"Mosquito bites," I tell her. By the looks of her, she's been waitressing long enough to humor herself with anything. I tell her that in order to see them, she has to take a closer look.
"Jesus," she says.
"Watch your language, Missy" That voice comes from a part of the cafe no one bothered to notice.
Both the waitress and I are startled. The man lowers his newspaper, revealing himself.
The way a Mosquito works when she's biting you is a thin, razor-like probiscis enters your skin, injecting you with saliva filled with enzymes and anticoagulants. I grew up in Minnesota, where they joke its the state bird. When you get the bites as a Minnesota kid, they swell on your light, buttery skin, and you scratch them until they bleed. The more bites you get, the happier you are, because time and many bites makes you totally immune to the bite. Over time, the only effect is a small red dot, nearly invisible. All those bites, my arm is now a constellation.
The heat this August week has kept most everybody holed up inside. This route has placed me in that narrow corridor of heat-locking Great Basin that borders places like Death Valley. This week, it's a hundred and five all the way from Mojave to Washington State.
The heat keeps everybody indoors, so my contact with people is limited to gas station attendents, occasionally a waitress. This northern-route conversation began with the thought of an email I received before I left for Oregon. Not a serious one, nor one from anybody I know by face. Rather, it was an accusation from the old opinions editor of an East Coast newspaper. We know each other only through the email; we're part of an e-mail discussion group that chews on current events issues.
Jim had revealed his disdain for what I call travel writing. Hunter S. Thompson called it, 'Gonzo Journalism.' When our current events conversation turned to Thompson's suicide, he wrote, "I spent nearly all of my newspaper career playing it as straight as humanly possible, and then, when I got to write a politically oriented opinion column, I was in hog heaven 'cause I had a place for all those unused adjectives and adverbs I'd stored up in all those straight years. Every time I'd read some of Hunter Thompson's Gonzo crap, I'd recall my few wasted evenings trying to relate at the College of Complexes, the '60s Beatnik saloon on Chicago's North Clark Street. I understand it's still there. Ah, misery."
Because I don't read newspapers or watch TV news, I don't have the same ability to comment on each detail of current events as others in our discussion group. Rather, I refer events to my own experience. If its about taxes, or war, or hurricanes, by default, my opinion and response has to be drawn from my observations.
