DRIVE ANGRY
by Matt Pelfrey
Rex
Rex the Mex behind the wheel. Chemo-Boy rides shotgun.

Concrete, concrete, concrete…lights, neon, billboards…… rich cars, poor cars, ugly cars, dented cars, cars with tint, with our-of-state plates, cars with vanity plates…cars with loser zoos, cars with stupid bumper stickers, cars with no bumpers, hot rods, jeeps, vans, busses…Asian dudes, Armenian dudes, Arab dudes, black dudes, brown dudes, white dudes. . .everyone mixing, merging, honking…Like this freeway is just a big concrete bloodstream full of mechanical germs.. .angry mechanical germs…Can I give you a lift tomorrow to where? Oh, man, your chemo treatment? What time? Nine o’clock? (Slightly annoyed.) Yeah, I can give you a ride. I’m not annoyed… I just wanted to sleep in. (Increasingly annoyed) I’ll drive you! I said I’d drive you…I said I would stinkin’ drive you, okay? Stop sniveling.You are. You’re sniveling like some kinda victim. Little Chemo-Boy suffering from cancer. Waaaaa! You’re not even losing your hair. I mean, you know, what kind of wimpy cancer you got that your chemo doesn’t make you go bald? You know? On TV, all the cool cancer patients go bald. Your stuff doesn’t do that? It’s cause you got pussy chemo. No, I’m not being a jerk. I’m chemo for your manhood. You heard me. I’m like chemo for your whatever, yeah, your manhood. I won’t let you become one of those people who start to feed off their disease. My uncle got pancreatic cancer, and that’s what he became. Pancreatic Cancer Man. Everything was about his disease. How he’s “bravely battling cancer.” All that disease hype. The whole time, I’m thinking, what’s so damn brave about battling something that you have no choice about? You got cancer. You deal with it. Its like how we treat cops and firemen. They save someone, they catch a killer, and, yeah, that’s great, but it’s their job. It’s not like some civilian that risks his life to intervene and save someone. A cop or fireman has no choice. That’s no more than what’s expected. It’s their job. They’re not being heroes, they’re earning a paycheck and enjoying a privileged position in society. Let me ask you a question. Let me pose a thought to you…Why did you get cancer? But what did the doctors tell you? But at your age, ass cancer is rare. So why did this stuff grow inside of you? You may not know, but I do. I do, man. I really do. What you continually fail to grasp, my diseased little friend, is that I am not burdened by over-education. I haven’t spent eight years after high school getting taught how to think or what pre-packaged crock to spout so that I appear smart at parties and espresso bars. I actually think. I have forced myself to remain open to the Cosmic Whatever. My diagnosis? Existential pollution. That is all the crap out there. All the crap that pisses you off and eats at you day in and day out. All that crap has crawled up inside your ass and died like a sick rat. And that got everything infected. What kind of crap? Well, as I touched on already Call the chicks that piss us off, our crappy jobs, our parents and especially the psychotic, selfish, assholic drivers who plague us every day of our lives. You see, all these elements are out there, like secondhand smoke “like smog” it’s drifting, hanging in the air, contaminating our world. Am I right? You know I am. Food for thought? It’s a stinking all-you-can-eat buffet and it’s all true.Feast on that for a while, my friend. Feast on that.