fic: the gospel according to kerouac (rpf)
the gospel according to kerouac
rpf. there are too many metaphors invoking the word “road” to use in this summary. yes. this is a story about a road trip. jgl; jgl/gubler, jgl/page. rated pg-13. 5868 words.
notes: WHAT IS THIS. i literally started writing this at like noon today after talking to Izi about hot, skinny hipsters and somehow wrote this over the course of the day when I was supposed to be packing. C, I HAVE RPF!ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE FIC ON THE WAY. so, um, this is for ava_leigh_fitz, and these are all lies. unless they aren't lies, which would be AWESOME.
there are some mornings when the sky looks like a road.
(JOANNA NEWSOM)
“It’s the summer ennui, man.”
When they look back on this, when they look back on this summer as a whole, neither one will remember who said it and whose idea it was. Matthew blames Joe, tells friends in the fall that Joe was going out of his skin and wanted to, like, embrace America as though she was a woman (“no, not Ugly Betty, America as in the United States of, dude, keep up - “) and stamp his claim on her shapely figure. Joe tells friends that it was all the Gube’s doing, that he can be really convincing and can really get up to some crazy shit when he’s not hobbling around on crutches, but Nora will be among the friends he is telling this particular tale to, and she’ll know that the idea belonged to the both of them.
“They’re like a hipster, Nylon-backed production of Dumb and Dumber,” she told Zooey at a party once. The other woman just nodded her head, mouth pursed before saying: “Yeah. The Gube’s even got Jeff Daniels’s hair.” Nora laughed, and despite the fact the two women had, you know, been involved with the same half of the aforementioned hipster duo, they got along well.
But back to the point (if one exists): this is a story about a road trip.
Before they left, everyone referred to it as The Big Gay Road Trip. Zooey was the most fervent culprit, calling Joe to see if he had left yet on his Great Gay Adventure, chiding him over lunch about who would top (her money was on him, and truth be told, Joe kinda sorta had to agree), and offering to accompany the two of them to be the leg of their traveling troika who would document their Big Gay Adventures (“I hope there are glory holes,” she said, and Joe had nearly spat out his coffee).
“What?” Joe argued. “A guy can’t depart with his guy friend to see all the little treasures this country has to offer? This is America!” And this was a cafe, and the two espressos were hitting him, hard. The couple at the table next to them gave the two a curious glance and Zooey smiled diplomatically, her face placid.
She turned back to Joe. “I don’t know, friend. You gave up the Zooey. For all I know you’ve given up the ladies for good. And now you’re going to Brokeback your way across the country. It happens.” Her mouth quirked on the last word, and he called her a soggy old cunt, among other offensive language, and she dissolved into oblivious laughter as the couple next to them grew more and more appalled.
A note of caution, if you will:
In May, back before any real planning for this road adventure began (planning: buying a lot of Kerouac and beat poetry, renting Y Tu Mama Tambien, procuring a hefty stash from his dealer, throwing away his razor to grow a beard befitting that of a wanderer, etc., etc.), the following conversation occurred:
“You’re in Oklahoma?”
“Yeah,” Ellen said. “I’m gonna be here until July? I think July we’ll wrap?”
“What the fuck are you filming in Oklahoma?”
“A musical,” she deadpanned.
If anyone beyond Ellen knew this conversation existed, Joe would argue this had served as no motivation whatsoever to embark on this adventure.
As it would happen, Matthew became the third to know, and they hadn’t even left California yet.
“Ellen? Ellen Page?” he’ll ask, taking his eyes off the road for mere seconds at a time, a far more nervous driver than Joe.
“DeGeneres,” Joe will slur, sleepy and hunched over in the passenger seat.
“Hmm,” Matthew will say. “Hate to say, they both seem to have the same probability of possibly boning you, dude.”
Joe will make a hmmph sound as he shifts, his eyes closed, mouth still tasting of the bowl they just smoked. “Page likes dick,” he will say, cotton-mouthed and he’ll slurp at the Big Gulp, but all that will be left is the gross blue raspberry syrup and no more ice.
“You speaking from experience?” Matthew will ask, his eyes bright, like this is the best entertainment of the trip so far, even if they are only four hours into it. But Joe will be too stoned and he’ll start talking about the Red Hot Chili Peppers and “Under the Bridge,” and, like, heroin, and it will be when the song is reaching a close that Matthew will realize that the song is playing on the radio and that’s why Joe is talking about it.
They leave on a Sunday.
Matthew insists on it, even tells a great long story about when he was a kid, they’d drive to Four Corners and they’d always leave on a Sunday, and Joe’s not one to mess with sacrilege like that, so they leave on a Sunday.
“Farewell, young lovers,” Zooey had said the night before, and then attempted a really weak joke about lube and Gube the two opted to ignore, and instead Matthew started throwing the luggage into the back of Joe’s car in a completely disorganized and haphazard manner while singing Simon and Garfunkel. Joe had a map spread out over the hood of the car and a red marker.
“They’ve all gone! To look for America!” Matthew sang.
They don’t really stop until they reach the Grand Canyon. They take piss breaks at sketchy looking gas stations where Matthew tries to make friends with the various attendants, more often than not speaking in loud Spanish or even louder English. They subsist on beef jerky and lukewarm Lipton iced teas and cartons of cigarettes they buy for cheap at the same gas stations where they piss and try to make friends and buy their food.
Matthew makes a big fanfare when they cut through Nevada. He whoops and hollers when they pass the sign, welcoming them to Nevada, remember, it is a crime not to wear a seatbelt, but when Joe asks him if he wants to stop anywhere, he says, “Nah,” and bites off a big hunk of the beef jerky and contents himself with the moody Ennio Morricone soundtrack they’ve been listening to in preparation for the wild, wild West.
They drive south into Arizona and stop at the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon proves to be a bit of disaster.
For one thing, they toke up before they go to see it, skinny boys sprawled out at picnic tables in some national park; “Jesus, man. I haven’t smoked this much in - in fucking forever,” Joe keeps repeating, and Matthew waves his hands in the air as though conducting an orchestra.
When they get to the canyon, they both sort of freak out. They both have been to the site before, Joe as a child, and Matthew several times throughout his lifetime, but they both stand back and marvel at it, eyes wide with fear.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Joe asks, all slack-jawed, sunglasses hiding his bloodshot eyes.
“Yeah,” Matthew draws out.
“Aliens. Fucking aliens. There is no other explanation. I bet the mothership is docked at the bottom.”
Matthew frowns. “That’s not what I was thinking.”
“But you said you were. I said, ‘you thinking what I’m thinking?’ And then you said, ‘yeahhhh.’” Joe gives Matthew a comically low baritone voice, and Matthew scoffs.
“Nah, I thought you were going to say that this is literally and figuratively and seriously the most depressing place on the planet. It’s, like, a pit. A pit of despair.”
“With aliens at the bottom. Really depressed aliens.”
“Fuuuuck,” Matthew says. And then, “Oh, hey. A donkey.”
They leave the canyon after a couple hours of kicking rocks around and discussing whether the aliens take Prozac or not and if a suicidal alien shoots himself in the head whether the blood would be green or like normal human blood, until finally Matthew announces that this place is harshing his buzz and they should leave.
