Page 28

By Jack Joseph Smith

"Your in the gutter," I heard her say. I tried to tighten up my eyes. Blazing through the morning was the center of a June New Orleans sun. "What in God's name are you doing?" I didn't know her, but her crisp nursing uniform made me answer: "I'm going to see the Gibby." "The who?" Well it didn't matter anyway with my fat booze hulk attempting to step up to a lady on her way to work. Crossing Basin Street in her arms into a kind of coffie shop had me thinking about making love. But that I would not have; not on this journey. After re- fusing the hospital, she left me at a table muttering on her way out, "you'll never make it to Los Angeles," She was almost right. As the sixty-two chevy with the fins was weaving with this hitch-hiker in the back seat watching other hitch-hikers give the mother fucker to our one hundred miles an hour along the then low, thin and thieving road to El Paso, I watched shocking lights jam at us as we seemed to slide along the great bow of a semi, that suddenly geared down like a steam engine to let us slip through a naked black hole back into the reality of the world. I didn't get laid or buy anything in Juarez; I just walked across the bridge twice. And I didn't worry on my way to, or out of Tucson. This hitch-hiker had sixteen cans of Iron City Beer in his suitcase. Picked up in Pittsburgh, just to make the

Original Scan

Page 28

AI Interpretation

GPT

The scan-verified page turns a New Orleans gutter scene, a nurse, Basin Street, a dangerous ride toward El Paso, Juarez, Tucson, and Iron City Beer into a hard comic road memory.

The cleaned transcript sharpens the page's movement from humiliation to survival. The speaker is rescued, tempted, endangered, and still self-mythologizing, so the westward trip feels battered rather than romantic.

Claude

First-person New Orleans wake-up - Your in the gutter, nurse in crisp uniform coffie-shop scene, I'm going to see the Gibby, refuses the hospital, then slides into a 62 Chevy with fins doing 100 toward El Paso, sliding under a semi into a naked black hole, walking across the bridge in Juarez, on to Tucson with sixteen cans of Iron City Beer from Pittsburgh. Cross-country road-out-of-hell sequence.