Highway To Hell

your free show. I'm actually recording his show on Friday afternoon because it's now September thirteenth, where two days passed, that awful day of remembrance from nine to eleven, and I was really searching for something I wrote for a magazine named Razor Magazine back in two thousand and two, which was about me and my buddy Neil Gumpel driving cross country an hour or two after we watched the towers come down, and we jumped in his rental car

and drove to New York. For the next three and a half days, there were no rental cars to get. Everybody already rented them. There was nothing to do. Thank god he had one. My car was vintage. It could not have it couldn't have made the ride all the way to New York. And I had a nineteen sixty fourth Fleetwood Cadillac. I would never drive that across country. But Neil had this small car so it's him, him and me, him and I, I should say, and my little dog cesaree my Yorkie. It was like a son

to me. And we taped God Bless America on a back windshield and we set out to drive, not before we bought enough liquor and cocaine and some fun pain pills and muscle relaxes to fuel us to drive across country and also to even understand the extent to which we were all facing, possibly World War three, the end of New York, the end of America. Who the hell knew?

But I want to read the audicle, I wrote back, and I think it was November or December of twenty twenty two, because I'd written for Razor before I wrote how It's During an article, and a couple of others, I believe. But that was when freelance magazine writing was great. I was making a lot of money writing for Playboy, Razor, Penthouse, other magazines, Maxim. I wrote for a lot of them, and that was in the day when a guy like me was getting two or three dollars a word per article.

Write a four thousand word article, do the myth. It was good money and I had all those guys on speed dial. They all knew me, and whenever I called and gave an idea, typically they jumped for it. Sometimes they called me and today you got anything. We're a little light for our July issue. What do you got? I'd sit down and go, yeah, I got something, and I always did, and that's what an editor likes from a writer. So look, I'm gonna read this to you.

If you could put yourself back to that day. And I know we just did this a couple of days ago, so it might not be so easier. Maybe it's going to be more painful. But I don't want to wait another year to do this. I want to do it now because God knows, with all the shit that's going on right now in this world and even the possibility of World War three and not knowing how our next president will be and how will fare, I'm gonna read this to you now. Let me know if you like it.

It was somewhere on the edge of Zion National Park, with four hundred miles of Utah ahead of us, when the percocets finally kicked in. It was only twenty hours earlier when my bedroom door was kicked open by my screenwriting partner Neil Gumpel. He had just driven all night, as he usually did from his home in Oakland, California. He walked into my unlocked house, turned on the TV when he arrived, and saw the surreal footage of the

first twin towers blown to pieces. Jesus fucked. I heard Neil scream as he came into my bedroom and told me what was going on. It wasn't even ten minutes since the first coward flew the hijacked jet into taro Ian, and my cell phone's mailbox was already at its capacity. I wiped asleep from my eyes, kissed my girlfriend awake, and punched my messages on. Neil and my girlfriend Bessie did the same thing, and there we were in the pitiful position too many of us transplanted New Yorkers found

ourselves in that day. We all sat in the bed and listened to the terror filled and trembling voices of our friends and family back home in New York City or Boston. Fans were literally running from the smoke and horror. A next girlfriend calledby, screaming as she ran to a West Village elementary school to pick up her seven year old son, the same kid I held to my chest at night through his terrible twos and watched Jurassic Park

some four hundred times. There was even a quivering message from my ex wife and childhood sweetheart, wondering aloud if I was in the city that day, before telling me she loved me, as she signed off with a heavy sigh. I finally lost it when my friend Jamie called from Virginia and cried that she hadn't heard from her husband John that day. And that's not like our boy John. John's a pilot for American Airlines. That's all he ever

wanted to be. He'd been saying it since he was fifteen, when we had to stand on tippy toes to spy on Jamie through the high gymnasium windows, and she would flirt with him during her balance beam routine while Fleetwood Mac sang dreams, and suddenly Stevie Nick's lyrics rang hauntingly true to me. In the stillness of remembering what you had and what you lost and what you lost, it was the most pivotal, painful moment of truth in our lives, none of us knowing what would fail next or fall next.

