Eddie's Story

If Eddie had known where he was going, he never would have left where he was at. Half slumped down in the driver's seat, he was leaning a little to the right, elbow deep in the armrest, left hand draped on the wheel, left foot planted on the edge of the seat where he kept it for highway driving. The heel of his boot had worn a spot to the warp and weft of the velvet, but that didn't bother Eddie much. He knew the old heap would be ready for scrap long before that seat wore through, and the way he drove that Cadillac car, he might have been on to something.

The boots were custom-made from horsehide, black with silver toe caps on them, initials cut from lizard skin. He'd kept them up with polish and spit but, along with everything else about Eddie, they were starting to show their age. They'd cost him a thousand dollars once when he was out on a tear, spending the fortune his forebears earned making useful things for people. Several billion, some said it was, after the brokers had churned the account, but Eddie went through it in less than a decade after his grandpa died, on slow dogs and fast women, derivatives and mortgage bonds. If it hadn't been for the leveraged bets, he'd be a rich man today, but all that was left of his family's sweat were the worn out boots, the junkyard car, and the clothes he'd packed in the trunk.

In his mind he was composing a memoir, in the mode of a Picaresque. In a barrier island village along the Florida Coast, there lived until a short while ago, a gentleman of a certain estate. He still kept a mallet and saddle around, but the stable of ponies for contact sport and the greyhounds for coursing were gone. His abode was a measly ten-room apartment above a mere twelve-car garage, and what little income he had left, from renting out the manse, was consumed by debt and daily expenses.

A crock of well-spiced brisket of beef, otherwise known as chili, and squabs he reared in a homemade coop, served as his principal diet. His vast collection of bespoke suits, ill-adapted to the Florida climate, had formerly sold on consignment, yet he recently cut a courageous figure in Brooks Brothers seconds from the outlet mall.

He was known by his peers for his excellent mind, though few could have said what for, and given to perusing sophistical tomes by Moldy Fried Ham, Ants Rant, and Friedrich von Hiccup, which still infected the imagination of the drug-addled leadership class. As these were no longer useful to him, he burnt them on his bluestone hearth and collected second-hand cookery books, from which he gleaned his knowledge of chili and the delicacies of the Creoles. He supplemented this reading with novels, chronicles of the open road that urged him to dispossess himself of all that he once held dear. The most notable of these were Don Quixote and The Tale of Huckleberry Finn.

It is said by some that he went rather mad, when finally, consumed by debt and wilted by the endless summer, he auctioned off his remaining estate and all the valuables therein. Rumor had it the auction price settled his accounts at Goldman-Sachs, but did not leave enough for his bookie. As the white collar criminal class might say, Eddie was on the lam.

The sharp blast of an air horn jarred him out of his reverie as the chromium grill of a big Mack tractor grew in his rear view mirror. Eddie swung his wheel to the right, veering into the slow lane. Watching the tanker truck roll by and cut in up ahead, his eyes were snared by the skull and crossbones looming over its tail end. Alas poor Yorick… Eddie mused, fingering the red bandanna tied around his neck. To be or not to be…, he muttered, pondering the depths of his situation. ...that is the bare bodkin.With a chortle at the thought of Duke and the Dauphin making such a hash of the Bard, Eddie swung the wheel to the left, gunning the motor to pass the skull and all the morbid thoughts it brought him.

In dire need of human contact, Eddie grabbed his microphone and launched into some of that CB chatter in a version of Texas Twang he'd learned from nowhere anyone could place.

“This is Gopher Anus talking, heading west on Highway Ten, anyone out there? Over.”

The accent would seem genuine, even to Texan ears, were it not for the riffs off Gomer Pyle, and bits of central Florida cracker he'd picked up at the track. It wasn't that Eddie was phony or nothing, but it didn't take much, to his way of thinking, to know that Connecticut lockjaw wasn't the way to appeal to truckers working the Deep South routes but, as with the chum of the ruling class, his populism was just a pose.

“This is Gopher Anus talking, heading west on Highway Ten, anyone out there? Over.”