They do; they drive over to a campground with the grand intention of sleeping in the car (“It’s like we’re homeless, but we’re not,” Joe says, and Matthew chimes in, “We could win an Independent Spirit Award if we film this. I bet you five marbles that’s true,” a statement that doesn’t make much sense since at no point during the trip have they played with marbles, but Joe takes him at his word and even considers getting the camera out; he doesn’t).
They don’t sleep in the car.
So, what happens is this: they set up shop at the edge of the parking lot, right next to the car. They smoke a bowl, and then they smoke another, and the sky looks like something from a preschool detention center, a macabre stretch of pastels and red, and Joe is contemplating it, trying to figure out where one corner of the sky starts and the other part ends (the sky is in pieces, you see, it was never really whole, and he tried explaining this, but Matthew wasn’t having any of it and told him that they needed to collect sticks to fight the ants, and - ), when Matthew approaches him.
“Hey, hey man,” he hisses, and Joe jerks his head around to look at him.
“Yeah,” he says, and he tries to watch the sky out of the corner of his eye, because it’s fading, and he can’t remember where he put his camera, not that it matters, he exposed the roll of film, like, two hours ago, so it’s useless, but he doesn’t think the gesture would be.
“Do you see that?” Matthew hisses, more a stage whisper than an actual whisper, and he’s pointing at the car.
“I see the car,” Joe hisses back, adopting whatever security precautions Matthew has seen fit.
“I think there’s someone. Inside the car.” Joe can feel his eyes grow really wide, and Matthew is clutching a collection of three scrawny sticks, and Joe’s eyes keep darting from the sticks to the car and back again. Matthew squats down next to him, and in the end, and in the morning, the two will discover that inside the car there is little more than a few threadbare cardigans and an open cooler as well as a straw fedora, the combination of the three creating an odd outline of a man crouched over the backseat, at least so it would appear to the chemically-enhanced eye.
They sit like that for awhile. Evening takes the desert, and Joe misses the transfer of the sky to first purple and then black. They watch the car religiously, fear alive in the both of them, and they split the box of Triscuits Joe brought with him to his original perch to watch the sunset.
“How can you tell if someone’s a serial killer?” he whispers to Matthew.
“With your eyes,” Matthew says, completely serious, the words whispered back like the sagest of advice, and Joe nods his head.
“My eyes aren’t telling me anything,” Joe finally says.
“Mine either,” and Matthew is still whispering, the crunch of the crackers deafening in comparison to his voice, but Joe’s too hungry to tell him to be quiet.
They eventually fall asleep in the campground parking lot, their backs resting against the trunk of two separate trees, a handful of paces from the car.
They swing north to Utah the next day. Matthew won’t stop talking about sister wives, and neither of them has showered in what feels like days, a good growth of stubbly beard taking over Joe’s neck, and Matthew’s hair hangs down limply.
They’re both tired, their supply of chronic is running low (“Someone should build a drive-thru weed factory. It’d be fucking awesome.”), and they’re both tired, cranky. When they smoke the last of the dope, they stop in at a convenience store and buy too many of those little 5 Hour Energy bottles and down too many of them too quickly. The two of them are slap happy, near deranged in their exhaustion and chemical dependency and happiness, and it’s dumb, it’s so fucking dumb.
It’s so fucking dumb because it’s in Utah, at some anonymous truckstop bathroom, the two of them loopy and sweaty and dirty, that all of Zooey’s prophecies came true and Joe jacked his best friend off next to a faded poster of Smokey the Bear warning them about forest fires.
The truth of the matter is, he doesn’t know why he does it. He feels near blind from the caffeine rush and the lazy pulse of the weed under his skin, and when Matthew splashes him with the dirty water from the rest stop’s sink, he doesn’t do the practical thing and laugh or splash him back. No. Instead his kisses him. Maybe he kisses him because he’s happy. Maybe he kisses him because he wants Smokey the Bear to have to see this, or maybe it’s his small rebellion against the state of Utah and the sister wives and the Mormon culture, because holy shit, we’ve got caffeine and weed and latent homosexual tendencies all in one fell swoop.
Matthew was easily taller than Joe, and he had to crane his neck up a little, his hair long under his hands, and it was hardly a suave kiss. His mashed his lips to his, hands clutching either side of his face, and Matthew startled. He startled and didn’t move, but then he kissed him back.
So, they’re both culpable. They both hate Utah and they both hate Smokey the Bear, and it’s kinda creepy because they both smell the same, like they’re the same person, so maybe that makes this an act of gross narcissism, or worse yet, incest, because Joe loves Gube like a brother, and here he is, eating his face off.
If kissing him is dumb enough and inexplicable enough, the next act is even more difficult to justify. They kiss for awhile, the sound of their mouths smacking echoing in the dank bathroom, and Matthew has his hands tight on Joe’s shoulders and then under his chin, and, well, then, Joe has his hand in Matthew’s pants like it’s the most natural idea ever.
His dick is thinner than he thought it would be, and he’s slow to get hard (he blames the pot and the stench of disinfectant and mildew of the restroom), but then he is, heavy in his hand, and they’re not really kissing anymore, but biting each other’s chins, mouthing over the skin, Matthew making these small panting sounds, and the angle of Joe’s wrist is awkward, and when he finally comes he shuts his eyes tight and Joe rubs the come off his hand and wrist with the hem of his t-shirt.
They both stand there for awhile, awkward and out of breath. And it’s not that he regrets it. Joe has never really seen a point in regretting stuff like this, and he’s easily had his share of sexual mishaps. But now, now he feels like he’s imbibed their friendship, their awesome, awesome, ridiculous friendship, with something he doesn’t want it to have.
“I’m sorry. Dude, I’m sorry, I don’t even,” Joe stutters. Matthew smiles with his mouth closed and shrugs, shakes his head, says, “it’s no big,” without actually using the words.
“You might, you might, you know, wanna wash your hands,” he says, and then he leaves.
They don’t talk for the better part of an hour. Joe drives, and the Gube is quiet, doing some kind of botched origami in his lap with a McDonald’s napkin too thin to take whatever shape he’s trying to give it.
“What are you making?” Joe finally asks.
“A nun,” he answers, the words slow, and the napkin just looks crumpled, not like any nun Joe has ever seen.
They descend into silence again.
“Hey, man,” Matthew finally says, and Joe catches his eye quickly. Matthew looks almost absurdly earnest, or as earnest as a person can look in a pair of Ray Bans. “About back there?” And, ugh, Joe thinks. They are going to acknowledge the really, really gay elephant in the room. Er, car.
“Yeah...”
Matthew claps his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “I love you, man. And I think we both know I mean that in the Judd Apatow-esque rendering of the words love and man. But, um, let’s never do that again. Even though we both know that’s easily not the gayest thing you’ve ever done.”
“I told you! I do not like Coldplay - that was not even my CD.”
