The Avenue of the Giants by Marc Dugain

Author:Marc Dugain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2014-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

33

I liked repairing roads but wasn’t crazy about it. The days started early. We worked in teams of ten, we each had our place and nobody budged from it. As there was no specific training, I was mostly given the job of directing the traffic onto the alternate lanes. The drivers would see me from a distance, waving my orange flag. I knew I wasn’t going to vegetate doing that all my life. Especially as my grandfather, the one I had killed, had spent his whole career on the highways and I had no desire to follow in his footsteps.

The smell of hot tar ended up making me nauseous. To be more specific, I have to say that at that time, my liver was being seriously weakened by alcohol. I’d started drinking a lot after every encounter with my mother and then, as the weeks passed, I drank regularly. Getting up early to go to the sites, which were always changing, required more and more effort. One morning, after a monumental bender the previous night in the bar opposite the courthouse, I decided not to get up. I deliberately stayed in bed until ten. By noon, I was in the highways office, getting the wages that were owed to me. In the middle of the afternoon, I greeted my colleagues as they got off the bus bringing them back from the site and said goodbye to them. I didn’t lie, I told them the gas fumes made me nauseous and I couldn’t continue. They were really nice to me. By late afternoon, I was at a Harley dealership buying a secondhand motorcycle and arranging credit. The manager must have liked me because, knowing I was looking for work, he offered me a job as a salesman on commission, which I accepted without thinking. The prospect of going back on the road on a bike gave me a real sense of joy, one I cultivate religiously in my memories. Every evening, every weekend, I was going to get back to the calm of the endless spaces and the rhythm of my twin-cylinder engine, my face numbed by the wind, reassured by the incomparable feeling that I actually existed. Deep down, I also had the idea that the prospect of those long rides would wean me off the booze. Leitner often told me that the reason alcohol had been as successful as it was among human beings was because no better tranquilizer had yet been invented. Alcohol may excite other people, but it calmed me down. I never had bad wine, far from it. After one or two bottles I entered a wonderful, calm world, the world my contemporaries searched for in drugs. A third or fourth bottle never sent me off the edge, the way I’d read about in Bukowski. But I knew the booze was getting me nowhere. I saw how it had hollowed my mother’s face, and how it sometimes sent her into a stupor that never led to anything good.

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