Introduce Yourself : An Open Road by Brian Flanagan

Finishing up a novel I wrote with a film adaptation in mind. 

The golden age of rock is receding. Reagan is on the horizon. All seems lost, but then an epic journey begins.

Youth

On the run from the police in the back streets of Paris last night, holed up in the west of Ireland today, posing as a student abroad... Books, papers and backpack for camouflage, an anonymous American in a village from the Middle Ages. Waiting out the rain by an open hearth, a fugitive in flight, stealing time, thinking what to do. Trying to set this down while memory is green and I can hear myself above the muttering of distant thunder, muffled by mist and rain.

§

Warm light flowed in through high windows. I lay quietly, propped up in bed with a book in my lap, wandering a realm between waking and dreaming. A wayward breeze parted muslin curtains - torn, makeshift shades like sails, billowing now on a sudden gust, scattering shadows. Prompting me to look up from long neglected reading.

A woman I once knew lay blissed out beside me, beer breath moving in recurrent sighs. While I tried to decipher a mystic logician who let fall the offhand remark: the mystery of the world is outside the world.

I watched a sleeping beauty compose her slight face in an enigmatic expression. Her name I recall now was Gloria, because of the song. Rather than pretend to read blurred words, I put the book aside and bore witness to the morning unfolding, sun shifting in his unhurried passage through the hours.

Sunshine daydream do da-do... The stereo playing low in the living room.

Awake, awash, not wholly alone, already a few miles down the road, then, when out of the blue a car pulled up in the drive, followed by a gentle rap tap tap and the back door creaking open. I figured it for one of my brother's friends.

But that was actually when Jack made his entrance. A bit of a start, that - the room hushed while time held its breath a moment. I hadn't seen Jack in years. And now this abrupt appearance, this all of a sudden visitation - the form of my old buddy illuminating the doorway, like Adam in the morning.

"Whoa! I guess the party can start, now!"

"Whatcha doin', Guy?" Jack whispered back, so as not to disturb the woman by my side.

"Contemplating the nature of being."

"Do tell."

Jack stood framed in my brother's door, handsome as the day, blue eyes wide, beholding the spectacle of my youthful debauch. ("A debacle unequaled in the annals of universal squalor," quoth the bard, Bonzo.)

"Mind if I crash on the couch? "

"Sure thing! What's goin' on? "

"Tell ya later! Go back to sleep! "

"No way! "

Meaning highly improbable.