I was in the car, pathetically lacking in drugs, but feeling OK, so I figured I was dead.

Ah, well. Empires fall. Children die. No fault of mine.

I looked around the car, seeing if I grabbed anyone for the ride, but there was no one else. I was alone, and in the car, hurtling to God knows where. I could see the sun above me, hanging in the sky and not showing an ounce of decency, but I couldn’t feel a single degree on my bald head. I wondered if I landed in hell and decided to take the long way. “That’s ok,” I said out loud, “long as I keep moving I can’t be doing that bad.”

The road was in front, straight as a republican, and the dessert all around. I was also driving the Great Red Shark, that damn car I drove during the “trip”. I traded it in for pearl-white slice of heaven, but I guess that ol’ boy’s taken a different path.

I took the road straight with my windows down and the hood pulled back for what felt like an hour. I knew I was driving like a bastard, I always do, but there was no wind to punch through. No desert sand getting whipped up and stinging my eyes.

There was no sound at all. In every dessert I’ve ever driven through, and mind you I’ve walk the dessert the miles, you could always hear noise. You could always hear bike mufflers rolling through the mountains in huge belches, or the crack of clay plates on the range. No, nobody wanted the desert for business, and the place was always full of noise.

Somewhere down this road, to my distinct alarm, I saw a fellow standing on the side of the road. He stood still as stone, with his hand stretching past his shirt. He was too far for me to swoop by without him seeing me coming. I didn’t want to hurt him, just rattle his teeth a little. Give him the clarity to understand that men with rollups and metal canteens had no place on the scorched earth. Poor fellow probably has someone standing at some window wondering when in the devil’s time is he gonna come home praying for mercy.

Maybe he needed to go somewhere I thought. Maybe I’m his ride. Shit…do you pick up people on a ride like this?

I came onto the curb, pulling past him but with expert skill anyway, and he took his time getting his bags. He was silent and seemed like a mess, and was covered in dust. “Dust off before you get in my car,” I said to him. He laughed a little and had a crazed grey look in his eyes. He started to slap himself wildly, getting all sorts of brown off his clothes. “How’s that,” he said, laughing a little along the way. I eyed this fellow up and down, seeing if I can catch a glint of a weapon in his pocket or pressing through his pants. You know, they build knives the size of quarters, and it would take less to spill me open.

I remembered that I was probably dead, and that he was probably homeless. “Yeah, get in,” I said to him. He threw his bags into the backseat, and I was lucky that I packed lightly for this trip. He got in the front, a bold move for a man in the dessert. He didn’t seemed all that surprised that he was catching a lift, and was quite confident, as though he has gotten in the right car.

I pulled back onto the road, my tires roaring but no dust was being kicked. It was making me mad as hell, wherever I was. It was like I was driving through a Bosch painting on pause, with all sorts of wonkey movements out in the vista, but nothing going on around me.

Hitchhiker grabbed my rearview and was checking his eyeballs. No point in bothering him, I figured. He was saggy all over, and looked like he had been on the road as long as I had. “Don’t worry, you’re fine,” I said to him, hoping that it’ll put a polish on his mood. His vibrations reminded of some strange animal who had dodged a whole shower of .30 carbine shells. He didn’t look at me, but started to watch himself closer and closer and closer, pulling his eyelids down and his eyeballs up. It looked like he was finding the right joint that’ll pop those eyeballs out with minimal effort. He played with his eyes for a while longer, and sat back into the chair.

“Thanks for the lift,man,” he said, finally looking at me. I went to grab my black Dunhill mouthpiece, but it wasn’t in my mouth. “Oh, bastard politics!” I yelled, cursing God or Devil, or whoever took my mouthpiece. “They didn’t let me keep anything!” The hitchhiker was laughing inside and staring straight ahead again, the way I saw it.

Couple of moments went by, and the silence was brutal. More brutal than Nixon’s oil foreign policy. If I had somehow brought Zeta, oh boy wouldn’t that have been a trip, eh? The ultimate trip, by my calculations. I can see the publishers sending me new cars, houses, and all sorts of exotic birds to get me to sign the deal. Probably would be the only worthwhile place to make another trip, what with it being hell and all. Where is that Samoan bastard anyway?

The hitchhiker started fumbling through his pockets and pulled out two hand-rolled cigarettes. He stretch his arm out slightly. His hands were filthy, but the cigarette was clean as cotton. “You want one?” he asked. Of course I said yes and snatched one off him. It was lit when he handed it to me, and the smell was pure as democracy.

