When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,22
it was telling a girl, and harder still when you’d taken too much acid and were trying to keep the little people from sticking pins in your eyes.
After my failure in Ohio, I headed back south. It was early December, and I had forgotten how cold it could get in the Midwest.
Todd had suggested that I take his down jacket, but I thought it was unsightly, so here I was in a thrift-shop overcoat that didn’t even button all the way up. He’d also offered a sweater that belted at the waist. It was thick and patterned in bright colors, the sort of thing a peasant might wear while herding llamas, but I’d said, “No, it might ruin my silhouette.” That was the phrase I had used, and now I was paying for my vanity — because what difference would it have made? “Oh, goodness, I can’t give him a ride. He looks too lumpy.”
I’d left Kent at eight in the morning, and the next five hours had taken me less than fifty miles. Now it was lunchtime — not that there was anywhere to buy it, or anything much to buy it with. It began to rain, and, just as I thought of turning back, a tow truck pulled over and the driver motioned for me to get in. He told me that he wasn’t going far — just thirty miles up the road — but I was grateful for the warmth and climbed into the passenger seat determined to soak up as much of it as I possibly could.
“So,” the man said after I had settled in, “where you from?” I pegged him to be somewhere between old and ancient, midforties, maybe, with gray-tinged sideburns shaped like boots.
I told him I was from North Carolina, and he slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “North Carolina. Now, there’s a state for you. My brother and me went down on vacation — Topsail Beach, I think it was — and we just had the time of our lives.”
When the man turned to address me, I noticed that his ears stuck out and that his forehead was divided almost in two by a vertical dent that started at the intersection of his eyebrows and ran to within an inch of his hairline. It was the type of thing associated with heavy thought, but this was so deep and painful-looking that it might have been left by a hatchet.
“Yessiree, good old North Carolina,” the man continued. “N.C., I guess you call it down there.”
He went on about the state’s climate and the friendliness of its people, and then he looked into his side mirror to monitor the progress of an advancing eighteen-wheeler. “All I know is that if anyone wanted to give me a blow job, or have me give him one, I’d do it.”
This came out of nowhere, and what threw me was the way he’d attached it to his previous observation. North Carolina is temperate and populated with well-meaning people; therefore I will engage in oral sex with another man.
“Well,” I said, “they’re not all friendly. I remember one time I was walking down the street and a group of men grabbed me by the arms and spit in my face.” The story was true, and, at its mention, I recalled the stench of their sour, phlegm-clotted saliva. I expected, and reasonably so, that the tow truck driver might ask for details: “Who were these men? Why did they spit in your face?”
But instead he picked up where he’d left off. “I mean to tell you that I would actually crouch down on this seat and perform fellatio,” he said. “Either that or I’d sit up while someone performed it on me. I really would.”
“Then, another time,” I told him, “another time this guy threatened to knock my teeth down my throat. I was just standing there minding my own business, and all of a sudden there he was.” This was a lie, or at least the last part was. The man had threatened to knock my teeth down my throat, but only because my friend and I had given him the finger and called him a crusty old redneck. “I was twelve years old at the time,” I said. “In Ohio you’d never threaten a kid like that, but down in North Carolina it’s par for the course.”
Par for the course. I was sounding more idiotic by the minute — not that it mattered.