GENESIS, PART 1
Hi! I’m Tommy.
I’m a broken man.
A sorry sack of shit.
And I have nothing left to lose.
Why? Because I have nothing! My parents are gone, I don’t have any friends I can trust, and the rest of my relatives are too busy fighting over money or reinforcing their fascist political narratives to care about me anymore.
It has been four months since my mom passed. My dad passed nearly a year ago. Cancer is a bitch.
My relatives, wherever the hell in the Northeast they all live now, far away from Central Jersey, haven’t bother to call or text me ever since my parents’ estate was settled two and a half months ago. As an only child, I have no siblings to confide in. My so-called “friends” make up every excuse in the book to not come over to my parents’ house or go out to a bar or a concert or anything with me.
The only thing I have deserved in the last year was losing my job last month. When you are a stock trader as a top-five financial firm in the world like Keeler-Mason, and you lost as much a thousand on a multi-million-dollar client’s portfolio, you get the boot!
Other than that, I never hurt anyone. I have never been arrested or broken curfew or treated anyone with disrespect.
So why am I in this mental and existential predicament? I spent the last two months, sitting in darkness in my parents’ four-bedroom, two bath house, complete with the most bland, boring furnishings imaginable in many sleepless nights driving myself insane asking this question. I never bothered to look at myself in the mirror, and I let my thinning frizzy brown hair grown down below my ears. My bushy beard began to display some gray, and the bangs of my hair, at moments, began to obscure my hazel eyes.
I ran the full breadth of emotions, virtually stretching the gamut five times around the equator. I punched out a wall in my bedroom. I cried more times than I would like to, and even for some brief moments, I even considered loading my father’s 12 gauge in the garage and pointing it at my head.
Instead, I watched some porn! Hell, that is one way of coping, right?
For fuck’s sake, I’m only 26. After years of quoting funny movies for amusement, jerking off to more hot women than you can count a million times on your fingers, a college degree, and a near six-figure career salary, what has it all been worth?
Have I really lived?
So, one cloudless and pleasant early June morning, as that rising big ball of orange in the sky painted a psychedelic picture of colorful beauty, I made a simple decision.
To stop thinking and start living.
I packed a couple of bags, threw them in the backseat of my life’s biggest investment: what I call the Black Knight: my black 2010 American muscle car with racetrack taillights, chrome side skirts, and the shiniest rims this side of the sun, revved its 6.0L V8, 390 horsepower engine, and hit the road to begin a new life of adventure, discovery, and to have a good fuckin’ time.
As the upgraded all terrain tires absorbed the asphalt of the cracked roads of my formerly middle-class neighborhood and kissed the smooth tarmac of the interstate as the orangeness above transitioned to blue and the early morning fog dissipated, any malaise within me ceased to be, and a sense of liberation the weight of two Empire State Buildings disappeared.
The open road is the equivalent of heaven.
When you’re driving 80 with the windows down, the stereo blasting, and no vehicles in sight in front of you under a cloudless sky, you begin to believe that God exists.
Each vibration of the engine rev that vibrated my lower half felt orgasmic. Even more liberating mentally was the fact that no one else in the car could tell you what to do, think, or feel.
Leaving it all behind is freedom.
Hours felt like minutes, minutes felt like seconds, and seconds felt like frozen moments in time.
Traveling also gives you the opportunity to do things others may consider monotonous, insipid, or ridiculous, like randomly browsing the backroads of rural America to possibly discover or see things you previously never thought possible.
I had always found the summer road trips with my parents to visit family in the Carolinas to be the cure to insomnia. The bland, repetitive lines of trees, grass, and rarely any aesthetically pleasing sights are enough to put even the most avid adventurer to sleep, and trust me, those nine-hour rides were snooze fests. However, in moments when I was awake, I always wondered if the rides would be more fun on the backroads.
So that’s what I did. As soon as I arrived in Pennsylvania after an exhilarating yet dreary half hour gliding along the interstate, I took the first exit, pulled over, set my GPS for back roads only directions all the way to Pittsburgh, and I let the electric contraption of atlas and map algorithms determine my fate.
