|
Introduction We're talking about a feeling here, possibly the best you've ever had. We're talking about one hand on the steering wheel and one hand (someone else's) on your thigh. We're talking about a full tank of gas, a pack of Chesterfields and the nonsensical need to get to Buffalo. We're talking about a hitch-hiker with the bitchingest dope you've ever smoked. We're talking about waiting at an empty intersection for the light to change with your boyfriend passed out in the passenger seat. You hear the light click to green, but you don't go because something wonderful has happened. Your angel has descended and brightened the dashboard lights to shine a glow on your face, and you know that soon you will leave him and this shitty little town to take a chance at making your dreams, at least one of them, come true. We're talking about Cars and Girls, the theme to this issue of LURCH. It involves some of the greatest moments life has to offer, but be warned before turning these pages; it's not all pink carnations, pickup trucks, balmy evenings, white t-shirts stretched over muscles and panties the next owner will find under the back seat. These are some of life's most wonderful things, but all things wonderful run a higher risk of tragedy. When you read the darker of these stories remember they are merely tragedy, not the incomprehendable horrors a title like "Cars and Death" would suggest. It is the best of moments we're looking at here, but as the eye flips an image backwards so the mind can flip it back, it is the nature of narrative to deal with the best through tragedy. Every supreme moment is tinged with nostalgia and an airy regret you can't trace to a cause but seems to have something to do with the breath moving through your lungs. Watch a baseball player hit his first home run in the World Series and you will see the tragedy in joy. As he rounds the bases, usually just after second, a very brief but terrible expression will flash over his face. It will look like he's been punched in the gut hard enough to make him puke. He is realizing, under the fireworks and the cheers of the crowd, that this is probably the best moment that life will ever bring him. Think about the gravity of knowing instantaneously and before you're thirty that you've already gotten the best life has to give. Tragedy here is ripe, but as tragedies go, it's a good one. So in honor of the man in his greatest moment -- turning third base to the cheers of half the nation and his teamates waiting at home plate to pound him on the head -- put your seat back, the top down, hide your drugs in the steering wheel under the cover of your horn, put the pedal to the floor and smile at the best a world of four rubber snakes, internal combustion, fumbling sexuality and an endless horizon of parking lots has to offer. Enjoy. Here are some the higways you'll reach along the way: a Motor City with the very meaning of its existence (the motors) devoured by a violent new-ageist and a fire-breathing monster truck; an Ohio farmgirl driven off by strangers to serve as wife-of-the-deceased to a jazzman she never knew; a young traveller proves the expression "love stinks" by covering himself in his girlfriend's shit; the mythos of a Southern African boxer and his beautiful driver; a cautionary tale about how riding with the wrong crowd can bring a disgusting transcendance on the banks of the Gowanus; a distraught academic hydroplaning his way out of marriage; and woman who has never "done it" in a car dreaming excitedly about the pleasure of vinyl seats sticking to her naked butt. All this and more on the road ahead. LURCH Magazine is a collective based in Brooklyn, NY. We can be found at www.lurchmag.com and at out favorite pit-stop, Freddy's Bar. Please submit to all that is bigger and greater than any one man, especially LURCH Magazine. The theme for our next issue is Inlaws and Outlaws. Please send us your stories and poems. For more information regarding submissions, subscriptions, and all that crap, please see the inside back cover. In the words of the trucker wishing well, "Keep it between the lines." |