Am I in hell?



The wind blows across the Texas Panhandle like sandpaper across my face, a harsh sun making this dip south feel like a trip through hell.

I think of LA and how much I miss its dismal streets and how I ache to get back to a place where rain takes a whole season to wash the world away, rather than this place which dumps it all on you at once after months of slow scalding torture.

I keep thinking I’m already dead, despite the doctors’ claims – they asking me again and again if I’ve ever used a dirty needle or made love to another man.

They make assumptions about me because my driver’s license says I live in LA.

They ask me for a list of lovers, then shake their heads when I give them one, trying hard to make out the boy’s names from the girl’s, and wondering how on earth they will manage to contact them all, eyeing me as if they suspected me of deliberately spreading a plague.

The car radio naturally stopped working in St. Louis. So I feel again in the glove compartment for the box of batteries I ought before crossing the panhandle, though I have come to respect the silence since every song I hear whispers the word “death.”

“Am I in Hell?” I ask the attendant when I stop at the last gas station in Texas.

He laughs.

He thinks I’m talking about the heat.

“No,” he says, “Just Texas.”

 




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