CHAPTER 03 YEAR 30, MONTH 11 NARRATOR: FIREBIRD After a few years in Las Diablas California I had a smaller prototype of my computer that fit in the back seat of my car and I'd saved up enough shrapnel to head east and grab them silver bars from my parents' safe. I was gonna use them silver bars to buy a factory so I could start mass producing my computers. I was gonna put the fucking world back together. The archetypical American road trip was always to head west towards the wide open spaces and laid back attitudes. I hoped my reverse road trip would turn out better for me than it did for them blokes in Easy Rider. The cities were smashed but cunts heard me coming and emerged from the rubble. They flagged me down and offered me petrol at exorbitant prices which I happily paid. If petrol were cheap then everybody would be taking road trips. As it was I had the country to myself. Route 66.... Joshua Tree.... Saguaros.... Grand Canyon.... I'd never seen any of this shit except in pictures. Looked just as good after the Big Bang as it had before. Better now cuz no one else was here. Hell is other tourists. Monument Valley.... Arches.... Natural bridges.... Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner.... Jonathan Richman on the radio. Plymouth paid Warner Brothers a heap of money to put Road Runner decals on them cars. The horn even made the Road Runner sound. Meep meep motherfucker. I don't know how it was possible but there was someone on the radio on every goddamn kilometer of Route 66. I felt like Kowalski in Vanishing Point with that DJ leading him home. Or them kids in The Warriors. Civilization was gone but weirdos in remote outposts still spent all day and night shouting into the void and playing records for nobody. I heard ads occasionally but there was no way those ads were paying for all of this. These people loved what they did. And I loved what they did. The radio kept me going when I had no petrol. It kept me going when I had no food. It kept me going when I had no water. If I'd had no air I would have breathed the music. When I was a kid I recorded songs off the radio cuz I couldn't afford the records. I'd be pissed when the DJ walked all over my music. Then one time I got a record for my birthday. Heart Of Glass. I listened to that record a lot. But sometimes I'd still go back and play my tape recording of the song cuz I missed hearing the DJ's voice over it. I was cannonballing through Arizona about to hit New Mexico when a DJ saved my life. "You're listening to Uranium Springs Radio" he said. "Get your fix on Route 66. Follow us all the way home. Coast to coast proof you're never alone. Shut up and listen. I've got what you've been missing. I am The Swede and I've got what you need. Here is the news. Stay away from the crossroads in Gallup. It's a birthday bash you do not wanna crash. Go dark. Go quiet. And go at night. This has been the news. Now back to the music. Rush. Spirit Of Radio." When I got close to Gallup I stopped and waited for night to fall. I turned off the headlights and took the side streets. It was immediately obvious what intersection he was referring to. An overpass came into view. Chockablock with assholes frolicking about. Playing Twister. Burning cars and shit. They were doing bad things to people who I hoped deserved it but who I suspected did not. Thanks for the tip Swede. Texas.... Every creature that's capable of locomotion needs to be able to remember its way around. How to find the way back to that spot where there was water. How to avoid that spot where there was a bear. It's what we share with the mice and the fish and the cockroaches and the dinosaurs. Oklahoma.... Driving distills the experience of navigating through space into its purest form. Missouri.... Driving is therefore a primal act. Illinois.... When you need to remember a list there's a trick you can use where you envision each item sitting in a different room of your childhood home. Later when you need to recall that list you imagine walking through the house and seeing each item in each room. The reason this works is cuz our memory of places is our most fundamental type of memory. Indiana.... I made up a list of items to remember as a game to keep myself awake. I imagined a glass of water on the floor in the foyer of our house in New Jersey. A bear sitting in a chair in the library. A mouse running across the TV in the family room. A fish swimming through the air in the kitchen. A cockroach on a plate in the dining room. A dinosaur on the couch in the living room. A heap of silver bars in the safe in my parents' bedroom. Ohio.... I tested myself. The trick worked. Foyer: Water. Library: Bear. Family room: Mouse. Kitchen: Fish. Dining room: Cockroach. Living room: Dinosaur. Parents' bedroom: Silver bars. Pennsylvania.... Water. Bear. Mouse. Fish. Cockroach. Dinosaur. Silver bars. New Jersey. It had been thirty years but I still knew how to find the place. Maybe Mom and Dad and Sis would be there waiting and we could start all over again. When I arrived it was a dark night with no moon. I camped out in a wooded area by our house where we used to try to take our bikes over some jumps we'd made out of piles of dirt. The sun woke me up. I opened my eyes and crawled out of the car. The trees were blackened trunks with no branches. The entire neighborhood was gone. Houses and mailboxes and flowerbeds and bicycles and above ground pools. Gone. The charred remnants were overgrown with weeds. I stepped into my house. What used to be my house. What used to be my home. I kicked over the blackened boards that were once the walls of my room. I found Dad's safe sitting half obscured in the brush. The door was hanging off its hinges. The silver was gone. All that was left in the safe was a reel of movie film. The fire hadn't gotten to it but the elements had. I held a piece up to the sky. It crumbled in my hands. I liked the weather better out west anyway. I had enough money to get back but my