You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Driving with ants.
“What the F, dude!,” I yell over the sound of a Linkin Park guitar riff. Spotify is playing the band after their lead singer was found hanged to death in his home.
“There are ants falling from the roof,” I say with emphasis.
Hector rolls his eyes and scratches the imaginary infestation crawling through his beard.
My trusty photographer has one hand on the wheel. It seems it is all he can do to keep the infested little news car on highway 40 barreling East out of Dickson.
“I thought I was hallucinating,” I yell, now scratching my neck. I feel like I’ve been rolling in a basket of pollen. My skin is crawling with real and imagined insects.
“Dude, there are ants all over the car,” I say somewhat alarmed.
I watch a line of ants crawling across the floor board. Where they have come from and where they are going is unknown.
I feel like I am suddenly in a B Movie. When Ants Kill!
“How the hell did all these ants get in here, man?”
Before Hector can respond, an ant throws himself from the sun visor in front of me.
“Did you see that?” I shout.
Hector doesn’t comment. He is digging his fingers through his facial hair, scratching at demons that possess him.
I turn my attention back to the ant that flung itself off the visor. Was it a planned leap like a paratrooper diving behind enemy lines? Or like the singer of Linkin Park, was it a planned suicide, an esoteric statement that will never be fully understood.
There is no time for psycho-ant-analysis or crime scene dissection. I think on the moment that just was. A speck of nothing falls, for just an instant, a black silhouette against a bright windshield filled with blue sky and tractor trailers. Then it’s gone, it’s whereabouts unknown.
“Ants are killing themselves all around us, man. For no damn good reason, they are launching themselves off the ceiling and just disappearing into the dirty floorboard of death.”
“Yes. I know. we have to get some ant traps,” Hector replies. He is scratching his face like a homeless man.
I see an ant on my pant leg. I am horrified, but at the same time, intrigued. It is fast, running with all legs churning up my thigh. How many legs does an ant have?, I wonder to myself. I study it. I am deciding whether to smash it or flick it. I have to calculate quickly. The ant is much faster than I would have thought for a creature with the atomic weight of lint.
I watch the ant dash forward toward my thigh. It’s hardy, and strong. What the hell do ants do? what is their global purpose?, I wonder as the little creature races toward my crotch. It’s looking for food I surmise. I check my crotch. I have no food on my crotch.
WTF?
I look at the critter racing forward. Should I swat it? No, that will possibly leave a smudge on my groin and that will be hard to explain later.
“Hey what’s that grease stain?” I imagine my co-workers asking back at the office.
“Oh that’s where I used the force of a neutron bomb to kill an ant climbing on my leg,” I might respond to jeers and snickers.
“Way to go Einstein,” I imagine them saying as they walk away, glad they didn’t ride in a news car with Hector.
“Man this is awful!”
“I know,” Hector says. He is itching with his left hand, then grabbing the wheel and itching the other side of his neck with his right hand.
I suddenly wonder if the ants are going to kill us, devour us like 8 legged piranhas. It’s implausible, but in the B Movie in my mind, it could happen. A billion ants could suddenly crawl out of the engine and chew on our dead skulls.
THE DAY THE ANTS ATE THE WORLD!
I shake the movie trailer from my thoughts and stare at my partner. He seems like a man who is battling typhoid. He is sweaty and his skin a color between used cat box and sunbaked sea weed.
ANTS. ANTS. ANTS.
The B movie announcer’s voice is ringing in my brain as I watch a dozen ants scurry into the air conditioning vent before me. What is their evil purpose I wonder?
I look at Hector, his grip on the steering wheel the only thing keeping us alive.
I can imagine it as clear as day. The tiny insect of death, with razor sharp talons and teeth. It is a microscopic warrior, with the strength of a million Eveready Batteries. I imagine the warrior insects crawling up Hector’s face, laughing an ant laugh, then biting him in the pupil. I imagine an ant’s tiny fangs, digging into the soft mushy part of his eye. I imagine the liquid in Hector’s brain seeping out of his eye into the ant warrior’s open jaws. The ant slurps a delicious smile.
