Part 17E (Rhapsody in Gordon)

"You guys wanna hear a sacred Caucasian song?" I said. I don't typically say something so stupid, and this was the second dumbest thing I said that night. Fucking Hurricane.

I've grown out of Freebird. Fuck those crackers. I've grown out of mindlessly worshiping most of the traditional rock anthems. I still love Zeppelin, The Stones, Beatles, mind you, but their discographies run so much deeper than what one hears on the radio.

BoRhap though, it always delivers. Just enough metal, prog, and ballad, not too much of any of the above. Mercury was still young and frisky. Not middle-aged, domesticated, and paying his sin-wages by melting alive. Stretching 1975 technology to its limit; the voice, the harmonies, the guitar, the dynamic tension. My God it's as beautiful as a Pilsner Urquell and a cigar in hand on a summer twilight.

And we all sang together and the oppression of driving at night in general and driving through desolation in particular was lifted. And Bohemian Rhapsody did everything that a well-known song is supposed to do to a pack of drunks, which is one of those things that's terribly important to me.

The locals were practically shaking with excitement. "Let's go to the bar" one of them said. "Let's go to Gordon, the bars are open their till 2:30. "They know how to have a good time their.

"The bars in Nebraska close at one everywhere." I said.

"Nah man, they know how to have a good time there. Where are we going? Let's go to Gordon?"

We had spent a night in Gordon. The town is small enough to hear any late-night revelry going on from anywhere else in town. These men's version of Gordon was a phantom, a fantasy, like the hotel where you can sing and dance all night without trouble that we heard about on the first night. Just how isolated were they for a village thirty miles away to be a rumor?

"Doesn't he look like Bon Scott?" Said Robert.

We got to Rushville before midnight. The calls for Las Gordon with its rivers of champaign and nubile women grew only louder.

We went back to the hotel instead. To do what exactly we didn't really know. A red-on-white homosexual orgy would have been hot but it still wouldn't have been Gordon.

Fuck everything. Respect nothing. Nothing really matters.