Any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retreval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, psychic, communicable, recording or otherwise with permission of the publisher.

note: the original edition featured 64 footnotes, unfortunately ommitted here.

THE CADILLAC TRAMPS

Ocotillo sprout like a squid, tentacles rodilating in the hot wind. Heads buried in the sand. Digital skeletal remains of the primeval sea, a memory of life and fertility waving at us trés femme, toodle-loo. And scrub miniature explosions of dry green in the vasty dustness. The yellows y bleached browns baked dry by a thousand summers of sun, sun, sun– California desert sun. All this flashing on our eyes, impressing us with death at ninety miles an hour. Fwoosh. The black asphalt rush ripping away under the tires of our vehicle. Our car, our auto-stimulation, so new, only 1,524 miles on it. The paint is brilliant white. Like lightning cracking through the desert without thunder. The silent whirrr of the tires. The flash. The speechless roar. The tires are tread heavy tread ready, the engine purring, the air conditioning freezing my naked toes, the upholstery the epitome of comfort, all gliding us to our destination– Club Río, Tempe, Arizona.

    I’ll tell you here that my name is Jimmy Jazz, and I’m a writer among other things. I’ve been many things to a few people. Two out of three of my favorite people in the world are here with me. I’m wearing boxer shorts with big red arrow-pierced heart shapes. My gonads are sweating anyway. I hate that.

    Alaska on the nod in the navigator’s position. I’m fixing up on the little curvature her big eye makes under the lid. Her mouth askew, open. It doesn’t let on to be as kissable as it is. In fact it looks like it could drool. The possibility for drool is high. Her brown hair pressed against the crushy blue upholstery. Her breasts heave slightly with sleep rhythm. She looks good.

    SeyMour McBean, the famous artist, that is potential famous, fame waiting to happen famous, as famous as an artist can get without showing his work to anyone but me, that SeyMour McBean is on the doze in the back seat. He was awake, pushing broom and mop before the sun this very day, earning a few survival ducats with his music blaring. He’s about the only one at the store this hour, so he brings the cassettes on the big boom box, and mops shit up without thinking too much about it. He’s off work before a load of us have had our first cup of coffee, leaving the rest of the day, post-nap, free for art or gigging or masturbation or whatever. The possibilities are infinite because that’s what life is for us since we’ve become artists. Joy kick after joy kick, squeeze the sublimity out of life’s fruit and drink up.

    His body is fetal tucked in happy sleep, the pillow from his very futon bed kissing the whole side of his face, behind the ear and everything with the blesséd kiss of sleep. Mmmm. Sleep, sleep, one hour twenty minutes past noon nap time sleep, conceptual. Sweet siesta power nap dreams kicking his rapid eyes around his skull for restful giggles. Yes, I’d like to join that resty graze in the subconscious pastures of safe delight, but the sheer rush of speed across the road has me narrow awake, sharp as a pencil fresh twisted around the blades eyes peeled for The Man.

    The landscape is reeling. Suddenly the scrub disappears. Dunes! Dunes! I’m T.E. Lawrence in Arabia. I’m Jim Morrison on acid. I’m a camel sailing the Sahara. Humph. This is the wonder of nature, this fertile Earth of a million years ground to powder dust. The land wasted to the final inhospitable step. The fine sand, the smoothiest smooth, save a few texturistical wind ripples. The dunes shoot face up a hundred feet. They are monumental, sublime! Inspiring guilt like a hoarded piece of rich cheesecake.

    “Alaska wake up.” Her eyes open momentarily, nod affirmation, then close back to private dreams. McBean is sound asleep. Sacred solitude. As soon as it appeared the vision of the dunes dematerializes. The scrub continues. Bush after bush. Bush, Bush, Bush…

    The car is a renta-rocket. My own Toyota wagon boils over around 60 mph, so this is a rare pleasure. An exotic delicacy. Yes the speed, the rate at which we approach other cars, and which they vanish behind my horizon seems natural. Smooth. Sub-conscious. Easy. Zoooooom. Ha ha. Of course speed is relative. On the surface streets of home downtown San Diego, or even the freeways around home 5-8-163-94-52 this speed would seem radical, absurd, inherently dangerous, crazy. I should be locked up for driving this fast. But here, here on the endless road, which is certainly the road to Gehenna as the temperature around my skin climbs, here 90 mph is necessary, inherent, genetic, invisible. Me, my friends, this car are invisible, invincible!

    The ‘fast’ lane, the fastest of the two where the trucks don’t drive, is bum–bum–bumpy. I prefer the slow lane even if I have to move to the left to pass every few minutes/ miles. Two minutes/three miles. Flash. We are moving. The right lane has been pounded smooth by eighteen million sets of eighteen wheels. The wagon ruts are my rocket sled track.

