Chapter One
Signs and Portents
"It was my first Friday night in LA," Laurie says in her press kit for the
album. "I was stuck on the Santa Monica Freeway, thinking about
buffalo. A vast single herd covering the earth from one horizon to the
other, the way they used to, placid, lost in their own grassy thoughts,
then suddenly careering off at top speed, all of them at exactly the same
time.
"So there I was, cheek to bumper with all the other cloven-tired,
sunroof-humped, Klaxon-horned metal ungulates, stalled on the concrete
plains, watching the hot breath steam from their tailpipes, when the sky
blew up.
"I didn't know if it was terrorists or nuclear war or the Big One that
was supposed to drop us all in the Pacific, but it was clearly the end.
Huge concussive explosions and fat orange cinders trailing fire out of the
sky. Ashes on the windshield. Cars veering off onto the shoulder and me
pretty sure I could feel the freeway shake under my Little Brown Datsun.
I kept driving, though, because, really, this was what I'd been waiting for
all my life: Armageddon.
"Anyway, I finally rolled my win ... read full excerpt from Say Goodbye ebook
