"Subtitles by Cobra35 Fixed by Listening "Sorry for Any Misunderstanding"" "Alfred Zimmer." "Friends call me Alfie, Alfie Zimmer." "Room 19." "Allright." " Mind if I tell you something?" " Not at all." "I've been selling in the Midwest for twenty years, and I have formulated four basic rules for securing my night's rest." "One, always reserve ahead." "Two, always reserve at a franchise motel if it all possible - your Holiday Inn, your Ramada Inn, your Confort Inn, your Motel 6." "Three, always get a room on the end." "That way, you only have is one set of noisy neighbors of at all." "Four, always get a room that starts with a one." "Do you know why?" "Why is that?" "Because, I'm forty-four years old, too old to be fucking truck-stop whores, eating chicken-fried steak, or hauling my luggage upstairs." "Okee Dokie." "Of course, the problem with rooms that begin with a one is that they're all non-smoking these days." "So, I have a rule for that, too." "Ask for'em and smoke anyway." "Save Russian Jews." "Collect valuable prizes." "There is a market for gourmet foods in Nebraska, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas;" "even in the Dakotas, although you might not believe it." "I've done quite well, especially over the last two years... as I've gotten to know the market's deeper creases- but... it's never going to equal the market for, let's say, fertilizer." "Is it possible that behind those lights, some farmer's wife is even now heating up a pot of Cottager Split Pea Soup." "Or perhaps micro-waving a Cottager Shepherd's Pie or Chicken Francais?" "It is." "It's as possible as Hell." "Her husband watches the early news with his shoes off and his socked feet on a hassock, ...and overhead their son plays a video game on his Game Cube and their daughter lies on a bed," "kicking her feet behind her, reading Harry Potter." "Can I help you?" "I just dropped by for a dinner." "That sounds a good great idea." "Come on in." "Can I help you?" "Save Russian Jews." "Collect valuable prizes." "Can I help you?" "Ma'am, according to at least one source I've read recently," "'All that you love will be carried away.'" "Maybe then I could offer her a sample box of Cottager brand quick-serve gourmet foods." "Maybe she'd have a particular taste for caviar." "Many did." "Even in Ohio." "Alfie Zimmer." "Frozen gourmet foods." "Charles More..." "Fertilizer." " Yeah, I can tell you, remembered the truck." " Right." "How about that botany make up around Mansfield?" "You get called in there?" "Yeah." "Truck dropped that tassel." "I missed my last meeting." "You know why?" "I already know what it looks like inside this room." "It's square." "The walls are white." "On one wall is a picture of daylilies, orchids or something." "It's cold in there right now, but if I hit that "High Heat" button on the Climatron, it'd heat up real fast, probably become too hot." "There are twin-beds, identical gold bed spreads on each one, first tucked under the pillows and then pulled back over them, so that they resemble corpses of infants." "On the table beside the bed there is a flesh colored phone, a Gideon Bible." "In the bathroom, if you turn on the light, you get the fan, too." "There is no way around there." "And then, the smell." "Can come a harsh chemical cleansers' smell next with the mildew on the shower curtain." "It's the room of my dreams." "I bought this notebook seven years ago in the stationary department of some five-and-dime in Omaha or Sioux City for a dollar and nine cents." "Restrooms are filled with homosexual graffiti, most of it tiresome and repetitive, but "poutie boy mouth" is pretty good." "Poopie doopie you so loopy." "(Papillion, NEB)" "I'm crazy about that one." "Something about the "-ie, -ie," and then, boom, you got "-y"." "It could be no more than an illiterate's mistake, but why think like that?" "What fun would that be?" "No, I prefer to believe that "-ie, -ie" wait for it... "-y" was an intended construction." "Something sneaky but playful, with the feel of an "E.E. Cummings" poem." "Two today." "I found two today." "Two in one day." "Two on the last day." "Like some sort of omen." "So many... so many entries recalling thousands of truck stops and roadside chicken shacks and highway rest areas the way certain songs on the radio can bring back specific memories of a place, or a time or the person you were with, what you were drinking," "what you were thinking..." "I started collecting bits of graffiti without at first knowing why I was doing it." "They were just amusing, or disconcerting, or both at the same time." "Yet, little by little I became fascinated with these messages from the innerstate, where the only other communications seem to be dipped headlights when you passed in the rain, or maybe somebody in a bad mood flipping you the bird when you went by in the passing lane pulling a roaster-tail of snow behind you." "I came gradually to see..." " or perhaps only hope - that something was going on here." "The E. E. Cummings' lilt of "Poopie doopie you so loopy", for instance, or the inarticulate rage of 1380 West Avenue." "Kill my mother." "TAKE HER JEWELS." "Or take this oldie:" "Here I sit, cheeks a flexing', giving birth to another Texan." "The meter, when you consider it, is odd." "Is not lambs, but some odd triplet formula with the stress on the third." "Here I sit... cheeks a flexing'..." "giving birth... to another Texan." "Of course, it broke down a little towards the end." "I thought on