The trouble all started when Franklin (our British GPS) lied to us in South Dakota.  Our destination was Keystone, a small tourist town near Mount Rushmore. 

I sat in the back seat. The car smelled musty, like a basement full of old Christmas decorations and glass cat figurines. We hadn’t showered for three days.

Badger was driving. She was still frazzled about almost running out of gas in Montana a few hours earlier. She needed sleep. The night before she had gotten about two hours in the mountains of Wyoming. A broken sleeping sack and cheap whiskey were the only things that kept her alive when temperatures dipped below freezing after sunset.

This was her at 7am: 

Hey Badger, I said. 

She looked at me through the rear view mirror.

Yeah?

I think we want to take this exit up here, I pointed ahead. 

Rat’s eyes looked at the GPS. He was sitting in the passenger seat.

The GPS says to stay on this road, Rat said.

What should I do? Badger asked. She was getting upset.

I think we should take the exit toward Keystone. That is where we’re staying, I began to unfold a United States Atlas.

I think we should follow the GPS, Rat said. I trust Franklin.

Take the exit!

Follow the GPS!

In a moment of quick decision making, Badger stayed on the road. As we passed the Exit 201 to Keystone sign it grew large, came into complete focus and grew smaller behind us.

Recalculating Franklin said.

Are you kidding me? Badger was frustrated

Aw Franklin! You lied to us, Rat said shaking the small plastic box.

I told you guys so, I smirked from the backseat.

 For the record, no one likes a smart ass, especially when they’ve been living out of a suitcase for two weeks.

  I’M GOING TO KILL YOU! Badger lost it. She was fed up with Rat. It was his idea to not stop for gas before we got onto the desolate road in Montana. She resented trusting his co-pilot advice then and she really resented it now.

I was just following the GPS, Rat defended himself.

You have to read the signs, I said.

Take exit 202 on right Franklin commanded.

Badger floored it off the interstate. An open window made her mangled hair was fly. Her eyes full of danger. She wasn’t messin’ around. We may have been on two wheels. I feared for rats life.

The GPS re-routed us on a slim road through the forested Black Hills. The western sun was setting. A line as red as blood divided the sky from the earth. It reminded me of a setting right out of Cormac McCarthy.

We pulled into the town of Keystone at dusk. A weird collection of lit-up family restaurants and bars lined a stark strip. It was a Saturday, but nobody was out. Flashing Welcome Tourists! signs and Mount Rushmore memorabilia shops made the ghost town scene really eerie.

This seems like a strange place, I said.

Creepy, Badger agreed.

We checked into the Travel Lodge and took showers. Next, we needed food.

 -Lizard 

Our friends push apart in the small space between the bar and wall. A woman squeezes through the channel of extended elbows and pressed bodies. She tries not to touch anyone. Probably ten years younger than she looks, the woman is scrawny. The skin on her arms hangs off in overly tanned and wrinkled slabs, blanketing where muscles should be. Her hair is tied back. Vodka and sprite on her breath.

Yer in my seat, she yaps.

Badger leans on the bar stool the woman is eyeing. She immediately stands up and begins apologizing for taking her seat. Her seat is one in a short line of empty seats near the back of the bar. The front of the bar is packed because it’s Wednesday night. Wednesday night is karaoke night. A strange festival that brings out a strange bunch from the small town including: recent college graduates like us, worn folk with yellow teeth and a mid-20s crowd who never got out of this town. There’s women paired in twos and single men sitting on the corners. They eye each other with sips from cheap drinks.

What are you drinking? I ask.

At this point the woman’s friend (we’ll call her Friend) with identical body frame is pushing to her seat. Friend’s hair is short and platinum blonde. Friend’s eyebrows are drawn on with a black eye liner. Friend looks drunk. Really drunk.

            Vodka Sprite, the woman says not making eye contact.

            I prefer Whiskey.

            So did my husband.

            Because she uses past tense I wonder where her husband could be. Dead? At home with the dogs? Did my breath bring up memories of him?

            You singing tonight? I ask shaking her from a dream.

            Yeah, up next. Yinz singin’?                        

            Yeah. We’re singing a duet. I point to Badger.

            Cute.