Bestowed on a Doofus he once portrayed on the open mikes of comedy clubs, the handle was now a private joke, used at his own expense. The skits were the work of his songwriter buddy, a one-hit wonder with a Grammy award, who had faded into obscurity in a haze of mind-altering substances. He was a surgeon when Eddie knew him, the kind who trims the trees, but he sure did have some tales to tell about the leading lights of the counterculture and the underaged groupies who serviced them. With his beatnik jive, and bohemian style, he provided a welcome diversion from the corporate clones on the benefit circuit, and was one of few who would speak to Eddie after his fall from grace. Having seen both sides of life, he challenged Eddie to get out more, to mix it up with “those people,” the ones that Eddie and cohorts saw as sacrificial pawns.

“They're the hipbone of society, Eddie,” his songwriter friend used to say. “We couldn't walk upright without them. We'd still be down on all fours sniffing each other's private parts and you wouldn't have the fingers to pull their strings.”

Eddie keyed his mike again. “This is Gopher Anus talking. I'd sure like some company. Anyone out there? Over.”

All he ever got was dead air, as if he were operating a blog that never had a visitor, or was, perhaps, that proverbial tree that fell in the forest with no one around... Much like social Internet sites, the CB enabled Eddie to be whatever he chose to be, and say whatever he had to say, but with one distinct advantage. Unregulated by the FCC, unmonitored by the NSA, and unrecorded by Lockheed Corp. for the spooks at HSD, it was the one remaining medium of free and unfettered democratic expression. The words he spoke were gone forever, a memory only to those who heard them, never to fly back into his face after going viral on him, or bollocks-up his career prospects due to their nonconformity to the range of acceptable ideas, and he was well beyond the reach of Bowdler and the priss who Gribbenized Huckleberry Finn. Were there more of an audience for it, it might well be dangerous to those from the former planet Pluto who really run the Republic, but as it was nobody cared.
Why won't Yorick talk to us, Gopher? Eddie wanted to know.

Eddie put down the mike and sighed. The romance of the open road was not living up to his expectations, given that he was on his own and his primary means of communication had but a one mile radius. Despite its limited usefulness, it had been a fad that swept the country at the height of the sexual revolution, celebrated by popular culture in film, television and song, though not so much in literature. Its demise coincided suspiciously with the rise of the AIDS epidemic, yet still it served its original purpose as a medium for teamsters.

What kind of trucker is he, anyway? No CB Radio.

With lightning flashes from a distant storm bringing back painful memories of old portfolio charts, it was not the time for solitude. Yorick's skull was back in his face, and a flashing light on the dashboard demanded his attention. He wondered how he'd fill his tank when he had no money for food or gas, and he was in desperate need of both.

Damn it, Gopher, Eddie said to himself, if we don't find some work real soon we just might have to end it all.

Suddenly, the radio squawked.

“This is Tango Tyler, over. Can anyone tell me -”

Almost overwhelmed with joy at the sound of a human voice, Eddie grabbed his microphone. He'd been a full day on the road already, up through the swamps on Route 19, where boundless groves of wax myrtle bushes were a man's sole travel companions. Unless you count the Florida heat, which felt like being hauled around in a marathoner's jockstrap. He'd warbled into his transmitter every half hour or so, and this was the first bit of conversation he'd had in all that time.

“Whaddayasay there, Tango Tyler? This is Gopher Anus talking, heading west on Highway Ten.”

“Whatchya haulin, prairie dog shit?”

“Seat of your pants, there, Tango Tyler, think you're some kinda comedian, do you? Rig full of laughing hyenas here be much obliged for your jokes and all but you wouldn't want to mess with them none. They ain't been fed a spell.”

“This is Tango Tyler. Don't be givin me lip now, boy. Runnin a handle like Gopher Anus, you take what's coming to you.”

“Got your attention, didn't I?”

“Tango Tyler, Gopher Anus. Don't be lettin it go to your head. Been tryin to raise some chat all day.”

“You the guy with the tanker truck, skull and crossbones on its back?”

“That's a negative, Gopher Anus. He the one you wanna talk to?”

