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Heidi Ho: Part THREE
Flashback to an Epiphany
In restless dreams I drove alone/narrow streets of cobblestone/I approached the halo of a street lamp/ I turned the car’s heater against the cold and damp*…Oh wait, that’s Simon and Garfunkel. But it fits magnificently my feeling of loneliness and isolation right now, seeing how I’ve been in the state penitentiary for the amount of time would take a beginning calculus student to master definite integrals. Interestingly enough, that amount of time is also equal to the amount of time it would take for a perfectly unassuming, harmless, innocuous drug runner to make a bad run, get caught, get stuck in rehab, and have the leeches there hook her to something far more dangerous than the simple perk she gets from delivering a (very reasonably priced) stash of goods from Bloomington to Columbus via Nashville: cathartic creative writing. I can’t go more than nine weeks without needing to turn out a lump of cheesy, maudlin sentiment that would make Chris Columbus retch in disgust.
In the midpoint of my trip, my ill-fated delivery mission, in the depths of Hicksvillish Nashville, indecision overwhelmed me. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? An inky pall fell over my soul, and my eyes went dark. I flipped on my headlights in an attempt to give my eyes light; I turned on the radio in an attempt to fill the emptiness that buzzed in my ears. No effect. Then, in front of me, I saw a street light approaching me, or maybe I was approaching it—in my realm of confusion, that was a difference without a difference. As the light and I drew nearer (the distance was decreasing at a rate of 34.189mph, which, interestingly enough, meant that, with the height of my car 4.5 feet and the height of the street light 25 feet, the shadow behind me would be moving at a rate of 41.634 mph) my soul became more and more clear to me for what it was: the soul of an evil, crack-head woman who would sell her own mother to pay the bills she ran up last night in that brothel on Park Avenue and Lincoln Street. The rays of light were merciless as they illuminated my soul, as they…well…enlightened it.
Then Santana, blasting on the radio, burst into my ears, and I remembered that my mother never made me chocolate chip cookies when I came home from school, and that the brothel was actually quite a nice brothel, and the street light became only another electric appliance that I was approaching at a rate of 34.189 mph, with my very faint (it was daylight, after all) shadow behind me rapidly catching up to me, because it was moving 7.505 mph faster than I was. A nice, comforting murk fell over my soul again and I remembered that I still had half the journey to continue before I could complete my drop and reap my reward (5 ounces of my employer’s finest), and I had better pay attention to the driving.
At that moment, sadly, an anal-retentive cop who should have been scarfing-down doughnuts at some cheesy diner noticed that I was not going slowly enough to suit his sensibilities, which would never survive in the fast-paced setting of people who are smart enough not to live in Nashville, or even Indiana, for that matter, and the rest, as they say, is history. Besides, it’s not so bad here. I’m taking notes to give to the management next time I stop at Park and Lincoln.
