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Show Blue Run/55 Another couple comes and the whole thing starts again. Lord help us, we're saved: know who I am? A certain kind of laughter is the acknowledgment of death, I've read. And some people laugh at inappropriate moments. I don't know why this comes to me now in the Pathfindner, Renee and laughing sickness, the these are the times of your life woman going doo-doo-doo Today's Father's Day; rocketing toward me my whole life, this long drive home. By the time we hit Pensacola Beach, Lara makes it clear that this is the end of the line, as far as we go. I've been here before, once with an old girlfriend who was an emergency room nurse and traveled with a long roll of little blue Valium that made you pass out in the sun with all the other rednecks and fry yourself to Jesus. We arrive on the heels of a rain, you can see the squall line receding east, the way we've just come. Our hotel for the night is to be a place called Sandy Shoes, one of those blue-painted clapboard beachsides A sliding glass window and two plastic chairs on a cracked patio. This could be the same place as that other time with a girlfriend, when we got whacked on Valium and Coors light and I broke out the glass door-just walked right into it, whammo While she went out for stone crabs and shrimp, I called home collect. Mama was in St. Vincent's with kidney stones. She was to have the "basket procedure" the next day, sleepy Traceleen said on the other end. I remember because it was August 25th, Jimmy's nineteenth and final birthday, and it seemed odd for her to be having a stone then. I had to get home. We hit the highway arguing after crabs and more beer. The girlfriend paid with American Express and we drove on out listening to Bad Company-bad company til the day I die We said things, and the worse it got, the faster she drove. Like a bat out of hell, she blew past semis in a thunderstorm, these big waves of rainwater walloping the windshield. By Mobile I'd had it, "Just let me out," I |