Run from
the Border
I saw the big brown sign first as we came over the hill and descended into the valley below. I slumped down in the passenger seat of the Trooper, hoping that my friend Jeff either hadn’t seen it or had had his fill.
I just shook my head. It was like a bad dream. Ever since we had left Roswell, New Mexico, and headed back to Phoenix on our annual summer road trip, I had been tortured. I was at Jeff’s mercy for survival since I had blown all my money, but I couldn’t help it. How could I say no to the round of T-shirts depicting the sad aliens killed in the 1947 crash, which I had bought for my family at the UFO Museum in Roswell?
And there was no way that I could pass up a visit to the Ten Million Dollar Museum and Quick Mart, which boasted having a ten-thousand-year-old Cliff-Dwelling Baby mummy on display, even though admission was fifteen bucks. Jeff, who adamantly declared that his vacation wasn’t going to include viewing corpses, stayed outside on a wooden bench and smoked.
When I found the Cliff-Dwelling Baby inside a case that butchers traditionally use to display fresh steaks, it had a huge head and yellow skin, and was all curled up in a ball. It looked like it stank, and was lying in a basket with a bunch of straw and a mean Cliff-Dwelling-Baby look on its face that told me it was mad about being in the Ten Million Dollar Museum. Right next to it was a mummified Cliff-Dwelling Fetus, which resembled the aliens on my T-shirt, only much smaller.
Before I went outside to meet Jeff, I made a mistake by buying a Lunchables at the Quick Mart to eat in the car. As soon as I opened it, I started and could not stop thinking that the Lunchables meat probably smelled a lot like the Cliff-Dwelling Baby, and that if I ate it, it would be a lot like eating Cliff-Dwelling-Baby flesh, and I made myself sick.
So as a result of my squandering, I was forced to do the only thing I could; as I climbed into the Trooper, I handed Jeff the last twenty-dollar bill left in my wallet and said simply, “Take care of me.”
It was then that I sealed my fate.
Jeff had taken quite a fancy to a new, super-hot Wild Jungle Burrito that Taco Bell had placed on its menu for a limited time only, and was determined to eat as many of them as he could before the time expired. This included stopping at every Taco Bell he spied between Roswell and Phoenix, and because I was now his charge, I had no choice but to oblige. By the time we hit Tucson, I had eaten more Taco Bell food than God had ever intended for one human being, and I was afraid that once I got home, my digestive system would no longer be capable of handling anything solid.
As we pulled into the parking lot that I prayed Jeff hadn’t seen, I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. I just couldn’t. For the last two days, I had consumed nothing but little cups of Pintos ’n Cheese and Cinnamon Crispas. Jeff had eaten his body weight in Wild Jungle Burritos, sometimes ordering five or six at a time and nibbling the leftovers as we drove through lonely stretches of desert road.
He pulled to a stop right in front of the double swinging Taco Bell doors and hopped out. I stayed planted firmly where I was.
“C’mon,” he said as he motioned. “I’m hungry!”
“No,” I said simply. “I’m not getting out. It’s too much. I can’t take it anymore.”
“So you’re going to go hungry,” he said sarcastically.
“I guess,” I pouted. “I can’t eat any more beans. And you shouldn’t either. The inside of this car smells like three days of death.”
“I have to eat here,” Jeff insisted. “I don’t know when they’re going to stop selling Wild Jungle Burritos. It could be at any time!”
“Then will you please give me three dollars so I can get chicken nuggets,” I said, pointing across the street. “There’s a KFC right there!”
“A bean-and-cheese burrito is only sixty-nine cents,” Jeff pushed. “You could buy three and a half burritos for that much.”
“Please, Jeff,” I pleaded, “please can I eat Kentucky Fried Chicken? I’ll just get a biscuit or some coleslaw. I need to chew something!”
“Then get a taco,” he insisted. “Maybe you should have thought about this before you spent all of your money.”
“Then just give me fifty cents for a biscuit,” I cried. “I only need a biscuit!”
“I’ll bet you wish you still had the fifteen dollars you spent to look at that dead baby!” he shouted.
I shook my head. “It was a mummy! The Cliff-Dwelling Baby was a mummy and worth every dime!”
“Your mother is never going to wear that dead-alien T-shirt!” he yelled. “You could buy a whole bucket of chicken for what you paid for it!”
I ignored him.
“You have a choice here,” Jeff said sternly. “Either you march in there and order a burrito, or you’re going to eat the Lunchables that’s still floating around in the cooler!”
Honestly, what choice did I have? Eat beans or the Cliff-Dwelling Baby. Beans or the Cliff-Dwelling Baby. Beans.
I shuffled to the counter and got another round of Pintos ’n Cheese, and Jeff placed his order for five more Wild Jungle Burritos.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the Taco Girl said. “We don’t have those anymore. The limited time expired at midnight.”
“I told you they were special!” Jeff hissed at me as I walked away with my little cup of beans on the tray, and I chuckled heartily as I raised the first spoonful to my mouth.
