An Uncivil War

Connor Tray is the hero. That much is true. He needs to get back to the East Coast of the US to start college, but these are strange days, indeed. The cheapest method he can find is to go by Greyhound bus from Los Angeles to New York, and that means through every square state there is. But the rules have changed, and Connor is a stranger in a strange land.

An Uncivil War

Jesus, I feel like breaking down and crying most days. I kid you not. To think that this is the land of Washington, of Dylan (Bob, that is), and the country where Woodstock happened.

Shit, how I miss the old country. The old times. When a soul knew what was bad and what was good, when you didn’t need to ask what was true and what was false. Not anymore, no sir, not anymore, those days are long gone.

The last thing I remember seeing that evening, as we left the city, was the glow from the distant bonfires, spitting out angel-like embers into a dark, hollow night. Travelling always caused my guts to feel empty, and my heart to sink to an all-time low. I honestly cannot tell you why that would be the case, but this travelling in anticipation was not what lit my dreams, nor would it be in any of the days ahead.   

I had been hanging out back west with my buddy, Shaker, but eventually the time had come when a soul had to head home. In my pocket was the last of the greenbacks, the money had long slipped into that pleasure-filled abyss, along with the creeps who helped me spend it.

I suddenly get an iced shiver in my spine, and I wonder: when did all the good folks disappear? Where are they all living?

Some say the good hearts left just after those Saturday night riots on the Sunbury Heights, and others think it was when the troopers started kicking in doors in the middle of the night.  Me, I reckon it was while I was passing though Omaha, but then, that’s much later in this story: so let me just start at the very beginning.

Okay one more thought, before I start, I mean really start. Was all of this the fault of weak skulls and weaker souls? Sometimes I lie awake at night and let that little rat of a thought burrow into my brain. You see good folks still defended churches, even when their little ones had been raped by hundreds of their own monsters. People still voted for Presidents when it was obvious to everyone else in this screwed-up world that they were biting on the wrong side of the moral biscuit. Heck, even Hitler fooled the people for a while. So who were the stupid ones? The ones who voted them in, and who supported them? 

Or the ones who always believed that, one day, good people would surely come riding by and put it all back to the way it was?’
 “There, there, little one, there, there”.

When it all started I was only eighteen summers and looking to get across the country to my college, back in New York City. My family lived just a gnat’s spit out of Sacramento, which is, or was, in the great state of California and I, Connor Tray, was going to be a Doctor of Medicine. Because that’s the words that made my daddy smile when he told his friends. ‘My boy is going to be a doctor’, and they’d all slap the gargoyle on the back and they’d all look back at me and wave. My stomach would go 360 inside, but still I’d smile and still I’d return the gesture.

You know, I used to think that the middle classes were a necessary evil, that they were the glue which held all this society stuff together. But the longer I walk this planet, the more I realise that they are just the fire blanket that suffocates life.  What could this planet have achieved, if the majority of folks hadn’t been shit stupid?  We could have surfed the stars and jumped the suns, but instead we drowned in banks, and mortgages and wars. Surely that has got to be the greatest sin going - being a dumb ape who steals and breaks folks so that they can have a pure gold toilet to shit in?

There was a time in this great country, when to pull out a cigarette was considered a greater crime that showing-off an automatic rifle. Not anymore. When the politically correct forgot to stop at the borders and kept on marching over the toes of the morally stupid – something had to give and give it certainly did. Folks started lighting up weed and cigarettes in bars and stores and even hospitals – hey, hadn’t it been those liberals who had caused all this correctness? I remember, in a sad, stinking, bar, downtown, a guy sticking up for the liberals by mumbling something about the fact that Jesus would have been a liberal. I thought to myself, that guy’s right, He would have. Then a monkey with a gun, shot the guy dead. Folks just moved up the bar some, they didn’t even call the cops.

So, I ask you, again, where did all the good people go?

The bus is the only option I can afford. Trains in the States? Forget that. Flying? Well, you know how that song goes. So, I leave downtown LA on a bus that is going to take me right across the country. I should have guessed it was never going to be straight-forward. There already had been trouble in the bus station. Some dude had started shouting that they ought to shoot the President. A messed-up drunk applauded at the sentiment, so one little old lady went off and called a cop over. The cop told the man to cease or else. The man chose the ‘or else’ and got dragged out of the bus station. I think I heard a scream coming from the direction he disappeared, but I couldn’t swear to that.

