I drive through the fog on my big black bike. It’s a lot like sex at all the straining angles. Cutting through the Blue Ridge fog, we become less and less. Glowing in the dark around a bend. Leaning into the shadows of the moon. We slept like cards in the small dark rooms poker is always played in. Stories are the slaughterhouse. To drive through fog in the days of blood and glass. Sullen like defeat. Dead armies of sailor boys and they always liked my cats. They never know your tongue is there until they taste it. Driving through the fog and leaving all the whores behind waving bye bye with their pink little hankies.

Sometimes, I go to the Harley-Davidson motorcycle shop in Chimney Rock, just down the street from Lake Lure, to simply breathe the bike shop in. The bikes themselves. The chrome. The leather. The oil. The lake. The new tires, and the hot sand. This is all I wanted. This is all I have ever wanted. I live out of one bag. I have always lived out of one bag. The people who have written about my life, and this would include the writers who threaten to write about my life, were not there, and they don’t know jack fucking shit about my life, and I am here to tell you what they have to say is complete whackjobhackjob dog piss. They lift their writer legs and whatever comes out comes out. I literally have no idea who they’re talking about. It is not me. They assume an intimacy that never existed.

If I had ever had a relationship with any of them, I think I would know it. I have never heard of most of them, and I have talked to none of them.

I just needed tires. Miles was casing the entire motorcycle shop. I know my thieves. They are like knowing Beethoven on any car radio or the smells of opening the doors to a grocery store you have never been in before. Thieves are like potatoes. They never fuck in church.

This one wanted a bike. The one he had ridden in on was a piece of shit.

“Your bike is a piece of rusted shit,” I told him.

“I know who you are.”

Lots of people know who I am. It doesn’t mean anything.

I shrugged. “Don’t be stealing bikes here. It would be a mistake. This is the Blue Ridge.”

This is code for Everyone Has a Gun.

“I know that.”

We kept bumping into each other in Chimney Rock. Finally, we simply ended up sitting at a picnic table behind Uncle Junk’s on the Broad River where we shared a joint, a bottle of Jack, and talked.

I appreciate people who do not fuck around. Goes right to the point.

I know every mountain cabin — occupied, ruined, abandoned, redecorated, reretrofitted, and repaired — in the Blue Ridge. I had hid out in most of them at one time or another. I have never been to jail. I do not have so much as a single parking ticket.

Miles had been in and out of foster homes, detention facilities, jails, prisons, whore houses, and police stations all his life. A record is a long way from a parking ticket. Miles was a thief. He could steal cars. Lots and lots of cars.

It was Miles who showed me you could live out of one bag.

We didn’t need stuff. We needed money. The kind of money that would buy you food. Hard boiled eggs in a bar do not count. People who own stuff own stuff that owns them. It was not about the stuff. It was about the ride.

The boys I work with today get it. When stuff does not own you, getting out of Dodge is as easy as the fog. If it doesn’t fit into the bag, you do not need it. That will separate you from most people then and there.

When the Gestapo arrives to bang your door down, where will you be. You will be with your stuff. I will be with the vanishing. I have always been with the vanishing. We are not unlike piano keys. You don’t see us. All you hear is the music.

Miles moved on to richer pastures. The clerks and the accountants of the Blue Ridge were glad for it. Miles was a criminal. The boys and I are not like criminals. We are like something floating, glinting off the sun in the French Broad river. Something. Everything. Then nothing.

I would never smoke weed or drink Jack with minors. It would crack my bones.

“Tell us about Miles when you guys were thieves.”

Stories are like the slaughterhouse. These boys are not from the Universe That Was. They are from the Universe That Will Never Be. Most of them are hit men. Hit men with no office numbers or offices for that matter. I can’t tell them stories on the wrong day. They have to sit down and wait. Jack Daniels is for sipping. Not chugging down your throat. I make them sit and watch the Broad river for a while like the darker stories down the hall by the telephone with all the numbers and the messages written by desperate whores on walls. Those days are over. There is little soothing music on the Internet.

“It’s all about desire,” I told them.

“What’s desire,” they asked.

“Sex on a motorcycle and love gone wrong. Sailors and the sound of running water in a tub. Jack Daniels and the lights go out. Leopards you keep in the corner of the room. Dreams thin as piss. Rooftops. Praying. Syringes and saying nothing. A tulip you bought for a dime. Inside tunnels on railroads under the Alps with women who wear red lipstick to match their stiletto heels. Being chased by attorneys around an office desk. Flying green birds. A drawer of folded shirts. Little people. Munchkins. Tin men not just yet. Your brother’s underwear with skid marks. Vacant lots. War in China. Anyone who might want you and no one does. His tongue in your mouth and slowly. Dying in your sleep. All of this is desire. I’m telling you, all of it. All, all, all.

This is when their mouths are half-open, and their lips are full, and their eyes are soft and guarded. From across the street, someone is playing the piano.

It’s about the ride. It’s just about the ride. It’s all I have ever wanted.

I drive through the fog on my big black bike. It’s a lot like sex at all the straining angles. Cutting through the Blue Ridge fog, we become less and less. Glowing in the dark around a bend. Leaning into the shadows of the moon. We slept like cards in the small dark rooms poker is always played in. Stories are the slaughterhouse. To drive through fog in the days of blood and glass. Sullen like defeat. Dead armies of sailor boys and they always liked my cats. They never know your tongue is there until they taste it. Driving through the fog and leaving all the whores behind waving bye bye with their pink little hankies.