Matthew laughs and then Joe laughs, and they plot out how the rest of that particular story could have gone - they have torrid sex in a depressing motel room while the guy next door is arranging a drug deal, and they’re spotted, and then they’re on the run instead of just on a road trip, but they pay off the drug dealers with all their Hollywood gold ("you have, like, roughly twelve point eight times more than I do," Matthew says), so then they’re poor, they’re Charles Dickens destitute and in hiding, and Joe becomes a gay prostitute ("again?!" he whines) and Matthew grows his hair super long, like Rapunzel long, and sells dates and figs on the side of the road in his native Nevada and they live in a desert shanty, because they are in love, Matthew explains, and people in love don’t mind residing in shanties, and by the time they stop for dinner at some anonymous greasy spoon diner, they are mostly sober and the restroom incident is mostly forgotten.
Joe orders a cheeseburger and Gube gets some nasty tuna salad looking thing, and the coffee they drink is toxic enough to take the paint off his car parked out front. The riotous conversation from the car has cooled, and dinner is more awkward than anything else. Joe smears his fries in ketchup and scratches at his neck, a not really attractive beard growing under his chin and along his throat. He coughs once and Matthew looks at him, all deer in the headlights.
“We’re good then, Gube?” Joe asks, and Matthew just sort of laughs, smiles, his mouth full of the tuna salad.
“Yeah, man,” he mumbles around the food, and then swallows. “The way I see it, this’ll be just like that time I finger-banged Zooey at that one party.”
Joe chokes on his burger and Matthew has never looked more amused.
(“What?” he says when he can, you know, breathe again. “You what? When? Where?”
“Oh, it was after, awhile after, you guys, you know. In a bathroom. There is a startling trend emerging here with me and you people and bathrooms.” Joe’s still kind of open-mouthed and Matthew shrugs. “You said you were over her.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t mean go...finger-bang her.”
“At least I didn’t bang-bang her.”
“That’d be, that’d be like me, finding Kat-whatever-her-last-name-was -”
“Dennings.”
“Yeah. Her. It’d be like me getting her and finger fucking her. How would you like that?”
“Well, for starters, that would never happen. She’s not your type. You like, you like those bird types. You like the bird girls. The teeny tiny ones with no discernible rack and those really big, baby bird eyes, big ol’ peepers. I mean, Nora? Yup. And Zooey was petite, had bird eyes. And, well, Ellen...”
They look each other in the eye and they both start chuckling as though on cue. Joe lights a cigarette and Matthew orders more coffee, and just like that, both incidents are behind them).
They drive through the night.
“So. You and Ellen then?” Matthew asks, waggles his eyebrows.
“What? No. Yeah. Kinda. No. What?” Matthew only shakes his head, a knowing look on his face, starts chanting, “Joey, Joey, Joey,” under his breath, like he’s counting baby kangaroos or something.
He turns to Joe then, a mischievous smile. “You can always take her to a rest stop bathroom. I heard you do your best work there.”
“Fuck off,” Joe shouts, but he’s laughing too.
And, okay, so it’s not that he hasn’t hooked up with her before. Only it was one time, and that time they were both drunk, her dizzyingly so, and he, impotently. There are few things worse for a man to suffer than whiskey dick, a thing he vaguely remembers telling her, her tiny hand (and, fuck, that makes him sound totally pedophiliac, right? cataloging how miniature everything is about her? or, goddamn, it makes him sound like he gets off fucking midgets or dwarves or something real messed up) fisted around him, high color on her cheeks, hair everywhere, and laughing, laughing hysterically.
“Should I be insulted?” she had teased, her mouth wet at his ear, and his hands were crawling all over her.
“No,” he moaned, a product of both lust and the sheer amount of beer he had consumed. “I want to fuck you,” he groaned. “I want to fuck you so bad, it’s all I think about, all the time,” his words degenerating until he was mumbling about wanting to always fuck her, that he wants to fuck her forever, and Ellen had laughed again, her body shaking against his, and she was all bone, all rattling bones, and he remembers that, he remembers that really well - how she was hard and firm everywhere except for where she wasn’t, her small breasts, the heated space between her legs.
Fuck.
Oklahoma blows. He decides this after they pass all the strip malls and then all the sad farms and then the even sadder nothingness. Ellen’s not even staying in Oklahoma City, but rather some small town with a lot of horse farms. “Is her movie about horses? Like, Black Beauty with an ironic twist? A remake of National Velvet?” Matthew asks, and he keeps talking, something about Seabiscuit, and Joe decides that Matthew knows way too much about horses and film and horses on film.
Ellen’s movie has nothing to do with horses. She says that near immediately, the same questions Matthew had posed at Joe now directed at Ellen.
“Oh, God, dude,” Ellen says as they approach. “Kurt Cobain called. He wants his look back.”
Joe hauls her up into a one-sided hug, her feet dangling above the ground, and when he places her back down he notices that her smile is guarded.
“Good to see you too, kid,” he says. Her face twists a little when he says kid, like she’s disappointed, or annoyed, but Ellen’s always hard to read, he thinks.
“We saw a goat in Colorado,” Matthew announces. They both look at him, a mixture of surprise and annoyance at the non sequitur, and he pulls a face, holds up his hands. “What? It was a really big goat.”
“How’s your knee?” she asks Matthew. “I’ve heard tales.” Matthew looks down at it, sticks his leg out and does some strange awkward little dance. Joe starts clapping out a beat, and just as abruptly the two stop in unison.
“Fine!”
“This was your fault?” she asks Joe, and both men start snickering, something so, so painfully serious about Ellen and the way the question is phrased.
“Joey did buy the tequila,” Matthew says, and that’s the end of that discussion.
There’s more tequila that night. Tequila and a lot of beer, and when some dude with the audacity to wear a cowboy hat and swagger around like Patrick Swayze actually calls Joe both a pansy and a faggot (a pansy faggot, to be exact, he blames the skinny jeans and the purple t-shirt he’s wearing) it totally makes sense to deck the guy in the face. It also make sense for the guy to punch him back, and he’s never been a friend of physics, and he certainly isn’t now, trying to stop his eye from watering and his hand from throbbing and the bouncer/bartender/town drunk from yelling at him to leave.
So that happens. He stumbles more than walks to his car in the crowded parking lot, their hotel the next lot over, but it suddenly seems too far. He’s not sure how much time passes, but he does know that he has smoked about four and a half cigarettes by the time Ellen exits the bar and walks over to him.
“Where’s your friend?” she asks as she approaches him. He thinks she means the Gube. He sits on the hood of the car, dirt and dust collected since L.A. smearing across the dark denim of his jeans.
“He could be your friend too,” he says with a faux pout, and she rolls her eyes. If Ellen wanted an actual answer to her question, she doesn’t do much else to earn it. She hoists herself up onto the hood of the car next to him, their elbows touching.
“Tom’s getting married,” she says.
“Old news,” Joe says. And then he smirks. “And to his former co-star nonetheless.”
“He’s marrying DiCaprio?” she says, the humor lazy, but Joe snorts anyway. They lull into a companionable silence. You can see the stars here. But then again, you could see the stars in Arizona and in Utah and any place not Los Angeles.