I have seen Hector react to insects before. There was a bee in our car once. He almost drove through a highway sign as he swatted at the flying insect. He is an insect wimp. He will let go of the steering wheel in an instant and scream like a little girl. I know this and decide I should not tell him of my vision of his ant related death.
“I’m itching like crazy,” he says, his eyes focused ahead.
“Just stay on the road, homey.”
The last thing I need is my kids to get a police report with the cause of death box checked; Ant Related homicide. How do you brag about Ant Related Homicide to your friends at school?
By this time, the renegade ant climbing my body, hunting in my loins for food, is my top concern. If I was driving at this moment, we would be driving under the tanker truck to the right of us.
As the tiny varmint dances a jig on my zipper, I feel one part disgusted and one part violated.
I poise my finger, locking it with my thumb, like a trip hammer ready to uncork.
“Little motha F**ker!”
The kinetic energy in my digit is tremendous. The anger and hate I feel for this speck of nothingness is exponential. I snap my finger like a cross bow being released. My nail skims off the top of my slacks, swiping the ant with a death blow.
The force I have just used to eradicate this dust molecule is equivalent to dropping a nuclear bomb on a dandelion.
Like a horrific crime scene, the singular molecule of irritation explodes toward the dash board, hitting the vinyl in a silent thud. Then the aggressor, no bigger than a single arm hair disappears into the darkness of the floor boards.
“Die you stinking little B**ch!”
I feel like William Wallace, my face painted white and blue, my locks flowing down to my Ars.
“FREEDOM!”
I look at Hector. He is grimacing, his hands off the steering wheel scratching himself like a black lab exiting a stagnant lake of detritus.
“I left a donut in the car,” he says scratching his arm.
I look at his arm. There’s nothing there. There are no ants. But the mind is a terrible thing to waste and Hector’s mind has gone to the dark side.
He is itching invisible creatures real and imagined. He is itching scratches he had as a youth. He is itching itches he will have when he’s someone’s grandpa. It is truly a sorry site to behold, I think to myself as I suddenly have the urge to pluck out my own eyebrows.
“A donut?” I exclaim over the tired wail of Chester Bennington, the Linkin Park rock singer who just committed suicide.
“All of this heinous disaster because of one God Damned Donut?”
“Yep,” Hector says, readjusting his hands on the wheel. The car swerves slightly as more ants are spotted on my boot. I quickly knock them away.
“There’s a colony in the parking lot. They get into the car,” he says his voice quivering, his fingers now scratching his thick salt and pepper locks like a man with leprosy.
“We gotta get them out of here, man. We’re gonna die.”
Hector would normally laugh. But there is no time for laughter, there is no time for more words.
I stare at the road ahead, scratching itches both real and imagined. I watch the blue sky go on forever and the clouds quietly move in front of the sun. Is this the end? The apocalypse? I think about life as an ant, crawling up someone’s crotch, hunting for a speck of food that has the gravitational equivalent of thread.
As Hector scratches his face with both hands for the 3rd time in as many miles, I say a silent prayer.
Dear Jesus. Please give Hector the strength to fight the temptation to scratch his face, to take his hands off the steering wheel, to deliver us from evil and get us home safely. And while you are at it, can you please kill all the ants in this car, regardless of how innocent or irrelevant any of them might be. And above all else, please keep my crotch a food free zone that might cause a panic, a riot, or stir an insurrection of eight legged creatures. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
“I’m going to buy an ant trap and kill them all,” Hector blurts out, his zombie eyes staring at the rolling dashed lines in the asphalt.
I nod in approval, knowing Jesus has heard my prayers.
I hear the voice of the B Movie Narrator boom in my thoughts over the whaling screams of Linkin Park.
Die you ant bastards. Die!
Coming to a theater near you!
Life’s Crazy™