adamgnade - Tumblr blog

adamgnade · 2 months ago

Text

HARDCOVERS available of these five. Hit my shop and get yours. Read an excerpt from one of these below.

Excerpt from Float Me Away, Floodwaters

There’s a man fishing under the train bridge. He stands on the rocks a few feet from the shaded water, casting out his line—the line and bait and sinker arcing gracefully in the air, the sun catching the line, and for a moment it shines like a strand of polished glass.

You can smell the river park’s lawn. It’s fresh cut—a summer smell. You can smell the gas from the mower. It’s barely there, on the breeze—a prickling tang in your nostrils along with hotdogs grilling and vanilla Swisher Sweets and coconut suntan lotion from the people on towels laying out.

As you get closer it’s the smell of the river—earthy, a desert kind of earthy next to the woody scent of the reeds and cattails. Underneath that it’s the smell of mud and wet rock.

As you near the shore it’s the smell of hot sand. It’s a mineral smell, salty, a smell like diamonds if diamonds had a smell—a beach scent without the sea.

I drop my rolled-up towel on the sand at the riverbank, pull my t-shirt over my head, and kick off my sneakers. I haven’t slept in two days. It might be three. After the first day and a half awake the details matter less and less.

Under the train bridge I wade out into the water of the Colorado River—a mild and shallow stretch of it running through the northern edge of Yuma, Arizona, the blonde sand sinking beneath my feet, thick grains, coarse like bits of gravel between your toes but finer the deeper you go. The water is warm. The smell of desert and sage and dry grass sharp in the air. In the shade under the overpass I sit cross-legged, the water up to my neck, and it moves around me and I dunk my head back and wash off the sweat of the past few days. It’s good to be clean. I feel alive, fresh, quiet inside, steady. I smile up at the overpass because I’m exhausted and because the train tracks are beautiful with the rectangular spaces of bright blue sky shining through them and I think of how I would explain it to Alison (the dark metal and wood, the wood that smells of tar even from this distance). There’s maybe a dozen of us in the water under the overpass. Sketchy dudes shirtless with silver cans of beer. An old man with a long gray mullet off on the edge of the group, standing waist deep, hands on his narrow hips, staring off downriver. Couples. Boys with shaved heads or rattails. Teenage girls in swimsuits and crop tops. Everyone floating off on their own or in small groups and then—

—the train.

—the train passing overhead from out of nowhere and all the sounds in the universe are blotted out to a crashing CHING CHING CHING CHING CHING—

—and you feel it inside your chest, in your guts, in the marrow of your bones. I shut my eyes and hear nothing but the train and feel nothing but the warm water moving and the sand below my crossed legs.

After the train has passed, specks of dust drift down from the bridge above us. The dust hangs in the gauzy light—silent, burnished like hot copper, dark and golden.

And then in the silence I hear myself think: But you will DIE someday. At some point you won’t exist and time will go on forever without you. I don’t want to tell myself this, but it comes on its own.

I shut my eyes again and push it away. No. Fuck you. Don’t ruin this.

When I open my eyes, the dust is gone. I dig my hands into the wet sand below me looking for what I don’t know and then—

—and then a slurry, drawling voice behind me says, “Ey man you gahha light?”

I swim-turn around and it’s a guy my age wading toward me. He’s skinny to the point of it being a problem and he’s got the words “Country Fucking Music” tattooed as an arch across his chest in Old English script. When he gets close he lets himself sink to his shoulders just like I am then sticks an arm out of the water. It splashes me and the splash startles me. My nerves are shot to hell, but I take his hand and shake it. “Man, you awright?” “Huh? Am I—” “I axed if you had a light and you just looked at me like I got spaghetti for hair.” He laughs as I try to remember the question. “I don’t rem— Oh. Right. Yeah, no, sorry I don’t have a light. I mean—” I realize then it’s been a few days since I’ve said anything out loud. Not since Austin. He stares up at the tracks above us, squinting, and then he says, “Yeah, man, I guess. We all wet here. Ain nobody gahha light.” “Sorry … that I don’t.” “Nobody does, man. Thas just how it is.” He shakes his head. He’s wearing an old red corduroy trucker cap that reads “Lakeside Speedway” in tilted white and blue lettering that’s meant to give the impression of fast movement, and now I notice tattoos, tiny ones along his jawline and across his cheekbones. Text. Words. Too small for me to read. “Ey, I’m Lakeside Speed Wayne,” he says, sticking his skinny arm out of the water again. I shake his hand for the second time. “James,” I say. “James who? James and the fuckin’ Giant fuckin’ Peach?” he laughs, and then I’m laughing too. Maybe I’m laughing because I haven’t slept, but that doesn’t matter, I’m laughing regardless and it feels great. It feels like all is right with the world, like we will never die, none of us, we will keep on driving through faded desert towns, keep staying awake for days, keep wading out into calm rivers, keep meeting new people, keep shaking hands over and over again, keep laughing, keep asking questions just to maybe ask questions. “James Jackson Bozic,” I say. “Sweet, man. Cool name. ‘S good to meet you. This place, man. This. Fucking. Plaaace.”