“We should get married,” he says then, voice quiet and amused, like he’s sorting something out in his head. “See what people have to say about that.” He looks over at Ellen and she’s shaking her head. She looks down at herself.
“The bride wore flannel,” she drawls and Joe laughs. And then, “I’m not going to marry you,” she says, voice as close to teasing as she gets.
Joe nods, solemn. “I thought as much.”
They smoke a joint in the back of his car, and he can’t help but think what a bitch of a habit this is going to be to break, when everything is said and done. Hers isn’t as potent as the shit Gube and he had been smoking across the desert, but he still inhales deep and chuckles at the small, content smile stretching over Ellen’s face.
The next part is sort of a blur - all the beer and his sore face and his bruised knuckles, and suddenly its her mouth on his knuckles, pink tongue bright even in the dim light of the parking lot. She licks at his sort of but not really bloody knuckles, and it’s weird and kinky, but also really, really fucking hot. When she takes his index finger into his mouth, he kind of short circuits, a really low groan escaping him and his hips rise of their own accord.
She leans over him then, and he can see down the front of her white t-shirt. There’s a plain black bra, but from this angle her tits look fuller than they actually are. He reaches forward and pulls the thin fabric down even farther, far enough that he can see her belly button and the waistband of her jeans; she chuckles under her breath, her face right there in front of his.
“Please don’t tell me you’re too stoned to fuck me properly.” He thinks he had wanted to laugh, but he sounds like he’s being strangled instead. He’s still gripping the low neckline of her shirt in his hand when he reaches, palms her breast through her bra, and she exhales against his mouth.
They’re a strange blur of limbs and open, greedy mouths, and there’s not enough room in the back of his car, her jeans are too tight, his jeans are too tight, and neither of them fully undresses but instead just peels back the necessary layers until his hands are fumbling with a condom that came from god knows where, Ellen muttering under him that she doesn’t want to have his babies, that she’s not going to be his babymaker, and he’s trying to explain that that’s what the condom is for, but he can’t seem to do two tasks at once (“that doesn’t bode well for me, does it?” Ellen says, all droll, but her face is flushed and her bra is peeled back to show a peaked nipple, so he just smirks, the condom wrapper still in his hand, but he bites at her breast and slides too fingers into her, and if she says something about multitasking, he doesn’t hear it). It’s the most bizarrely inane pre-sex conversation he’s ever had, at least in recent, adult memory.
They fog up the windows (“slap your hand against the window DiCaprio style,” she goads, “I dare you,” and Joe has never been one to pass on a dare, so the next day when Matthew asks about the handprints on the window and Ellen starts humming “My Heart Will Go On,” he can only shake his head and laugh). The car sways back and forth as he thrusts into her, and he starts trying to explain how totally not inconspicuous they are being, but she tells him to shut up, and then she clenches, twists her hips, and he thinks they could be back inside that awful bar with those awful people that maybe wanted to kill him for all he cares. They both stink of the weed and the bar, but she also smells like girl and soap and a little bit of sweat. He licks her neck to taste, and he likes it.
They stay in Oklahoma for a little bit.
Joe finds that shower sex is pretty easy to achieve when the partner in said shower sex is barely an inch over five feet tall and weighs the same if not a little less than the suitcase he packed for this joke of a trip.
He lifts her easily, but her back slides against the wet tile, her body wriggling against his as he fits his hips between her own. He’s not sure if this is rude or just plain unmentionable to be fucking a girl in the bathroom while the guy you sort of hooked up with in a different bathroom is sitting in the next room.
Ellen makes this painfully desperate sound, and it’s not that he finds that he doesn’t care, but rather that Matthew would completely understand.
(And he does. They go to breakfast together alone one morning, Ellen still asleep and cranky as hell when they tried to wake her, and the first thing out of Matthew’s mouth as they shut the hotel room door behind them is: “You bang her yet?”)
They decide to take Ellen back to L.A. with them. Wildfires are bursting through the West, and they can smell the smoke, but they can’t see the flames. Matthew’s nervous, his wiry frame spread out over the backseat, and then hunched between the driver and passenger seat, rambling about firefighters and smoke inhalation, and finally Joe snaps, “you want me to stop somewhere?”
They stop in southern Nevada near the state line into California.
“That woman looks like a robot,” Matthew announces. “All a part of the plan.”
They share a pack of stale strawberry pop-tarts and watch the news. Ellen sits on the bed, one of Joe’s t-shirts on and a pair of pink panties. Joe can’t stop staring at them, decides that they had to have been a gift, because for the life of him and the life of her, he cannot envision her walking into a store, picking up a pink pair of panties and saying, oh I like these, I’ll buy a pair.
Matthew’s doing crunches on the floor, an open twelve-pack next to him, the beer warm and cheap.
Later, the three of them will share the same bed. They’ll lie there, Joe in the middle, Gube’s matted hair pressed into the pillow at his right and Ellen tucked into his side on the left. Ellen will still be in his t-shirt and her pink panties. Joe will be in an old pair of jeans, and Gube will be the only one of the bunch fully dressed. And the three will share a bed, and later, much later, back home later, Joe will think this was his favorite part of the trip. Nothing happens, nothing like that. They just laid on the bed, under the crisp, cheap sheet, the comforter kicked to the floor, and they ate some more pop-tarts and watched more of the news. The fires continued, and from the parking lot, Joe had been able to see the mountains.
It will be a good memory, but it won’t be one he shares with anyone. None of the three will. Back in L.A., Matthew will tell people about the goat in Colorado and the Grand Canyon at night and Joe will talk about the bar brawl in Oklahoma, and Ellen won’t say a thing to anyone.
He’ll think that he’d like to stay like this until August, but the motel room will be already smelling of smoke.
Los Angeles is the same as they left it.
“You took up stragglers,” Zooey says when they bring Ellen to the bar, their usual haunt, a band already warming up on the low stage.
“She was going to make a movie about horses but then she didn’t,” Matthew says.
Ellen shakes her head. “That’s not even remotely true,” she says.
The four of them will sit down and they’ll drink too much and laugh even more, and the fires are still burning through the trees, but they’re dying out. The summer is dying down, and soon it will be autumn, but he’s trying not to think about that. He still sort of has a black eye, and more friends join them, Nora appalled at his injury and a little appalled at Ellen too (“I thought you were kidding,” she’ll tell him later, a small alcove next to a defunct pay phone, and Joe will laugh, but he’ll be thinking of the backseat of his car and how Ellen likes it on her knees).
“It’s a good memory,” he says, and raises a glass.
“What is?” someone asks.
“All of it,” he crows, and Matthew springs up, a shout of, “here, here!”
They down those drinks and order more. The conversation turns more predictive than reflective, focusing on the future instead of the past. Nora will play matchmaker for the Gube and Zooey will call her husband and Joe and Ellen will pretend that nothing, nothing at all is happening between them.
It will be dawn when Joe will realize he didn’t take a single photograph that entire summer. He’ll stumble on the sidewalk a little, Matthew rambling behind him, for some reason discussing the process of photosynthesis, and when he stumbles, Ellen will snicker, her hand warm on his wrist.
He’ll hardly think it matters.