“Not a problem,” Eddie said. “I'm looking for that good old boy they calls Ophelia's Darling. Ain't heard tell of him lately, have you?”

“Sounds like a live one to me, Good Buddy, you two doin the hanky-panky?”

“Hell I am. But your wife might be. He's one hell of a womanizer -”

“Tango Tyler, right back at you. Don't be talkin about my Mama. I'm half a mind to shove your teeth right down your lyin throat.”

“Just squaring up the put-downs, pardner. Heard that handle round these parts?”

“Can't say I have there, Gopher.”

“How long you been driving, Tango?”

“Darn near half my lifetime, and I'm well over fifty.”

“And you ain't heard of… damn! All his cooking and womanizing… boy's a legend near as I can tell.”

The traffic ahead was slowing down approaching the brow of the hill, at least what passed for a hill in those parts. It was undulating woodland mostly, not a town or a building in sight. To Eddie it looked like the chart pattern of a real solid equity buy, but songwriter buddy's words of wisdom echoed in his mind.

Get your head out of that world, Big Daddy. The market's just a pack of wolves feeding off a diminishing herd. Think of what else you can do for bread instead of running money.

While he might have corralled some new investors and gotten back in the game, he sensed it had gotten beyond his ken in the years that he had played it, and was far too spooked by his massive losses, which exceeded all his previous gains and all the paid in capital. Thus, freed from the burden of his family's wealth, he was forced to do what his father urged but never had the courage to try. Like many a fictional character before him, and a few real people, too, Eddie set out to seek his fortune without a dime to his name.

As Eddie reached the crest of the slope, a cacophony of voices erupted from the scanner. Its talk was full of exit ramps and alternate routes, etcetera, what the cause of the hold-up was and how long it might be. Another half a mile on, Interstate Ten was a parking lot, and a truck stop parking lot at that, filled with scores and dozens of trucks, all within range of his radio, and all at a dead stop. Eddie looked down at his gas gauge, turned his vapor fueled car to the shoulder, and waited for the chatter to settle down. As Eddie sat there cooling his heels, contemplating the fix he was in, he had no doubt he was capable of getting himself out of it, but was clueless on how to proceed. Though he'd read some Horatio Alger tales back when he was a boy, the fact is he wasn't a lad anymore, and he'd never known anyone, personally, who had to started up with nothing.

K

“This is Hairless Hairy...”

He calls himself Hairless, hell. Kind of haircut I had, what does he think I am?

“...Anyone know some banker jokes?”

“This is Tango Tyler, Harry. How does a Wall Street bankster resemble a Master of the Universe? Over.”

Eddie rolled his eyeballs. Not that old saw, he thought.

“Beats the hell out of me, Tango,” Hairless Harry replied.

“One is a mongoloid version of the other,” Eddie chimed in with the obvious answer. “This is Gopher Anus, Harry, you get clipped in the bond market, too?”

“What the hell you talking about?”

“Hell if I know, Harry,” Eddie said. “I'm just looking to make some chatter and find Ophelia's Darling, wanting to eat his famous chili. Starts with brisket, that boy does, braised in stout with garden herbs, capsicums and tomatillos, couple of secret ingredients just to round the hot stuff out, all served up on a china plate, with a side of rice and turtle beans. Downright aphrodisiac, that boy's chili is. Worked cafes from here to Abilene long as I been driving rigs. Last I heard he'd be in these parts. I always like to taste his cooking whenever I pass through, but that boy never stays put nowhere. Gets himself woman trouble everywhere he goes. Has to hotfoot out of town once they get that way about him. Says them gals want saddle ponies they shouldn't be riding rodeo. Over.”

Satisfied, he looked around and saw the traffic hadn't moved. Yorick's skull was still in sight, so he figured he'd stay put awhile. My advertisement for myself went off pretty well, he thought. He'd spread the word about his chili, made it sound right tasty, too, and sexy enough to sell it.

Then, it occurred to him what went wrong. Goddam it, Gopher Anus, you forgot about the outfit. How's anyone gonna recognize me and offer me a job?

K