Chapter 9 Don’t Dance With Molly
Jack was in an awkward spot. He spent the next day trying to find this girl and her sorority. He walked every path and every walkway of every street and of every-which way by, to , and through the school. He saw her nowhere.
He found the closest free clinic. After a four hour wait, he saw a doctor and he found out that nothing was wrong. He was relieved. Jack decided to get the hell out of Eugene.
So Jack left the city where it was quite possible that the mother of his child was off binge drinking and enjoying menage a tuas.
Jack was glad to be out of this town more than he was to be out of Sacramento or Boise, at least there he didn't have a possible love child.
He packed and got out of there by checkout time and was back on a road in the middle of a green nowhere in a matter of hours.
Three days later he ended up in Portland.
He found a hostel and paid for a few nights. His cash wad was getting progressively thinner and Jack resolved to get some money soon.
He thought about stealing some cash, but decided against it. He was already on the run and had crossed countless state lines. He chuckled to himself and thought how it was the fact he was a fugitive from the law that was making him more law abiding.
The next day he wandered onto some street called Hawthorne which was just a block from the hostel. The street was full of college hipsters, punks, hippies, and nerd punk hippie rockers, Jack decided. He looked for any potential cash opportunity. He eventually stumbled on one.
Apparently Portland has a huge problem with bank robberies. There was a bank on Hawthorne that got robbed as he walked past. The men ran out and jumped into a car only to have the paint bomb go off. Except on the bag they didn't manage to close which had a huge trail of twenties falling out of it. The cops were so busy busting the guys in the car, they didn't even notice the homeless hippie sweeping up the cash until both the cash and the homeless hippie were long gone.
Jack had made another thousand and couldn't believe his luck. He then wondered if this made him an accessory to robbery or if this counted as tampering with a crime scene. Actually it was both, with the process of “staking the charges” Jack could be charged for both.
Jack didn't know and didn't care. Jack was just glad that he didn't have to worry about money for a while and he was glad to now have this time to read. So after he went back to get his books he settled in a coffee shop with a large black coffee while reading his Shakespeare and Ivanhoe.
He didn't like Ivanhoe as much as the others but he liked how it was like reading a Shakespeare play in the form of a novel. It was different, and Jack liked that.
Jack walked back to his hostel.here he found he would be sharing the bunk with a hippie named Toasty. They shook hands, Jack was polite but immediately decided he didn't like the guy. That changed when the guy asked the question, “You wanna do some Molly shots.”
Jack asked what that was and the guy told him, “Pure Ecstasy.”
Jack had heard plenty about Ecstasy, and had been with tons of people when they did it, especially back in 2005 when hyphy was blowing up in California. He had never taken it himself though. Out of curiosity he took two shots of Molly and water.
After an hour of impatient waiting, Jack started feeling better than he ever had before in his life. He felt so ecstatic and happy. As if he was climaxing at a nonstop rate. He felt alone in his hostel. He wanted to get out and be around people, and listen to music. Jack hadn't wanted to listen to music more than at this moment in his entire life.
He wandered the town in the dead of night, enjoying every sight he saw, even the people he saw passing by. Jack loved it, he felt energized to an endless point, and he couldn't understand it, but he loved everyone. He felt like his life time of indifference has been a mistake. He actually loved these people walking by him, and he just smiled and gave an emphatic hello. Eventually he came across a house party full of college students, who were blasting good music. Jack walked in as Superstition just ended, and Thriller just got started on the speakers. Jack immediately walked in, not having to pay anything, and stayed on the dance floor until the cops came.
When Jack returned to the hostel, he rubbed the sheets like they were the last piece of cloth on earth, loving their texture, and wishing he had Ann with him right now, and Alice and Fiona too.
Jack didn't feel half as happy the next afternoon, when he awoke to what felt like the flu and a hangover combined.
Still, Jack felt he had to take this in with the ecstatic joy he felt last night. It was worth the trade off, and Jack was glad he was feeling something.
Jack resolved to get more Molly from the guy, but by the time Jack woke he was gone.
Jack thought it was for the best.
He soon changed his mind about Molly as he felt like shit for almost half the week, and after the woman running the hostel regaled him with all of the retarded things he said like apologizing for dropping his own cigarette. After the woman was done laughing in Jack’s face about that night and Jack stormed off to her laughter he simply resolved, “Never again, it’s not worth it.”
Jack soon forgot about the Molly, recovered his state of indifference and recovered from his cluster fuck morning after disease.
The next day Jack felt much better, and felt ready to conquer the word. However, instead he resolved just to find a spot to read some more.
His plans changed when he saw a white windowless van parked across the street.
Jack got the fuck out of there with all of his bags.
The van eventually faded into nothing, and he was safe, but still scared stiff.
“The fuckers are on my tale.” He thought.
He continued to wander the city in paranoia and eventually settled on stopping at a bar to get a drink to calm his nerves. He drank his beer while constantly peeping over his shoulder to make sure no under-covers followed him, and to make sure the van wasn't waiting outside with a swat team to beat him into submission, drag him back to Leavenworth and keep him there the rest of his life.
The van wasn't an undercover cop. What was inside was a man raping his girlfriend at gunpoint. Jack was so paranoid he didn't even try to check somehow.
Jack felt ashamed, as if this desperation of his was pathetic, but sadly necessary. It was run away from strange white vans, or be on your guard 24/7 surrounded by iron and concrete. Jack knew he had made a few mistakes, but he also knew he didn't deserve twenty five years to the rest of his life just for following instinct. He didn't deserve that kind of a life.
Hell, he started to realize he didn't need the kind of a life had now, but he decided he would rather be running from the law instead of in its grasp. At least when you're on the run, you get the pleasure of outsmarting the law.
In its grasp, the law reminds you every single day you could never be smart enough to out run it, never strong enough.
Jack felt that by walking casually out of Lampoc he had been strong enough, and indeed he had.
He had no idea how pissed Judge Bachman was when he found out one of his convicts had escaped. He prayed when that they brought him back, they brought the escapee back to him in his court, but when he found out it was Jack Lewis, he only remembered that cold lack of emotion, and he couldn't help but tremble just a little.
If he had seen Jack now, in a state of drunken paranoia, he would have had his ego restored. Jack was lucky he was only having a panic attack.
Eventually he was drunk enough to forget about it all, and stumbled out onto the street.
When Jack woke up the next morning he was in the middle of some intercity park, his bags were spread out and emptied on the grass next to him. All his food and all his money was gone. They only left him his clothes and his books.
Jack tried to figure out what time he passed out, and he was glad his books were still okay. He simply repacked his books, grabbed his now empty bags and started looking for a place where he could get some food.