He’s a shit photographer anyway.
fin.
rpf. there are too many metaphors invoking the word “road” to use in this summary. yes. this is a story about a road trip. jgl; jgl/gubler, jgl/page. rated pg-13. 5868 words.
notes: WHAT IS THIS. i literally started writing this at like noon today after talking to Izi about hot, skinny hipsters and somehow wrote this over the course of the day when I was supposed to be packing. C, I HAVE RPF!ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE FIC ON THE WAY. so, um, this is for ava_leigh_fitz, and these are all lies. unless they aren't lies, which would be AWESOME.
there are some mornings when the sky looks like a road.
(JOANNA NEWSOM)
“It’s the summer ennui, man.”
When they look back on this, when they look back on this summer as a whole, neither one will remember who said it and whose idea it was. Matthew blames Joe, tells friends in the fall that Joe was going out of his skin and wanted to, like, embrace America as though she was a woman (“no, not Ugly Betty, America as in the United States of, dude, keep up - “) and stamp his claim on her shapely figure. Joe tells friends that it was all the Gube’s doing, that he can be really convincing and can really get up to some crazy shit when he’s not hobbling around on crutches, but Nora will be among the friends he is telling this particular tale to, and she’ll know that the idea belonged to the both of them.
“They’re like a hipster, Nylon-backed production of Dumb and Dumber,” she told Zooey at a party once. The other woman just nodded her head, mouth pursed before saying: “Yeah. The Gube’s even got Jeff Daniels’s hair.” Nora laughed, and despite the fact the two women had, you know, been involved with the same half of the aforementioned hipster duo, they got along well.
But back to the point (if one exists): this is a story about a road trip.
Before they left, everyone referred to it as The Big Gay Road Trip. Zooey was the most fervent culprit, calling Joe to see if he had left yet on his Great Gay Adventure, chiding him over lunch about who would top (her money was on him, and truth be told, Joe kinda sorta had to agree), and offering to accompany the two of them to be the leg of their traveling troika who would document their Big Gay Adventures (“I hope there are glory holes,” she said, and Joe had nearly spat out his coffee).
“What?” Joe argued. “A guy can’t depart with his guy friend to see all the little treasures this country has to offer? This is America!” And this was a cafe, and the two espressos were hitting him, hard. The couple at the table next to them gave the two a curious glance and Zooey smiled diplomatically, her face placid.
She turned back to Joe. “I don’t know, friend. You gave up the Zooey. For all I know you’ve given up the ladies for good. And now you’re going to Brokeback your way across the country. It happens.” Her mouth quirked on the last word, and he called her a soggy old cunt, among other offensive language, and she dissolved into oblivious laughter as the couple next to them grew more and more appalled.
A note of caution, if you will:
In May, back before any real planning for this road adventure began (planning: buying a lot of Kerouac and beat poetry, renting Y Tu Mama Tambien, procuring a hefty stash from his dealer, throwing away his razor to grow a beard befitting that of a wanderer, etc., etc.), the following conversation occurred:
“You’re in Oklahoma?”
“Yeah,” Ellen said. “I’m gonna be here until July? I think July we’ll wrap?”
“What the fuck are you filming in Oklahoma?”
“A musical,” she deadpanned.
If anyone beyond Ellen knew this conversation existed, Joe would argue this had served as no motivation whatsoever to embark on this adventure.
As it would happen, Matthew became the third to know, and they hadn’t even left California yet.
“Ellen? Ellen Page?” he’ll ask, taking his eyes off the road for mere seconds at a time, a far more nervous driver than Joe.
“DeGeneres,” Joe will slur, sleepy and hunched over in the passenger seat.
“Hmm,” Matthew will say. “Hate to say, they both seem to have the same probability of possibly boning you, dude.”
Joe will make a hmmph sound as he shifts, his eyes closed, mouth still tasting of the bowl they just smoked. “Page likes dick,” he will say, cotton-mouthed and he’ll slurp at the Big Gulp, but all that will be left is the gross blue raspberry syrup and no more ice.
“You speaking from experience?” Matthew will ask, his eyes bright, like this is the best entertainment of the trip so far, even if they are only four hours into it. But Joe will be too stoned and he’ll start talking about the Red Hot Chili Peppers and “Under the Bridge,” and, like, heroin, and it will be when the song is reaching a close that Matthew will realize that the song is playing on the radio and that’s why Joe is talking about it.
They leave on a Sunday.
Matthew insists on it, even tells a great long story about when he was a kid, they’d drive to Four Corners and they’d always leave on a Sunday, and Joe’s not one to mess with sacrilege like that, so they leave on a Sunday.
“Farewell, young lovers,” Zooey had said the night before, and then attempted a really weak joke about lube and Gube the two opted to ignore, and instead Matthew started throwing the luggage into the back of Joe’s car in a completely disorganized and haphazard manner while singing Simon and Garfunkel. Joe had a map spread out over the hood of the car and a red marker.
“They’ve all gone! To look for America!” Matthew sang.
They don’t really stop until they reach the Grand Canyon. They take piss breaks at sketchy looking gas stations where Matthew tries to make friends with the various attendants, more often than not speaking in loud Spanish or even louder English. They subsist on beef jerky and lukewarm Lipton iced teas and cartons of cigarettes they buy for cheap at the same gas stations where they piss and try to make friends and buy their food.
Matthew makes a big fanfare when they cut through Nevada. He whoops and hollers when they pass the sign, welcoming them to Nevada, remember, it is a crime not to wear a seatbelt, but when Joe asks him if he wants to stop anywhere, he says, “Nah,” and bites off a big hunk of the beef jerky and contents himself with the moody Ennio Morricone soundtrack they’ve been listening to in preparation for the wild, wild West.
They drive south into Arizona and stop at the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon proves to be a bit of disaster.
For one thing, they toke up before they go to see it, skinny boys sprawled out at picnic tables in some national park; “Jesus, man. I haven’t smoked this much in - in fucking forever,” Joe keeps repeating, and Matthew waves his hands in the air as though conducting an orchestra.
When they get to the canyon, they both sort of freak out. They both have been to the site before, Joe as a child, and Matthew several times throughout his lifetime, but they both stand back and marvel at it, eyes wide with fear.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Joe asks, all slack-jawed, sunglasses hiding his bloodshot eyes.
“Yeah,” Matthew draws out.
“Aliens. Fucking aliens. There is no other explanation. I bet the mothership is docked at the bottom.”
Matthew frowns. “That’s not what I was thinking.”
“But you said you were. I said, ‘you thinking what I’m thinking?’ And then you said, ‘yeahhhh.’” Joe gives Matthew a comically low baritone voice, and Matthew scoffs.
“Nah, I thought you were going to say that this is literally and figuratively and seriously the most depressing place on the planet. It’s, like, a pit. A pit of despair.”
“With aliens at the bottom. Really depressed aliens.”
“Fuuuuck,” Matthew says. And then, “Oh, hey. A donkey.”
They leave the canyon after a couple hours of kicking rocks around and discussing whether the aliens take Prozac or not and if a suicidal alien shoots himself in the head whether the blood would be green or like normal human blood, until finally Matthew announces that this place is harshing his buzz and they should leave.