many occasions I could go back to school, take some courses, get all that feet-and-meter stuff down pat." "Know that I was talking about instead of running on a tightrope of intuition." "All I really remember clearly from the school is iambic pentameter." ""To be or not to be, that is the question."" "I had thought about writing a book once." "Just a little one." "The first title that occurred to me was..." ""Don't Look Up Here, You're Pissing On Your Shoes" but you couldn't call a book that." "Not and reasonably hope someone could put it out for sale in a store anyway." "And, besides, that was light." "Frothy." "I became convinced over the years that something was going on here." "The title I finally decided on was an adaptation of something I'd seen in a rest-area stall outside Fort Scott," "Kansas, on Highway 54." "I Killed Ted Bundy:" "The Secret Transit Code of America's Highways, by Alfred Zimmer." "That sounded mysterious and ominous, almost scholarly." "But I hadn't done it." "I'm just a little man, after all, with a little man's job." "I sell things." "A line of frozen dinners currently." "And now, of course now." "Hi, it's me." "I'm in Wentworth." "Remember the casserole you were gonna take over to my mother." "She is expecting it, so..." "Oh, she asked for the Red Ball coupons." "I know you think she's crazy on that subject, but go ahead and humor her, okay?" "She's old." "Tell Carlene that Daddy says, "Hi"." "I love you." "It's me again." "Don't forget Rambo's appointment at the vet day after tomorrow, okay?" "And the sea-jerky strips at night." "They really do help his hips." "Bye." "Okee Dokie." "The first thing anyone would see, responding to the shot, would be my dead body of course, my head hanging down and bleeding on the nubbly rug." "The second thing, however, would be the Spiral notebook." "Watch the blood." ""All that you love..." "will be carried away."" "Frank, looks like this nutjob left a suicide note." ""Elvis killed big pussy."" "I think we're lucky this guy didn't decide to visit a schoolyard with an AK-47." "Take a bunch of little kids." "But, I'm not crazy, and the things I've written here over the years aren't crazy, either." "I'm convinced of it." "They'll think I'm crazy if they find this notebook, though." "They will." "And is that fair to Maura or Carlene?" "Carlene who's at her j.v. basketball game right now?" "No, of course not." "But, there's nothing fair about what happened to me, either." "Sometimes when you're cruising along the highway, you see big curls of rubber that have unwound from the recap tires some of the independent truckers use." "That's what I feel like." "Thrown tread." "The pills make it worse." "They clear your mind just enough to see what a colossal jam you're in." "It's an embarrassment to me if they find the notebook, and I can't explain the reasons behind it." "If I can't explain that there is something profound within the context of these messages." "It would be like accidentally hanging yourself in the closet... because you were experimenting with a new way of jerking off and got found that way with your shorts under your feet and shit on your ankles." "Behind the picture, maybe?" "That might work." "But they'll still find the pills in my coat pocket." "They're prescription, sure, but not the sort the doctor gives you if you're feeling sunny." "And if they find the pills, they'll look harder." "Then, the things inside my notebook will look worse, even crazier, because of the pains I'd taken to hide it." "I'll throw it in Farmer John's field." "Soon, he'll come out this way on his tractor, the cab filled with music of Patty Loveless or Larry Underwood, or maybe even Clint Black and he will plow the notebook under without seeing it and it will disappear into the scheme of things." "Someone in Cameron, Missouri had once written:" ""Relax, it's all just the rinse cycle."" "See, a shot in the mouth would be easier than any living change." "Far easier than struggling to write a book few people, if any at all, are likely to read." "I'll count down from sixty." "If the light in the kitchen comes on by the time I reach one..." "I'll write the book." "In order to write a book like that, you'd have to begin by talking about how it was to measure distance in green mile markers, and the very width of land," "and how the wind sounded when you got out of your car at one of those rest areas in Oklahoma or North Dakota." "How it sounded almost like words." "You'd have to explicate that silence, and how the badrooms always smelled of piss... and the great hollow farts of departed travelers, and how in that silence the voices on the walls began to speak." "The voices of those who had written and then moved on." "That telling that would hurt," "but if the wind drops and the spark lights of the farm come back," "I'll do that anyway." "If they don't,... well." "Either way." "Either way." "Sixty." "Fifty nine..." "Fifty eight..." "Fifty seven..." "Fifty six..." "Fifty five..." "Fifty four..." "Fifty three..." "Fifty two..." "Fifty one..." "Fifty..." "Fourty nine..." "Fourty eight..." "Fourty seven..." "Fourty six..." "Fourty five..." "Fourty four..." "Fourty three..." "Fourty two..." "Fourty one..." "Fourty..." "Thirty nine..." "Thirty eight..." "Thirty seven..." "Thirty six..." "Thirty five..." "Thirty four..." "Thirty three..." "Thirty two..." "Thirty one..." "Thirty..." "Twenty nine..." "Subtitles by Cobra35 Fixed by Listening "Sorry for Any Misunderstanding""