here. My legs felt like petrified stumps as I limped to the bathroom. All
systems negative. Brain dismantled. Hair disheveled. Joints creaking. Bones aching. Hand shaking uncontrollably while lighting cigarette. Clothes damp. Vision blurred. Numbers on the speedometer had no meaning.
After a bunch of coffee and Red Bull, the blood started pumping the speed through my system again, and I felt great. Pushed far beyond the point of insanity, I swerved around the mountains, manhandling traffic with ease while bobbing my head to James Brown. I was bubbling over with mad joy on a beautiful sunny day. Within an hour or so all this life-threatening dementia would come to a screeching halt and drop me off to wander around in circles in Seattle, muttering to myself, with an unholy zombie light behind my eyes forcing me to keep standing when I should’ve collapsed long ago.
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