The local station had just played 'come as you are' and the dj was announcing the request line. I repeated the numbers to myself, as I was due for caffeine and the car was due for gasoline. Jim slumbered gently beside me. Periodically he would snore, and then the car would strike a pothole, and jar him back into silence.

I had slept through Tennesee, or North Carolina, whichever it was Jim had taken us through, and now the car was bearing down on the outskirts of Atlanta.

Homing in on the phone at the side of the gas station, I let go of a quarter as it reached the slot, and dialed the numbers. The dj answered.

'Please,' I said, 'play 'heart-shaped box' or 'pennyroyal tea.''

"Sure kid," he said.

I paid for the liquids-- the gasoline and caffeine-- and snaked the car through the highways of Georgia, hoping the dj would play the song before his station began to fade. Just as I thought this, I heard the radio tell me, "Stay tuned, we'll have nirvana by request after this mandatory capitalist propaganda."

After the smiling plastic advertisements, the plastic smiling dj talked over the now- hollow intro notes of 'smells like teen spirit.' I switched the radio off.

Later, the dawn stripped illusion from every sharp-cornered shape leering over the edge of the concrete walls of the submerged freeway. Jim had just barely woken, so we were about even, alertness-wise, and we sat together quietly in bemused contemplation of the place we had discovered around us. There were seventeen waffle shops along Atlanta's main freeway alone, by our count, and six of those were drive-through. We passed them all.

Hours before we would reach New Orleans, I could already see in my mind's eye the lanes of freeway leaping up to the bridge that led into the city, rushing at us like a mechanical mouth.