How many more would die, how many more breaths each of us had left? And really I just sat there remembering what we all had, and at the same time I couldn' yet understand what we'd lost. Meanwhile, Neil couldn't get through to any of his three daughters in New York. Emily, his middle is a New York college student, and Neil was convinced he wanted her to quit college for a year, anything than risk her life by walking the war torn city streets another day. Now you have to understand my

pal Neil. He already lives with the anger of a bit of divorce and a great writing ability that brought him to a town called Hollywood filled with bullshitters and backstabbers. All Neil ever wanted to do was make a pile of fuck you money and head back East to spoil us little girls rotten to think of it, all I ever wanted to do was stay in New York City and be a calumnist for the New York Daily News. But the earth spins, shit happens, and wham, I'll become

a TV star. But truthfully, I've never enjoyed anything more in my career than watching someone on the subway open up my column and smile because I was a voice in New York, had a loft in Greenwich Village and a view of the towers from my living room. Now I was just another talking head in Los Angeles without knowing each other. At the time, Neil was working at a fish markt and did some bookmaking on the side

to make ends meet. Our backgrounds don't matter, but Neil's in my life because he's a survivor with the same gypsy heart that beats in me, and he's from pain, and now he finally had a huge ache in common. So here we were watching New York City die, crying from our ringside seats to what was essentially a castration of the toughest city in the world. Neil and I didn't go to Columbia journalism school. We are fighters who

can write equally dangerous with both pen and sword. And now there was no one to throw a punch at an invisible enemy amongst us in three thousand miles, separating us from getting home again to the fight, to the fear to family. What followed over the next several hours was something out of taxi driver. I made the appropriate calls to my agent, manager and network, and through cry baby tears, I wailed that I was getting in a car and getting the fuck out of here. I said,

I don't want to hear about work. The hell with TV. I'm gone. I'm done. I'll call you when I get back. Inexplictedly. Neil and I shaved our heads, bold hopped in this midsize rental car, taped God Bless America across the back window, and headed for the road. The highways that split our country straight down the middle of filled with towns of families who were sons that go off to war and die. The way we saw it, there was no better, more

sentimental way to see the heartland. At the last second, I scooped up my little Yorkie, Cessaret, and brought him along for the ride. I knew that would make the ride a bit longer, with his peepee stops and feeding the little guy, but I needed everything and everyone I loved around me. I never saw myself so goddamn soft. We hired, tailed out of California through the kitschy neon lights of Nevada and rolled into Utah. Spent and still spinning from the initial shock of the previous day's news.

We just driven seven hundred miles and were ready to dive into the gin olives and vermouth. That Neil insisted, We're going to be necessary as the gas and the fuel tank, and he was never more right. Let me put it to you this way, when the Pentagon is on fire, the twin towers are gone, and the president is missing for half the day, I say valium should spill from every gumball machine in the country. Cocaine dealers ought to be allowed to hang a shingle on their doors,

and friends should insist that their friends drive drunk. The world was coming to an end, God damn it, and I wanted to be numb and out of pain until it was all over. In other words, shell gasoline was not the only fuel that we had in the car. Now I realized that two go tea wearing baldies with a Yorky between them aren't exactly reservation material at finer

dining establishments. So that meant there was going to be grabbing run when it came to filling our bellies on the trip, and we were ready to live off the fast food chains that line the route, And looking back, we'd like to thank Subway for being there. For us along the way. I gotta be honest, Neil and I always thought we were too good for a sandwich chain,

and with good reason. Neil tends to be a bit of a food snob due to two years of culinary experience, and my sister Rosalie lays out Italian Sunday feast that would make you cry, and she taught me how to cook. But when you're in the middle of ass Wife Montana at eleven PM and your stomach is screaming for food, believe me, Subway is consistent. And may I say, decent

sandwiches are like a mirage and a sweltering desert. Even Chezi was given a few slices of roast beef and general salami by kind hearted managers of the chain and guys who were sympathetic to our cause. That's a far cry from those fucks at Starbucks who charged New York City's walking wounded as they begged to clean the blood, death and tears from the disbelieving eyes and bottled water

they wanted. Bottled water Starbucks said no, if someone ever sets foot or sees me set foot in that coffee chain again, please beat me senseless with one of those gay latte machines they worship. I can't say a hell of a lot for the cell phone service that me and Neil used after Las Vegas. You might as well throw the goddamn phone in your trunk until you see signs for the Jersey Turnpike. The following morning, we crawled out of bed and took a look at this beautiful state,

and we felt a bit at home. We saw the American flags flying on every car in business. The people of Utah, with other holier than now Mormon ways, had the same look of pain on their faces as we did. Utah's good people. Our plan was to head north on Root fifteen and cut across Route eighty, but after we through Utah, we got antsy and decided to cut over to Colorado on Route seventy. We're both a bit nutty because there was no real news coming out of New York.