They do; they drive over to a campground with the grand intention of sleeping in the car (“It’s like we’re homeless, but we’re not,” Joe says, and Matthew chimes in, “We could win an Independent Spirit Award if we film this. I bet you five marbles that’s true,” a statement that doesn’t make much sense since at no point during the trip have they played with marbles, but Joe takes him at his word and even considers getting the camera out; he doesn’t).
They don’t sleep in the car.
So, what happens is this: they set up shop at the edge of the parking lot, right next to the car. They smoke a bowl, and then they smoke another, and the sky looks like something from a preschool detention center, a macabre stretch of pastels and red, and Joe is contemplating it, trying to figure out where one corner of the sky starts and the other part ends (the sky is in pieces, you see, it was never really whole, and he tried explaining this, but Matthew wasn’t having any of it and told him that they needed to collect sticks to fight the ants, and - ), when Matthew approaches him.
“Hey, hey man,” he hisses, and Joe jerks his head around to look at him.
“Yeah,” he says, and he tries to watch the sky out of the corner of his eye, because it’s fading, and he can’t remember where he put his camera, not that it matters, he exposed the roll of film, like, two hours ago, so it’s useless, but he doesn’t think the gesture would be.
“Do you see that?” Matthew hisses, more a stage whisper than an actual whisper, and he’s pointing at the car.
“I see the car,” Joe hisses back, adopting whatever security precautions Matthew has seen fit.
“I think there’s someone. Inside the car.” Joe can feel his eyes grow really wide, and Matthew is clutching a collection of three scrawny sticks, and Joe’s eyes keep darting from the sticks to the car and back again. Matthew squats down next to him, and in the end, and in the morning, the two will discover that inside the car there is little more than a few threadbare cardigans and an open cooler as well as a straw fedora, the combination of the three creating an odd outline of a man crouched over the backseat, at least so it would appear to the chemically-enhanced eye.
They sit like that for awhile. Evening takes the desert, and Joe misses the transfer of the sky to first purple and then black. They watch the car religiously, fear alive in the both of them, and they split the box of Triscuits Joe brought with him to his original perch to watch the sunset.
“How can you tell if someone’s a serial killer?” he whispers to Matthew.
“With your eyes,” Matthew says, completely serious, the words whispered back like the sagest of advice, and Joe nods his head.
“My eyes aren’t telling me anything,” Joe finally says.
“Mine either,” and Matthew is still whispering, the crunch of the crackers deafening in comparison to his voice, but Joe’s too hungry to tell him to be quiet.
They eventually fall asleep in the campground parking lot, their backs resting against the trunk of two separate trees, a handful of paces from the car.
They swing north to Utah the next day. Matthew won’t stop talking about sister wives, and neither of them has showered in what feels like days, a good growth of stubbly beard taking over Joe’s neck, and Matthew’s hair hangs down limply.
They’re both tired, their supply of chronic is running low (“Someone should build a drive-thru weed factory. It’d be fucking awesome.”), and they’re both tired, cranky. When they smoke the last of the dope, they stop in at a convenience store and buy too many of those little 5 Hour Energy bottles and down too many of them too quickly. The two of them are slap happy, near deranged in their exhaustion and chemical dependency and happiness, and it’s dumb, it’s so fucking dumb.
It’s so fucking dumb because it’s in Utah, at some anonymous truckstop bathroom, the two of them loopy and sweaty and dirty, that all of Zooey’s prophecies came true and Joe jacked his best friend off next to a faded poster of Smokey the Bear warning them about forest fires.
The truth of the matter is, he doesn’t know why he does it. He feels near blind from the caffeine rush and the lazy pulse of the weed under his skin, and when Matthew splashes him with the dirty water from the rest stop’s sink, he doesn’t do the practical thing and laugh or splash him back. No. Instead his kisses him. Maybe he kisses him because he’s happy. Maybe he kisses him because he wants Smokey the Bear to have to see this, or maybe it’s his small rebellion against the state of Utah and the sister wives and the Mormon culture, because holy shit, we’ve got caffeine and weed and latent homosexual tendencies all in one fell swoop.
Matthew was easily taller than Joe, and he had to crane his neck up a little, his hair long under his hands, and it was hardly a suave kiss. His mashed his lips to his, hands clutching either side of his face, and Matthew startled. He startled and didn’t move, but then he kissed him back.
So, they’re both culpable. They both hate Utah and they both hate Smokey the Bear, and it’s kinda creepy because they both smell the same, like they’re the same person, so maybe that makes this an act of gross narcissism, or worse yet, incest, because Joe loves Gube like a brother, and here he is, eating his face off.
If kissing him is dumb enough and inexplicable enough, the next act is even more difficult to justify. They kiss for awhile, the sound of their mouths smacking echoing in the dank bathroom, and Matthew has his hands tight on Joe’s shoulders and then under his chin, and, well, then, Joe has his hand in Matthew’s pants like it’s the most natural idea ever.
His dick is thinner than he thought it would be, and he’s slow to get hard (he blames the pot and the stench of disinfectant and mildew of the restroom), but then he is, heavy in his hand, and they’re not really kissing anymore, but biting each other’s chins, mouthing over the skin, Matthew making these small panting sounds, and the angle of Joe’s wrist is awkward, and when he finally comes he shuts his eyes tight and Joe rubs the come off his hand and wrist with the hem of his t-shirt.
They both stand there for awhile, awkward and out of breath. And it’s not that he regrets it. Joe has never really seen a point in regretting stuff like this, and he’s easily had his share of sexual mishaps. But now, now he feels like he’s imbibed their friendship, their awesome, awesome, ridiculous friendship, with something he doesn’t want it to have.
“I’m sorry. Dude, I’m sorry, I don’t even,” Joe stutters. Matthew smiles with his mouth closed and shrugs, shakes his head, says, “it’s no big,” without actually using the words.
“You might, you might, you know, wanna wash your hands,” he says, and then he leaves.
They don’t talk for the better part of an hour. Joe drives, and the Gube is quiet, doing some kind of botched origami in his lap with a McDonald’s napkin too thin to take whatever shape he’s trying to give it.
“What are you making?” Joe finally asks.
“A nun,” he answers, the words slow, and the napkin just looks crumpled, not like any nun Joe has ever seen.
They descend into silence again.
“Hey, man,” Matthew finally says, and Joe catches his eye quickly. Matthew looks almost absurdly earnest, or as earnest as a person can look in a pair of Ray Bans. “About back there?” And, ugh, Joe thinks. They are going to acknowledge the really, really gay elephant in the room. Er, car.
“Yeah...”
Matthew claps his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “I love you, man. And I think we both know I mean that in the Judd Apatow-esque rendering of the words love and man. But, um, let’s never do that again. Even though we both know that’s easily not the gayest thing you’ve ever done.”
“I told you! I do not like Coldplay - that was not even my CD.”
