I am gassing up my Jeep in Truckee when she approaches. She is short and round-faced and dressed in full gypsy hippie regalia, complete with bare feet and peace medallion necklace, and ridiculously young. Maybe seventeen years old. She is carrying a plastic five-gallon gas can and feeds me a story about a cross-country trip and she just needs a little gas because she’s almost home. I look at her acne skin and how she’s biting her lip and how she is hiding herself in that regalia and think: bullshit. This girl isn’t going home. She’s running. From something, to something, maybe she doesn’t even know, but she isn’t going home.
So I say “Sure, just put the gas can right there” pointing to the rear of my Jeep, and when I finish filling up my Jeep I fill it up. She says “thanks”, and her boyfriend flounces from around the corner of the filling station. When I say flounces, I’m not joking. He is dressed like a punk rocker with spiky hair and colorful tattoos and piercings, but he is young and thin and unformed and flounces, and when he starts saying something to his girl it is in a whiny petulant childish voice. I think to myself, girl, you can do a lot better than that, but then I think maybe she doesn’t feel good enough about herself to know that. He takes the gas can and flounces back around the corner of the gas station.
As I walk into the store to get a cup of coffee, the girl walks over to the area at the side of the store with the air pump, and looks out at Donner Lake. She takes her jacket off and lets the sun shine on her bare shoulders, closes her eyes and feels the sun shining on her face, feels the wind blowing on her face. For a moment, she looks almost at peace. When I get back out she is begging more gas from someone else. I get into my Jeep and buckle the seat belt and slowly wend my way through heavy gas station traffic to get to the parking lot entry that I want, and as I drive past that corner of the gas station I see the flouncy boy pick up the gas can and start putting fuel into a tired old RV, one of those converted van with a boxy body things. Then I turn left, merge onto the Interstate highway, and am gone.
Tonight I am in my bedroom, with the air conditioner humming and my laptop computer sitting on my lap, typing words into my computer that maybe a few dozen people will ever read. And somewhere out there, somewhere out on the road, a girl is sleeping curled up on a thin bed in an old motor home, running from something, running to something, maybe even she doesn’t know.
Dang Tux, your getting to be a romantic in your old age.
Get out, Jack Kerouac. You caught the mood, you lucky dog, keep it and enjoy. It only happens once. The flashback isn’t quite the same. You’ll understand. Trust me.
Nice post. Thanks.
Pessimistic approach:
the laptopper maybe will save the tiger (J.Lemmon, 1973 ca.), the two Bonnie and Clyde -fuc… for the forest? playing candid camera for Texaco?- after the exploit will be back as the Cat and the Fox in Pinocchio’s fab.
Go on, get it out of your system. Everyone gets to glurge once in a while, even us cynics –
http://walkingwithghosts.blogspot.co.nz/2007/10/scene-from-oriental-bay-today.html
Good onya for buying them some gas, Tux. You are a kinder, more generous man than I would be. If it has been Mr. Flouncy begging, would the gassed-up results have been the same?
Next time I’m hit up for spare change here, I will try to think of your good example and not be such a tight-ass.
Bukko, I doubt it. Mr. Flouncy was just so pathetic as to invite disdain rather than pity. Hmm, I wonder if the girl was taking care of flouncy? Wouldn’t surprise me. Girls tend to grow up faster than boys.
BTW, I don’t give money. Money tends to disappear into needles into veins. Though this girl was well fed and pretty clearly not on anything stronger than Willie’s Herbal Remedy.
Phoenician, I tend to glurge more than once every five years
.
Leopard, I’m not perfect at reading people, but neither of these kids was anywhere near being a Bonnie or Clyde. The girl didn’t have any aggression in her, she was doing what she felt she had to do, and the boy… flounced. He was trying to look scary, and only managed to look like a pathetic little boy in a bad Halloween costume. A kitten manages to look more aggressive than he did.
Pa, no, I don’t understand. I’ve captured a few moments over the years on film (well, bytes now) or words. But they are only moments, and then they are over.
Harley, I do one of these every six months or so. It is a way to keep up my fiction-writing skills, making up stories about people I see on the road. It was one of the exercises assigned to me when I took creative writing in college (what, you mean an engineering major took a creative writing course? Yeppers, made an “A” in it too!), and I revisit it from time to time.
And I have always been a romantic, but one of the Hemingway kind of hopeless fatalistic romanticism. Not interested in eating a shotgun though.
- Badtux the Creative Writing Penguin
Reminds me of a scene from an Annie Dillard piece I recall fondly. Nice work Tux.
Also – since Wikipedia doesn’t tell me what “glurge” might be, could someone here please ‘splain it to me?
There is no question a human can ask that the omniscient God of teh Oogle cannot answer…
Aw, Bukko, that sounds too much like RTFM.
Tux, it was good of you (and the right thing to do) to help with the gas. Hopefully the lady will eventually figure out she can do better; meanwhile the running might well be in order. You never know what hell other people might be going through.
(To the reply above:)
It was supposed to be a reminder with a sly semi-hidden answer to the query. As evil as Oogle is, I now find myself going to it when questions about all sorts of things come up at work, when we’re sitting around eating dinner, etc. It’s an amazing feeling to me, that there is NOTHING I cannot know. Godlike wisdom at my fingertips!