The Road Ahead

”The road stretched on and on. Not a soul in sight. I looked around and the barren landscape stared back at me. The heat was oppressive. How long had I been going? Hard to say, but I was determined not to lose my nerve. I could not stop thinking about what had happened. My head was spinning. There was no point going back to the car. I picked up my bag again and went on”.

I always knew I would end up on this very road. They’d said it a hundred times before, and they had been right. Here I was, on the longest and loneliest road in southern Texas, trying to reach the Mexican border. It was the road that every criminal who escaped conviction went down. It was a dirt road and it stretched on for miles, in a southern direction, towards pity and poverty, but towards freedom. I was a criminal you see, a convict. I had robbed a few liquor stores to support my drug addiction and had ended up shooting one of the clerks that worked there. It was a woman, in her early twenties. I don’t know if she made it, but it didn’t matter anyway. I was a criminal on the run, and I wouldn’t survive a prison stay, especially not one as long as the one I was going to sentence. I had been to prison once before. That time it was just a minor assault charge, and I only sat for 30 days and had two years in a rehabilitation program, but what for? Later that same year I got a girlfriend and we moved in together. After eight months or so, she left and the next thing I heard was that she had gotten pregnant and was demanding child support. All this happened in DC, so I moved to Kansas, in a small village. I then started getting into heroin and alcohol, and tried to start a band. We played pubs and bars, and we also had a club job once, but we never got any further, because the drummer went suicidal and shot himself in the head, and our singer got happily married, until his wife fucked him over, that is. So it was just me, my drug addiction, and my guitar. I started writing a few songs, about life generally, but also about what I had experienced in my life. There wasn’t much to tell from my childhood, but there was enough for around thirty songs in the past few years. So I wrote two albums, and mailed it out to different record companies. I would very much have liked to know what they thought about, but then it all went wrong as you might as well have noticed. So here I am, on the road again with a broke down car, an acoustic guitar and a bag with necessary tools I need to survive the trip, and in my pocket, a little over 35.000 US$. I also had a gun but I only had three bullets left, and nothing to shoot at so I didn’t know what to do with it. For self-defense maybe if I ran into an alligator, not that there was a river for the next 50 miles. I started walking, step by step, because I knew that this would probably be the end of me. I had no idea how to cross the border. A simple message from the police in Kansas and they would kick my ass into court as soon as they saw trying to get past the border. I didn’t know what my plan was, except going to Mexico. If I ever got there I wouldn’t know what to do. Maybe get a new identity, and travel to Europe. It was easily done in Mexico when you had as much money as I did. Then maybe I would check my mail and see if the record companies liked it. If they did I could be a musician and earn some, and maybe start living a decent life. Quit the drugs, and get married. Buy a mansion and have a kid, perhaps. And then when my fourth record would have come out, I would stop and retire to be around my family. I would go on vacation, and buy a little cabin at the beach, watch my kids grow, and see them starting their own family. Then I would like to have grandchildren, and watch them grow older. And when all this is done and me and my wife are happy, I can die in peace.