Matthew laughs and then Joe laughs, and they plot out how the rest of that particular story could have gone - they have torrid sex in a depressing motel room while the guy next door is arranging a drug deal, and they’re spotted, and then they’re on the run instead of just on a road trip, but they pay off the drug dealers with all their Hollywood gold ("you have, like, roughly twelve point eight times more than I do," Matthew says), so then they’re poor, they’re Charles Dickens destitute and in hiding, and Joe becomes a gay prostitute ("again?!" he whines) and Matthew grows his hair super long, like Rapunzel long, and sells dates and figs on the side of the road in his native Nevada and they live in a desert shanty, because they are in love, Matthew explains, and people in love don’t mind residing in shanties, and by the time they stop for dinner at some anonymous greasy spoon diner, they are mostly sober and the restroom incident is mostly forgotten.
Joe orders a cheeseburger and Gube gets some nasty tuna salad looking thing, and the coffee they drink is toxic enough to take the paint off his car parked out front. The riotous conversation from the car has cooled, and dinner is more awkward than anything else. Joe smears his fries in ketchup and scratches at his neck, a not really attractive beard growing under his chin and along his throat. He coughs once and Matthew looks at him, all deer in the headlights.
“We’re good then, Gube?” Joe asks, and Matthew just sort of laughs, smiles, his mouth full of the tuna salad.
“Yeah, man,” he mumbles around the food, and then swallows. “The way I see it, this’ll be just like that time I finger-banged Zooey at that one party.”
Joe chokes on his burger and Matthew has never looked more amused.
(“What?” he says when he can, you know, breathe again. “You what? When? Where?”
“Oh, it was after, awhile after, you guys, you know. In a bathroom. There is a startling trend emerging here with me and you people and bathrooms.” Joe’s still kind of open-mouthed and Matthew shrugs. “You said you were over her.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t mean go...finger-bang her.”
“At least I didn’t bang-bang her.”
“That’d be, that’d be like me, finding Kat-whatever-her-last-name-was -”
“Dennings.”
“Yeah. Her. It’d be like me getting her and finger fucking her. How would you like that?”
“Well, for starters, that would never happen. She’s not your type. You like, you like those bird types. You like the bird girls. The teeny tiny ones with no discernible rack and those really big, baby bird eyes, big ol’ peepers. I mean, Nora? Yup. And Zooey was petite, had bird eyes. And, well, Ellen...”
They look each other in the eye and they both start chuckling as though on cue. Joe lights a cigarette and Matthew orders more coffee, and just like that, both incidents are behind them).
They drive through the night.
“So. You and Ellen then?” Matthew asks, waggles his eyebrows.
“What? No. Yeah. Kinda. No. What?” Matthew only shakes his head, a knowing look on his face, starts chanting, “Joey, Joey, Joey,” under his breath, like he’s counting baby kangaroos or something.
He turns to Joe then, a mischievous smile. “You can always take her to a rest stop bathroom. I heard you do your best work there.”
“Fuck off,” Joe shouts, but he’s laughing too.
And, okay, so it’s not that he hasn’t hooked up with her before. Only it was one time, and that time they were both drunk, her dizzyingly so, and he, impotently. There are few things worse for a man to suffer than whiskey dick, a thing he vaguely remembers telling her, her tiny hand (and, fuck, that makes him sound totally pedophiliac, right? cataloging how miniature everything is about her? or, goddamn, it makes him sound like he gets off fucking midgets or dwarves or something real messed up) fisted around him, high color on her cheeks, hair everywhere, and laughing, laughing hysterically.
“Should I be insulted?” she had teased, her mouth wet at his ear, and his hands were crawling all over her.
“No,” he moaned, a product of both lust and the sheer amount of beer he had consumed. “I want to fuck you,” he groaned. “I want to fuck you so bad, it’s all I think about, all the time,” his words degenerating until he was mumbling about wanting to always fuck her, that he wants to fuck her forever, and Ellen had laughed again, her body shaking against his, and she was all bone, all rattling bones, and he remembers that, he remembers that really well - how she was hard and firm everywhere except for where she wasn’t, her small breasts, the heated space between her legs.
Fuck.
Oklahoma blows. He decides this after they pass all the strip malls and then all the sad farms and then the even sadder nothingness. Ellen’s not even staying in Oklahoma City, but rather some small town with a lot of horse farms. “Is her movie about horses? Like, Black Beauty with an ironic twist? A remake of National Velvet?” Matthew asks, and he keeps talking, something about Seabiscuit, and Joe decides that Matthew knows way too much about horses and film and horses on film.
Ellen’s movie has nothing to do with horses. She says that near immediately, the same questions Matthew had posed at Joe now directed at Ellen.
“Oh, God, dude,” Ellen says as they approach. “Kurt Cobain called. He wants his look back.”
Joe hauls her up into a one-sided hug, her feet dangling above the ground, and when he places her back down he notices that her smile is guarded.
“Good to see you too, kid,” he says. Her face twists a little when he says kid, like she’s disappointed, or annoyed, but Ellen’s always hard to read, he thinks.
“We saw a goat in Colorado,” Matthew announces. They both look at him, a mixture of surprise and annoyance at the non sequitur, and he pulls a face, holds up his hands. “What? It was a really big goat.”
“How’s your knee?” she asks Matthew. “I’ve heard tales.” Matthew looks down at it, sticks his leg out and does some strange awkward little dance. Joe starts clapping out a beat, and just as abruptly the two stop in unison.
“Fine!”
“This was your fault?” she asks Joe, and both men start snickering, something so, so painfully serious about Ellen and the way the question is phrased.
“Joey did buy the tequila,” Matthew says, and that’s the end of that discussion.
There’s more tequila that night. Tequila and a lot of beer, and when some dude with the audacity to wear a cowboy hat and swagger around like Patrick Swayze actually calls Joe both a pansy and a faggot (a pansy faggot, to be exact, he blames the skinny jeans and the purple t-shirt he’s wearing) it totally makes sense to deck the guy in the face. It also make sense for the guy to punch him back, and he’s never been a friend of physics, and he certainly isn’t now, trying to stop his eye from watering and his hand from throbbing and the bouncer/bartender/town drunk from yelling at him to leave.
So that happens. He stumbles more than walks to his car in the crowded parking lot, their hotel the next lot over, but it suddenly seems too far. He’s not sure how much time passes, but he does know that he has smoked about four and a half cigarettes by the time Ellen exits the bar and walks over to him.
“Where’s your friend?” she asks as she approaches him. He thinks she means the Gube. He sits on the hood of the car, dirt and dust collected since L.A. smearing across the dark denim of his jeans.
“He could be your friend too,” he says with a faux pout, and she rolls her eyes. If Ellen wanted an actual answer to her question, she doesn’t do much else to earn it. She hoists herself up onto the hood of the car next to him, their elbows touching.
“Tom’s getting married,” she says.
“Old news,” Joe says. And then he smirks. “And to his former co-star nonetheless.”
“He’s marrying DiCaprio?” she says, the humor lazy, but Joe snorts anyway. They lull into a companionable silence. You can see the stars here. But then again, you could see the stars in Arizona and in Utah and any place not Los Angeles.
“We should get married,” he says then, voice quiet and amused, like he’s sorting something out in his head. “See what people have to say about that.” He looks over at Ellen and she’s shaking her head. She looks down at herself.
