Never once did he respond with any indication of his intention, which we later discovered was to shoot the caravan crossing the Missouri River.

I don't remember exactly how it went down, but move out we did. Ned had done his best to calm me, even getting Chiquita to sing me a song in French. But I'll be the first to admit that by the time we hit the on ramp, I was rip shit. And I am not easily angered. Tooling down the highway and out over the bridge, we learned at last what Ramon was up to. But it was too late. The caravan formation was a shambles. If the damn film ever comes out and that little blurb survives the editing process, you will likely be able to see the smoke rising out over Duke, and not from the exhaust.

A few miles up the road we pulled off to let the Sub catch up and Tex took over driving for me. Frustrated and tired, I self-prescribed a nap and crawled upstairs to crash. Whatever rest I might have gotten was soon to be needed in Murdo.

A year and a half ago, Jill and I crossed South Dakota in the dead of winter. I wrote about that journey, too, and one of that tale's richest yet darkest nuggets was about Murdo. I hated the place, and had I been at the wheel I would never have stopped there again. As it happened this time, I woke up there.

Tex would become known to Seven and I as the well-meaning guy whose assistance usually left you wishing you had just done it yourself. Pulling into Murdo, he apparently took one look at the gas station where everyone else in the caravan was going and decided it was too full. So he pulled in across the street. Fine. Except that instead of pumping the gas and rejoining the group, he simply knocked on the trunks to wake me up and left me there.

Now, I don't know how everyone else in the world wakes up from hot summer afternoon naps, but for me it's a struggle. Add to that struggle the sketchy nature of sleeping in a makeshift camper shell at 55 mph and waking up to a dozen leering, bad-toothed local yokels circling your car wondering if they should lynch the long-haired art fag or simply hack him up and eat him on sight? (My mind is an ugly thing to wake up to.)

That gas stop was unique among the three dozen or so gas stops I would make on that cross-country trek. I stuck the hose in Duke, stared at the digital readout as it zoomed toward $20, and never made eye contact or voiced more than a one-syllable answer to anyone's questions of Duke. I couldn't. I would have lost my mind if anyone had violated my fragile, half-asleep space. If any of them had tried to fuck with me, I might have doused them with gas and gone tearing out of the parking lot sending up sparks as my tailpipe scraped the sidewalk. Lord only knows.

Naturally, that awakening had done little for my mood. My anger had now jumped tracks and focused itself on Tex, the bungling fool who'd abandoned me to the rabid and drooling buck-toothed locals. And with all that going on, Ned called a meeting out front of some car museum down the street. The subject was more or less Ramon's discontent with our fucking up his shoot back at the Missouri River. I went in with all guns firing.

All I recall with clarity is getting in Ramon's face when he announced his near-intention to "take the camera, get on a plane and fly to Portland" where he would do business and await our arrival there in two weeks. "Don't make like your the one who's been put out here!" I shouted, referring to his pouty take-my-toys-and-go-home attitude. It was ugly.

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Last update April 1, 2004