Boom Town

Deafheaven, whose album Sunbather played on a loop in my headphones for years as I wrote and revised this book.

I’d like to thank my agent, Jay Mandel,

but I could hardly pay attention to what he was saying because the beard, up close, was overwhelming, a real ninety-ninth-percentile super-mammalian face bush.

Drive for fifteen minutes in any direction and the city will begin to blend with the country. You’ll think you’ve left town, but you haven’t. Not even close. It will take many more miles of driving, much more open country, before you’ll see a sign that says, out of nowhere, LEAVING OKLAHOMA CITY.

Its on-ramps and off-ramps end, eerily, in midair—entrances and exits to a ghost road that your GPS will keep trying to make you drive on. Ignore it. Drive on the actual roads.

Many of the city’s neighborhoods lack sidewalks, intentionally, as a symbol of status, because walking was considered to be outmoded, primitive, impoverished, a little sad, an activity that might even distract the cars, or offend them. You will hear, while you are here, two basic axioms about driving in OKC, each of which seems to violate the laws

Most places have one sky; Oklahoma City has about twelve. There seem to be many different vectors up there, completely unrelated to one another, happening all at once. Sometimes you’ll see silent lightning blinking, very high, in one region, while smooth white clouds slide around low behind you. Will Rogers’s lasso, if you look through it, might be

“World” is meaningless here because there are actually no international flights. It’s just another example of one of Oklahoma City’s defining behaviors: trying to make itself seem bigger than it is. The city conducts itself, whenever possible, like a hiker threatened by a bear in the woods, hysterically exaggerating its size.

$10 per day to upgrade to a Mustang—a special deal, he’ll tell you—but do your best to resist the temptation, because when you get out to the parking garage, you’ll suddenly remember what a Mustang looks like: like a shark, with a fat snout, bullet-nosed and swaggering. Politely refuse, and collect the keys to some kind of nondescript sedan.