More to the point, they were at his cousin’s wedding in Cincinnati.
Beyond his mission and all its implications, he was also eager to escape the gun-blast heat of New Orleans for a few days. That place already felt as claustrophobic as New Canaan. It was really all he’d discovered from his travels: No matter where you went or how novel it seemed when you first pulled into town, it always turned into the same bars, same food, same women, same politics, same liquor, same drugs, same troubles.
He’d been writing media releases for a wetlands conservation group, an organization that had sprung up following the 2010 BP nightmareathon. Dedicated to helping residents and the environment of the Louisiana coast, rumored to have some Oscar winner’s money behind it, pushing back against the oil and petrochemical interests that ran the state like the British ran colonial India. It didn’t exactly take a policy wonk to understand that the state and local governments were obsessed with slurping up every last drop of oil from the wells off the coast, and the wetlands—as far as the vast majority of the state legislature was concerned—could go take a flying fuck on the spaceship Challenger. No two ways about it: the city was fucking doomed. It wasn’t clear if he’d been fired for his desperation, his drinking, or an impolitic remark to his boss (the prissy, lecherous, Vermontonian Treme superfan), “Try fucking your wife for a change,” but fired he had been.
So if he ever went back to New Orleans, it would be to clean out his apartment. After securing this new gig, he made a diplomatic mission to the French Quarter where he found a saxophone player willing to sell him a tab of acid. He then smuggled himself past his self-loathing and straight out of town. From there, he drove north.
The first part of the job went off without a hitch. He met the guy in the empty, forsaken lot of a shuttered warehouse, the chain-link fortification rusted and collapsing, scoured NO TRESPASSING sign in the dirt, weeds taking back the concrete through any crack rain and sunlight dared penetrate. Just another abandoned industrial Leeziana outpost, nothing on the approach but grief, churches, cancer clusters, and gut-loving bayou cooking. The man also drove a truck but not a cheap, used beater like Bill’s. This Cajun good ole boy drove a shiny new F-350, bloodred and fierce. He had a salt goatee and a camo trucker’s hat with a cross dead center. He’d come from somewhere that put mud on his boots, and he spoke in that Creole dialect that a kid from Ohio could never fully decipher. He instructed Bill to smash the burner cell underfoot. The two of them got under Bill’s truck together, and Bill handed the guy tape and twine while he fixed the package to the truck’s guts. Then he gave Bill an envelope stuffed with twenties.
“Drive the limit. Don’t go talk to no one. And you get pulled over, don’t got drink nor drugs in your cab.”
“I got cruise control and white skin, my man. Pigs can’t even see me.”
The Cajun didn’t look amused, and Bill didn’t have time to explain that the comment was ironically racist, a satirizing of the power structure—or that he fully intended to do psychedelics on the trip. (Lotsa stuff left out of that convo.)
Thing was, Bill had a hard time driving long distances without being some kind of altered, and pulling from New Orleans to Northeast Ohio in a day to deliver mystery contraband would require strong mojo. He only had the one mishap when he tossed his phone, a bad idea because he’d been told to show up for this exchange at an acutely specific time. He remedied his mistake by stopping at a pharmacy where—unable to locate a section with wristwatches and feeling the searing eyes of the staff—he purchased a small kitchen timer and, after stumbling into a display of self-tanning lotion, the bottles clattering and careening down the sleek aisle like bowling pins, set it to 15:00:00, which was a fine guesstimate of the schedule he’d been given. Solving that hiccup seemed to activate the LSD’s magic. For ten to twelve hours, he smoked cigs across the bleached-out American landscape, up through the deltas of Mississippi and stars falling on Alabama, he watched the sky shift in burning purple and orange wars. Armies cascaded across the plains and planes died in beautiful violent violet clashes. Dust thick enough to taste billowing off the fields serving up their corn and soy. Black birds clutched black telephone wires and watched him with black eyes. The flags ran up the polls of the clouds and an amber smoke drifted in and out of time, crept up into other levels of existence and sailed back, changed. The CD player useless, the clock broken, and the radio his only companion, he kept for company the vast panoply of American broadcast eccentricity: pop radio, country doggerel, and Evangelical dreamers hoping against hope that Jesus would make it back sooner rather than later. Through Tennessee and Nashville and the bluegrass hills of Kentucky, through July, a month of electric heat hallucination and erotic moons, the fields were on fire on all sides, and the flames rose thousands of feet in the air until they scorched the underbellies of passenger jets. Only the highway was a cool river of water through which he could be assured safe passage. The rest of it burned like blood on fire. Cruising along Eisenhower’s interstate baby with the setting sun on his left spilling some mystic aurora across the addled sky, he thought he could feel his brain bleeding.
But these visions began to tame as he neared home, and when he crossed the Ohio River near Marietta, that familiar thirst was there, riding him, demanding satisfaction, that whole beautiful flow of mid-American freshwater looking like a goddamn bathtub full of booze. He pulled into a liquor store, bought the cheap shit, and drove across the gloaming blue of the Ohio, taking his first pull at the moment the fading color of the twilight sky perfectly matched the water.
He’d been on a bestial three-week bender since getting fired, but that was more like a culmination of a four-year bender since getting fired from Obama’s Columbus office, which itself may have been an extension of a prolonged drinking spurt that dated back to New Canaan High School. Hard to say, really. Bill had spent this last three-week leg drinking and smoking and snorting and popping in such an unreflective stupor that, in a way, the acid had almost woken him up, brought him reeling out of a safe place into the vampire-incinerating light of day, and now this whole moment of existence was a protracted, muscular mindfuck of remembrance and poetry and wonder. Really, the way a good trip should be. He hadn’t eaten in a day. Every time he took acid, he’d forget to eat for thirty-six hours and wake up famished, wanting to drain the blood from a rabbit.
He trotted along the dark country road, a shambolic gait through whispering trees wrung wild. Big stars overhead. Sweatshop Nikes crunching over the gravel edge of the road. Too sober following his purge. The long walk into town took him over a bridge with low concrete barriers. Below, the swiftly flowing Cattawa River whispered. His childhood river. The grass on the banks was a dirty, dry summer yellow. The night felt formless here, and it wasn’t just the alcohol’s cool washcloth on his mind or the lingering effects of the LSD—this was something elemental he was hearing. The river spoke and its singular trail churning through the earth, shaping its contours, told profound stories of time and apology and geology. This was the sound or absence of sound he sometimes felt when he drove from New Orleans to the wildlife refuge to hike the trails through the bayous and watch the world waste away. Trying to catch a glimpse of the part that had maintained, that had survived, at least for now, the pestilential lust of humankind’s brief party.