(JUST OUTSIDE NASHVILLE, TENNESSE, 8/21/05)

She answered after three rings, her voice cool and quick.  “Hey, what’s up?”

“I’m about forty miles away,” I said, pinching my phone between my shoulder and ear.  ”Sorry it got so late.”  I’d been driving all day.  Florida, Georgia, now Tennessee.

“No it’s fine.  I’m just getting out of a recording session here anyway.  Meeting some friends downtown.  I’ll give you directions.”  Just as she started, my cell phone began beeping.  Low battery.  A few seconds later it was dead.  Just like that.  I drove on for a couple minutes in shocked silence.  [It seemed like I was in] the middle of nowhere, certainly not a mere forty minutes away from Music City.  The only sign of life was the occasional billboard.  One read THANK THE LORD FOR GEORGE W. BUSH.

But then I saw a gas station ahead.  I pulled up and walked into the store holding my phone by its wire like a dead bird.  I didn’t say hello, only creeped through the aisles searching for outlets.  I actually saw a few, but when I plugged my adapter into them there was no power.  Then I heard a voice.  

“You!”  

I continued hunting.  

“You!”  It was a stocky, bearded man standing by the Coors Light display.  “You can’t do that!” 

“My phone died,” I said, standing up straight.

“You can’t do that.  She won’t let us.”

She?  Who was she?  “It’ll only be plugged in for a sec,” I assured him.  ”I just need to finish getting some directions.”           

“Sorry.”  

I felt a stiffening behind my lungs, like rage building up and needing to escape.  He pointed toward another bearded man with a hunter’s cap and glasses, the lenses darkened, standing behind the front counter.  It was a fortress of lottery tickets and beef jerky raised up like a stage, the counter’s edge just about level with my head.  I walked over and cranked my neck up see him, barely beginning my plea before he interrupted me.  “Sorry,” he said, smirking.  “All my outlets’re plugged up.”

“Every single one,” I said.  My tone had become less pleading, more flat.  I wasn’t asking as much as I was clarifying.  ”You don’t have a single free outlet in this entire store.”

“Nope.”

“So you can’t unplug anything for two seconds while I finish getting directions from the girl I was talking to?” By now it was worth a shot to try leveraging the fact that I’d been speaking with a female on the phone.  Perhaps such a detail would arouse his sympathies.

“Nope,” he repeated.  ”Where you headed?”

“Nashville.”

He sighed.  “Well, where in Nashville?”

“I’m going up 440—”

“440-what?”

“I don’t know.  440 North?”

“Ain’t no 440 North.  Just East and West.”

“Then 440-I-don’t-know!” I cried.  “That’s why I need to finish my call!”           

“Sorry.  She won’t let us.” 

There “she” was again.  This all seemed like some kind of absurdist exercise playing out at my expense.  And why?  What did I look like to these men?  What did I represent?  Maybe it was better not to ask such questions.  Maybe I’d take this whole episode less personally if in fact I treated it like an absurdist exercise.  So I came up with the most idiotic question I could think of and, well, just put it out there.  

“Would you say there’s nowhere else in this town with an outlet?” 

He shook his head in a gesture of resignation.  ”Nope.”

“Nowhere.  Not even a house?”

“Nope.”  

“So I should probably go to the next town to find someplace to plug my phone in there?”

“Yeah, probably you should do that.”

“Because she won’t let…”

“—won’t let us,” he said, finishing my sentence.  ”That’s right.  There’s a Dairy Queen ten miles down the road.”