    Despite the speed, the flash of the landscape, the scrub bushes repeating themselves 24 times a second on the glass screen, the trip is quiet. Rolling down the window brings on this crazy hum, of snakes or locusts unseen in the bush. Down windows also let the heat in with a windy Gene Krupa on the ear drum. Now the windows are up, streamline push rocket east on interstate eight toward Arizona in the California desert. The radio is not on. Music is not driving me. I don’t like radio. I hate commercials. I hate commercial radio. I love music.

    McBean and I are punk rockers from way back, though we left our mohawks and died hair in the 80’s, and never believed in anything enough to have it tattooed. It’s the punk mentality, the punk heart still with us, like we said it would be when our parents scoffed, “This punk thing is just a phase all teeneagers go through.” “It’s angst,” we told them, “And it never goes away.” I’ve had some wacky hairdoo’s in my weeks. I knew they were stupid, that was the point, though secretly I thought I looked pretty good. Hair spray spikes and home style buzz jobs and black dye or bleach and once I had three dread locks. I think I still have them somewhere. I still wear my first pair of Doctor Marten boots. Those boots were made for flying. The little “With Bouncing Soles” tag flutters back in the wind flap like Hermes’ (god of thieves, travellers and wind) winged sandals. I kind of wish I hadn’t left them at home. We’re going to a gig. Alaska’s favorite band, Los Cadillacas Trampas, The Cadillac Tramps are playing in Tempe in a few hours. McBean and I love the Tramps too, but we have so many favorite bands we’re beyond prioritizing. Stiff Little Fingers, Social Distortion, The Germs , The Stooges, X? “I can’t wait till the show tonight // when I’m with my friends everything’s all right.”  McBean is partial to Husker Du, Replacements, Soul Asylum, also digging trenches with the local scene (Uncle Joe’s Big Ole Driver, Lucy’s Fur Coat, Well Strung to Hang, Radio Wendy, aMiniature, Gregory Page, The Rugburns, Inch, Creedle, Deadbolt, Contra Guerra, Truman’s Water, Donald Wilson, The Nephews, Drive Like Jehu, Heavy Vegetable, House of Suffering, No Knife, The Paladins, Rust, Ghetto Sheist, Fluf, Drip Tank, The Down’s Family)  and I myself dig this swing band Royal Crown Review and their stand-up basic scene and ska gets me jumping (The Specials, Selector) and the blues (esp. Billie Holiday) take my soul down three notches into mellow barbiturate nods, and I admire the big words of Bad Religion, and the politics of Peter Tosh and the jazz– Basie to Byrd handles certain moods. On the home streets about the only decent FM station plays all that honkin’ and screamin’ jazz out of the city college (tune in 88.3) usually with a weak signal static chaser. The jazz station is way gone as we hurtle over the Cuyamaca Mountains and blaze a trail across the imperial desert.

    There isn’t a blue note of music in the car or in my head, which keeps the speed below a hundred. I get a little crazy under the influence of music. In fact it was at a Cadillac Tramps show only two days before, on a glorious beach evening rock-n-picnic pre-fireworks Fourth of July talking with Gary Glazed (singer for local band Honey Glaze) that Alaska, McBean and concocted the idea to follow the Cadillac Tramps to Arizona. Gary (whose band is scheduled to open the gig) said he’d put us on the list. There you go. The next morning I called mom to rent me a car on her credit card, since my visa dried up cause I didn’t use the thing, the beast, the bitch, the monster swallowing America with skin of swank cars and teeth of fine clothes. We do dress well.

    Alaska’s eyes open to the metallic glint off car metal (no time to make the make) we pass like flash. She looks over at the speedometer, with a subtle exaggerated crane of the neck, and carries her register of our current speed up to my eyes. I’ve been trying to acknowledge her feelings with action lately, probably the weak point in our “relationship” being my lack of consideration. I slow down to 65, but with my 90 mile per hour brain we are crawling just above a standstill. My brain is agitated by the slow down and I toy with the cruise control. I’ve never driven a car with cruise control, so I finger around with the cruise control until I figure out the cruise control. I set the cruise control at 65. There is an acceleration button. It’s like some turbo thrust. I push it and hold it down. It lightly kicks my head to the rest, gravity style as we pick up speed 70, 80, I want 90 but it stops at 85. Shouldn’t it stop at 65 since that’s the highest legal speed in the nation? So we cruise at 85 for mile after mile, I get bored at times and manually accelerate to a hundred. A little over 100 mph on a long straight downhill with nothing in front of us but road. We are near crashing into the heat mirage sea which is the road ahead, but the “water” recedes even faster, light speed likely, and we can’t catch it so I let off the gas and settle back at eighty five. I blow around a semi-truck and trailer carrying gimmie gimmie gimmies to consumers; and whipping around the long sweet arch of bend in the highway I see the formal shape of CHP black and white on my eastern horizon– in my face. We are closing fast, so I apply the brake and the renta-rocket complies with a saner speed. The cop is bathed in mirage water, and disappears around the curve. I reduce speed until we seem to be moving retrograde to our desire. Time has more than stopped. I try to read flash-o-matic warning sign at road side which denotes some freeway closure ahead, maybe? Even at reduced to speed limit speed I couldn’t read it. We need Ray Bradbury’s 451° 200 foot billboards. Zooooom.

