Will
you get off with me and have a cup of coffee? I've been riding next to
you on the subway for a month, and I want to find out what you're like.'
"I wouldn't have done it, except before I knew what I was doing, I'd
already said, 'I beg your pardon?' because I wasn't sure I'd heard him
right. And once I'd said that, once I'd spoken, I couldn't bear the
thought of not speaking again."
#
They blew through Kapuskasing at ten a.m., on a grey morning that dawned
with drizzle and bad-tempered clouds low overhead. The little main drag
-- which Alan remembered as a bustling center of commerce where he'd
waited out half a day to change buses -- was deserted, the only evidence
of habitation the occasional car pulling through a donut store
drive-through lane.
"Jesus, who divorced me this time?" Mimi said, ungumming her eyes and
stuffing a fresh cigarette into her mouth.
"*Fear and Loathing* again, right?"
"It's *the* road-trip novel," she said.
"What about *On the Road*?"
"Oh, *that*," she said. "Pfft. Kerouac was a Martian on crank. Dope
fiend prose isn't fit for human consumption."
"Thompson isn't a dope fiend?"
"No. That was just a put-on. He wrote *about* drugs, not *on* drugs."
"Have you *read* Kerouac?"
"I couldn't get into it," she said.
He pulled sharply off the road and into a parking lot.
"What's this?" she said.
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