The World in my Head

1

A brief description of the young man James Julius Joneson and the place he lives in.

About fifteen minutes into driving along that long, boring road, I came across a hitchhiker. There was nothing too special about him; he just walked along the road, one hand in his pocket and one stuck out with the thumb up. He was headed in the same direction as me, so I saw no harm in picking him up. 

The guy stepped into my truck and mumbled a small thanks. He smelled like cigarettes and sadness. When I asked him where he was going, he answered simply, "Follow this road 'till you see the weird tree. Make a right. We'll be there." He didn't speak another word until we arrived.

I looked at him. He was wearing a simple black suit with a white shirt underneath, but something told me that it wasn't his preferred attire. His shirt was hastily unbuttoned to the third button or so and the wrinkled, untied bowtie lay forgotten around his neck. His dark hair looked as if it had been fixed for a while, but he had run his hands through it before it had the chance to think of itself as distinguished. Judging from the distance I drove without seeing anything on the side of the road, he had been walking for a while. He looked tired.

A few minutes passed silently and it got pretty awkward. Well, more than pretty awkward, but that's not a subject worth discussing at the moment. I shifted around uncomfortably. The hitchhiker sat motionless, staring out the window with a face that was unreadable. I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out.

More time passed, and the 'weird tree' came into sight. Wow. He wasn't kidding. It really was weird. It twisted and turned in ways that should have been physically impossible for a tree to perform. I made a right. We came to a small house that looked somewhat abandoned. I thought we were at the wrong place, but he got out of the truck anyway. I got out too.

The guy stared at (presumably) his house for a second with his hand to his head. He then turned around to me. "Thanks again."

"Uh, I didn't catch your name!" The words stumbled out of my mouth as I tried to be friendly with this mysterious stranger. 

He smirked. "Didn't throw it." He held out his hand for a handshake. "Jones."

I could finally see his eyes. They were a dark brown and they looked tired. "I'm Harris," I said, accepting his hand.

Jones walked away. Something told me I would never see him again. I was wrong.

----- (insert rest of novel here) -----

I wouldn't say I woke up that morning. I'd say an invisible force punched me in the gut with a blunt, heavy object and smacked me over the head with, oh I don't know, something else that's blunt and heavy, only worse. Mm, first hangover. Gotta love that.

Someone was holding something cold to my lips. It was a glass that was hopefully full of water. I managed to grab it from whoever it was, my eyes were still closed at the time, and chugged it. I found out, with shocking intensity, that it was not water as the taste of something sour and downright disgusting filled my mouth. I died. Not literally. My eyes shot open.

"God! What the hell?!" My sight was still unfocused, but I could distinctly make out the tall silhouette of a young man with a coffee mug. Jones. He took the cold glass from my hands, looked at me, and snorted. By now, my eyes had adjusted to the god-awful light streaming through the windows. Jones was smiling.

He stood up, mildly amused. "You look like hell, angel." The word 'hell' was dragged out so as to emphasize just how bad I looked and felt, I guess. Jones set my glass on a table and took a long sip from the mug in his other hand. He then set it down on the same table.

I tried sitting up but winced at the aforementioned pain in my head. "Jones, what in the world was that?"

"Pickle juice. Blame E."

I was about to yell for Eileen, that devil, but then I focused on my surroundings. The smell of cigarettes hung strongly in the air as obvious as a dog in a room full of birds. Posters of various bands hung on the walls; they were old and sad, but not unloved as far as I could tell. Green Day, The Offspring, The Clash, and other bands I'd never heard of were the names that adorned these seemingly beloved posters. A record player sat alone on a small table in the corner with quite a few records stacked next to it and even more on a stack on the floor. Almost every surface in the room was occupied by paper or pens or pretty much anything else. An ashtray sat on the bedside table along with a sad pair of dusty glasses, presumably forgotten long ago. Worn, old clothes littered the floor and the edge of the bed. A very used, very vandalized acoustic guitar sat next to the record player among the stacks of vinyl records. This was Jones' room.

I looked at Jones and he seemed... relaxed, for once. There was something about this place that made it seem like he really was at home. His head was moving along to some music that was silent to everyone but him. He began humming and frowned as though he couldn't remember the name of the song, or perhaps the words. He was wearing a simple black t-shirt; no design, no rips, just a shirt. He crossed the room and grabbed a couple albums, sifting through them a little. Jones asked me what kind of music I liked and I shrugged, so he picked one, smiled fondly at it, and put it on the player. Fast, intense music played softly from the device. Jones looked happy. It made me happy.

I yelled for Eileen anyway.