Austin Nights

by Herocious

question. In other words, there’s time for resting in the Texas Welcome Center.

  I don’t have a problem with resting before continuing, if this rest will help keep us alert on the road. I also don’t have a problem with stretching during gas stops. Blood clots are a reality. Sitting for too long, whether in a plane or car, does increase the likelihood of having an embolism.

  Then there are the times when traffic comes to a complete stop on I-10 West, like it does when we’re trying to cross Louisiana for the third and final time. The iPhone shows a solid red line, indicating a block of traffic, but it doesn’t offer an explanation.

  It starts with one guy getting out of his SUV. Then the lady next to him turns off her engine, rolls down her window, and smokes a cancer stick. Then three guys in their 20s do a Chinese fire drill. They have dreads. Then random cars lose hope and cross the grassy median over to the fluid I-10 eastbound traffic.

  “Where do they think they’re going?” I ask Bridget. “Is there an alternate route?”

  I get out of the car to stretch my legs, preempt the blood clot. Bridget doesn’t follow suit. She sits in the passenger seat, shielding Honeyed Cat from the sun with one of our two memory foam pillows.

  “I’m not sure, but turn off the car,” she says, “we’re not going anywhere for awhile.”

  The thing about traffic jams like these, the kind that brings cars and trucks to a total stop, is that it isn’t right getting annoyed at the delay in your progress, however long it may be, because their cause is almost always an accident, an irreversible undoing.

  “I’m just glad we weren’t any closer,” says Bridget.

  “Why, so we don’t have to see the cleanup?”

  I say this sarcastically. It’s wrong.

  “No,” says Bridget. “It could’ve been you and me, Viejo.”

  There’s sadness in her voice and demeanor. She may not have known those involved in the accident, but she understands they were travelers like us.

  It’s called empathy.

  0

  I close the sliding glass door, and Bridget sparks incense. We don’t like the smell of cigarettes. They disgust us.

  The new guy who moved in downstairs with the three-legged dog, he smokes cancer sticks, and all his ephemeral friends do the same. They laugh on the ground-floor balcony, directly beneath ours, every night of the week. He’s a college student, a sophomore at St. Edward’s, a mindless Mohawk who doesn’t think twice about hanging a gigantic Texas flag in his kitchen because in his kitchen he wants to think about Texas.

  I don’t like people who are overly proud about where they live. Anyone who hangs a gigantic Texas flag, or any flag, in his or her kitchen is no friend of mine. I’m dead serious. There’s such a thing as nationalism. History proves it over and over. Whenever I see anyone who flies high their flag, I want to shout, “Read history!” and then I want to walk away and never see their faces again.

  If we’re incapable of learning from our mistakes, we’re incapable of learning.

  But I won’t let the cigarette smoke get the best of me. Fuck cancer sticks. I’ll shut the sliding glass door, and Bridget will spark incense, and we’ll breathe clean air unpolluted by mindless Mohawks who hang flags in their kitchens.

  In the silence of our sealed home, I fetch Bridget a glass of tap water. She’s prostrate on the micro-foam sofa, wearing green shorts and white cotton tee, her reddish gold hair collated neatly behind her ear.

  I turn off the movie we were watching. She has fallen asleep. After twelve ounces of 90 minute Dogfish Head and ~500 milliliters of the cheapest Pinot Grigio at HEB, her brain is spinning. But we’re not lushes. We biked close to ten miles today, up and down Austin hills. We walked through the Pecan St arts and crafts fair, perusing booths and tasting all vittles. We bought our mothers dreamcatchers for Mother’s Day. Did you know the string is what catches dreams, not the beads, not the feathers?

  We biked and ate fried fish without the fries because we didn’t have enough money. We biked and drank strawberry lemonade. We biked and took photos of the old live oaks in Republic Square. We congealed with the crowd on the Congress Ave Bridge until bats took flight. And, at the end of it all, we came home to Honeyed Cat, changed into our swimsuits, and cannonballed into the pool. No one else was there to join us on our nighttime dip.

  Bridget likes to swim laps using either her arms or her legs, but never both together. She gets a more effective workout this way. More isolated. More controlled. She may be right. She wore a mismatched bikini conducive to fantasy. Her skin glowed in the pool light. When she used the ladder to rise out of the deep end, I felt my entire body throb, and I pulled her back into the water.