It had only been two days since the attack, and already the images of the towers were dwindling away. Why weren't we seeing the videos and eyewitness accounts constantly replaying the way the networks feed us. They feed us snippets of other news items. Why wasn't this the same thing. I started thinking about how videos are shoved down our throats over and over for months on end when it

comes to police wrongdoing and other popular topics. But for fuck's sake, we're just attacked on our own soil, and the preliminary numbers on fatalities were telling us that the loss of life was far beyond what we lost in Pearl Harbor. If Michael Bay had pitched this as a movie to Hollywood Studios, nobody would have green lit the thing. But it wasn't at pitch, so who the hell was

at the wheel of the machine. The perfect TV haircuts and perky network news buddies were telling us stay calm, but also to remain at a level of high alert. The next minute, they were stressing that we keep shopping at moles and that we keep visiting parks and museums. But the kicker was to always remain on a high alert. What does that exactly mean? Do I stay home on a ladder wearing an old pair of platform shoes to costco know? Neil and I finally agreed that we would

alert each other when we weren't feeling high enough. Neil was a talk radio freak, jumped around the am dial like mad. The only people who voiced my thoughts were a bit to the right of what I was normally comfortable with. They made perfect sense all of a sudden. I mean, for Christ's sake, when our grandparents came over here from the Native lands, they had to learn English real quick or else they'd starve. They did just that, and they couldn't wait to take up arms to protect

their new home. The problem is an immigration. The country was founded on the principle of open immigration. The problem is that we're taking in people over here is suck astrid with no intention of blending into our system, and no intention of learning our language and history and culture. Get the hint. Already the pledge of allegiance is already gone from California classrooms. This ain't the way it was supposed to ago when the big meeting took place two

undred and twenty six years ago. Anyhow, Neil couldn't shut up about Colorado. He'd been there before, and he told me it would be the highlight of our trip. Wrong. I hate the find fault, but there was an obvious decline in the outward signs of unity when we crossed Colorado's border. Utah and Nevada had signs out of their asses and motorists constantly flashing his thumbs up to our

God Bless America sign. There was a definite indifference to the horror that was still smoldering out on the East coast, and it didn't go unnoticed by us and other travelers who were en route. The real clincher was when we tried to get a room late one night in Ski country and an obviously empty hotel. The middle aged woman behind the desk where Laura Ashley type get up with one of those ugly cameos around a grizzled deck. She gave us both the ones and told us there were

no rooms available. I guess my olive skin clashed with the new powder that had just dropped that afternoon. Our story about heading to New York City to see family didn't move her elitist ass either. She should be so lucky if her issue of Country Living crosses at the bail with the magazine. With this story, writer's note, remember to pitch a remake of Clockwork Orange set at a ski hotel, and Asmen suggests, Neil and I write Direct and Star. After finding a more sympathetic hotel owner an

hour out of self entitlement Colorado. I was starting to get crumbs of information about missing neighbors and childhood friends. Now, thank god, my buddy John was alive and merely rerouted to Canada during the hijacks. So Neil and I headed north and had a quick pass through the lower corner of Wyoming. I got to tell you, when we take our next trip under better circumstances, I'm going to give that state a closer look. I want to see Yellowstone

in the fall. I want to see a grizzly bear leading my car, or a moose run across the road in front of my car, things I never imagine happening. While my father sent me on my first driving list on the Brooklyn's Merciless Belt Parkway, entering Nebraska was a mine blower. Despite our ignorant and preconceived notions about toothless farmers and banjo playing retards, we suddenly had our car radio blasting classic jazz and priceless oldies from Sinatra, Bennett,

count Basie, and the folks there were even better. You've heard about the corn fed beauties that trickle out of La on a turnip truck well, now we're finally observing them on their own turf. Tall, good looking people look you with the eye and shake your hand like they meet it. There were flags flying and sincere nods from

