''This pair of panties, right here, has just been in my door for...I don't know whose they are, and I've asked, like everybody, whose they could be and they told me that they don't know either.'' says The Inch holding the undergarments in his hand and folding them back into his car door as he punches eighty down the highway.
''I don't know where the **** they came from but they're my lucky, like, side of the door, car panties, I guess now.'' The Inch continues as I laugh in the passenger seat; Garrett, The Jaffer, in the backseat nodding his head in appreciation.
It was a mid day in July with the heat tanning our arms outside the window. The highway looked like an endless strip of asphalt in the sea of green corn stalks on each side.
When we got in the town of Ollie, population no more than fifty people, it seemed like any other day out in the middle of nowhere. Trucks cruzed by broken down homes as I spotted what I've been looking for; in the middle of the town was a small road with a series of abandoned buildings on each side. We parked The Inchmobile II (a 97' Buick Park Ave four door) next to, what looked like, a former store front; the property still for sale.
Almost every window in the two building structure was broken out, shards of glass littered the floor, along with pieces of the former roof which had collapsed long ago; the beams smashed down in a corner. Little remnants of the roof still existed in the joining building we were standing in. The other had it's roof still on but the back wall had looked as if it imploded backwards in on itself. The Jaffer started pissing on the broken window ledges.
The joining part we were in had almost been completely taken over by wildlife inside the barrier of remaining brick walls that surrounded us. Complete piles of rubble was amassed in a heap near the front door and an old table that held moldy dictionaries and the remnants of a phonograph.
Back in the main building, the piles of were a mixture of rubble and garbage; a moldy couch laid against the wall with an empty pack of Busch Light from the late 90's stuck under it. The floor was completely littered with garbage of about twenty years; an Apple II computer stuck out in a pile of broken chairs. The Inch walked out on the glass laden sidewalk in front of the building and said ''I think that's cig worthy'' as the heat beamed down on him with the birds chirping on top the stoop of the building.
Next to the lonely scene laid a small patch of fenced off junk. Another dilapidated building was just across the small street; ''the ratio of livable to unlivable houses is now one to one'' says The Inch as he gazes upon an abandoned pub. Only the stickers on the window signified it's past as the door was locked.
''Meanwhile, the shoelace around my neck gets tighter as the noose lynches'' said The Inch. I turned and said ''yea, I think it's time for a cig''.
We drove a couple blocks to the small city park, exactly in the middle of town, houses lined around us as trucks kept circling around like vultures hovering over the carcass. The local sheroof kept his eyelids open as he joined the rally around the city park. Sweat formed on my brows as I huffed the cigarette down and nervously eyed The Inch who revved up The Inchmobile and we were off.
These were towns on the edge of desperation. The locals were insecure creatures that crept behind their window sills with shotguns in one hand, and possibly, hard drugs running through the veins of the other. This much isolation creates an eerie atmosphere of silence that is only broken by vehicles coming off (or beside) the nearby highway. Granted, the drivers usually waved at you, but that only felt true when they were driving far away.
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