“What’s your name,” I asked him. His hands were squirreling around in his pockets, but he looked at me right in the eyes, dead as a statue. “Jack,” he said. His cigarette was burning bright and smoke went straight up into the air as we drove.

Holy Creeping God! I thought to myself. Had I walked into some strange update on Dr. Faustus? My nerves were like rods under my skin, and I could feel them bristle whenever I twitched or put my hand up to smoke. Jack was still looking at me, he eyeballs searching, his hands searching, hell, probably someone out in the distance searching. “What’s your name, fella?” he asks

I knew I had to play it straight. Act like the guy bores me, or pretend that I somehow know exactly what I’m doing, and that at no point in this trip should I ever ben inclined to walk down a road with him, no sir not today thank you kindly.

“Hunter,” I said. I grabbed the cigarette from my mouth and looked out the rearview window. Jack was still playing around in his jacket, but I felt his eyes move to the floor. I was wondering if my vibe was as good as a silent alarm to him. Last thing I wanted to do was make this guy think there’s no room in the car for one person.

“You write books?” he asked. Did I saw that out loud? Did I really think it would be time for writing?

Short silence.

“Uhh, I was actually a sports journalist, but I did write books,” I said. I mumbled that there probably wouldn’t be time for that anymore, but I don’t think he heard me. “How do you know?” I asked. He started to stroke the leather console, like it was a strange afterbirth of NASA technology. “Because you look nervous as hell, and you’re probably thinking its either death or new material,” he said, taking small peeks and talking in a low voice. He leaned back, grabbing his cigarette, and flicked the butt into the air, and I did the same. “Well, uh, there comes time where ideas just follow you around, you know? Just sorta become ya, waiting to be filled,” I said, not at all sure of what I had said. He laughed at that, probably because its was funnier than it was true. To be honest, I didn’t know what the hell I just said, I just wanted him off my back. I considered signing the car over to him. This guy looks like he’s been on the road longer than me and needs a nice roller to get farther away from whatever he’s running from. My feet were starting to swell, from being in the downward position.

“I write books as well,” he said. He was tapping on the side of the car in even strides and bobbing his head like a peacock. I turned to take a good look at the guy, see how crazy he really is. God help me out, I could swear I knew his face, and it wasn’t some political junkie bipartisan pirate. He was someone who had a face that would fight a dog to say he lost, or someone who survived major trauma, like me. “Oh yeah? Anything I might know?” I asked. Figured I should be civil in my investigation.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t really matter now,” he said.

“Well, shit, why not?”

“Because it doesn’t matter what people write here. I prefer to talk about how people wrote.”

He started to reach over to his bag in the back, mumbling some melody that he said was French, which I would have mistaken for Spanish. He grabbed a box that had a handle and was battered considerably. He gave the locks on the box a pop and threw the top of the box back into the backseat. “Hey, that’s an Underwood! Those guys’ll take a flight a stairs.” I couldn’t hide my enthusiasm. I had one of them myself when I was in the army. Probably thrown into storage, or incinerated. They’re always fighting to get rid of stuff over there.

He smiled to himself, and his fingers were lightly tapping on the keys, but not hard enough to make marks.

“How do you write,” he asked. He was getting paper out from a pouch that he left at his feet, which I didn’t notice before. “Me, well, I like to take things into a different perspective. Sometimes it involves drugs, and sometimes it doesn’t, although they’ve always worked for.” I froze for a moment. Hunter, you might be dead, but that doesn’t mean you should ever let your guard down! I needed to focus; needed to get that strange junk out of my mind. Back in the states, a man could get away with these acts, but I have no idea where I am, and I don’t even own a driver’s license for these parts. Don’t want to end up the guy you see on the news, naked and behind bars.

I cut off the conversation and stared straight ahead at the road, which promised to reach the mountains at the end of someday. First station, or sign of life, I’ll turn this puppy over and let him off.

Had I been in his shoes, I would already start winding the cable around my hands and making motions to something in the far west. This is a good car, and it’ll take you as far as you want to go.

“Don’t worry about any of that stuff, man. I know where that falls. Its cool with me.” He took a sheet of smudgy paper and started clicking it through the roller. He started typing furiously, the little fingers slapping the paper. It sounded like a machine gun, and he didn’t look like he was slowing down.

I tried to keep disinterested, but I was curious as to what he was typing. I had a hard time thinking the guy actually knew English, or how to eat with a fork, but he continued to type away like the last man on the titanic. The road looked like a strip of bacon anyway.

He finished writing on the sheet in a flourish, and as soon as he was done he folded it up tightly and shoved it in his pocket. “Let’s see if that’ll grow, eh?”