dream of setting up a computer factory was gonna have to wait. I wanted to make one last stop before heading back to Las Diablas. When I was a kid I visited New York City. I remembered seeing the Monet exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art. The impressionism really made an impression on me. I decided to drive into the city and see what was left of the museum. Nowadays they call it Rotten Apple. The buildings were bombed out even worse than O'Sydney. Few were even standing. Anything that could help with survival had been looted. People crawled in and out of doorways like rats. Rats crawled in and out of doorways like people. There was a chance that some of them great works of art might still be around. When you're hungry and everyone else is hungry what's the point of stealing art? Grub first then ethics then art. I headed for The Met. I had to stop every now and then to hook a tow strap onto an abandoned vehicle so I could tug it out of the way. There was no life within sight of the museum. I took that as a good sign. I parked my car and locked it and cut all the kill switches. As soon as I stepped into the museum a gang of cunts with guns and knives appeared. "You have to pay admission to visit the museum" a woman said. "You own the place?" I asked. "We protect it" she replied. "Is the art still here?" "Most of it." "What about the Monets?" "All of them are here." She pointed to a pin on her jacket. It read "Monet Preservation Society." "So you don't own the place but you protect it and I have to pay you if I wanna look at the art?" "That's right." "Fair dinkum." I paid their admission fee and one of them cunts followed me around. An old geezer. I could still make out the museum's logo on his jacket. "How long you been working here?" I asked. "Forty years" he said. Since before the war. The geezer led me to the Monets. When the woman at the door had said "all of them are here" I thought she meant all the ones that used to be here were still here. But no. She meant like everything by Monet was here. Not literally everything Monet ever painted but they'd collected heaps of his works from all over the world. They were thumbtacked all over the walls. Monet used reality as an excuse to paint. When I visit a place I've been before it's the same damn place every time. When Monet visited a place he'd been before he saw it again for the first time. The light had changed. The weather had changed. The season had changed. The water shimmered in a new way. Monet was like a puppy. He was surprised and overjoyed to wake up every goddamn day. Every one of Monet's paintings contains a hidden joke. Every stroke contains frivolity. He used to say "I like to paint as a bird sings." Viewing a Monet is an active process. You can't properly appreciate a Monet while seated. You gotta approach the painting then step back then look away then look back. You gotta laugh and cry and experience moments of revelation. A work by Monet is a three dimensional object. More sculpture than painting. The colors Monet created had not existed anywhere on earth until Monet dreamt them up. Van Gogh was a better artist but Monet had more fun. It was nice to see that this little bit of the old world was still around and doing ok. On the way out they made me walk by their gift shop which consisted of a couple of folding tables. They had shirts that said "Monet Preservation Society" on them so of course I bought one. I was getting into my car when I heard the glorious roar of V8s in the distance. Maybe even some V12s. It might have been a gang of skags out for blood but I didn't care. I had to go find out what was going on. Dozens of cars were pulling out of a parking building and gunning it headed west. Every kind of car. Ferrari Dino. Aston Martin Vantage. Lamborghini Countach. Chevy Vega. Pretty much every car had a motherfucker hanging out the passenger window with a big scary gun of some sort. The faded sign on the building read "Red Ball Garage." I couldn't get my car into the garage while everyone was coming out so I parked outside and walked in. There were cunts in there signing time cards and handing one to each driver. I asked them what the fuck was going on. "It's the Cannonball Baker Sea To Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash" they told me. The real life Cannonball Run. The famous race from New York to LA. Rotten Apple to Las Diablas. They were still doing it after all these years. Fuck yes I entered the race. The entrance fee was half of my gas money home but I'd figure something out. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Did the fact that there weren't any laws to break take away from the fun? Fuck no it didn't. We drove as fast as we could as long as we could and we felt the wind in our hair. No anxiety. No worries. Except for the gangs of highway robbers. Ok maybe there were some worries. I was somewhere in Ohio when I saw them fuckers in the Lamborghini broken down on the side of the road. They had the decklid up and they were staring at the engine with big question marks over their heads. At this point it became clear how I'd be paying my way back to Las Diablas. I turned around and went back. I charged those rich fucks big bucks to get their V12 purring again. I fixed four or five more cars along the way. I came home with shrapnel to spare. Who won? Who gives a shit. This little story of all the crazy shit that's happened in my life has now caught up to me in the present tense and from now on I'm writing it all down as it happens. Who knows how it's gonna end? No one knows! In the Cannonball Run movie Dom DeLuise's character could suddenly turn into a whole different version of himself he called Captain Chaos. He'd always sing a little musical motif before he changed. Right now I'm gonna hand the story over to my own personal Captain Chaos. Maybe I should come up with my own theme music for this. Doot doo doobee doowha. Nah fuck that's not gonna work. Just fucking read it.