The Night
They Drove
Ole Laurie Down
Okay. This is what happened:
It was my friend Patti Pierson’s birthday. We were all at our favorite bar to celebrate it with him on a Thursday night.
It was what you would call a slow drinking night. I only had four bucks to my name, which equaled one solitary drink as lonely as my soul. I ordered it and put it down before the clock even reached ten, sat on a bar stool, and then felt very sorry for myself.
I decided to try several approaches to score myself some more hooch. I’m a woman, I remembered. I have feminine wiles, and, besides, I’ve seen it done in movies. Look how successful Faye Dunaway was in
Barfly,
she had booze available at every turn because she knew how to utilize her estrogen, and she even looked like she smelled bad. I have a chance, I convinced myself, today I used deodorant, and I also vaguely recalled brushing my teeth.
I needed to practice first, of course, so I tried to catwalk. I stood up and swayed into the bathroom, thinking, Right foot first, swing out left hip. Left foot, swing out left hip, no, right hip, no, left hip. Oh Christ, I thought, this isn’t going to work. I looked like a starving mule pulling a cart, or worse, a senior citizen missing both hips.
Damnit! I told myself, I know I can be sexy, if I can just let the sexiness out. Concentrate. Let it out, let the sexiness flow out of you, think of Gregg Allman, think of the sideburns, yes! Here it comes, here comes the sexiness, long blond hair, those beautiful shit-brown eyes, seduce, Laurie, seduce, open the floodgates of sexiness, hear it rush, oh yes, my arms are outstretched and I am Whorie Laurie.
I slinked out of the bathroom like Sharon Stone in Gertrude Stein’s body, real lustylike, and spotted my victim.
It was to be my friend John.
I leaned on the bar, lowered my head and looked up, batted my eyelashes a couple of times, smiled, as in “I WANT YOU BABY,” and winked, flying in for the kill.
“You look weird,” he said, and turned back to his beer.
DO NOT GIVE UP, the coquette in my mind screamed. KEEP BEING SEXY! WE’RE TALKING WHISKEY HERE! PRETEND HE HAS SIDEBURNS! “TIED TO THE WHIPPIN’ POST!”
I blew in his ear, so delicately, like a little, almost unnoticeable breeze.
He put his beer down, turned, and looked at me.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Did you forget to take your medication today?”
“I’m being carnal,” I informed him in a whisper.
“You must be drunk,” John declared. “You’re trying to be a girl. I’m not going to buy you a drink. Get a job.”
I shoved my dry ass back on the bar stool. The alcohol I had consumed wasn’t enough to get an embryo drunk, and unless I started turning tricks behind the bar, I was going to remain broke, sober, and thirsty.
Patti, on the other hand, who was two beers away from residing in an alcohol-induced coma, announced to the bar via the PA system that all one hundred fifty people in the bar were welcome at his house for his birthday party after the bar closed.
His roommate Chris, however, missed the announcement, since he was cornered by a woman who had snakes wiggling out of her head, a woman that I recognized as his ex-girlfriend, Medusa.
I watched them. Her hands flew about viciously, several times coming dangerously close to his face, and her lips beat together as quickly as the hands of a clapping monkey. He wasn’t saying a word. He stood there, dazed and mildly confused, waiting for the chance to escape. Chris glanced over at me with anxiety written all over his face, and I shrugged my shoulders. There wasn’t much I could do.
She finally took a breath, and he beat it to the bathroom, which I thought was a smooth move. But when he peeked his head out from behind the door, there she was again, animated, angry, and yelling.
He walked out of the bar with her following inches from his heels as she barked at the back of his head.
It was last call, and I had sorely missed the boat. I accepted the fact that I was not going to get another drink, Whorie Laurie or not.
The bar was emptying out, directions to Patti’s house were being screamed through the gray smoke of the bar, and I headed for my car across the street.
As I pulled out of the parking lot and stopped at the traffic light, I glanced to my left, and there was Chris again, shaking his head as Medusa screamed at him.
I rolled down the window. I could hear her now, her voice screeching like a rape whistle, flames shooting out of her mouth.
I did the only thing that I could.
“Hey, Chris,” I shouted. “You need a ride?”
“Hell, yes,” he said and ran across the street and jumped into the passenger seat.
Undaunted, Medusa charged into the street, where we were held captive by a red light. She marched right up to my side and boldly stuck her head into the open window, flooding the car with bellows and thunder.
Chris calmly reached past me, hit the button on my door, and the window began to climb. She was still shrieking like a vampire caught underneath the sun as the glass grew higher and higher, higher and higher, until the pane stopped at the skin of her throat, and her head was stuck.
It didn’t bother her; it didn’t even daunt her. She kept roaring through the threat of decapitation, she could not move, and Chris desperately wanted to finish the job. I fought him for the button as the window zipped up and down, up and down, until I finally managed to smack the palm of my hand against her forehead, dislodging her skull from my car window.