“Yeah, this place,” I nod.

“This … plaaaaaace,” he drawls quietly, staring up at the bridge and the tracks above us.

We sit in silence for a while.

I dig into the sand and find a pebble then sidearm it across the surface of the water. It skips once and then it’s gone. “Naw, man, watch this. See a true champion at work,” he says, and his arm jerks out from the water and a black flash leaves his hand in a whipping snap. The rock skips once, once more, three times, a fourth, a triumphant fifth, and an extravagant sixth before it flicks through the cattails like a bullet. “Lakeside Speed Waaaayne!” he shouts, arms raised out of the water above his head. “Woop woop! Yeeeeah! Come meet the champion, muhfuckers!”

Two of our fellow swimmers turn to look. The rest ignore us. It’s quiet again.

I hear a girl laugh behind me.

A beer can snaps open.

Someone sneezes and someone god blesses them. Someone says, softly, quietly, “Bro, I would freakin’ kill for a pizza right now.”

A guy and a girl stand up from the water and wade to shore, holding hands, tall, slim, dark-skinned, faces close, talking soundlessly. “Lovebirds,” says Lakeside Speed Wayne matter-of-factly, jutting his chin at them.

I nod at his red trucker cap and say, “Your Lakeside Speedway hat … we’ve got a track called Lakeside Speedway where I live. Just outside Leavenworth. In Kansas.” “My maaan!” his arm sticks out of the water again and we shake hands for the third time. “My my my my man! You’ll never believe this but I lived in Lev’worth all my life ‘fore I came out here. Muhfuckers called me Lakeside Speed Wayne ‘cause I’m Wayne—” he lays a hand on his chest and bows his head “—and I worked at the track sellin’ nachos since I was a baby. You ever go?” “Yeah, totally. I was just there, like … uh, like, a couple weeks ago for the stock cars.” “Home. Town. Brother!” A fourth handshake. I tell him it’s so weird to meet somebody from Leavenworth out here that it’s breaking my brain in half and he says, “Yeah man, me and my buddy Stevie Durkin drove out here from Lev’worth three years ago for that dry Arizoney climate and we ain never look back. Muh. Fucker. I miss it today! I can hear the cars right now. Vrrroom! Yeah! Woop! Woop! And them nachos! Naaaachos! Get your nachos, muhfuckers! Get your nachos right here! You know Stevie, Stevie Durkin? Big guy but got a little baby head and a mouse voice like Michael Jackson? Prison guard out at Lansing? Worked at Petro Deli for a moment. Drunk Stevie? Trouble Stevie?” “I don’t know anybody.” “You know that auto shop down on 4th that has the, like … the fuckin’ … what is it called … that fuckin’ … fuckin’ LED sign out front with all them Jesus jokes?” “Jesus what?” “Jesus jokes, man! Like, God sent the first text message—the bible. That sorta thing. The Easter Bunny never died for nobody’s sins. Jesus jokes.” “Oh yeah, course! It’s like five minutes from the farm where I live.” “Stevie’s uncle Jarmaine owns that place, man! He owns it! Lakeside Speed Waaaayne!” he shouts. I think of shouting my own name, but then I realize I have no reason to. You’ve got to do something heroic or say something cool in order to shout your own name. People who shout their own name for no reason make everyone else nervous.