other cars as they passed us by. While Nina was in one of the truck stops, I was walking chesray off in the corner of a that went on forever, and one barrel chested trucker with a handlebar mustache sat beside me as I walked past his truck. Suddenly my hoop earrings made me feel like I stood out or I stood a worst chance at survival of Ned Beatty in Deliverance. This guy had to be six foot six with a voice that rolled like thunder. Ain't you de

fancy TV guy? I knowdded yes and thought, great, now I'm gonna be raped by a gain Nebraskan starfucker. But I was way off. Boy was I wrong. The trucker extended his hand and told me that he was headed out to Fresno, California with a low of something. And when I told him we were gone, he just shook his head and said, God be with those families, and I know he meant it. The words were simple to the point, and a lifetime of preconceived image of misconceived

images of country Christians went out the window. I felt like I was with a real man. He quoted something from somewhere, but it was his final words that hit me like an elephant gun. To this day, I think about what he said. You keep up the TV th because you're good at it, boy, but don't stay out there too long, or else she might start thinking all that Hollywood bullshit is important. Then he stepped high into his truck and disappeared behind his tinted windows. Nebraskt is

flat and looking off in all directions. You can see nothing but corn feels it's beautiful. I understand that most people would think that could be boring as hell, but it was just what we needed, and we go in spurts. We'd have fits of laughter and tears for hours, just as quickly spend several hours saying nothing to each other, but the silence held more weight than any words we could stream together. I felt like calling up every great woman I've ever known and proposed I wanted to have

six kids and raise them on that farm over there. No, that farm over there, Damn God, shed a lot of grace on Nebraska. Without even knowing, I found myself turning the dial to country music. Those people know how to sing and write songs. I had lumps in my throat the size of golf balls at times. I never knew it, but those lyrics were saying the things that I always wanted to say to someone that I loved or no

longer loved. And O'Neil slept in the back seat. I found myself pulling into truck stops at two AM for a six pack of high Life, the cassettes of Dwight Yoakum, Garth Brooks, and old Don Williams. At one point I played Glenn Campbell's Gentle on My Mind fifteen times in a row. Now believe me, I love two Packshakur as much as the next guy. But if Campbell doesn't move you in that crazy song, do the world a favor and light your head on fire. The corn Fierals started

the roll like giant waves. As we left Nebraska and entered Iowa. It was Friday now, and my sister Rose they just told us to expect an early dinner on Sunday. And that was one of the few times that Neil and I had to duke it out. He didn't want to rush, but now I wanted to be there. I wanted to be home. I was desperate to help out a ground zero, and the images of good strong men standing online for Alice to help out made me green with envy in a weird way. I was jealous that

I wasn't there. It made me yearn to see a Red Sox hat chatting up a Yankee cat, Guys with jet jerseys and giant jerseys throwing their arms around each other. The fact that I had inkling that all volunteers would be turning away by the time I got home made me taste bile on my throat because I got to tell you this summer before. I showed up at my twenty year high school reunion in leather pants and a five hundred dollars shirt and six hundred dollars shoes. I

even signed autographs for my friend's sons and daughters. It was nice, but the world shouldn't work that way. I'm glad New York City cops and firemen will forever be heroes, that their reunions from now on, what they do is a little more important and harder than reading a teleprompter on the streets of Hollywood. As we headed further east, we saw more flags and signs hanging from bridges and overpasses.

We didn't feel alone on our anger anymore. I had the same feeling I felt years earlier when I walked up the sidewalk to the funeral of my parents. Boy that hurt India. I'm sorry Indiana, Illinois and Ohio. Pennsylvania, they were sure no sights to speak of in miles They go so goddamn slow. It wasn't fun day, or so. Neil got real quiet on me. We were headed into the mouth of the Dragon. The final day of driving

across Pennsylvania and Jersey was flat out scary. We could literally see the smoke cloud and smell the carnage as we headed toward the Hudson. It was mid Sunday afternoon when we finally arrived at the George Washington Bridge, and I turned my head at our skyline of heartache and was akin to the months I'd spent carefully staring at my slowly dying father in the hospital bed when I

was twenty two. There were better things to do with my time, but there were certain things you have to do out of duty and respect for the only way. Sometimes our heroes leave us. Men generally don't want to be seen crying in front of other men, but there was no holding back to tears for myself and Neil, and some tears were mixed with bursts of unanswerable questions