“Grow? What in the fuck are you talking about?” I said, incapable of withholding a comment. He reached over his typewriter and made a grab for another sheet of paper. He looked at me again with those stony eyeballs. “Words. I’m using words about us. I wanna see how these words’ll grow. You wouldn’t believe I’m harvesting prose, huh?”

Good lord, I thought, I have one of those Jim Jones lunatics her…

By some strange trick of smoke and mirrors, he acted as though he heard me. “It’s not insanity, Hunter,” he said, clicking another sheet around the roller, “It’s the world’s noblest profession reborn, my friend. You know that….you’re part of it.”

I wanted to scream and beat him senseless with his own equipment, and throw in a couple of stomps while I was at, should I have any other personal grudges. Nothing more despicable in the world than a man who thinks he can get metaphysical with your brain and try to affirm that somehow you are the cornerstone. Saw too much of that in the 80’s.

But for some strange reason, I held my fist. The more he insulted me with his windy rhetoric, the more I felt as if I knew him or knew of him. The belief couldn’t be proven. Soak a rag with ether and that’ll prove lots of things to you, but I couldn’t prove how I “knew” this guy somehow.

“You said you did drugs when you wrote. I have no problem with that. Did they help you?”

“If you mean politically, then yes. Creatively, I never needed a drug to see those farm animals.”

“Then what did you see when you saw these animals?”

“What I always saw when I saw them; Fear and Loathing,” I said, proud as a papa bear.

He gave hoot and tapped out something else on the typewriter. “Fear and Loathing. I like that. You have no idea how much I like that,” he said. “Its ideas like that that stir our hearts and create such amazing grounds for words.”

At least I got this guy laughing. Lord knows what he plans to do if this was a boring trip.

“Was Fear and Loathing what caused you to write?” he asked.

“Well of course,” I said. “What else could we write at the time?”

He looked up and squinted at the sun. He looks like the kind of guy who did that for hours back in the heyday. We were still driving and the air was still silent all around us. I had decided that it was time to play some music, but the button on Big Red didn’t do anything when you touched them.

“I know what you mean,” he finally said. “I wasn’t always sure what to write in my time. So many terrible, terrible things were going on all around us-“

“All swooping like great big bats,” I said quickly. He pounded his hand into his fist. “Haha, yes! They were swooping around like huge bats. Trying to suck us dry…”

He tapped out some more words that I couldn’t read from where I was sitting. He took a moment to pass the idea through, whatever it was.

“But we fought those forces, Hunter. Not always with our hands, but we fought those forces. They wanted me generation to mechanical. To be industry.”

“Yeah, but every generation has their anvil,” I said. “Myself included.”

“Believe in the holy contour of life,” he said. My cigarette had burned down to a stub and I flicked it out of the car. “Damn right,” I said. “Live life and fight…anything worth doing, its worth doing right.”

The mountains were starting to appear closer, and I was not feeling like fire. Before, I felt on the verge of a freakout, and I couldn’t explain why. Was it that I was dead? Was it that some railroad rider from way back then was eying me up and put the world in a knot? Would a freakout even matter? Freaking out was great when you had some to take their kids under their skirts and dog catchers to try and ring you around the neck and put you in a box. Out here, there was nobody to lash out against, present company not included. If a man is crazy in the forest, is he still crazy?

Jack finished another sheet. I snatched the paper out of his hands before he can start folding it away like some Russian space secret. I expected him to grab at the paper madly, gibbering how there was knowledge only men lab coats could decipher, but instead he sat at his side of the car, humming that French song again.

I took turns reading the paper and watching the road that was easily taking care of itself. It was largely gibberish; nonsensical words that were raw and biased. It all came from his mind and his mouth. I was in it, but so were people who I never heard about. Regardless of the conditions, the style was nice. “This is as rough as a horse’s ass,” I said, “but I like it.”

“Ah, but it’s not rough, Hunter. It’s there already. Finished product.” He took the paper back from me and looked at it lovingly for a good minute or so before folding it up and putting it in his pocket with the other nugget. “Either way, I’ve read worse, but balls if I knew what you meant,” I said. The bastard kept looking at me. “Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better,” he said. He pulled another cigarette from his pocket and handed me one without offering. Creepy Lord, they’re coming out of his pocket lit I thought, but there have been tougher times than these, so I stuck close to my mind and didn’t let a part of me scatter. I had to play cool.

