Authors: Chuck Stepanek
Just as the Bird had foretold, he was floating: The fourth dimension.
“Up, up, up, up, up, up…”
Another perfectly timed crest
. “And down, down, down, down, down… And in the end it's only round and round and round”
14 Hills couldn’t have been more perfectly designed for side two/track two of Dark Side of the Moon than if the band themselves had driven the route and composed the lyrics on site. Speculative rumors to that effect, all wildly untrue, circulated freely. Their only merit was that they helped to spread the word about the upper
Midwest
’s most notable dope-smokers attraction.
Demon and the Bird sat motionless as they rode the slow motion roller coaster over a dozen ululating hills. Each ascent, summit and descent synchronized to the soothing rise and ebb of the music, and whispered echoing lyrics.
At hill 13, the Bird knew his synchronization would be off. No sweat, nobody ever nailed hills 13 and 14, and those who said they did were either full of shit or had hit the gas hard and spoiled the effect. Fuck ‘em.
“Down, down, down, down, down…”
The Falcon was rolling evenly on level ground.
“And out, out, out, out, out… It can't be helped but there's a lot of it about.”
See? Fuck em. It can't be helped. It’s best just to cruise at the same speed and make 13 the final hill. They were upon it now.
“With, with, with, with, with…”
Nailed it.
“With-out, out, out, out, out… And who'll deny it's what the fighting’s all about?
The music played on, the Bird maintaining his pace and then slowly raising his right fist in a gesture of victory. A musical crescendo rewarded his salute:
“Out of the way, it's a busy day
I've got things on my mind.
For the want of the price, of tea and a slice
The old man died.”
The 8 track faded, and went silent. “Whoa, fuckin A De-man.” The words were deliberate; respectful. “That is some totally kick-ass shit.”
Demon was speechless. He had always been a man of few words. More accurately, in conversation, he was a man of no words. And at this moment, it was all about feeling. This was how everyone else experienced the world, what he had been missing. This was what it was like to feel happy. For his many youthful years he had been on the outside, not even recognizing that there could be such fantastical magic, that the world held such vibrancy, such color, sound, depth.
The hills and the music, they had…they had connected. He had floated, was still floating. The world had slowed down, way, way down so that he could take a look, and see it as it was supposed to be seen. At least, now, he could start to understand.
As Demon swam in his personal reflections, the Bird talked for both of them. He mentioned that there was a turnaround spot on the top of 14. He wasn’t too thrilled about using it since some kids got busted there after the landowner started bitching, but he had to piss like a racehorse and they would have to take their chances.
The resumption of flat
Minnesota
wheat fields to the east tempered the slope of 14. It wasn’t the smallest of the series but it was certainly qualified as one of the bottom two. At the top, the Falcon took to the shoulder. Demon startled at the sudden sensation, then recognizing it, savored his new found perception. He noticed the gravel, could feel every nugget and bump, could hear the rumbling beneath the tires. Before tonight, it had always been an object, a name, gravel.
“I think we’re good De-man” the Bird had pulled to a stop and was gripping the door handle. “There aren’t any lights ahead of us and I didn’t see any in the rear view mirror. But those hills you know.” He left the issue hanging, crawled out the door and left it hanging too.
Demon took the cue that he should also get out and piss. He brought his right hand to the door and groped. He couldn’t find the handle. His eyes and hands were less than two feet apart, yet his mind was in a completely different zip code.
Earlier he had found it easily when he had open the door for air. Now, it evaded him.
He leaned forward with both hands, sliding them along the face of the panel and then stumbled upon the lever. The action of the mechanism puzzled him. Pull up? No. Push down? No. Pull up again? Still no.
“You gonna piss or hold it until your teeth are swimming De-man?” The Bird called while he leaked in the wheel well.
“I-I can’t….” To his own ears the two words and one stutter came out eerily and conspicuously. He fumbled for the verb and predicate.
“You can’t piss? You would have to be
really
fucked up if you couldn’t piss.”
“I can’t open (that was the key word, the rest came easier) the door.”
“Oh!” The Bird twittered in recognition. “Lemme just shake off ‘n then I’ll get it from that side.”
The act of forming words had clarified a fraction of his pot-induced brain. He fingered the handle and tested it by pulling inward. There was a slight give. Cautiously he pulled harder, releasing the mechanism and allowing the door to swing free.
“Ha, you got it.” The Bird had rounded the right fender. “Piss away my man. I’ll find us some new tunes.” The Bird retreated to his side respecting the privacy of Demon’s drainage.
The natural process of standing was anything but. Demon had to think through each motion, first planting one leg on the ground, then swinging his left to follow. He found handhold on the Falcon’s doorframe and stood.
He dared three steps into the weeds. His body moving like a robot in strobe. Undoing his pants and fly was the easy part, a procedure so engrained he could still be doing it long after he was dead. He held his penis in his hand and waited for the urine flow.
As he stood on the top of hill 14 Demon took in his surroundings. Far to the southwest was a fairyland of lights. Mostly arc sodium white, but several rust, amber and a few greens and blues. The lights enthralled him. He stood stoic, concentrating, and the mass of lights began to gently rotate; a cosmic skyscape of color.
