I have long thought that it is the dream of all Americans to get out on the open road, to feel the cool wind in their hair, to watch the country side slide lazily by. This dream exists always, just outside your office window. It takes only a healthy shove away from the chains that bind to leave that flytrap town in your dust. But whatever you do, don't you go shoving too much or else the great road-dream can quickly turn into a fever-dream nightmare.
What should have been a sweetly timed, mellow escape on a 48-hour leave to go see the power rock band Clutch in Sacramento, and a De La Salle High School football game (they who sport a national record 151 straight victories) in my old hometown, has turned into a slow-mo, crippling descent into total physical agony, and disbelief in another very American Dream.
This foul predicament all started with tragically bad advice from the Governator, whose chiseled physique inspired me and a co-worker to start power lifting, The Arnold Way. It has been a while since I put up serious weight in the gym. All indications seem to point out that I should have made that a very long, possibly indefinite while.
During that first, fatefully overconfident clean and jerk, as I hoisted several pounds of cold, indifferent steel above my ego-swollen head, I felt the bands of the muscles in my neck rip and shred, twanging like a moonshine soaked banjo. The immediate sensation was not unlike when you bite through a tall stack of Pringles, feeling those thin layers of salty goodness give way one by one.
Initially I laughed off my injury and completed the workout, not wanting to look like a gurley-man to Arnold, or my new work-out partner.
An hour later, as I ambled down on the river of black tar that splits the Coastal Range from the Sierras, away from the conflicted world of gated-community CEO escapism, towards the state capitol, I could feel the presence of a lusty, four-eyed pit bull gnawing on the back of my neck. I listened to the AM band in stunned silence to panicked reports of worldwide economic hara-kiri committed by the markets from Omaha to Osaka.
By the time that I got to Sacramento, checked into the hotel and drank a few beers, the markets had totally tanked, indignant power pimps were fueling calls for "terrorist traitors" to be punished by death, the Dodgers had lost game one, and my Schwarzeneggered neck was fused into a tweeked weld.
And then I went to the punk rock show that was the original impetus for the trip. This was, in hindsight, not an excellent idea considering the circumstances. But, after weeks of administering to the very greed merchants who are plunging our country into a New Depression, I needed to taste the road dream once more ... and I have always been a sucker for a good mosh pit.
When I returned from the hardscrabble rock club, my situation had taken a turn for the worse. Waves of unconscionable pain rifled down my spine, ringing around and around my collar. Sensing the onrushing paralysis, and with my last remaining energy, I stumbled out to the truck and gathered up a pile of necessities. Jumper cables, a small winch, a tire iron, the spare tire, a flashlight, glow sticks and some beef jerky.
I rigged all of this into a rudimentary traction device, hanging from the light fixture above. This would lift the mattress up into a forward leaning pose, so that I could watch TV while waiting out the inevitable vegetative state. For reading materials I was left to ponder over and over again the channel lineup for the Sacramento cable system.
As the pain became thick and unbearable, I ground up a tincture of whatever medicine that I could find in my travel kit and rubbed it on my neck: Prilosec, aspirin, Tums and some funny-looking fungus mixed into the Tiger Balm and Preparation H shake, which I applied liberally to a stray maxi-pad (not my own, but handy nonetheless), sticking the goopy mess onto my neck before climbing into bed for what turned out to be a three-day stint in the Motel 6 infirmary.
I could not reach the phone. I bark/mumbled orders to the prying maids, twice asking them to ding my card for one more day, to give me time to heal. Somehow, I thought ahead enough to fashion a three-foot articulated straw out of hotel coffee packets so that I could control the remote with my mouth once movement became impossible.
For 72 hours I wafted in and out of a hallucinatory dream, one filled with images of beady eyed old men cloaked in sheepskin whipping up a hateful furor at large, bloodthirsty rallies, exciting the base into a murderous rage. I sat bug-eyed as the panicked reports came in from the money farms. The crops of our nation were wiped out by the duplicitous locusts of unchecked hubris. The Dodgers lost again. What is this? A Speed Channel spotlight on a Border Patrol-sponsored NASCAR team ... who approved that? And now here comes an army-sponsored dragster. How much is the fuel for that thing? The Red Sox win a close one. Black and white scenes of bread lines, of murderous mobs rushing the gates with torches in hand. A banker explains his half-billion dollar salary away as legitimate compensation while Congressfolk salivate on the national checkbook. The guttural sound of an Austrian bodybuilder mocking me incessantly. Ugliness.
And then, the morning, The long, bad dream is suddenly over. My neck has regained its rotational abilities, the pall has lifted. I rise and shake myself off. As I walk out into the blue glare of a new day, I feel around my neck, pulling off the home remedy patch that I had applied. Interesting. The pad is soaked in a thick, red glossy lipstick. Curious, indeed.
Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News one keystroke at a time with a three-foot, articulated coffee straw from a self-rigged traction device in a Motel 6. He can be reached at corbyanderson@hotmail.com.
