Sterling slammed on the brakes and pulled to the side of the highway.

Get in, he told the hitchhiker.

He then launched into a radical soliloquy that defined him and his world.

Cabbage sucks.

Celery blows.

Working at the supermarket part-time, even when they promoted me to manager because nobody else wanted the job, made me want to kill every vegetable I saw. Sterling, wash the potatoes. Sterling, rinse the cucumbers. Sterling, clean the lettuce. I spit on the egg plants once because they were looking at me thinking they were better than me. I hate produce, tomatoes, especially. I’d be out all night sometimes getting high with my boys and I’d get to work early because I had to open up and take off all my clothes and take a shower in the spray that comes out over the vegetable display cases. That fine cool mist pampers and cleanses the prissy radishes and the too cool kale and the cocky carrots. I have to admit I liked standing nude in the mist like a cave man on the first morning of civilization. I hate beets of color, too. 

Ah, enough about me. Look at her sleeping. Little miss perfect, Princess Ashley, valedictorian and new heiress with more money than Billy Eilish would know what to do with. I didn’t make as much money as people think off the painkillers and pot as her degenerate dead brother, Palmer did. Basically I’m broke. But I’m a criminal at heart. So was Palmer, both of us raised in the lap of white privilege with our names on the golf team hall of fame wall at school, as entitled as white boys can be.

Personally, I don’t like white people, Nazis, cops, Trump or black people, for that matter not that I know any black people, but look at Tiger Woods with his white girlfriend he cheated on his white wife with. At least Oreo Obama has a black wife but I didn’t like him or her, either. If I needed a black role model I’d take Eminem or Kid Rock even if they’re white they know all the black moves they need to know to get famous by acting black. We took the Indians land, right? We stole a big piece of Mexico, right? I’m with the Mexicans, though, because I like tacos.

I’m with antifa, too, if you’re wondering. You know what that is? It’s nothing. No hierarchy. No organization. No time for government or corporations or mainstream media. I’m an army of one even though antifa never heard of me. I target everybody on the right but because I’m an equal opportunity activist I’ll fight the left, too. If you have something I don’t have and want or think somebody else I support should have I’ll burn down your business, throw cinderblocks through your windows and loot your store. Skateboards and sneakers for everybody!

Anarchy is the universal life force, dude. ACAB. All cops are bastards. Looting is protest, a political act no matter what the politicians say. Like pirates pillaging and ransacking Rome. Plunder is no blunder. To the Victor belong the spoils. I did some research online to find out more about this Victor, who he was but didn’t get anywhere. He must have been something, though, better than Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Carribean.”

Victor got the booty.

Show me the money!

Don’t tell Ashley, though. She doesn’t know I’m an antifa. She thinks I’m just cool and down with her free the pigs crusade vegetarian slash COVIDtarian trip and I am OK with tofu and noodles and eating magic mushrooms and smoking weed and following the Dead. Don’t tell Ashley Jerry Garcia’s like real dead, though. Jerry’s her favorite.

So we’re going to Minneapolis even though George Floyd is dead and buried in Houston, Texas when we get there. I wish I had been with that rioter who burned down the police station. That would have been all me, man. But I’m not a copycat and now I don’t know what to torch. Ashley calls him, Brother George Floyd. She really means well but I can’t take this little piggy went to market routine anymore. She loves pigs more than people. Me? I need super-charged radical individualism to change America.

Burn it down. Start from scratch. Maybe I’m more than antifa, like, the anti-antifda. Like a new wave warrior battling the establishment to start fresh from nothing just like a human Big Boom that happened thousands of years ago up in space and made us what we are today. Speaking of today we better get tested, though, me and her, with Palmer dying of the COVID and me passing joints to him all the time maybe we got the coronavirus and are infecting people. How cool is that? Contaminate the enemy. Tear down the social order. Thin the herd with my own personal germ warfare weapon of mass destruction.

Shhh. Be quiet. Don’t wake Ashley. I’ll drop you off at the next exit. Hitchhiking, man, that is so awesome. Where are you going? Work? You’re hitchhiking to work? What kind of job you do? Supermarket produce manager! OMG! OMG! I can’t believe it. I’m pulling over right now. You’re like the old Sterling. It’s like picking up myself hitchhiking.

Sterling screeches the van to a halt.

Get out, get out!

This can’t be happening to me.

Bad karma.

Bad trip.

The door slams.

Sterling starts coughing and tears out as fast as an old VW camper can tear out.

Ashley stirs.

Sterling?

Go back to sleep.

You OK?

Driving that train, high on cocaine, he says.

You better watch your speed, she says.