I miss the days of cheap gas. And by cheap gas, I'm talking late 90's where I actually got pissed off when gas went from 82.9 cents to 83.9 cents a gallon.
But not for what you might think. Yeah, I mean... Saving a shitload of money compared to the 400% more we pay for it now (in the last 12 years. Thanks, washington political assholes! And thanks to you enviro-douches too. This is your fault) but that's not really why.
No, the reason why is because it's no longer really an option of just getting in the car and getting lost. Intentionally. Like, get in the car, and start driving and then start taking random roads that you've never been on before and just exploring. It's just not really a feasible option anymore. And that sucks. Because I always loved exploring. So much.
And well, I also loved that I could hit Sheetz, fill up my Jeep from the needle on E and still get a couple hotdogs and a pack of smokes for under $20. Once again... fuck you, politicians. I couldn't do that for under $50 now. Assholes. I'm not talking about the 70's here. I'm talking about a decade ago! Fuckers.
But I digress. I'm starting to get pissed about how much these motherfuckers have messed with the cost of living in just a decade. And that's not what I'm here for today.
Now, I could keep going with like another 2000 words on WHY I love exploring, but I think I'll tell you an exploring story instead.
It was near the end of the "able to just get in the car and drive forever and not worry about the gas" phase. About summer of 2000 or so. A pretty clear night. Warm but not hot. One of those just really awesome nights to be out and doing shit. Well, we were bored as fuck. My buddy PrettyBoy, and I (I've got to get myself in the habit of using nicknames now. I'm not paying anyone fucking money for using their real names in the book and I need to get used to doing this now) decided to just hop in the car and go for a drive.
Now... the thing to keep in mind about PrettyBoy was exactly how apt of a name for this dude that is is. He is the definition of suburban yuppie. If you don't know him (and even if you do), he's one of those dudes that you see and instantly hate. The kind that you just have an uncontrollable urge to punch. Wildly self-conscious about how he looks. Would spend an hour on his hair to do the same thing that I, at the time, could manage to do with mine in like 8 seconds. Delicate features. Almost feminine in some ways. But more male Abercrombie model, but a little skinnier. Kind of yuppie meets hipster, without being fucking dirty. Wore scarves like 2 years before even the hipsters decided that was "cool". Spent way too god damn much money on clothes and was always stylish. As I said, totally image-conscious and was about half-way on his way to being Patrick Bateman (seriously. If you don't get the reference... go google that shit) before he was even 20.
I had no idea how you could be that tightly wound at that age and not go on a killing spree. Well, his method for avoiding that was to smoke pot. A LOT of pot. And by a lot, I mean everything got celebrated with "let's smoke a bowl!". There was the "I just woke up" bowl. There was the "I made breakfast (cereal)" bowl. There was the "I got in the car!" bowl. There was the "I just smoked a bowl" bowl.
Yeah. A lot of pot.
What does this have to do with the story? You'll see.
So this given evening that I was starting to write about, PrettyBoy and I got in the car and just kinda started wandering around. He was driving, which was weird, but I kinda let it go. To this day, driving aimlessly and NOT being the driver is still weird to me. Hell, just not being the driver is weird to me. But I was ok with it this night. But whatever. We started driving.
A few weeks earlier, we had come across one particular back road out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. And we kinda wanted to go back to it. There was about a half dozen really cool looking roads off of it, but we had picked one the previous time and kinda wanted to explore the other ones now.
So, we ventured off in that direction, but not entirely sure exactly where we were going. Through the magic of my awesomness, and potentially some blood and oxygen and other useful things mixing in with the little bit of THC and alot of alcohol coursing thru my veins and brain, we managed to find our way back to this road. Maybe that's why I wasn't driving. Already drunk before we left.
I immediately decided that this road on the right looked fucking awesome to drive on. And I wanted to be on it right the fuck now. So instead of simplly saying "turn here"... no... that would be too easy. No, instead I reach across the god damn car and grab the wheel and just turn the car while he's trying to light a cigarette. Looking back now, I have no idea how we didn't die. Or how I managed to do it without us even going out of control at all.
Well, somehow, he just reacted as though this was as normal as him turning the wheel. And calmly kept going. I'm pretty sure that, had anyone else been in the car, they would have lost their god damned minds. But nope... was perfectly normal. What does that say about my life or my friends?
Well, after another half hour of driving and just picking random roads and becoming completely and totally lost, we realize that we haven't seen even a house in at least 15 minutes. No houses. No lights. Nothing. We're really in bumfuck nowhere. And almost as soon as we realized this, we came upon a stretch of road that had 8 foot corn stalks on both sides of the road.
Fuck. I've seen too many horror movies that start like this. And by start like this, I mean the idiot 20-somethings that get killed in the first 15 minutes of the movie before someone either 1) comes to look for them; or 2) get used as the story that some dude, 2 years later, tells his buddies as he takes them there and he tries to scare them by talking about the people that got massacred in the cornfield a year or 2 back. Yeah... fuck. Those idiot 20-somethings were us. Great.
Well about half way thru this gigantic clusterfuck of corn that we can't see over, we hit a 4 way insteresction. 3 of the ways to go... it's more fucking corn. The other way? No corn. Trees. Yeah... I wanted nothing to do with the fucking corn anymore. I'm picking fucking trees. I can deal with trees. Fuck corn.
