By the time Frank crossed the Colorado line it was getting dark. The roadside shadows were filled with all sorts of strange things and his thoughts were bouncing and hopping like flies on a dead dog. But the self-loathing hadn’t entered the mix yet and Frank sensed the Hater was just waiting until the time was right. The demon would hang back until Frank was tired and strung out then bring on the anguish and the suffering.
The way it usually went.
A few miles into Colorado, he came upon a roadside oasis containing two motels, two gas stations closed for the night and a convenience store. An old-fashioned single-level motel sat on one side of the frontage road cul-de-sac and a fairly new, two-story Best Western with a swimming pool was on the other side. Deciding to go upscale, such as it was, Frank swung into the Best Western and got himself a room, paying cash in advance.
After checking in, he walked across the parking lot to the bright fluorescent glow of the small convenience store and bought a sixer of Coors.
When in Rome…
He took the chicken breast and the potatoes—spuds now limp and soggy and looking somewhat inedible—from his cooler in the back of the wagon and went to his room, the big fat joint from Waverly’s gift box nestled in the pocket of his blue denim shirt.
Frank turned on the television. There was a baseball game on and he left it there, popped a beer and set up his dinner on the small table by the window that looked out over the parking lot and the darkness of the western plains. He was kind of excited about seeing Larry Richards again—the guy had always possessed a knack for fun—but decided to wait until the morning to do the searching.
When his belly was full (spuds weren’t half bad) and his body engulfed in a pleasant heaviness, Frank popped another beer, stuffed a bath towel across the space under the room door and fired up the joint. He smoked about half of it, blowing the smoke out the window by the table and then grabbed On the Road and stretched out on the bed, propping up two pillows behind his head.
He dissolved into the book.
And couldn’t help but notice the similarities, the parallels, between himself and the narrator of the book.
They were both on the way to California, although Frank would be looking for work there as opposed to searching out fellow conspirators for safaris into the heart of the American night. And Frank was thirty-six, no longer an arrested/perennial adolescent like Sal Paradise. But they’d both fueled their journey with amphetamine, and Frank’s stop in Denver would be another similarity.
As his eyelids got heavy and the words on the page began to blur, Frank put the book down on the night table and shut off the light.
He was drifting, halfway between waking and sleeping, when another parallel came to him.
Frank, like the characters in the book, had a burning longing inside him for a freedom he couldn’t quite define.
And that longing was pushing him down the road.
(End of Chapter 3)
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