“The bride wore flannel,” she drawls and Joe laughs. And then, “I’m not going to marry you,” she says, voice as close to teasing as she gets.
Joe nods, solemn. “I thought as much.”
They smoke a joint in the back of his car, and he can’t help but think what a bitch of a habit this is going to be to break, when everything is said and done. Hers isn’t as potent as the shit Gube and he had been smoking across the desert, but he still inhales deep and chuckles at the small, content smile stretching over Ellen’s face.
The next part is sort of a blur - all the beer and his sore face and his bruised knuckles, and suddenly its her mouth on his knuckles, pink tongue bright even in the dim light of the parking lot. She licks at his sort of but not really bloody knuckles, and it’s weird and kinky, but also really, really fucking hot. When she takes his index finger into his mouth, he kind of short circuits, a really low groan escaping him and his hips rise of their own accord.
She leans over him then, and he can see down the front of her white t-shirt. There’s a plain black bra, but from this angle her tits look fuller than they actually are. He reaches forward and pulls the thin fabric down even farther, far enough that he can see her belly button and the waistband of her jeans; she chuckles under her breath, her face right there in front of his.
“Please don’t tell me you’re too stoned to fuck me properly.” He thinks he had wanted to laugh, but he sounds like he’s being strangled instead. He’s still gripping the low neckline of her shirt in his hand when he reaches, palms her breast through her bra, and she exhales against his mouth.
They’re a strange blur of limbs and open, greedy mouths, and there’s not enough room in the back of his car, her jeans are too tight, his jeans are too tight, and neither of them fully undresses but instead just peels back the necessary layers until his hands are fumbling with a condom that came from god knows where, Ellen muttering under him that she doesn’t want to have his babies, that she’s not going to be his babymaker, and he’s trying to explain that that’s what the condom is for, but he can’t seem to do two tasks at once (“that doesn’t bode well for me, does it?” Ellen says, all droll, but her face is flushed and her bra is peeled back to show a peaked nipple, so he just smirks, the condom wrapper still in his hand, but he bites at her breast and slides too fingers into her, and if she says something about multitasking, he doesn’t hear it). It’s the most bizarrely inane pre-sex conversation he’s ever had, at least in recent, adult memory.
They fog up the windows (“slap your hand against the window DiCaprio style,” she goads, “I dare you,” and Joe has never been one to pass on a dare, so the next day when Matthew asks about the handprints on the window and Ellen starts humming “My Heart Will Go On,” he can only shake his head and laugh). The car sways back and forth as he thrusts into her, and he starts trying to explain how totally not inconspicuous they are being, but she tells him to shut up, and then she clenches, twists her hips, and he thinks they could be back inside that awful bar with those awful people that maybe wanted to kill him for all he cares. They both stink of the weed and the bar, but she also smells like girl and soap and a little bit of sweat. He licks her neck to taste, and he likes it.
They stay in Oklahoma for a little bit.
Joe finds that shower sex is pretty easy to achieve when the partner in said shower sex is barely an inch over five feet tall and weighs the same if not a little less than the suitcase he packed for this joke of a trip.
He lifts her easily, but her back slides against the wet tile, her body wriggling against his as he fits his hips between her own. He’s not sure if this is rude or just plain unmentionable to be fucking a girl in the bathroom while the guy you sort of hooked up with in a different bathroom is sitting in the next room.
Ellen makes this painfully desperate sound, and it’s not that he finds that he doesn’t care, but rather that Matthew would completely understand.
(And he does. They go to breakfast together alone one morning, Ellen still asleep and cranky as hell when they tried to wake her, and the first thing out of Matthew’s mouth as they shut the hotel room door behind them is: “You bang her yet?”)
They decide to take Ellen back to L.A. with them. Wildfires are bursting through the West, and they can smell the smoke, but they can’t see the flames. Matthew’s nervous, his wiry frame spread out over the backseat, and then hunched between the driver and passenger seat, rambling about firefighters and smoke inhalation, and finally Joe snaps, “you want me to stop somewhere?”
They stop in southern Nevada near the state line into California.
“That woman looks like a robot,” Matthew announces. “All a part of the plan.”
They share a pack of stale strawberry pop-tarts and watch the news. Ellen sits on the bed, one of Joe’s t-shirts on and a pair of pink panties. Joe can’t stop staring at them, decides that they had to have been a gift, because for the life of him and the life of her, he cannot envision her walking into a store, picking up a pink pair of panties and saying, oh I like these, I’ll buy a pair.
Matthew’s doing crunches on the floor, an open twelve-pack next to him, the beer warm and cheap.
Later, the three of them will share the same bed. They’ll lie there, Joe in the middle, Gube’s matted hair pressed into the pillow at his right and Ellen tucked into his side on the left. Ellen will still be in his t-shirt and her pink panties. Joe will be in an old pair of jeans, and Gube will be the only one of the bunch fully dressed. And the three will share a bed, and later, much later, back home later, Joe will think this was his favorite part of the trip. Nothing happens, nothing like that. They just laid on the bed, under the crisp, cheap sheet, the comforter kicked to the floor, and they ate some more pop-tarts and watched more of the news. The fires continued, and from the parking lot, Joe had been able to see the mountains.
It will be a good memory, but it won’t be one he shares with anyone. None of the three will. Back in L.A., Matthew will tell people about the goat in Colorado and the Grand Canyon at night and Joe will talk about the bar brawl in Oklahoma, and Ellen won’t say a thing to anyone.
He’ll think that he’d like to stay like this until August, but the motel room will be already smelling of smoke.
Los Angeles is the same as they left it.
“You took up stragglers,” Zooey says when they bring Ellen to the bar, their usual haunt, a band already warming up on the low stage.
“She was going to make a movie about horses but then she didn’t,” Matthew says.
Ellen shakes her head. “That’s not even remotely true,” she says.
The four of them will sit down and they’ll drink too much and laugh even more, and the fires are still burning through the trees, but they’re dying out. The summer is dying down, and soon it will be autumn, but he’s trying not to think about that. He still sort of has a black eye, and more friends join them, Nora appalled at his injury and a little appalled at Ellen too (“I thought you were kidding,” she’ll tell him later, a small alcove next to a defunct pay phone, and Joe will laugh, but he’ll be thinking of the backseat of his car and how Ellen likes it on her knees).
“It’s a good memory,” he says, and raises a glass.
“What is?” someone asks.
“All of it,” he crows, and Matthew springs up, a shout of, “here, here!”
They down those drinks and order more. The conversation turns more predictive than reflective, focusing on the future instead of the past. Nora will play matchmaker for the Gube and Zooey will call her husband and Joe and Ellen will pretend that nothing, nothing at all is happening between them.
It will be dawn when Joe will realize he didn’t take a single photograph that entire summer. He’ll stumble on the sidewalk a little, Matthew rambling behind him, for some reason discussing the process of photosynthesis, and when he stumbles, Ellen will snicker, her hand warm on his wrist.
He’ll hardly think it matters.
He’s a shit photographer anyway.
fin.