More.
He redirected his gaze slowly, oh so slowly to the left. An abandoned farmhouse and sagging barn lay just below the swell of the hill. The paintless buildings had been ravaged by the natural elements, rock throwing hoodlums, and every manner of critter in need of nesting ground. Far off in the distance was a transmission tower. Three double sets of red lights measured its growth while a throbbing red beacon pulsed lazily a few times each minute to announce its height.
Demon stared at the scene and the tower and farmhouse became one. The menacing tower admonishing the pathetic farm for its failure, and warning others that if you too should fail, I will haunt you with my pulsing red eye.
And then there was the sky. Demon sucked in breath as he lifted his head and absorbed the cosmos. He had looked at the sky a thousand times before, but had never seen the vastness. Galaxies of stars swirled above him. He imagined the world being under a blackened dome. The stars actually pinpricks of light from the
mysterious far side. Moonless, they radiated like diamonds. He was looking at heav---
(You don’t want to go there!)
A long forgotten memory shook him from his reverie. He felt a sharp pain, a body memory, in his anus. The experience drove him to self awareness. He looked down and realized that he had yet to pee. He had been standing out here with his dick in his hand for how long, five minutes? Ten minutes? Three hours? He just couldn’t tell.
“Hey de-man, you
takin'
the
world’s
longest piss or did you have to take a shit too? I hope not because the only ass-wipe I’ve got is last
week’s
pay stub from the prospect-hole.”
Demon felt immediately conspicuous. He had been spacing off, standing with his dick in his hand, not peeing, just standing, and then there had been that sudden, strange scary thought and odd pain in his behind. He buckled his pants, not having the need to pee in the first place, more just participating in the social function, and moved back to the car.
“Doing a little spacing out?” It was more statement than question. His response came easy.
“Woooohhh…”
“Ha ha, I told you man!” The Bird was delighted and repeated for about the 20
th
time. “That gold is some kick-ass shit!”
He fired up the Falcon and, rather than revisit the hills, continued east on 6. “The hills just ain’t the same going back, plus 34 is one bumpy piece of shit. 91is just a few miles up; it’s smooth and angles back toward town.”
The Bird lit a grit and offered the pack to Demon. This time he declined. Not because he didn’t want one, but because he didn’t think he could control that herky-jerky robot in a strobe light sensation while guiding a smoke to his lips.
“I got me the new Kansas De-man.” He held up the 8 track proudly. “I been listening to it a lot but can’t help myself.” He grinned at his passenger as if the forbidden practice of overplaying a new album was common knowledge. “You dig Kansas De-man?”
“Don’t know…” Honest and infantile.
“Oh man, then we got to, we just go to!”
Pink Floyd had been extracted while Demon had been outside peeing. Or not peeing if you want to be completely accurate about it. And now “Leftoverture” was inserted into the gap.
The cacophony was instantaneous. Organs, drums, violins and guitars were waging a frantic battle for supremacy. “Whoa, sorry. Didn’t have that one cued up.” The Bird mercifully cut the volume by half and then clicked to the middle of the next track where wistful “Cheyenne Anthem” was rolling easily. He enhanced the volume by two clicks of the attenuators and for the next 90 seconds they listened to the final chords of the serene ballad of our red-skinned brothers.
As
Cheyenne
anthem faded, the Bird disengaged the tape from the console. “I want to wait for the turn.”
Demon understood. Just like the Bird had timed out the ‘Lloyd?’ ‘Pink Moon?’ music to match the road ahead, he was doing the same with this one. The awareness that he understood another person’s intent without having to have it explained to him was inwardly gratifying.
As they drove quietly toward the turnoff Demon worried his fuzzy brain into prompting his gummy tongue. The three syllables formed, he turned toward the Bird. “I like it.”
The Bird chided: “you ain’t heard nothing yet, wait
'til
we get to the turn.”
“No” Demon restarted. “I like it...” But could not finish.
“What? Pink Floyd? 14 hills road? Shoving your cucumber into
Rosie's
prospect-hole?”
“Pot! It flew out of him like a cork from a champagne bottle. “I like pot. Mother A Fucking love pot!”
Serendipitously, the road widened for the approaching intersection with 91 and was vacant in all directions. Had this not been the case, they would have been perilously close to barrel rolling into the south ditch or smashing head-on or T-boning some fellow stoner en route to ‘the hills.’
The Bird went into hysterics. Some for the misspoken “mother A fuckin,” but mostly for De-mans most sincere disclosure. He convulsively yanked the wheel left, filling half of the opposite lane. He over corrected, flying past the original, and widening the intended girth of the deceleration/turning lane. Awkwardly he re-corrected, found the brakes, and finally regained control of the runaway Falcon.
“The De-man loves his pot!” The Bird was oblivious to the near brush with death; to the contrary, he was stoked! “What a ride De-man! You got me good, you got me reeeaaal good!” The Bird stopped the Falcon at the illuminated intersection of east 6 and 91 and had himself a party. He laughed at the innocent humor of his passenger, he laughed for the awesome brush with death, mostly he laughed because he was stoned out of his gourd.