“Man, Bozic, what you doin’ out in Yuma? You are … far off course, my fren.” “I’m on tour all summer.” “Like in a band? You play music? What instrument?” “No, a book tour. I’m on a book tour.” “You got any of your books with you?” I pretend like he’s asking if I have my books with me in the river and I make a startled face and act shocked, “What?! Here in the river?! No!” “Hahahaha, I like you, man. Here in the river. I like you.” “I’m just playin’ but yeah, yeah, I got some in my car. I got a bunch of boxes. I’ll give you a copy if you want.” “Give. Shit, man, I’ll trade somethin’ for it. You like long-sleeve t-shirts?” “Sure, yeah, I guess I like long-sleeve shirts.” “I got a lotta long-sleeve t-shirts in my van. I’ll hook you up.”

Digging in the sand for another rock to skip, I find a tiny clam the size of a marble. I pull it dripping from the water—black and yellow with elegant circular ridge lines on its shell like a thing carved from gold. “Check it out. It’s a clam,” I say. I hand it to him. “What the fuck, man, a little bitty clam. What up, little clam? How you doin’, muhfucker,” he holds it close to his left eye and says, “Man, Bozic, you ever eat a clam?” “Yeah, when I was a kid. Clams and linguine.” “Man, it’s like eatin’ a damn eyeball. I do not approve. Clams are cool, though, man. Clams are some chill muhfuckers. You gotta respect a clam. Just sittin’ there and bein’ like, Hey, assholes, I’m a clam and I don’t care about shit, leave me alone, get outta here, fuck off because I’m a clam, I ain even got a face. Man, I wish we was clams. That’d be fuckin’ tight, man. To be inside thislittle shell? Don’t even get me started! Let’s be clams. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, man.”

Yeah. Okay. Why not.

Let us be clams.

Two sleepy clams. Let us sleep in the sand and grit and silt. The river flowing above. The breeze rustling the cattails as soft as a dream. The train passing over.

After I trade a book for a shirt with Lakeside Speed Wayne, I sleep for a while on my towel in the sand under the train bridge—a deep, stagnate, dreamless sleep. When I wake up it’s dusk and cooler now. Gnats hang in thick clouds over the river water which moves so slow you can hardly tell it’s moving. The water is dark like wine bottle glass—glossy, smooth. The sky is shades of gray and purple—aluminum, fireplace ash, orchid, a shadowy violet. The silence, heavy.

That night I eat a couple oranges I pulled off a tree in San Angelo and a bag of Gardetto’s rye chips then sleep in the backseat of my car in the parking lot. When I wake up it’s morning and hot again and the sun glares hard through the window.

I take another dip in the river. Then, half-asleep still, I drive back through town wearing my damp swim trunks and the white long-sleeve Dale Earnhardt Jr. shirt Lakeside Speed Wayne traded me.

Driving down the dusty main street—old cars parked in front of vacant storefronts, windows soaped white, signs that read: “We Have Moved,” “Sorry We’re Closed,” “For Rent.” A mannequin woman—naked and without hair, armless, leaning in the second story window of a red brick building. On the radio the DJ says, “Whut up, y’all! Iss y’girl Karen Kay! KTTI Yuuuuma! Gon be a hot one today. High of 105! Awready 80 and iss only 9:30! Keep cool, drink lotsa water, Yuma. Up next we got Reba. We got Garth. We got Kenny Chesney and Alan Jackson and Faith Hill. Keep y’dial on KTTI Yuma, Country Hits of Yesterday and Today! Don’t go nowhere!”

Don’t go nowhere.

I won’t.

Driving. My phone sits on the seat next to me—dead, black screen, cracked. Battery ran down two days ago. Won’t hold a charge.

Driving. The pillowy sand dunes and the sunbaked rock flats. The blazing yellow sun and the great piercing sky, blue and empty of clouds.

Stopped again. Dry wind cooling the sweat in my hair, rattling tin signs nailed to the old gas station facade at Crossing Snake Junction where I pull over for a fill-up and another bag of Gardetto’s for later. Getting back in my car my brain says, Don’t go nowhere in the voice of the KTTI DJ and then I say it out loud in my own voice to no one in particular.

Don’t go nowhere. Low hills—blue and dim like strips of faded construction paper. Jagged stone ruins of wasteland settlements.

Don’t go nowhere—go somewhere. Hot asphalt and silver pools of heat mirage wriggling on the road up ahead.