The light had turned green. Medusa was still attached to us with one of her head snakes writhing above me, still caught in the window. I pushed the button again to release the serpent, and she took that opportunity to rear back into the car like a furious grizzly, her jowls dripping with rabid saliva and her eyes the color of burning coals.
Christ Almighty, she’s going to eat us, I thought as I punched the gas pedal and tore through the yellow light as she took one last final swing and body-slammed my car.
We hadn’t traveled farther than fifty feet when circus lights began to blink in my rearview mirror.
“Oh, no,” was all Chris could say.
I pulled into the Mobil station at the nearest intersection and stopped the car. Officer Barney Fife strolled over and stuck his head into the window, which was still dripping and smeared with Medusa’s sputter.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” he questioned.
I shook my head.
“You had that girl’s head stuck in the window,” he informed me.
“I know,” I answered. “She wanted to eat us.”
“You were holding up traffic,” he added.
“She was going to eat us alive,” I stressed.
“Have you been drinking, Miss?” Barney asked.
Oh my God.
“Yes, I have. One drink. I only had four dollars, and I am a failure at being a whore,” I replied.
“Step out of the car, please.”
Shit, I thought, it’s never good when they ask you to step out of the car, I’ve seen this on
COPS.
Bad Laurie, bad Laurie, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
“I’m going to give you a Field Sobriety Test,” he told me. “Have you had any head injuries?”
Oh God, I thought, scratching my scalp. What constitutes a head injury? I fell out of the car drunk one night and hit my head on a river rock in the yard once, no, twice; I cracked my head on the toilet another time while I was passing out; I crashed into a telephone pole in the third grade on a field trip because I wasn’t paying attention to where I was walking; my mom whacked me with a hairbrush on my eleventh birthday because I bit my sister.
“I don’t think so,” I decided.
“All right. This is what you need to do,” he said. “Pretend there’s a straight line here, and I need you to, heel to toe, start out with your left foot first, place it directly in front of your right foot, heel to toe, in back of your left foot, directly along the straight, imaginary line, traveling westbound, heel to toe, nine times, not eight, not ten, swivel with the heel of your left foot, spin a cartwheel, a back flip, heel to toe, complete a Flying Dutchman, and then do a back bend. Leave your cigarette in the car, please.”
I had already practiced catwalking in the bar, so I figured that I might be able to do the drunk walk, although it seemed a little more complicated. And, if I do this, I wanted to ask him, do I get an endorsement from Wheaties? However, I recognized that this was no time to be a comedian.
I handed Chris my cigarette and began my routine, though I would have preferred to have background music, like Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ with Disaster” or anything by Foghat. I began, heel to toe, heading westbound, nine times, outdid myself with a one-handed cartwheel, and flawlessly executed the back flip, although my aerial was a bit sloppy.
“Sorry,” I said when I was done, “I have a slipped disc in my back.”
Barney didn’t believe me, I could tell.
By this time, two other patrolmen had stopped by to join the fun of administering a drunk test to a sober girl, the lights of their cars flying about, transforming the Mobil station into a full-fledged carnival.
“She’s drunk,” I saw them agree as Barney and his security guards with real guns, Goober and Gomer, nodded their heads in unison. “That girl smells like a still.”
I had failed the coordination test. I failed it. And I was sober as the day I was goddamned born. They decided to proceed onward to the technical “pen and light” test, for which none of them was certified but they gave to me anyway.
It was at this point that I noticed all of the cars migrating to Patti’s house, all the occupants of which recognized me in the Mobil parking lot, which by now had enough cops in it bugging me to qualify as a homicide scene. Some of the people I knew in those cars even waved at me after they honked.
Goober came forth with a Bic pen and flashlight in hand, and told me to follow the pen with my eyes without moving my head. He started off slowly, moving the pen to his right, my left, then moving it back, and all of a sudden the pen started whizzing around, darting back and forth, up and down, sideways, like the lights of a crazed UFO. I thought Goober was having a seizure, so I just plain stopped trying to play his game and looked him dead in the eye.
“I AM NOT DRUNK,” I said sternly. If I was, the drunk test would have seemed like a lot more fun than it really was.
Goober, Gomer, and Barney huddled together, rock, paper, scissors, and in the third round they decided that maybe I was telling the truth.
“I’m going to give you a warning,” Barney declared. “Don’t hold up traffic anymore. You know, that third car behind you completely missed the light.”
“That sucks,” I said sympathetically.
“And don’t do any more drinking!” he added.
“I can’t,” I replied. “I’ve run out of money, charm, and, apparently, luck.”
I looked at Chris. He looked like he had lost a gallon of blood.
I lit another cigarette as we pulled out of the gas station and joined the caravan of cars headed to Patti’s place. I realized then that I was lucky that I had absolutely no sex appeal whatsoever; if I had, I, without a doubt, would have been drunk, cuffed, and on my way to a new life and new job in the prison laundry.
Well, it might not have been so bad; maybe I could have found myself a nice girl and finally settled down.