            Friend’s eyes cross as she sips from a clear and bubbly drink. I notice another solo man with a large beard sitting at the bar across from us. Beer foam coats his whiskers. He drinks and will not take his eyes off our group.

            From the front of the room we hear the DJ call the woman’s name. She throws back the rest of her Vodka Sprite, coughs and presses to the front of the room. A twangy song begins and the woman lifts the microphone in her bony hands. The hum of bar talk doesn’t die down, but the woman sings as though she was in front of three hundred people. An American Idol fan, maybe. The man with foamy whiskers is still staring. I begin to chug my beer. I wave at the bartender.

            Two snake bites, please.

            Sure thing, he says grabbing the Yukon Jack. The bartender continues talking as he mixes our shots. He pours the amber into shot glasses and slides them toward me and Badger. We mutter a lame cheers we learned in college and throw back the spicy and sour shot. I look at Badger.

            You ready?

            Yeah.

            The DJ calls us to the front and we take the stage. The first strums of TLC’s No Scrubs sound and Badger and I begin to sway. One snake bite was definitely not enough for this. After an awkward performance acknowledge by no one, Badger and I decide we should try something else in life.

            Why not go out west?

-Lizard 

8 hours later, after the most facile drive of our trip, we had arrived at our destination.  That’s not to say we didn’t encounter any road blocks because as soon as I stopped bawling about a puppy’s failed attempt to make it across the road, we encountered WILD CHICKENS in a desolate town that had us questioning whether our car was going to break down, we were going to split up to find help, stumble upon the dissected remains of an elderly couple and fight Leatherface for our lives.  Holy toads, I’m glad that didn’t happen because then everybody, even the forehead-creasers would have been right.

 We stayed in our friends’ dorm room for the night (which really took me back to the sleepless nights I spent plotting my getaway at summer camp…I don’t know, I think it was the lighting.) Unlike summer camp, we had booze.  Leave it to Ray to find us “the best goddamn barbecue chicken on this side of the Mississippi.”  He had chicken, coleslaw and Hurricane 40’s ready to go and I wouldn’t expect anything less from that son of a b.  There wasn’t much to do in Wise other than get buck wild and pretend to be British at Applebee’s or go to the movies.  We chose the movies.  But after 30 minutes into Bad Teacher, I wished we had chosen to speak Cockney at Applebee’s.  No, J. Timberlake, not even you and your dapperness could save that movie.

Ray drove us around in his grandma’s old Buick that had bright, pink towels on the back seats and for that, I gave him a bag of popcorn that (fell on the floor) looked like an ass rabbit had pooped in upon exceeding the yogurt chip limit. Or was it a Pocket Taco that I gave him?  No, that was Fregly who ate the Pocket Taco.  On the way back home, he took us to a rad lookout in the Smokey Mountains:

We went to bed early so we wouldn’t be tired for the start of our trek to Denver. And when I say we, I mean girl number 2 because Fregly is an insomniac and strategically only falls asleep when it’s his turn to drive while I laid awkwardly on one of those wooden chairs that should never have been invented because their only useful quality could be keeping a fire ablaze next to him because there was a couple in the bedroom.  Of course, in cartoon life, I nonchalantly floated out of the room after obnoxiously winking a few times so they could get wild but in R.L., I fell over a pair of New Balances on the way out and never finished the sentence, “Oh… I’m not tired, I’ll uh go watch TV with - drink of water…”

I wonder if there’s a day when you stop doing that… maybe during the “it” year when you’re like 32…you know, trailing off in mid-sentence, jumbling all your words up without having the gumption to explain what you actually mean. If not, I guess I’ll just be a savant forever.  

Moms, neighbors, basically anyone who heard word of our trip was worried about us - images of bears, killers and the sole idea that two jackaloons such as ourselves would be on our own to remember to eat, shower and find places to sleep all over the country brought horror to the minds of many.  That’s how and why we managed to commandeer a key player on our journey. His name: Fregly.
 
Remembering a night out on the patio when Fregly tried to weasel his way into coming with us, we decided to drunk dial him after the “No Scrubs” debut.  He was in.  He was shorter than us.  He had a smaller inseam than us.  Therefore, he could not outrun a bear faster than us. He also had a Pocket Rocket aluminum camp stove and that made his presence ideal.

