Die Opiumhoehle (December 2013 Reprint)
Excerpt
Noah at once hurled the sign to the ground. Then he made sure that he ran over it with his motorcycle on his way out of the parking lot.
"What are you doing? Are you nuts?" I screamed at the top of my lungs. I didn't like all my dad's preachings about tsunamis and sneaker waves either. But that didn't mean that I ripped down signs and trampled on them!
"Those creeps like your dad just wanna spoil my fun. Who cares about tomorrow anyway? Man, just live for today!" Noah shouted.
Noah was infamous around this town for not liking adult authority of any kind. He wouldn't go to school. He wouldn't obey traffic laws. He didn't stay off the beach when he was supposed to. He and his gang did pretty much anything that they wanted any time that they wanted.
But I couldn't believe that even Noah didn't respect and fear the warnings about tsunamis! Maybe he didn't come from Virginia Beach as I did where nobody had ever heard of tsunamis except in movies. But wasn't it just human to be afraid of big waves? Nobody alive could out run them. In fact, my dad always said that if you could see one it was too late to escape. Yet maybe Noah was just conceited enough to think that he could!
And what did he mean about living only for today? Didn't he care about the future at all? Didn't he have any plans, any dreams? Did he always want to be a beach bum in trouble with the law even when he turned forty?
He was making me hold onto him for dear life, gripping him around the waist so tightly that I had to press my ear up against his back. I could even hear his heart beating. No doubt his heart was pounding with some sort of crazy thrill of it all the way mine was pounding out of fear and trepidation.
My fingernails dug into his chest. My nails went right through the thin, torn material of his T-shirt. I was hardly used to these roads either. Even when I was driving a car let alone riding on the back of a motorcycle they took my breath away. As Noah raced around sharp bends and curves in the road doing fifty, I thought that I was about to fly off the back of the motorcycle and down into one of those yawning chasms below. Sometimes the drop from the Coastal Highway went straight down into the sea. Of course there were no barriers or ramps to separate the road from the cliffs.
Even where there was no sharp drop those big gray and black boulders looked pretty mean. They were often sharp and ragged with rough edges. Sometimes Noah drove so close to the edge of the cliffs that I feared we were going to smash into them or at least graze against them. I squeezed my eyelids shut.
All Noah would do as a consolation (And here I suspected that he was deliberately teasing me!) was to take one hand off the handlebars and to squeeze my hand in his as we rounded the worst curves in the road. But his taking his hand off the handlebars made me even more nervous. It was like shouting, "Look, everybody, no hands!"
As if things weren't bad enough already, Noah decided to flick on his Walkman that he had attached to his handlebars. Music blared out all around me, deafening me. It almost sounded like a boom box instead of a mere Walkman the way it vibrated. It felt as if it might shake the motorcycle apart.
The news broke into the music hour. I was startled to hear my father's voice coming over the airwaves. He was saying:
This is Dr. Saunders with some tsunami tips, a public service announcement brought to you by the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation. Number 1: The worst tsunamis are caused by local earthquakes, and lately we've been picking up earth tremors on our seismographs. If you feel an earthquake, get down and protect yourself. After it stops, immediately evacuate. You may have only from five to thirty minutes before the first tsunami strikes . . . "
Noah suddenly blew his horn, drowning out my father's message. Then he laughed.
"What are you doing?" I protested, shocked at his lack of respect.
"The old windbag! He likes to hear himself talk!" Noah kept on interrupting everything my father said every ten seconds. "What does it matter if the whole earth blows up? We've all gotta go when our number's up."
Noah at once hurled the sign to the ground. Then he made sure that he ran over it with his motorcycle on his way out of the parking lot.
"What are you doing? Are you nuts?" I screamed at the top of my lungs. I didn't like all my dad's preachings about tsunamis and sneaker waves either. But that didn't mean that I ripped down signs and trampled on them!
"Those creeps like your dad just wanna spoil my fun. Who cares about tomorrow anyway? Man, just live for today!" Noah shouted.
Noah was infamous around this town for not liking adult authority of any kind. He wouldn't go to school. He wouldn't obey traffic laws. He didn't stay off the beach when he was supposed to. He and his gang did pretty much anything that they wanted any time that they wanted.
But I couldn't believe that even Noah didn't respect and fear the warnings about tsunamis! Maybe he didn't come from Virginia Beach as I did where nobody had ever heard of tsunamis except in movies. But wasn't it just human to be afraid of big waves? Nobody alive could out run them. In fact, my dad always said that if you could see one it was too late to escape. Yet maybe Noah was just conceited enough to think that he could!
And what did he mean about living only for today? Didn't he care about the future at all? Didn't he have any plans, any dreams? Did he always want to be a beach bum in trouble with the law even when he turned forty?
He was making me hold onto him for dear life, gripping him around the waist so tightly that I had to press my ear up against his back. I could even hear his heart beating. No doubt his heart was pounding with some sort of crazy thrill of it all the way mine was pounding out of fear and trepidation.
My fingernails dug into his chest. My nails went right through the thin, torn material of his T-shirt. I was hardly used to these roads either. Even when I was driving a car let alone riding on the back of a motorcycle they took my breath away. As Noah raced around sharp bends and curves in the road doing fifty, I thought that I was about to fly off the back of the motorcycle and down into one of those yawning chasms below. Sometimes the drop from the Coastal Highway went straight down into the sea. Of course there were no barriers or ramps to separate the road from the cliffs.
Even where there was no sharp drop those big gray and black boulders looked pretty mean. They were often sharp and ragged with rough edges. Sometimes Noah drove so close to the edge of the cliffs that I feared we were going to smash into them or at least graze against them. I squeezed my eyelids shut.
All Noah would do as a consolation (And here I suspected that he was deliberately teasing me!) was to take one hand off the handlebars and to squeeze my hand in his as we rounded the worst curves in the road. But his taking his hand off the handlebars made me even more nervous. It was like shouting, "Look, everybody, no hands!"
As if things weren't bad enough already, Noah decided to flick on his Walkman that he had attached to his handlebars. Music blared out all around me, deafening me. It almost sounded like a boom box instead of a mere Walkman the way it vibrated. It felt as if it might shake the motorcycle apart.
The news broke into the music hour. I was startled to hear my father's voice coming over the airwaves. He was saying:
This is Dr. Saunders with some tsunami tips, a public service announcement brought to you by the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation. Number 1: The worst tsunamis are caused by local earthquakes, and lately we've been picking up earth tremors on our seismographs. If you feel an earthquake, get down and protect yourself. After it stops, immediately evacuate. You may have only from five to thirty minutes before the first tsunami strikes . . . "
Noah suddenly blew his horn, drowning out my father's message. Then he laughed.
"What are you doing?" I protested, shocked at his lack of respect.
"The old windbag! He likes to hear himself talk!" Noah kept on interrupting everything my father said every ten seconds. "What does it matter if the whole earth blows up? We've all gotta go when our number's up."