even laughter. What spineless asshole thinks there's nobility in killing thousands of hard working people headed to work the night before. Those terrorists had shown shoved bills and the crotches of young strippers, and did it all so that they could get the hell off this earth, where they could finally get laid in whorehouses with a fistful of fifties. That also made me wonder what kind of a man fights

religious wars. Imagine an enemy that never tucks the picture of his wife and kids into his boot or sock or turban for that matter. These fuckers packed their wives on their head, leave their dirt cave, and never tell little Mohammed that that Daddy's going off to die. I don't think that the number one dad gold chains ever flew off the shelves at the bazaars and cobble. Well, I'll tell you our ugly long islan On Expressway never

looks so damn beautiful. By the time he got home, my nephew Joey met us on the front lawn and gave us two Gin Martinis, dry, dirty, four olives, and just a rumor of removeth. I hugged the shit out of him, and later that day Kneel went off to see Heather, Emily and Alison with a belly full of my sister's pesto sauce. Well it's one year later now, and our guy in the White House has risen to

the occasion. Though I would have liked to have seen Osama bin Laden dead, and quite frankly, I would have preferred a nuclear bombing campaign that would have made Fred Finstone look like he lived in modern times. Why do people still think they can fuck with America? The last time ass Kicking School was in session, the people of Japan heard the loudest noise in their lives, and only they quit fucking with us and go on to make

us toys in great sushi. Isn't there something our enemies in the Middle East can aspired to after we turned several of their cities into parking lots. I say it's worth the shot. Our heartbreaking trek across this fruited plane of ours made me realize that the people of the US of A are the tops. And nowhere along our trip did we feel that the need to lock the

doors or watch our backs when we were paranoid. It was because we had some nutty ideas planted in our heads by some more on who probably never left the East or West Coast. I remember pulling to a gas station where along the second part of our trip and seeing the six foot tall knockout pumping gas and salt Lake City. I started talking to her, and I was amazed to find out that she was the owner and operator of that station, along with his thirty room motel.

I asked her why I should have packed up her snap on tools and headed to any of the big cities for work as a top model. She gave me a smirk and shook her head. Why would I want to do that, she said, And then she went out to tell me about a lake nearby where she goes water skiing on her days off, and how all of her friends have never left home. She fills the hotel most of the year and does a booming business at

the pumps. I started to think right before her eyes as she drove a point home with an estimate of how much she's making a year and how great she feels every day when she wakes up. And when I got back to the car, I told Neil to just shut up and drive, and we did. And it's only this week that I'm finally sharing this story with him. I throw him through the photos from time to time and watch the videotapes of us along the way. That's not the same. You need to smell the rivers that

run down from the mountains in America. You got to stop the car alongside an empty highway to watch a herd of deer if they bounce across a prairie. Maybe see chesray square off with a big bull behind a highway fence. Neil and I just know we're gonna make this trip again next year. Joey won't have us do it without him. I want to stop and take it all in. Well, I'm not out of my mind. I may even check out some real estate somewhere someday so that I years to come, I can get out of

LA before I start to believe that it's real. That's what I wrote a long time ago, and then the PostScript is A. J. Benser is the author of Faman and a Bitch Confessions of a Reformed Gossip commas. After during loads of bullshit, Neil Gumple is finally seeing three of his script set to go together. Bens and Gumple have just completed three screenplays of their own. They also haven't forgotten about pitching the remake of a Clockwork Orange

set in that Staddie Aspin Ski Hotel. Well, guys, that's what was going through my mind and what I was doing on nine to eleven twenty three years ago. We all have a story, and I wanted to get that to you before it became old news, which I fear is happening too much about nine to eleven. It's amazing how people just tend to forget move on some things. You can't forget somethings you'll always have to remember, even though that damn slogan never forget doesn't seem to apply anymore.

Maybe things like this, podcasts like this, articles like that, talks like this will change people and make us get back and remember what we have and what we lost and maybe how we can get back. I'm aj Benson that was famous. Bitch your free show. I'm not sure whate that's gonna run, but today is Friday thirteenth, so you get this in the next day or so and

we'll talk during the week. Thank you for listening. Fame as a Bitch is an AJ Benza Workhouse Connect production featuring the endless wisdom, insightful commentary, and sometimes fucked up perspective of AJ Benza. Executive producer Mike Agavino