Dakota

Dakota, 1995

Solitude is an omnipresent friend. Like a friend, they piss me off more often than I'd let an enemy ever get under my skin. And like a friend I forgive them and come back to them and talk to them and love them. I'm sitting in the car now, looking out at the plains of South Dakota as they slowly lumber by. We've outrun a thunderstorm, and we can't stop for food because we'd A #1) have to pass all the idiots we had just passed, according to Dad, and #2) we don't want to be driving in a storm. I'm not from a place that has storms, so I can't protest. My friend shrugs and promises an exciting time staring at grass, or corn? Wheat? I don't remember what grows in South Dakota now aside from flatness and the very worst pizza I've ever had. I don't know how they did it, really, but this thing tasted more like cigarette smoke than (as I'd find later) actual cigarettes.

It sits on my plate, mutely greasy. I'm not alone, Dad and Mom (step) are eating their tuna salad. At first I thought myself clever for having escaped the lonely road truck stop's tuna. Oh what a fool I am. The greasy part of the pizza isn't what made it so sad, though there's a lot of it. Even in my youth I know that that is too much yellow-orange on this pie, and use some paper towels to soak up the biggest lakes. Dad rolls his eyes at me. I don't think he likes me, but he's got me and that sucks for him. Now dry, the pizza nearly sighs at me. The color is a little closer to clear and grey than I'd like in a cheese. It looks like it's in mourning. Or maybe it's dead, and it is above all else distilled South Dakota. At least in my mind, all dreary and plain and more than all that god fucking awful. I probably don't think the word fucking back then. Maybe a harsh freaking, or maybe a flippin', but certainly I wouldn't think of swears around Dad and Mom (step). Solitude got to hear them plenty.

Hurry up. We need to get back on the road. No I won't buy you something else. How bad can it be?

So I eat, forcing the ashy pie through my gullet in an attempt to make it as shitty as it is to me. I succeed, and don't get sick, although that's a big lesson for me—it's the first time in my life that I should be suspicious of gas station food and am not. I don't remember too much from this trip, or most of the rest of my life, but I remember the spongy and rubbery crust that juices almost audibly as I bite into it. I make a second rookie mistake, taking a big gulp of my coke both before and after a bite. This, I would find, works swimmingly for downing the most vile rotgut and is a trick that serves me well along my illustrious drinking career. Solitude can attest to the fact that I'm damn good at swilling stuff that proudly exclaimed it came in a new, unbreakable, plastic bottle. But as for bookending the bad pizza, all it does is run me out of coke with half of my lunch left on the plate.

I won't get anything else. So, time to man up, time to trudge through it, time to hear Dad laugh at the faces I make as I try to wolf down my shitty food. Near the end, he takes a bite and says that it is remarkably bad. I feel vindicated, but no I would not be getting anything else. Okay, combos. Everything a growing boy needs, I guess.

Solitude has been cruel to me in many ways, but the casual suffering inflicted upon me by corporeal people confuses and deflates me. It's no wonder that Solitude is my best friend, they don't laugh at me. The brown-green blur starts up again, back on the road. The thunderstorm has found us, and now we drive under a strangely oppressive blanket of dark and towering thunderheads. The world smells of damp and must and is something I love deeply, but never get enough of back home. Though it is hot and otherwise unpleasant, I could go back there to breathe any day. Eventually the rain falls, hitting the windshield in weighty splats, except it isn't yet. We get there, but for the past three or four miles what I think is the patter of hard rain is instead clouds of near-invisible bugs that spring into being already exploded, guts smeared by the wiper blades, full of clear blood. Do they have blood? They must, I conclude. Solitude is silent on the matter, but I've come to expect that.