How It Will Crash

(NOTE: This story appeared in the 2005 edition of the Onion River Review)

His hair is being blown by the wind and he has what some might call "a real head of hair," golden, soft, conditioned several times during each of two daily showers, about shoulder length, layered, leonine, blowing in the wind like a field of majestic American-Heartland wheat, and his cleft-chin, jaws clenched, smile broad, cutting through the wind, big black sunglasses impenetrably dark and glossed with a reflective coating that reflects only the sun's rays in a top-down convertible in Des Moines, driving down roads the television audience can't even distinguish from the roads in their own hometowns, and so they may, momentarily, wonder where they were during the day before learning that, yes, in fact this did occur in Des Moines, and before learning this they wonder if they may have been driving down a road parallel to the road he was driving down, the great green wave that billows from the back seat of his top-down convertible composed of so many verdant leaves, and all the leaves have a face imprinted upon them, the face of a man whose devotion to and espousal of the American DIY philosophy has probably been the single greatest and consistent catalyst for what we now call the "American Dream." And so there are "Benjamin's" flying out of the back of this car, the man at once pulling more of the same currency from the pockets of his ebony suit-coat, and, perhaps more worrying to some safety-first-type television viewers, taking both hands off the wheel, opening up the glove-box while still propelling down the road, near-misses thanks to the alert maneuvers of other motorists and the athletic diving and fast-twitch self-preservation responses of pedestrians, ignoring stop lights and getting away with it, the glove-box loaded with hun's, and he pulls them out and puts them in his mouth and somewhat ravenously gnashes at them, and then he spits them out at parked cars and balls up a wad of them and throws them at some kids waiting for a bus on the side of the road, and when people see this broadcast on one of several cable news channels—because they all manage to get a hold of the same clip—the audience echoes the sentiments voiced by all the talking heads on all the stations, something to the effect of "God damn, I wish I was there," the talking heads saying only this much and of course berating the man for his lack of concern for the safety of others, they and the television audience unaware of this man's motivations as he dispenses hundred dollar bills from a well-aerated American-made vehicle on a well-paved homogenous American highway in a well-organized homogenous American town. Because how could everybody know the rather complex reasons behind the expansive generosity of this man, that four days earlier he had pledged to forgo his psych-meds for the foreseeable future, he just didn't need them anymore, he explained to himself; that he, a former childhood actor whose appearance in a highly successful and well-received oatmeal commercial was judged by his the parents of his fellow childhood actors to be the performance of the year in a nationally syndicated cereal/grains spot in 1985; that he, the man in the open-air convertible whose acting talent had failed to mature, had instead earned an advanced computer sciences degree from the U. of Michigan and had programmed, released, and sold a wildly-successful social-networking website, Smallworld.com, for midgets/dwarves/little-people, for a number in the higher triple digits; that his meds were administered to control irrational behavior of the same variety (pulling out all his hair and pasting it on a dozen (he being an incredibly hirsute individual…) hairless cats he adopted from the local humane society; adhering sticky-notes (…and also having a definite "thing" for adhesives) upon which he had written his credit card number on all the windshields of all the cars parked at Kinnick Stadium on a game day when the Hawkeyes were playing the Buckeyes (result: 21-42, some very displeased creditors appealed to successfully by a very pricey lawyer, and the reestablished solvency of his fortune)), that just yesterday he had liquidated his stock-options, his 401k, various CD's, and his savings and credit accounts, maxed out platinum, black and gold credit cards, requesting that all the funds be dispensed in brand-new $100 bills, that he had then purchased this shiny top-down convertible, a really snazzy new jet-black designer suit-coat, reflective UVA/B blocking sunglasses, a box of mint flavored condoms and, perhaps too predictably, a metric ounce of superbly potent cocaine, that he expended all the cocaine over night and utilized, selfishly, all the condoms, and had also during the course of this epic binge polished off three liter-sized bottles of a popular cola beverage, a six pack of tall-boys, a liter of American whiskey, a box of saltines, a gallon of cookies 'n cream ice cream, two bags of chips as well as two large and rapidly delivered extra-pepperoni pizzas, then tossed two full-size travel suitcases filled with his now portable financial assets into the back seat of the new car, and proceeded, pantsless, to a local all-hours diner where he continued to eat one plate of steak and eggs, one of a tall-stack of flapjacks, a plate of hashbrowns, two hot-fudge sundaes, and consumed four pots of coffee, went back out to his car, emptied the contents of the suitcases into the back seat, tossed the now empty suitcases at a passing cross-continental semi-truck, violently and vociferously hurling compliments at everybody he passed or encountered ("Has anybody ever told you how god-damn fucking beautiful you are?" this to a little girl in the restaurant; "You, sir, cooked those cock-sucking eggs to perfection!" this, inexplicably, to an elderly lady pulling out of the parking lot), and peeled smoking European-imported radial rubber up the on-ramp, onto the freeway, the wind in his hair like the fingers of a loving woman, like a mother, feeling free from chemical dependency as well as any sense of hypocrisy, a verdant and expensive contrail of magnanimous generosity flitting behind him. How could you or the television news personalities know all of this; he is just an image on a screen, "a crazy man" who is now pulling off the freeway—and you can see this on the newscast, a disembodied voice narrating—and now careens down another anonymous American street, people running after him, grabbing spastically at the flapping bills, hands stuck out of moving vehicles he is passing in a delirious haze with a smile and a bloody nose, hollow-eyed and knuckles white on the steering wheel, hands now clutching the face of Benjamin Franklin emblazoned on perhaps the most singular piece of currency in the world. He's flying through red lights barely avoiding collision, performing the actions earlier noted (bill-chewing, using innocent children for target practice), swerving manically into and out of oncoming traffic, the trail of bills now getting thinner, and he lets go of the steering wheel, pulls his wallet out of his back pocket and manages to stand erect in the moving vehicle, and then holds the wallet up in the air with both hands above his head like an offering, eyes heavenward, muttering incomprehensible probably profane prayers lost in the wind and unheard by the helicopter whirling over the scene to capture the spectacle for the television audience, the wallet's contents spilling out behind him. He laughs boisterously between inchoate mutterings, bearing a grin shared only by those similarly enthused, intoxicated and afflicted, the grin of the ecstatically ignorant of their own mortality, as the car veers wildly to the right, slams into and bounds over the curb, he thrown headfirst from the car, it crashing into the glass-façade of a mom & pop soul-food restaurant giving Ma such a fright as she dips the po'boys into the Fryolator that she experiences an acute cardiac arrhythmia and falls bodily into the hot oil, and outside the restaurant, right next to the still intact door of The Southern Bell, you can, if you look very closely at the footage (which is of course now available for review online), see her, red hair in pony-tails, white-shirt almost brown and wholly tattered, jeans down around her ankles, about five or six years old, missing both upper lateral incisors, and, one would surmise, somewhat similarly maladjusted, squatting over a tin bucket with a mop handle protruding from it, peeing in a gentle stream, magnificently oblivious to the shattered glass sparkling in the humid and endless Iowan summer sun, the disconsolate caterwauling of a widower, the thrum of the car's engine and the whir and spin of its wheels, all these sounds drowned out for her by the reverberant and mesmerizing ping of her fluids against the bottom of the bucket, and the man lay in the parking lot, a ruddy puddle collecting beneath his head, still smiling, penniless and breathless.