George Pelecanos - Nick's trip

We slept that morning and, after stopping to say goodbye to our host (he was scarfing down a slice of pizza as he waved us off), headed south. The drive lasted into the evening and ended when we pulled into a motel called the Pennsylvania on Twenty-first Street in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We hung out on the beach and swam the next two days in the piss-warm wavelets of the Atlantic. On the second night we felt rejuvenated enough to party and returned to it with a vengeance. By the time we got to the Spanish Galleon, the resort’s most popular nightclub, which was packed with raucous innocents (in a way that only Southern bars can be), Billy and I were raped on beer and tequila and determined to score. We had by now developed a contest involving the number of women we could rack up on the trip (Billy dubbed it our “cock test”), and I immediately crossed a busy concrete dance floor where college kids were doing the shag to Chairman of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” and proceeded to slip my tongue into the mouth of a hideous but willing biker queen who had been standing by herself. From out of the corner of my eye I could see Billy laughing as I rolled my tongue in her cankerous orifice, and now, with spiteful determination, I led her out to the beach for the long walk down to the surf where I “made love” to her near the breakers. After I came in her doughy box her face changed from the merely ugly to the truly frightening, and when she demanded that I “fuck” her again, I obeyed, her oily black hair buried in the sand by my dutiful thrusts. Somehow I lost her in the Go ther in alleon and hitched to the motel, where an unrelenting Billy was waiting for me with an evil grin. For the next three days he teased me about the clap (and every time I urinated I could hear his laughter outside the bathroom door), but miraculously it didn’t surface, and the next morning, my head pounding and down in disgust, we left Myrtle and continued south.

Our next stop was Charleston, the Jewel of the South, which at first glance promised to be a genteel blend of white-gloved belles and dripping cypress. We planned to visit Billy’s friend Dan Ballenger, who for reasons I can’t recall was nicknamed and preferred to be called Pooter. Pooter was an amiable squid who lived off base in a decaying suburb of the city. Pooter’s cottage was small and not even air-conditioned with window shakers, so there was little else to do in that oppressive heat but lie around on his sticky green vinyl furniture and do bong hits while watching the Summer Olympics. This was the year the young man from Palmer Park took the gold medal in boxing, and I cannot remember anytime being quite so proud to carry the label of Washingtonian. On the second night of our stay Pooter took us to a shotgun shack of a bar on the edge of town where aggressively plain girls were employed to wear negligees and con the customers into buying them seven-dollar wine coolers. One of them, an emaciated, pimply little teenager, sat on my lap and then got pissed when I refused to step up for the drink. By now Pooter was nervous, as there were several sinewy, long-haired types scattered around the place who looked more than happy to dispatch wiseasses such as us. Billy made a point of finding the owner and telling him what a “classy place” he had, and that was when we all decided it was time to go. In the car Billy and I ate two more tabs of haze and drove to a Piggly Wiggly, where we stole a watermelon from the outdoor rack and, as a startlingly quick clerk chased us on foot, peeled out of the parking lot and into the thick night. The watermelon was as warm as the air and we dumped it after a disappointing taste. Then we found a movie theater and bought tickets to The Out-law Josie Wales. After Joseph Bottoms’s wonderfully acted death scene-“I was prouder than a game rooster to have ridden with ye, Josie”-I remember very little, since the acid kicked in and I focused, for the remainder of the film, on the colorful, dust-filled tubes of light that traveled from the projector to the screen. When the film ended we drove to the Battery, which seemed to be the only spot in Charleston that carried a breeze, and got high, and talked with a young man named Spit who claimed he didn’t care for “ofay motherfuckers” but had no problem with smoking their weed. The whole time we were doing this, Pooter slept (I still don’t know how) in the backseat of the Camaro, his head back between the Superthruster speakers that were now blowing thirty distorted watts of Hendrix out across the intracoastal waterway. We slept that whole next day and, at six in the evening, said good-bye to a rather relieved-looking Pooter.

Soon after we hit the highway we agreed that we needed to clear our heads. Each of us swallowed a black beauty and then, as that cranial tingle began, we pulled over in Columbia and bought two large bottles of burgundy. After Columbia the speed tore in, and from then on it was all cigarettes, wine, open windows, and maximum volume (we blew one of the speakers that night, during Earl Slick’s screaming guitar solo on Bowie’s “Stay”). In Augusta we stopped for more wine, were thrown out of a rock-and-roll club for something Billy said to the doorman, then wandered into an all-black disco and danced with an amphetaminic frenzy until 3:00 A.M. (I was fairly proficient then in a jerky, popular dance called the Robot.) I drove the resat rove tht of the night, nervously picking at my thumb the entire way, which resulted in a good bit of blood on my hand by the time we reached our destination. We pulled into Atlanta at 6:30 in the morning.

The first hotel we saw was on Houston Street, and it was there, a ten-dollar-a-night wino flophouse, that we took a room. We only stayed in Atlanta a couple of days, finding it in general to be neither friendly nor safe, though I did get a date on the first night with a young, green-eyed strawberry blonde, a hawker for one of the clubs in the Underground. She had no intention of sleeping with me-she was too smart for that-but we enjoyed a quiet, air-conditioned evening together in her apartment, where she lent me the use of her blessedly clean shower. I think I reminded her of her brother from whatever small midwestern town she had mistakenly fled. The next day a junkie tried to pay Billy and me to pick up his “pharmaceutical” prescription for Quaaludes, and we came very close to doing it. We decided then to think about leaving, as our part of town was clearly no place for a couple of Yankee white boys, and of course there was the matter of the expensive boat parked in the lot behind the hotel. That night I sat almost naked in the window box of our room (the only spot that wasn’t hellish), smoking cigarettes and thinking about home, while Billy stretched out in a bathtub filled with cold water. We left the next morning.

The trip to Key West was sickeningly hot and seemed to take the better part of two days. Once there, we dropped the boat off quickly to some middle-aged hippie and collected our two hundred dollars. We walked around the town but, our spirits drained, found its surreal trappings not to our mutual taste. There was a fully clothed, sun-blistered young man lying in the middle of Truman Street with pennies stuck in his eyes. That is what I remember of Key West.

An hour north on A1-A we smoked a huge, celebratory joint, which had me peaking just as we rolled onto the old Seven Mile Bridge and gave me the most panicky few minutes I have spent on any stretch of road. Liberated from the boat, Billy’s Camaro seemed to be mounted on mattress springs rather than shocks, and it was all I could do to keep the goddamn vehicle from becoming airborne as other similarly drugged and sailing individuals sped toward us, missing collision by what seemed like inches. When we got off the bridge we were both ready for a beer or two, and we stopped in Marathon at what looked to be a peaceful dive called Dave’s Dockside. Never having experienced the novelty of a twenty-four-hour bar, Billy and I began a long, boozy evening in which we lost all but fifty dollars of our payoff money shooting pool. The whole thing ended around dawn when a pirate type (yes, wearing a black eye patch) took a swing at me for talking to his girlfriend. He was too drunk to connect, but suddenly our former friends all looked like bad-assed, raw-knuckled locals, and we walked out to the car and pointed it north.