“Here, you try,” he said, and the car had suddenly flipped sides. My hand dropped from where it was holding the steering wheel and my foot stomped down on the floor. Jack was suddenly the one driving and I was sitting with a portable Underwood typewriter on my lap. Since I knew I was dead, I couldn’t even pretend to be surprised.

“Allright, what should I write?” I said to him. He was enjoying the ride, it was a beautiful car after all.

“Blow as deep as you want to blow,” he said. I wasn’t particularly interested in writing at this point. Smart men don’t kill themselves if they have lingering ideas. So, I started to type about that deal. I didn’t expect it to hurt so little, and I didn’t expect to come back in a scene from a vile trip almost four decades gone. The typewriter was working like magic, and I knew that this machine was given constant maintenance.

“Ahh, shit.” I said in a howl. “I misspelled anachronism.”

“Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition,” he said. “You know you do.”

Guess the geek was right. There wasn’t much pressure for error here. Hell, there wasn’t that much pressure for error back there either.

“You know, this is fun, but I’m a notebook guy,” I said. “Get some ideas through my fingers on paper, then see what’ll make headlines and what’ll sink careers.” He didn’t seem like he was listening until he turned and looked back at me. He was dirty as hell.

“That’s what needs to be done, man. We need to take back this craft and do it for ourselves. Our intellectual, spiritual lives begin in notebooks.”

He took a glance back at the road, to make sure we were still on it. “Keep going,” he said.

So I typed a bit more. About the movie they were making. About the beautiful monument they promised up me. “Of course Hunter, as soon as your gone, we’ll have that thing up and reaching for heaven,” they would say to me. Those bastard better make good on their deal, because I have no problem hunting them like dogs.

The roller dinged one more time, and I was done. Jack grabbed my paper out of the typewriter. “You bastard,” I said. “You just wanted to get a statement against me. Some proof of lunacy or racism."

I was driving again, and now he was reading my paper. “Relax, brother,” he said. “I’m just looking for you.”

He stared at my paper like a man who was used to reading horrible papers, like a teacher at some public school from Flowersprout, Kentucky. “Ah, here you are,” he said. He leaned over and pointed to the first line of the page.

“The first line of the whole damn thing?”

“Did you expect it not to define you,” he said, folding up the sheet. “Well, I just thought that it was some strange litmus test to get character description,” I said.

“No way, man,” he said. “That was you from the moment you pressed down on the first key.” I was restless, or interested. “You understand it. You understand the throbbing in your chest.”

I wanted to blame it one the drugs, but I was feeling ok in that department. “It’s what I do,” I said. “I find the idea and I want its hands nailed to the walls for all to see.”

“The unspeakable visions of the individual,” he said. I laughed a little while I reflected on that comment. “Oooh, man, you got that right,” I said. “World would be a lot messier if I let it all hang out.”

“But we are the beaten society, you and me,” he said. “We are the ones who had no choice but to lash out through our words. It was the only place that we were free.”

He obviously had no idea who I was. Must have never heard of “gonzo” or “Raoul Duke” or “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. I lashed out in those outlets, I sure did. People started getting confused as to was Hunter and who was Raoul.

“I don’t want to end this trip, Hunter, but I am afraid its time to get back on the road.”

Naturally, I wasn’t sad to see him go, but I was wondering why he was leaving as soon as we were starting to make some sense here. Some music to pipe into the dessert sands.

This time that crazy bastard actually heard me somehow, and stopped packing up his typewriter. “What we were doing was fun, but the talking of it can only go so far. Its more often than not a solitary trip inside our minds to makes words in poetry.

“Fuck poetry,” I spat, suddenly feeling vindictive. I expected him to be hurt by my truth, and start whimpering or get crazy and defend its honor.

“You know what….yeah. Fuck poetry,” he said. I laughed a hard and naked laugh. I hadn’t laughed like that in a long time.

He was bundling up his gear again, and humming the French tune. ‘Where am I dropping you off,” I said. He took a moment to look up at the road. “Right here’s fine,” he said.

“You poor bastard, there’s nothing out here,” I said. He wasn’t too worried. “Yeah, but it’s where you found me.”

It was one of those profound moments, lacking in any pretension and loaded with good grit. Not like the Olympic torch. Must have a whole bag of those following off-camera.

I pulled to the side of the road. He didn’t take the time to open the door and just sprang up over it instead. He started to grab his gear from the back seat. “Hey,” I said. “Where the hell am I. Heaven or Hell or what?”

“Wherever you are, make sure not to get drunk outside of your own house,” he said, and he turned away and walked off.

I pulled back on the road. The there was plenty of gas in the car.

“Way too late for that,” I said.