I frantically began packing; checking off every item on a road trip check list some lady hesitantly handed me at REI.  Even she was nervous for us and I’m not sure why because I am unmistakably good at pretending I am a serious individual.  I mean, I am super serious about things that are actually important like good pizza and determining which Hogwarts House people belong in AND I only hosted an Ad Club meeting while I was intoxicated like… twice.

“Is that all you’re bringing to travel the country? You girls are nuts - never gonna make it.”  Girl number two’s dad, 1-2 bottles of wine deep, bellowed at me as I entered their house with only a pillow and a lantern in hand.  Of course we were updating our GPS only hours before we embarked on our journey and while we were doing so, girl number two’s father continued lecturing us about bears, killers and being us while my mom cried and lamented prayers. 

ARE WE SOME KIND OF BABOON CIRCUS FREAKS?! 22 years of perpetual buffoonery?  I never realized how much of a joke I was until people other than the o.g. forehead-creasers began questioning my ability to survive without my mother or some maaaaaaaaaaaaaan to protect me. WHATEVER, BOGANS!

We packed up, bumped our music - shit Swan Lake was playing - quickly diverted with some gangster rap and picked that son of a b, Fregly up.  His dad didn’t have to say anything to reveal what his face read: “WHAT THE HELL IS MY BOY DOING?” Nevertheless, he wished us well and we were on our way.  First stop: Wise, Virginia.  No typos, we really went to Wise, Virginia.

“Are you jackalopes coming or what?”  

Girl number 2 and I had been texting back and forth, bantering about which of the situations we were in was worse off.  It’s hard to decide at this point, but let’s just say that both of us were at the only two bars our town has to offer on a Wednesday night.  Admitting that you’re excited to go out and get buck-wild at either of these establishments is the equivalent to constructing a Facebook status about… anything.  Oh, your grandma just got a cat? Awesome! The weather outside is making you sad? Bummer!  Updating your FB with such irrelevant news will only render you a grinning moron.  My suggestion is to grace your FB audience with  an open ended question, something like… “I like my men like I like my beer: pale and bitter, how about you?” 

Normally, I’d have a difficult time deciding which bar to exude my drunkenness in, however, there’s no contest when karaoke is involved.  Wednesday night is karaoke night at one of the two, so I made a b-line in hopes to show off that golden throat of mine. In real life, we all knew there was no chance for me because I was already 3 beers deep.  I’m actually a pretty decent singer but I’m certain no one will ever know about it because every time karaoke is involved, I produce an irrevocably tainted version of whatever song I sing and I blame it on imbeciles like Jack Daniels. 

As my friends and I are walking to the door, I’m expecting to see familiar faces all around upon entering…

“Party’s here!!!! …Oh…I don’t know…. anyone.”

Just once, I want to enter a bar Sam Malone status.

I see the girl number 2 in the back of the bar and of course, manage at least two awkward exchanges with strangers as I finagle my way to my friends.  Once I shook the feeling that everyone was staring at me as if I had t-rex arms and was reaching for a glass on the top shelf (actually, maybe I was raptor-arming it, and if so, they had valid reason to stare) I realized I had stepped into a time portal.  I was surrounded by acid wash jeans and mullets.  

Welp, time for a snake bite!  As I threw my head back and forced the bottom-shelf whiskey down my throat, a gangly lady with smoker-voice-extraoidinaire pushed me off my stool.

“Ey sweethawt, you’re in my seat.  Yeah, yeah, it’s okay, just get outta my seat.”

Deb, I call her was probably only about 32, but years of smoking and guzzling bottom-shelf whiskey aged her quite poorly.  She also had the karaoke game of a tone deaf priest.  As she sang Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance” I sort of wished she’d have sat it out instead of belting.  But who am I to talk? I just made a pun out of a Lee Ann Womack song and secondly, I had already slammed a Coors Lite, ripped two more snake bites and proceeded to sing “No Scrubs” with girl number 2.  

We were no one hit wonder.  A few older men with mullets cheered us on while the rest of our friends ducked in the back, pretending not to know us.  That’s when I knew I had to make it back to the year 2011 immediately.  Sequentially, execute the trip.  So that’s exactly what we did: packed up girl number 2’s car and flew like bats out of hell the very, next day.