This Freedom Will Not Go Up In Smoke

AI generated art prompted by the author

On the midnight outskirts of New Orleans our dome light is dead for we are stealthy / buoyant / nimble / wispy. Pablo slip slides into this old 56 Merc, hands me a bag of weed, stinking sweet Mexican ride-a-rocket weed.

Put it away for now, this bag of dreams
under the seat where cops don’t sniff
until we find out who we really are.

A roar from the hood, the spit of gravel, and we are free falling on the road into Pearl River, Mississippi. An all night bar. A Willie Nelson jukebox. A few glasses later, rum & coke Pablo, half drunk, half Cuban takes the wheel back into the night.

Now the sun hisses out of the ocean and we are bouncing on a bridge over the Alabama gulf, riding atop a mountain of wood and steel. This engine rumbles thunder, the tires squeal, and we’re over; we buck-bump / skid-slide-howl to a 56 Merc leaf-spring landing.

All quiet now, an island resort: condos, card parlors, boats and breezes. A boy on the sidewalk flicks ants with his popsicle stick.

My Daddy owns this island, all the beaches, trees, bird houses,
hotels and black wrought iron railings.

Pablo winks, impetuous, flashes a stubbly chin grin. To hoist our fortune high a brash crime of opportunity: hold for ransom some dumb shit rich kid, talk some fast-lane persuasion, get a mint of tax-free coin!

Hey! When prospects knock like old piston rods, take a fast, fat left-turn chance out of this civil transportation corridor. Inhale the opportunity and paint the highways with the color of endless sky. Say goodbye to every Bill and Bobby who come to a full 4-way stop on their Sunday visits to Aunt Betsy. That’s pure apple-pie boredom.

Pablo grabs the boy and sprints to a phone booth; it’s time to call Papa for cash. But damn. Two big men in grey suits step large upon this street stage, savage and thick gums grim, their coats bulgy. This could be where we meet the lead we never exactly dreaded but never exactly invited into the depths of our chests, either.

My god, a baseball bat! saves us from ruin, leaves two bodyguards to cry for their mamas as Pablo channels Freddy Garcia for a windup, belts some henchmen-home-run-jaw-bones & broken molars over the fence!

Throw the boy in the back and now the running. Running through the gears, running through the reasons for what we do, running for the mainland. And now a gale of doubts from the rear-view mirror. Did we take the right turn when we gave up decorum for adventure? When we first unzipped a bag of weed to mask the smell of our captivity?

There’s no choice.

We must defend this anarchy our road has become or we are nothing but everyday people. We must gasp, pump high-octane into our veins if we are to live the tragedy and magnificence we always knew we would find outside the family shells that became our jails by birth when an indifferent society constructed its own continuum to keep the humdrum alive. We must prove we are better than nature, that we are a force of our own and not a transient illusion. We must show that not only Greeks have heroes.

Call us outlaws in work boots if you will that we would live forever in legend – or at least look back on the highways and say we left a oily streak of our own making across a nation. We stepped on laws and ignorance. We gave this freedom a new name. And we did not lie down with the many dead and exhausted institutions.

Pablo knows the score.

He came from Havana in the big belly of his Mama on a boat made of lumber scraps and tarpaper; now he can’t live without the wind on his face. His father ran down iron tracks out of Chicago and Indianapolis, belched black diesel smoke, screamed! his train horn crossings, showed little Pablo wide-open-throttle locomotive delight.

After that…

nothing tastes the same again, or smells the same again. You need an out-of-town road to a whiskey blotched pool table, a 2 a.m. blurred yellow line showing a 56 Merc the way. The engine shrieks, shrieks again and again, calms our fear of conformity, confirms that we’re far away from those on the safe streets who mumble slogans from Immanuel Kant.

And after that…

once you have been rifle shot and missed the grave, nothing sounds the same again, the air doesn’t rub the skin the same, nothing catches your eye the same. The world shifted and we fell in love with the life of our dreams - and yet nothing prepared us for this final emancipation of our spirit.

Nothing had organized our understanding into cubicles or showed us how a young boy, through our struggles and skirmishes, would confirm that a crime committed in candor and passion as you carve the road of your own independence is nothing but a cheap-suit misdemeanor.

And as we speed and spin our prospects faster into the future, the tires sing of how his worried daddy should know that although alive in flesh, his young boy innocence is over, dead.

For the boy is Pablo now as much as me as we cross the river back to Lake Salvador in the last Merc we will ever own, our bag of weed consumed by this hurricane of events. We created a force to topple tradition, to rip the heart from normalcy and display its rotted essence. And now we stand by a hobo fire with a cup of coffee and a sandwich as the sun lays down its day.

Over there, to the west, in the red and gray shadows between earth and sky, a wonderful series of deaths and births sinks into a pillow of trees.

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Yours in solidarity, Victor David.