I like sitting next to the window, so some putz came in a filled the other seat. He looked real kind of nervous. Maybe he had just been running a long ways for the bus, or perhaps he had a secret. I wasn’t caring either way – except to say that he was smelling real bad. I mean the guy wasn’t too bad for a bus companion, I suppose, except that he kept checking his watch as if he didn’t want the bus to be late.  So, when the bus started up and pulled out of the station, I could see the relief on the guy’s face – well he looked happy, that’s all I can say.

As we turned out into the main street, I could hear the rat-tat-tat of gun fire – I stood up to get a better view, but it soon became obvious that they were making some kind of movie on the far corner. That’s LA for you – you can never tell what is real and what is fake. Jeez, that’s America for you.

The guy next to me, the guy who sweated a lot, was called Prince (well, that’s what it sounded like). He said he was traveling back across the wilds of this country to get a job in Kingston, upstate New York. Leastways that’s what he said. As the bus headed out of the city and towards the great playground of Las Vegas, he started to loosen up some and eventually he gave me the whole story. Seems had married a crazy looking ‘American lady’ for thirty thousand big ones – and now he was on his way to putting as much distance as he could between her and him.  He hoped it would let him stay in the country as the husband of the crazy woman. I sneered a little, because I wasn’t too sure that they would let him stay but I wouldn’t say that to his face. No sir. I wished him well but all the time, I knew.

I’m reading a book. Well it all kind of came back into style a while back – didn’t it? Prince or whatever his name was, is watching a movie or something on a cheap imitation iPhone – one that came out of China. Those bastards copy everything these days. Least that’s what my daddy said on the last night I saw him alive. But hey, I’ll keep that story for later, there is still a lot going on down here.

I ask this, Prince if he ain’t scared that the immigration folks will catch up with him, because these guys (and gals) seem to be on a bounty bonus these days. Kicking in doors. Stopping folks in the street. Throwing people off buses. Yeah, I had to remind him of that point. So, it was just as the bus was about to leave the LA area, that a car slows and pulls up in front of the bus. Man, the bus comes to a halt with a screech. The driver shouts something in Spanish, sees that it’s the immigration mongrels getting out of the car and changes to English. I kid you not.

They come on like some Gestapo officers from a black and white movie, asking for papers from those who don’t look like white Anglo-Saxon protestants. I look at Prince. He is sweating. I mean that’s the whole caboodle running down his face. One of the immigration officers, a woman, can see he’s nervous and asks for his papers. He’s got them, but he’s just married and he’s sitting next to a dude on a bus.
“Where’s your wife?” 

Prince mumbles something about being back in LA, she took sick and he decided to go on the honeymoon on his own – yeah, I didn’t believe it either. The next thing I know they are dragging him off the bus – dragging, as in his feet are scrape along the floor. Man, this guy is cooked. The car moves off and the only thought going through my head, is that at least I get a free seat next to me, at least until the next stop.

What kind of selfish is that?
Somewhere after we hit the desert, I must have dozed off, because the next thing I know this woman is sitting next to me, shaking me hard and telling me I gotta wake up. Why for god sake? Know what her answer was? Seriously, she woke me up to see the mountains. Like I’d never seen them before.

Before I took this bus, I had gone with my bud up the Big Sur and there were folks on that bus who had never seen the sea. Okay, I mean in real life. They’d all seen them on television but here they were staring at the waves.  Like some kind of miracle was going to blast out of the water and then they would have to applaud. I might have clapped under those circumstances, but these bus-riders were just staring at the quiet Pacific waves and saying ‘wow’ under their collective dumb-ass breaths. Sometimes it’s tiring sharing the world with idiots.

Once things had calmed down, our bus slid over the mountains and into that road which sits above Las Vegas. Man, have you ever seen Vegas from this angle? It is breath-taking. It looks like a city on the moon. A big glorious, neon encrusted, paradise of joy whacked straight down into the Sea of Tranquillity. 

Put it in your list of things to see before you die. You won’t be disappointed.

Vegas is one crazy, sonofabitch place to visit, never mind live. Nothing is real but then again perhaps they should make this the new capital of the new united states, because nothing is what it seems any more. Nothing.

Can I just state right here and now, that I never took to gambling. I knew that there was no way an ordinary person could win. I mean they built Vegas on all the suckers who thought they had a chance. You take a few bucks with you into the casino and when it’s gone, so are you. But that isn’t the way they work. 