But so, as the road winds thru the trees, we all of a sudden see a sign for a town. Kinda. It's made out of a 10 foot sheet of plywood and nailed between 2 trees. And someone had spraypainted a name on it.
Brownstown.
They even spraypainted a population. That had been sprayed over in black at least once and then re-painted with a brush. Classy. Or wait... fuck. This is where it turns into the horror movie. Sonuvabitch. That was why all the rest of the ways were corn. So you'd get fucking lost when you came out of the tree road. Cause you'd forget which fucking way got you home. Yeah... we're totally screwed.
Well, in my infinite wisdom, and with absolutely no fear of consequences... and probably a deathwish based on the shit I'd done in the prior few years and would keep doing for a few more years beyond that, I decided that we needed to investigate this place. Brownstown. I'd never heard of this place. Granted, I didnt' have a fucking clue where I was, but hey... that's what exploration is about. Finding new cool shit.
We turned down this road and a few seconds later are presented by ... well... I still dont' know how to describe it. It was trailer park meets campground meets scrap yard meets dirtbike tail. And then someone managed to spill the rest of the bottle of redneck on it. I was waiting to find the Thunderdome in the middle of this place. Everything was just totally ghetto. The only thing that prevented you from confusing this place with Compton or Detroit were the trees on the perimeter... well, and the white people.
We quickly learned that "this place" was only about 4 streets wide with 3 cross streets. And the way we came in was also the only way out. Except this motherfucking place was a god damn maze. We started driving thru it and quickly realized, even with it being a grid, this place was like the god damned bermuda triangle. My internal compass just started spinning. Everywhere was north. I had no idea how to get out. So we kept driving.
Oh, and that's about when we fianlly stumbled upon the natives. Fantastic. And by natives, I mean natives. You ever hear about those tribes in South America in the Amazon that have never even had contact with the outside world? They don't trade with the outside world They've probably never even seen a white person?
That's how this felt. I don't think they'd ever seen anything like PrettyBoy before. I think he had more teeth showing when he smiled than they all did combined.
And that's when I decided that we needed to party here. Because this was going to be awesome.
We had just about past a trailer that had a detached garage and light pouring out of the open garage door. And as we're approaching, I hear this awful twang of hillbilly sister-fucking music coming out of some musical contraption that I didn't even want to ponder the shock hazards of. And as we're passing, I look at the garage and see a half dozen people inside, playing beer pong. And another half dozen on the porch. Oh, we definitely need to party here. And I'm going to make this happen.
I force PrettyBoy to pull over. Well, force might be a little off base. We were doing about 5 mph on this shitty dirt horse path that passed for a motor vehicle thruway and I simply opened the passenger door and stepped out. While moving. I didn't give a fuck. I didn't even say anything to him. I just got out and started approaching the chainlink fence and barking dogs that really weren't held back by the fence, since the fence only covered about 1/3 of the front yard.
I guess my ridiculous exit caught everyone by surprise... PrettyBoy included. Because he slammed on the brakes and stopped and parked in the middle of the road just as I was getting to the front porch and being stared at by natives with a look of shock and curiousity. I could see the gear in their brain working. They only had one. And it was trying to process a number of questions at once.
"Who dis guy in dem fancy britches wit them perty teef and mouf?" "What he want?" "Where's my sister? I want a blowjob" and any number of other hillbilly world problems... like "copenhagen vs skoal" or "Is my daddy my brother or my brother my daddy?" or whatever else they think about.
But I walk over and wave and loudly say "Hello! We were just driving past and wondered if we could join your game of beer pong?"
PrettyBoy is just stepping out of the car at this moment. And think of the look I just got... multiply it by a billion and that's the one PrettyBoy got.
They were in shock. I don't think they had a clue how to respond. And simply nodded as we walked right into the garage and stepped up to their recently finished pong game.
"Who's next?" I say and I grab the cups and set up.
I have no idea how the fuck we got out of there. The actual evenings events were rather uneventful. It was a typical night. We ran the table on these guys a couple times. And I'm pretty sure someone's mother/sister/daughter/alloftheabove tried to talk to me at some point. But I couldn't hear her over the amount of cum probably still swirling in her mouth from her cousin and the gigantic side-chew she had in. Or maybe that lump was from someone punching her for not having dinner ready. I don't know. But eventually, we decided to be off.
PrettyBoy never even moved the car out of the middle of the road. For 2 hours. And nobody ever drove by. We'd have known. Cause it was barely wide enough for 1 car, much less 2.
It took us about another half hour to find out way back out of this fucking place. Only one road in or out, but this fucking place was a maze. Finally though, we ventured out and manged to somehow get home after a while.
A few days later, I decided to figure out where the fuck we had been. I remembered the sign saying "Brownstown" on the way in and decided to google it. Nothing came up on google. This was the early days of google, but it existed. I checked mapquest next. Nothing. I checked every motherfucking internet resource available and this place does not exist. Anywhere. There is no brownstown.
Where the fuck were we drinking? Was it really an imaginary place? I mean... it was nearly unbelievable that this kinda place exists, but wow. Apparently this place was like... mythical.
It has since been added to the list of mythical places in western PA. Alongside such wonderful places as the Magical Disappearing Lake and the Gateway To Indiana. And Ma's Laundry.
*EDIT*
Fuck all you motherfuckers. I found it!
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