Candace is current and stylish, yet simple enough to stand the test of time.
That is all.
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We slumped down in our chairs and licked the tip of the weekend's popsicle, quietly realizing our thirst could never be quenched before the thing melted in our hands. And then we looked at each other, breathed through our nostrils and took in the full experience of doing gasoline shots.
Not many people do them. Frat boys and frat girls like Jell-O shots, except when on holiday in Cancun, where they prefer to lick each other. But we're oil derrick roustabouts and we don't lick each other. Oil's in our blood. Actually, gasoline is in our blood. We're smart enough to wait until that stuff is refined.
It's a poor man's absinthe. You know - Hemingway, Wilde, Poe, Rimbaud, Picasso, van Gogh, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Gaugin, Degas, Manet, Jarry. Well, I've never drank absinthe and I don't know if any of them have drank gasoline, but it's a pretty cheap hallucinogenic.
It happened by mistake, I guess. We were about 40 miles outside of Yuma - on the run of John Law, you know - and Mabel, the Nova, she started coughing and wheezing like she had run out of gas. We siphoned some from a minivan pulled into a rest stop, but I swallowed a bit of mine. Have you ever read Kate Chopin - The Awakening? I haven't, but the title of the book is what I had. An awakening. I was vomiting all over the car when we got back on the road and started spitting up blood a little later, but that 87 octane (you know that in Wyoming you can buy 85 octane? It's not bad stuff) was just what my brain needed - it got a little softer and filled me all sorts of great ideas. My poetry got a lot more personal and it deepened my relationship with my local grease monkey, who enjoys it almost as much as I do. We're collaborating on a gasoline cookoff where all the food uses gasoline - trying to get some venture funding from the Food Network, but they aren't budging.