Sand dunes as far as you can see. Sand like yellow-white soft serve ice cream, rippling out in all directions, rising in great waves of mounds, dipping into smooth, soft valleys. Driving with my knees, I roll my red bandana into a thin strip and tie it across my forehead to keep the hair and sweat out of my eyes and I think of Bruce Springsteen. Bruce with his red bandana headband, his Fender Telecaster slung low, his cut-off sleeves and some sort of black leather vest, one fist punched in the air, singing about blowing away the lies that leave you lost and brokenhearted, about tearing the pain right out of your heart because you are done fucking around, you are done hurting yourself, you are fixing what’s broke. Out the open window I yell “Bruuuce!” and it feels good to yell it and—

—and out the open window it’s tan-yellow desert flats passing. Hills in the distance, absent of feature, boundless south to Mexico. I want to yell “Bruuuce!” a thousand times. I want to claw into my chest and rip out all that’s been darkening my eyes.

Rip it all out. That feeling where it’s like you’re excluded from everything. Where you’re disposable to the people you love. Where you’re here on the edge fighting like hell to break in, but you can’t get through. Where no one wants you to get through. Where there’s something wrong with you and everyone can tell there’s something wrong with you and they keep their distance. You don’t sleep enough. You always look tired. You say awkward shit that makes you sound stupid. You’re bad at keeping in touch. You’re weird in a way they don’t like. They smell it on you. They see it in your eyes.

Rip it all out. The hard days where you smash your head into a wall from dawn to dusk and stay up all night worried sick with awful gnawing thoughts. Rip it all out. Thoughts like But you will DIE someday.

Rip it all out.

Rip it all out. This stupid fucking book tour I’m on and three days ago in Austin where only two people showed up and they were drunk. They sat in the front row and talked to each other about how much they loved movies about whales the whole time until I adlibbed a part in the reading where I said, “I fucking hate whales, I wish they would all get their asses kicked,” even though I actually love whales, and have always loved whales. The two people got up and one of them said, “Bro you are the worst person in the world,” and they left and there was no one to read to.

Rip it all out.

Rip it all out. How you never know what to say and sometimes you say something and you’re like, “Ugh, no, why did I just saythat! I am the dumbest person who ever lived. I should be in jail!”

Rip it all out.

Rip it all out. The weight of fear. The weight you’ve let hold you down like a huge rock chained to your leg, and you’re just below the surface of the water fighting for breath, trying to swim up to the air. You can see the light above and the bottom of your boat floating on the surface, but the stone and the chain hold fast.

Rip it all out.

Rip it all out because it feels good. It feels like a sun rising inside you. A lovely yellow flower opening like a gift in your heart.

Driving.

Desert sky as seen through the window—sharp blue against tan and gray. Up ahead of me is a white Mack truck. I pull behind it, but there are cars in either lane and I can’t pass.

On the back of the trailer is a crudely drawn black and white image—some sort of magnet poster of an angry man as seen from the chest up, life-size. He looks like a cop and he’s pointing a finger in my direction and the caption above his head reads, “HAVE YOU PRAYED TODAY.” No question mark. I roll up the sleeves of Lakeside Speed Wayne’s Dale Jr. shirt—one, then the other, and when I do that I realize the shirt’s a bootleg. Dale is spelled “Dial.” I say it out loud and it sounds like an Australian accent. “Dial Earnhardt Jr.” I say, “Dial Earnhardt Jr., mate.” I say, “Throw a shrimp on the barbie, Dial Jr. Come and say G’day, Dial Jr.” It feels good to say and I can’t stop saying it and doing so out loud (and alone) makes me feel absolutely disconnected from the world and reality and from any chance I’ve got at being a functioning member of society. Disconnected and thirsty. “Pull ovah for a bee-uh, Dial Jr. Fosters, Australian for bee-uh. Get a bee-uh for Jiff Gordon, too.”

I hit the turn signal and take the off-ramp to get a cold drink. The air is hot and forceful in thick gusts through my window, but now it’s easing as I slow and pull up behind a gray van with silver-white glares of sun on its twin back windows, blinding. You can smell the exhaust from its muffler—sour and dark and hot in the air.

