Read Online When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris - Free Book Online Page A

cigarette lighter, and I could see a tag the size of an index card showing through the sheer fabric at the back of her neck. We drove in silence for a mile or two before the man turned in his seat and asked, as if he were inquiring about my health, “How’d you like to eat my wife’s pussy?”
    Then the woman turned as well, and it was to her that I made my confession: “I’m a homosexual.” I’d been waiting to unload this for as long as I could remember, and, amid the screeching of tires and the violent swerve to the side of the road, I felt all the relief I’d imagined I would.
    A few months later I said the same thing to my best friend, Ronnie, who pretended to be surprised and then admitted that she’d known all along. “It’s the way you run,” she said. “You let your arms flop instead of holding them to your sides.”
    “Work on your run,” I wrote in my diary the following morning.
    At the age that many would consider their heyday, I had not had sex with anyone. My confessions did nothing to alter this situation, but for the first time in my life I felt that somebody actually knew me. Three somebodies, to be exact. Two were roaming the highway in a Cadillac, doing God knows what with a CB radio, but the other was as close to me as my own skin, and I could now feel the undiluted pleasure of her company.
    Next on my list of people to tell was my former college roommate, Todd. I hitched from Raleigh to Kent, Ohio, but once I got there, the time didn’t seem quite right. It was harder telling a guy than it was telling a girl, and harder still when you’d taken too much acid and were trying to keep the little people from sticking pins in your eyes.
    After my failure in Ohio, I headed back south. It was early December, and I had forgotten how cold it could get in the Midwest.
    Todd had suggested that I take his down jacket, but I thought it was unsightly, so here I was in a thrift-shop overcoat that didn’t even button all the way up. He’d also offered a sweater that belted at the waist. It was thick and patterned in bright colors, the sort of thing a peasant might wear while herding llamas, but I’d said, “No, it might ruin my silhouette.” That was the phrase I had used, and now I was paying for my vanity — because what difference would it have made? “Oh, goodness, I can’t give
him
a ride. He looks too lumpy.”
    I’d left Kent at eight in the morning, and the next five hours had taken me less than fifty miles. Now it was lunchtime — not that there was anywhere to buy it, or anything much to buy it with. It began to rain, and, just as I thought of turning back, a tow truck pulled over and the driver motioned for me to get in. He told me that he wasn’t going far — just thirty miles up the road — but I was grateful for the warmth and climbed into the passenger seat determined to soak up as much of it as I possibly could.
    “So,” the man said after I had settled in, “where you from?” I pegged him to be somewhere between old and ancient, midforties, maybe, with gray-tinged sideburns shaped like boots.
    I told him I was from North Carolina, and he slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “North Carolina. Now, there’s a state for you. My brother and me went down on vacation — Topsail Beach, I think it was — and we just had the time of our lives.”
    When the man turned to address me, I noticed that his ears stuck out and that his forehead was divided almost in two by a vertical dent that started at the intersection of his eyebrows and ran to within an inch of his hairline. It was the type of thing associated with heavy thought, but this was so deep and painful-looking that it might have been left by a hatchet.
    “Yessiree, good old North Carolina,” the man continued. “N.C., I guess you call it down there.”
    He went on about the state’s climate and the friendliness of its people, and then he looked into his side mirror to monitor the progress of an advancing