I get to the state line between Missouri and Kansas, driving forward and reversing, repeating to myself.
“I guess we’re not in fucking Kansas anymore.”, with each repetition making it funnier. I keep doing funny voices, warping it to the point it stops making sense. This was a way I would recover from traumatic situations, playing them out again and again, twisting them, implanting false memories, melting the neuroplasticity of my brain to the point I wasn’t sure the memory was real or not. A cop car pulls up behind me, so I get out of the car at the same time as them. They pull a gun.
“Get back in your vehicle.”
“I guess we’re not in fucking Kansas anymore!” I say in a high-pitched Humphrey Bogart accent. “Play it again Stan!”
“Get back in your vehicle or I’ll shoot!” the cop screams at me.
“You’re going to sentence me to death for getting out of a car? My Hyundai?” I say, putting my hands in the air and waving at the traffic speeding past. I wonder if I’m going to be on one of those traffic cop shows. I ball my fists up, sticking both middle fingers up.
“On the count of 3! Uh…”
“One?”
“Yep, one! Uh…”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Sure, this is Kansas.”
“And I’m in Missouri. You got no jurisdiction here, knucklehead.” I say, pointing to a huge sign next to me that says ‘Welcome To Missouri’. The cop rubs at his head with the gun still in his hand.
“Dag-nabit.” Says the cop, walking back to his car.
“Hey cop!” I call after him. He turns around. I have tied a custard pie to a balloon that slowly drifts towards him. He starts shaking his head, getting clumsy with his gun.
“I need backup! I need backup, now!” he yells into his radio. The pie slowly approaches him as he jiggles the car door, realising he has locked himself out. Hand into pocket, fumbling the keys out, they drop on the floor. Down in the dirt, scrabbling, grit beneath fingernails, up again, stabbing and scratching the keys around the lock, body filled with adrenaline, mouth dry, temples wet with sweat that runs into his eye. He finally finds the right key, looks up, just in time for the custard pie to hit him in the face. Immediately he tries to pull it off, instead pushing it harder into his face, the cream filling his nose and mouth. He can’t scream. He struggles, feet lifting off the ground, the balloon carrying him away like a spider in the wind. I watch as the cop drifts across the interstate, the uplift from the cars below makes him go higher and higher.
“I guess we’re not in fucking Kansas anymore!” I yell up at him, laughing as I get back into the Hyundai Sonata and head for Kansas City, Missouri.
The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art was just next to the World’s Largest Shuttlecock, offering arts and culture to the denizens of Kansas City since 1933. The collection spanned 5,000 years of cultural history from around the world, including everything from Ancient Egyptian death artifacts to contemporary sculpture by Donald Judd and Anish Kapoor. The windows of the gallery give a view of the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park, containing a mix of figurative and abstract sculptures placed between the trees and lawns of the museum’s footprint down to Brush Creek. As I walk the corridors, the curatorial decisions create strange juxtapositions in my mind. There is Baroque art across the hall from Modernism. There are Chinese ceramics next door to American landscape paintings. At the Rozzelle Court Restaurant, located on the first floor, you can grab some Homemade Mac & Cheese for $8.95 and still be chewing on it as you look at ‘Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness’ by Caravaggio, listening to someone sat nearby on Duolingo, the little beeping noise adding to the overall effect of uncanniness of my visit. It was the cultural equivalent of an All You Can Eat international buffet, with plates piled high with bagels, curry, lasagna and ice cream.
I began to sprint through the galleries, filming the walls with my phone, the footage a blurry mess dubbed with heavy breathing that I would never watch all the way through. Invigilators and gallery staff would chase after me, security guards would leap from the edge of doorways, try to block my path.
“You need to slow down!” they would say, as I pushed past families and old couples and teenagers. I grabbed a bronze statue of Shiva from 13th century India, holding it aloft as I continued to sprint around the gallery. I loved consuming content. I needed to speedrun every cultural experience. I would read the synopsis of books by ChatGPT because it was more efficient than wasting time reading. Imagine being an author and spending all that time writing a whole book when you could just write a synopsis. Imagine being an artist spending hours, days, years, creating a masterpiece, when I would spend less than five seconds looking at it on my phone. Were these guys stupid?
I find myself breaking free from the confines of the gallery, still holding onto the Shiva statue, tossing it into the backseat of my Hyundai Sonata, tyres screeching as I left the car park, driving through Kansas City with Acidcore pumping out of my car stereo at maximum volume, I mount the sidewalk, speed through a park, I’m huffing nitrous straight out of the canister, my mouth is cold and my eyes are bright red. Now I’m in an industrial area, passing factories and warehouses, beneath the I70, screeching to a stop where the Missouri and Kansas rivers meet. I sit on the hood of my car, hitting the vape, trying to come down from the intense cultural experience I had tried to force feed my brain.
I needed an antidote. Something to relax me. I tried looking at the map on my phone for something, though the screen was shattered and pieces of glass rubbed beneath my fingertips. I was turning back on myself. I was heading East. I needed to correct my course before I ended up back at New York. I hit the vape, though was just hitting the coil, the taste of lead painted my inner cheeks. I spit onto the floor and it is black.
