Burning Tracks – Fiction

Burning Tracks

by Scott Hefflon
illustration by Dave Dawson

I stepped off the train and took a deep breath of fresh air. I felt like vomiting. There’s something about being cooped up in a disgustingly upholstered moving tin can for eight hours that makes you sick. Not having slept the night before may’ve helped. Ditto with getting on the train smashed at 10 am. Yeah, my fellow humans must love travelling with me. Drunk and disheveled boisterousness followed by pale reticence followed by the almost mandatory hour in the cubicle they call a bathroom, praying to whoever to just let me pass out, the sound of sloshing blue stuff somewhere in the shadowy depths inspiring me to heave what’s left of my stomach lining into a frighteningly large hole in the metal cabinette which is the toilet, followed by passing out in my seat and drooling on myself for a few hours, followed by waking with a start, sweating madly, feeling confused, violent, and reeking of more bodily fluids than any polite writer would care to name, followed by patiently waiting for the nightmare to end by either reaching our destination or a trainwreck. Yeah, I must be a blast of a travel companion. That’s why I travel alone.

Walking down the platform toward the station, my legs felt like jelly and I looked for a bathroom or a bar to crawl into. How it’s 6 pm I just can’t imagine. There’s a whole Friday night left ahead of me. That people in the old days travelled for days or months on the open seas to reach the promised land is a thought that luckily didn’t occur to me at the time. I wouldn’t’ve had the stomach for it. I find a bathroom and quickly duck inside. Why the sudden urgency to wipe the dried drool from my cheek and any vomit that may’ve spattered on my shoes for the last several hours is a question I’ve learned not to ask myself. I have friends to meet. I have a girl who paid for my ticket coming to pick me up. And I look like shit.

At times such as these, I’m reminded of that skit from Saturday Night Live that stated that it’s more important to look good than to feel good. So true. A little cold water splashed on the face, a little touseling of the hair (ow, you know you’re messed up when your hair follicles hurt), a fresh shirt, and a wipe down (yeah, I own a lint brush, what of it?), and I’m back in business. And this is my business.

Leaving the men’s room, I’m a far cry from the wretched soul who dragged his beaten carcass in there mere moments ago. And there she is, across the room, looking for me. Our eyes meet. I walk toward her. I smile that devilish, ironic smirk I withhold for such purposes, and breathe, “Hey.” My breath tingles like a mouthful of mints. And while the rather acidic drip of minty freshness turns my stomach, it certainly makes my exhalations more exciting and enticing than the fetid expulsions they were.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says, and hugs me tightly.

I don’t have the heart to tell her that if she doesn’t release me soon I’ll puke down her back.

“I told you I’d come back.” Actually, I’m not sure I ever did, but it seemed like a cool thing to say at the time. Hell, I probably did say it, along with an awful lot of other shit I’d never remember, much less own up to, much less live up to, much less want brought back in my face in mixed company. But it seemed like the right thing to say.

“And here you are,” she replied.

Sometimes when people state the obvious it’s annoying. Sometimes it’s beautiful. This was a case of the latter.

I looked at her, probably for the first time since I first saw her. Every other time, I was probably seeing what I thought of her, what I wanted from her, but now I was actually seeing her. And damn she looked good. I probably wouldn’t’ve hung out with her that first night if she hadn’t looked somewhat attractive to me, but I doubt I ever realized just how attractive she was. Perception is weird that way.

“I’m glad to be here,” I said, realizing immediately how inane it probably sounded, but unable to think of a more interesting way to put it. Hell, I was glad to be there.

Her eyes sparkled as she looked up at me. She said something in reply, but I was getting tired of trading polite platitudes and wanted to go somewhere, do something, get on with it. Whatever “it” might be.

We stopped and picked up booze and beer on the way to her house. At a drive-in liquor store. My first. I commented on her having my virginity in that regard, but I don’t think she found it as notable as I did. She watched the road intently.

After showering and meeting her roommates whose names I instantly forgot, not only because I have a tendency to do so, but because they were less interesting than the furniture they were sitting on, we went to the house of my first college roommate. A good friend over the years, one who I’d come to visit often, and one who’d come to party with me up in Boston where I was going to school. Or slowly flunking out of yet another school. Whatever.

I’d never been to his new house. Nor had I met his new roommates; “long time” friends from either his band background or his school background, but not both. It was an interesting mix of worlds colliding. It was obvious there were different languages spoken here. That was fine with me ’cause I didn’t come to talk to his roommates. He’d been seeing yet another of my ex-girlfriends (and I use the term loosely; seeing as how I never have any actual girlfriends, it’s rather interesting that I have so many ex-girlfiends), and she was all but living with him by this point. That didn’t bother me. Nor did it seem to bother him. But I got the feeling it bothered her. And it was her that I’d come to see. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.

As the night wore on, the conversation turned, as I knew it would, to what I’d done that summer. There’re not many people who can run an over-the-top rock’n’roll party house in the death throes of the rock revolution for as long as I did and not only make it out alive to tell the tales, but also explore the psychological impact of those tales. So from there on out, the night was filled with accounts of human decadence and depravity, why one would suffer such things, and what it does to the youthful spirit when maintained, for philosophical purposes I assure you, for any length of time.

“I have to go,” she said, bolting for the door.

I should’ve known it was coming, and in a way, I did. She’d gone blank quite some time ago, yet my former roommate and his girlfriend kept egging me on. And I was only too happy to oblige. But this was the price you sometimes have to pay. And this was the explaining you sometimes have to do.

“Hey, hey, what’s wrong, baby?” I asked soothingly, finally catching up with her as she reached her car. I tried to hold her and stroke her hair, but she wouldn’t let me touch her.

“I can’t believe you were saying all those things. I can’t believe you did all those things. I wanted to see you tonight. I’ve been looking forward to this ever since you said you’d come to see me at the end of the summer. I didn’t want to think about what you’d been doing. And I certainly didn’t want to hear you talking about all those parties, all that booze and drugs, all those girls… I wanted you away from all that. I wanted you to myself. Here. Like it was at the beginning of the summer. That’s what I wanted. Not…” She waved her arm back toward the house, and before she could finish, I cut in.

“I had to get that out of my system. I told you that. I don’t think you understood it then, nor do you understand why I had to bring it up tonight, but I had to do it. We all have demons inside us, and all I was trying to do was purge all my demons in an environment where I could get away with it without hurting anyone. I know this summer was disgusting, you don’t have to tell me, I was there. But that’s why I did it. I had to unleash the most grotesque bastardization of human behavior I felt inside me in order to come out the other side at peace with myself. Don’t you see? That purified me. I’ve plummeted to the depths of my being and I’ve come back to the surface gasping for air. I don’t want that anymore. I burned all of that out of me, once and for all, and now I can get on with my life. I never meant to hurt you with the things I said in there. I never meant to hurt you with the things that I’ve done. But can’t you understand that I had to do it? That I had to let it out so I could come back to face you without evil lurking in my heart?”

“No,” she replied simply, her eyes glistening.

And I honestly believed her. She couldn’t see why I’d subject myself to such degradation, especially voluntarily, and ask her to believe it was necessary. I wasn’t asking for forgiveness, I was asking for understanding. And that’s even harder to get.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say, “I never meant to hurt you.”

She waited a moment, rubbing my hands in hers. Evidently, I’d taken her hands in mine when stressing some point or other without even realizing it.

“I know,” she said, looking up at me again, her eyes glistening with more tears I’d caused. And she smiled.