They tempt with a little win here or a little win there and soon you’re hooked.
Just as we pulled into the bus station in Vegas, I could see a couple of tanks - army ones – pointing at something down the strip. I sometimes wonder if, as Americans, we went to war just after 9/11 and no one had the curtsey to shout ‘start’. We just slipped into it without ever noticing. Most days, I just feel like breaking down and crying. I tell you.

As I was getting off the bus, the driver looked at me, as if to say, ‘what could I do about your friend?’.
“I didn’t know him.” Was what I said, as I stepped down from the bus.

I think it’s safer these days to keep your distance. I’ve heard of folks whose only relationship with an outcast (so to speak) was on social media – getting picked up because they were a ‘friend’ of a deportee. You just don’t know who to trust anymore. You just don’t.

I have a half-hour to kill while they change over the drivers. Each one does their own little section – driving the bus one way, then returning on a bus going the other way. So, I walk up the strip to where I saw the tanks. There must be twenty armed soldiers hiding in the shadows of those beasts. Something is out there.

Turns out (and get this) it’s a demonstration supporting the new President. I kid you not. Supporting! I ask the guy ‘why the tanks?’, and he tells me ‘it’s to protect the good folks who are standing up for their individual rights to free-speech’. I thought he meant the other lot – but he didn’t. He meant those supporting the President. Is he crazy? What can the other lot do against tanks? Someone does what they did in China all those years ago and puts flags in the barrels of the guns. He gets hit and knocked to the ground. So much for free-speech, I’m thinking. What a load of baloney. Nowadays, free-speech is whatever backs up with what those in charge are thinking. Jeez, I’d probably get hit for just thinking that.

What happened to my country? When did it get so divided? Did too many good people keep quiet? Is this the beginning of the end? Because it sure feels like it.
It’s a strange old place, is Vegas. All about the gambling and the shows. 

Everywhere you go there are machines to play this and try that. But try to find out the time – and you can’t. So perhaps, this place would work just as well on the Moon.

I go into a small café for a pee, then a coffee and before I’ve got time to sip one drop, a brick comes straight through the store window. Some lady and a kid, sitting at the window, get hit and I can see blood trickling down both their faces. Before I can even cuss, two cops look in the café, then chase the guy, who threw the projectile, down the Strip. No one comes in to see if we are all okay. Guess that’s what we’ve become. A country that likes to catch those who disagree with it – and if you get caught up in the middle of it all – well, you’re just collateral, plain and simple.   

Now don’t you ever misuse my words and get me wrong, I love my country. I mean I love my country from the tip of my hairs to the nails on my feet and all stations in between. But something happened while we were sleeping. Those crazy folks who you would meet in malls or on buses, the ones who used to spout all sorts of crazy stuff, started to vote and when they tasted a little bit of what that could do, they voted some more. Right, I hear what you’re saying: it’s their world too, but just because you think a man is wrong because of his skin, or who he sleeps with, or what tongue he speaks – don’t mean you are right.

Once the genie is out of the bottle there ain’t no going back. No sir. Getting rid of a President don’t fix things. It surely doesn’t, because once you realize you are hungry, all you want is more of what you need.

This country, my country, is split right down the middle and nothing is going to fix that.

It’s just then that I get brought back with a bang. The guy the cops had been chasing is dragged back up the Strip. He managed to kick out and hit our window on the way back. Guess he’s going where Prince is going.

I remember once, long time ago, in my short life, me and my granddaddy were fishing in a creek out by the old docks. Now my granddaddy never fished in his life, but he used to like to come and keep me company while I gave it a try. To be real honest, I never caught anything worthwhile. Just little ones, from time to time, which I would throw back. But my granddaddy used to smoke his pipe and sit and think about the world.

“What if fish could scream?” He asked one morning.
“Well, would ya still keep on fishing if they screamed to high-heavens as they were being pulled out of the creek?”
“I guess not,” I told him.
“Then why do it?” He asked.

And do you know what? He was right. I never fished another fish again.  So, what’s the point of the story, you’re asking? The point is, people are getting away with murder these days because fish don’t scream. Folks are being pulled out of the river of life by thugs and no one is caring, because it’s not them – this time.
And we all know where that thinking leads.

bobby stevenson 2018