  We showered together.

  Then, with Nag Champa burning, we turned off the projector.

  Bridget is asleep on the micro-foam sofa. Her head is resting on my lap and spinning from beer and wine. Mine is a vortex of alcohol, too. But I had to write.

  I don’t like people who let flags define them. I’m never going to become a mindless Mohawk. Nor will I ever pay for my freedom.

  6

  It has always bugged me, when reading stories written in the first person, why is the narrator writing any of this down? Is it even written down, or is it a story that exists outside the page, as in stories passed down orally, and somehow happens to be transcribed? If so, who did the transcribing, the narrator or the author, or someone else entirely?

  Unless the narrator makes it clear whom he/she is, and what he/she is doing writing anything down, the story seems to be a farce, like hiding behind a mask, like a lie.

  There must be an explanation for what I’m reading. How is it I’m reading any of this? I not only have to understand the story, but I have to understand its genesis.

  2

  The woman with purple boots steps out of the management office, and Bridget dives into the pool.

  No one else is swimming even though the sun hasn’t set and is, in fact, a couple hours away from setting. But Building Six casts a long shadow over the water once the day is on the wane, and most mortals in The Oaks find the swimming temperature too frigid this time of year, early spring.

  Bridget, on the other hand, swims leisurely after our rigorous bike ride to the Barton Creek Greenbelt. It’s easier for her to take the cold water after near heat exhaustion.

  Distance-wise, our bike ride isn’t too severe, only seven miles. But the terrain is laden with steep ascents. Case and point: even on the easiest gear, Bridget can’t make it up two climbs, or rather, she could make it but not any quicker than the pedestrians who speed by her, so she decides to do the sensible thing and walk uphill with them.

  Our efforts, however, allow us to see another weirder side of Austin. In the middle of Capitol City, there are running creeks and swimming holes and waterfalls and hiking trails and rock walls and verdant energy growing into the sky. Butterflies flit, turtles pop heads, flowers bloom, and the purl of creeks serenades this natural greenery.

  Austin, you seem to have it all. In the same amount of time, we can either bike downtown, or to the State Capitol, or to a thriving state university, or to an urban trail that runs along the Colorado River, or to any of the 300 music venues, or, if we’re in the mood, we can go to the greenbelt, where life is playful and free. It’s also stoned. Joints and one-hitters make the rounds while people perch on rocks and stare ponderously at seasonal beauty. There will come a time of year when these waters runs dry. The creeks will grow impoverished. The greenery will turn brown and lose its tenacity. Aridity will sear the terrain.

  But now it’s spring, and this past winter was full of rainfall, so now life flourishes. It also gets deeply stoned.

  From every direction, my eager nostrils catch billows of dankness. It’s too much for me really, to walk around and see people going from rip-roaring laughter to quiet profundity. Everyone has the best ideas ever to talk about. They sit on these rocks and expound at great length. And then, almost on queue, everyone goes silent
and thoughtful and very Om, if you know what I mean.

  I take some black-and-white photos and navigate some tricky spots in trails and ask Bridget if she knows what poison ivy and poison oak look like. Every now and then I try to clap eyes with someone smoking a nice joint, but his or her eyes are invariably fixated on the Om running inches above the river current.

  “Aren’t you going to swim?” asks Bridget, harmlessly splashing chlorinated water in my direction.

  “I don’t think so,” I say, chuckling on the chaise. “There’s no sun to dry me off.”

  The woman with purple boots rushes back into the management office. She seems to be vexed over some business matter.

  I feel sorry for her condition.

  8

  Sometime after trying in earnest to become Bob Dylan, Abe turns to painting. He gets more recognition as a painter. Colleges give him residencies. He spends his time in Virginia, up in the mountains, painting in his studio with a view of altitude. He doesn’t have to do anything but paint for the year.

  Then, when this residency expires, he gets another residency, this time on the west coast. He takes the Greyhound Bus there. He calls himself a million-miler. He’s loath to use air travel, and he doesn’t own a car.

  The Greyhound has shown him this place that is our country. Of air travel, he says you miss too much of what’s really going on everywhere in America. You disappear