I make a left into the parking lot. A group of children are standing in the shade of the entrance to the gas station’s Country Kitchen. One of them holds a small dog and the others crowd around to pet it.

I open the car door and step into the heat.

Leaving the mini-mart with my 99-cent bag of popcorn and a can of Country Time lemonade I see a girl with lavender hair stretching in the shade next to the pumps. In the passenger seat of her car, a guy her age is looking at his phone.

The girl dips forward in a bow, then rising graceful, arms skywards in a U shape. She bows at the waist again, swinging her torso to the left before rising back up. Her lavender hair sways left then right.

A man with big eyeglasses and a skinny brown mustache, his thin hair lifting with the breeze like a mohawk, stands next to his Honda Accord, holding the gas nozzle in place as it pumps into his tank. He’s watching her stretch, his necktie flapping over his shoulder in the dry wind, yellow sweat stains under the arms of his shirt. He bends over, reaching into the open window, pulls a tan suede cowboy hat out of the car, and jams it on his head. After that he takes a vape pen out of the pocket of his loose khakis and sucks on it deeply, his cheeks hollowing. I look down before he lets out the smoke.

Sitting in my car in the gas station parking lot I write a postcard to Alison back on the farm and then one to Frankie’s boys, my god-sons, who I helped raise until they moved up to Michigan three years ago. I tell Alison about Lakeside Speed Wayne and Dial Jr. and about the Navajo train kids who took me swimming outside Sedona in a great desert canyon, a place called “the Cheese Grater” because you slide down a gushing shoot of wet rocks to the pools below and it shreds your skin and then drops you into an icy pool of water only it’s not icy anymore because your heart is racing and the air is hot even at this altitude. You lie floating in the pool and your scraped-up back and sides ache like hell and you stare up at the red canyon walls and god you’ve never felt better. I tell the boys about the abandoned stripmalls and the gas stations selling dried rattlesnake heads and scorpions in glass paperweight baubles. As I write, I eat the popcorn. It tastes like nothing, like styrofoam peanuts that squeak as you bite into them. My throat is dry and it’s been dry all day. I crack open my can of lemonade and take a sip, but it doesn’t help.

Driving up into the hills of Devil’s Canyon before the descent down the pass into Pine Valley, the road twists through the Jacumba Mountains to the summit, boulders strewn on either side, the land hard and irregular like a great handful of rocks dropped from the sky with no semblance of design. My car struggles with the incline as big rigs pass and disappear up the grade, the road twisting through sharp switchbacks. Below me in the canyon crevice is the rust-blacked carcass of an old van on its side. I look down at it as I drive. My dry throat feels like the metal of that van—coarse, hard. No way anyone survived that fall. It must’ve rolled a quarter mile, tumbling end over end before it came to rest. Maybe it’s fine. Maybe they pushed it over the edge then walked away. Can someone push a van off a cliff? How many people would it take? Ten? They’d have to be weightlifters. Ten weightlifters pushing a van until it tips and rolls tumbling down the cliff. I imagine the weightlifters celebrating after they push the van off the cliff. High-fiving. Flexing. Showing each other their muscles. Maybe one of them is Arnold Schwarzenegger and he’s their leader. He says, “Hasta la vista, baby” to the van and his friends high-five some more, flex some more. Maybe one of the weightlifters claps Arnold on the back and tells him, “Don’t go nowhere” as a response to “Hasta la vista, baby” and maybe Arnold has a moment of clarity, maybe Arnold thinks, Don’t go nowhere means don’t die. Don’t go nowhere means don’t go to the place that is nowhere. Live, stay alive, pump iron until you’re Mr. Universe, make movies, flex your muscles so everyone can see, smoke cigars, take vitamins, crack jokes about killing your enemies in the action movies you star in, drink mineral water, travel back to the past and try to terminate someone, do a sweet family comedy that makes everyone cry and also smile, tell them “Hasta la vista, baby,” tell them “I eat Green Berets for breakfast and right now I’m very hungry,” tell them “I’ll be back” and then BE back, pump more iron, be a governor, be great, be fantastic. For some reason it makes me want to eat all the spaghetti in the world. I don’t know why but it does. I think of a giant plate of cartoon spaghetti with red sauce on top and a couple meatballs and a fork sticking out of it.

#writting #travel writing #adam gnade #book tour #books

2 notes · View notes