On the run from the fuzz on the way to Nashville

The sun rose lazily over the horizon as the dark orange sky turned red, then pink, and finally the familiar bright blue that heralds a new day of running from the law - one thing I excel at.

I got out of bed and showered - avoiding small dogs running around the upstairs of the house on my way down the hall. I stripped the bed, folded the sheets and left them neatly stacked in the corner of the room. Finally, I packed my guitars into their cases and carried them downstairs like rifles before loading them into the car. I put on my sunglasses and took off down the dusty road - but there was one piece of unfinished business I had in Kansas City.

I'd heard tell that the barbecue 'round these parts was the best on the planet, and I aimed to put that claim to the test. After all, if Anthony Bourdain told you that Oklahoma Joe's Barbecue was the best on Earth, and you just happened to a) be less than a mile from it and b) have an hour to kill, what would you do?

Other than burnouts in your Honda Element, of course.

Why, nothing other than visit Oklahoma Joe's Barbecue. So I found the address and sped recklessly down crowded streets without any concern for human life for several minutes until I found the place. And it's exactly like where you would expect the world's best barbecue to be - in a converted gas station. I heard once earlier this summer that in order to have good barbecue, you have to have a gnarled old black man working in the restaurant. So naturally, the first goal of mine was to look behind the counter into the kitchen, and sure enough, not one, but TWO gnarled old black men were making barbecue back there. I couldn't help but think maybe Anthony Bourdain had it right. 

Protip: Click the image to enlarge it!

At only 11:30 in the morning, right as they opened, the place was already completely packed. All the tables were taken up, and the line was nearly out the door. I learned later that on Friday and Saturday nights, the line actually wraps around the outside of the building several times. But this was before noon, and look how many people there already were:

And after ordering? Here's what came:

I'm not even gonna bother writing about how good it was, especially after only having eaten raisins and a gas station salad in the last three days. Any words I could write here to vainly attempt to describe what the experience was like would make me feel bad later for not having written more. 

Excuse me, I have to go consider ending my life after having had the experience of eating here - and knowing that there would be a very low probability of ever eating anything better again.

 

 

 

 

 

I'm finished, and I've decided that I'll hold on a little longer because I haven't tried everything on the menu quite yet. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is reason enough.

So I departed the back roads and headed out onto the interstate, where I'll make up a story about why I came home with a speeding ticket:

It was bright... bright enough to make you want to close your eyes, like the light glinting off the asphalt was enough to make a man go blind. But you'd never wanna open them again, because you'd be afraid that the world would change away from the renegade hellhole that had made you who you are - a man, alone, nobody to look after and nobody to look after you.

Yeah, that was me.

Sure, it was bright... but I reckoned it was better to tough it out than to drive blind - I'd almost feel bad for the poor bastard unlucky enough to get in my way. So I put my sunglasses on, and headed out onto the open road. Interstate 70, eastbound. Some call it home, some call it hell. Me? I just call it another battlefield to get lost on. 

Like I said, it was bright. There was no way to tell the difference between the sun way up in the hot sky and the thousand suns you saw in the reflections on the bumpers and grills of the steel horses around you - you just kept following them until they led you into the night, into Nashville, where I was bound. 

In front of me, maybe eight or nine good lasso-throws off, I noticed something I hadn't seen since my pa got himself done in by a pair of outlaws from Kentucky - the very car they drove, a dark red Bronco, the same color of the blood I saw on the walls that day so long ago. I could almost smell something. It's a smell you never forget - the smell of regret after two men from Kentucky shoot your pa dead in cold blood. The smell of regret that you were never man enough to go after them. I can still hear his final words to me.

Boy, I ain't never seen a rattlesnake know no fear. You go after them, and you bite them. You bite them dead, you hear me boy?

 

It's a strange feeling when you got to have a man's blood on your hands in order to keep the adrenaline down. But that's the feeling that came over me, and that's exactly what I set off to do. The gas pedal hit the floor, and the rubber skipped across the road like a stone across a lake of fire. I was right behind them. I could smell their fear - they knew this was their last day walking the earth.

But in the rearview mirror, I could see the Missouri State Patrol light up like a match. The adrenaline was gone. It was hate - hate for the men what killed my pa, hate for the law, hate for injustice. In the end, I drove away not with vengeance, but with a speeding ticket. 

Pictured: What my life is like 90% of the time anyway.

But what really happened was the cops set the speed limit on a stretch of interstate to 45 mph, to fill their ticket quotas. So when I raced by in the right lane at the breakneck speed of 64, guess who got to make a donation to the donut fund.

(me.)

I got to Nashville that night. Chill out, it's coming.