True Story
by Ryan Brosmer
I was driving home and the day was one that demanded a soundtrack behind it. The sky was a pale blue and the sun was at its peak. I hadn’t brought my iPod along on this trip, my CD player was busted and my radio had spotty reception on a good day. Though, this was a good day, remember? I let the radio scan through the stations, FM and AM, and both came up blank for a while and I just kept driving past schools and subdivisions on my way to the interstate.
The station numbers kept blinking by until one finally stuck. There was a momentary burst of static and then the announcement that I was now tuned into “Today’s Best Rockin’ Country….THUNDER 94.5!”
I laughed at God, but accepted my fate that my soundtrack for this trip started with a song about a guy who hops up onto the bar, and yells at the band to “Crank it up to 11” and is basically the all-around life of the party until riding off on his Harley.
Ever since I’d gone to Nashville and saw some songwriters perform songs that they had written but then sold away for somebody else to get famous off of and now these guys were stuck in time from the day they got their first big royalty checks. This time warp originated sometime in the mid to late-nineties it would seem from the pre-ripped jeans, frosted hair and pierced ears on all three men. When I saw those three plays their original songs that I had known as they were sung by other voices on the radio I’ve thought about the real face behind any goddamned pop-country song that comes on the radio and the poor bastard who was good enough to write a catchy tune but too ugly to be the face behind it on stage and on album covers. I thought about the guy who wrote this song about a loud, obnoxious douchebag who gets the girls and all of his drinks for free and then rides off in a drunken stupor on his Harley and wrap the thing around a tree and will be remembered as a great country music legend of the early 2000s, which is easily the great Pewter Age of country music.
I was on a smaller back road at this point. The trip from the city to the interstate was always excruciating. The experience was exacerbated by this song, which was now finally coming to a close, as it churned the bile in my stomach. I scanned through the radio stations once more and again landed back on 94.5.
The song was over and another was beginning. Somebody thinks this guy’s tractor is sexy. This song is already a Pewter Age classic. A guy on his motorcycle was coming around the bend in the road—this was in real life, not the song—and I was coming toward him from the opposite direction. At the last second, just before he passed me I decided to jerk the steering wheel to the left and swerve into the oncoming lane and I collided with the motorcycle. We were each going 50 mph.
My seatbelt kept me in place during the collision. The motorcycle bounced off of my bumper and skidded across the road and into the trees. The operator of the motorcycle, with no sort of restrain keeping him and his vehicle attached, bounced against my windshield helmet first. Snow white fractures shot across the glass away from the initial crater of impact, which looked like the cap on a cherry sno-cone.
I jerked the steering wheel back to the right and positioned myself back in the westbound lane. The motion shook the body off my hood and sent it beneath my tires. I might have heard the cracking of bones, or I might just have imagined it. I might have even hoped for it.
I kept the steering wheel turned sharply to the right as I finished going through the slight bank in the road. I sank into a ditch on the shoulder and rose once again to find myself in the front yard of one of the houses that was situated only a short driveway’s length from the road. I ran over plastic renditions of woodland animals and clay pots of fresh-bloomed flowers. I regained my composure soon thereafter, returning to the road and rolling down my window for fresh air and because it was impossible to see out of my fractured windshield.
The police pulled me over shortly thereafter.
I don’t know if somebody witnessed the whole ordeal and called me in or if it was simply the suspicious state my vehicle was in as I tried to ease myself onto the highway. Either way, they got me. I wasn’t worried though. I was just waiting for it, because look, here I am with the perfect insanity plea. I’m finally free. They won’t ever release me. I’m far too dangerous to be on the outside. At the same time I can never go to a regular prison. I won’t ever have to take care of myself again. Early retirement. All I have to do is cement my insanity every now and again.