    Anyway, I get tired of crawling real quick, ready to run before walking, I set the cruise control and build the speed with my finger. A simple touch of a button and we are moving 85 again. The road is straight, no copper in sight so blast forward into the heat. The car splits the heat, a knife cold and sharp. California grows short. The sign says, “Yuma 4 miles.” I’m thinking pure mathematical flying thoughts. ‘Four miles at ninety miles per hour that’ll be, lemmie see, um, three minutes until I can relieve this aching back.’ Stressed sacroiliac . This desert sucks dry shit out of road-killed coyote’s dead asshole. I hate air conditioning (being environmentally aware) but the heat had grown unbearable, even in breezy boxer shorts. My bare feet like sour popsicle toes.

    “My eyes are dried out,” Alaska says. The blue isn’t glossy like it could be. Her eyes reflecting the death of the surroundings, the road where nothing can live and the desert where scaly things sleep scurfed in dust. I want to drive naked, but this isn’t a sexual fetish, I like driving naked when I’m on vacation. Last summer I drove naked into Yosemite National, a sublime joybang. But this is no Yosemite jillion trees teeming with fertile life and bears lurking. This is god’s perception of Hell and human Death marching off the road in either direction. The only sin is the heat. And of course the speed of my vehicle.

    The cars are bunching up on the right as I “rocket from the crypt, leave the dead behind” blamo into the stratosphere 90 miles per hour. Yuma is getting close and I’m thinking of slowing down, sort of coasting into the semblance of civilization when the siren and flashing lights jump up behind me. Aaagghh. A few seconds of heart burning distress and tension as I pull shoulder right and brake to a stop in the middle of fucking nowhere.

THE TICKET

My heart is racing even faster than I was driving and when the police officer says “Did you know you were traveling at ninety miles per hour?”

I throw it back, mimic, with an intonation like I myself cannot believe it. “90?”     Before I can say, “But the cruise control peaks at 85,” he says, “You passed eighteen cars.” This is supposed to floor me with remorse. Perhaps I’m supposed to realize the danger of driving 90, but the car I was driving and the setting gave me such an illusion of control that I can’t see it. “May I see your driver’s licence?” I fetch my black leather wallet from the dash. The chain dangles awkwardly without a belt to snap on to. I hand him the credit card license. This one has my correct address on it. The last ticket I got at was six or seven years ago. I rolled California style through a stop sign at one am. There wasn’t a car or soul in sight. There was a police car waiting dark across the street for some fool to roll through that very stop sign. It was the middle of a quiet residential ‘hood. One o’clock in the morning. It took him awhile to stow his coffee, start the car, wipe the powdered sugar from his mustache, U-turn and pursue with red light aflash. I almost made it back to the pad. The “T.D.P. ballroom” as we called it. I shared a bunk bed with McBean at the time. SeyMour had the bottom, I had the top. That was a wiggly old bunk bed. He used to come in from a gig (I was under 21 at the time) “Jimmy you missed a fucking great gig. Johnny Thunders was ripping on the gitter, and I met this guy Mark…he’s in The Front…”

    “Could you step out of the car please.”

    McBean is awake in the back. He isn’t saying anything. It was a year ago this week when he had the grand sobering experience. His teacher was a cop like this one, back in the city, at the beach, SeyMour was driving, stunt-driving really. In a white renta-car. His old pal cynical Cecil Gonococci pulled the E-brake on his drunken ass for a giggle spin, which ended quick with the flashing lights. SeyMour was so drunk he tried to escape (pull around corner, park and hide) Hollywood movie style, for about a minute. Then caught, he got the big cuff treatment. My pal the criminal. When the cop wouldn’t loosen the cuffs he spit on the window. The saliva held for a second then oozed a trail down into insignificance. He’s been on the wagon ever since, with anonymous helpers sponsoring his untrustworthy ass.

    Some aware scrupulous-attention-to-detail writer genius I turned out to be (dig the sarcasm.) I never recognized his alcohol consumption as a “problem.” We always had fun swimming in generic beer . He could get drunk and talk to anybody, especially any female. Soak your hormones in alcohol and light ‘em on fire. If he weren’t on the wagon we would have been cruising with the booze loosener, and I’d be one sorry prison bound  mother fucker right now.

    Alaska just looks at me with I-told-you-so eyes. I deserve it. I’m shaking a little as I reach over the seat for my shoes. No way I’m stepping on the asphalt without shoes. See I’m not crazy. I can hear her saying “Why were you driving so fast?” even though her lips aren’t moving. I put on a shirt and a pair of Camel cigarettes’ promotional use only shorts. Alaska got them for me from this manager guy she knew at 7/11 about a year ago, and again just now so that I could cover my semi-nakedness. I don’t smoke. I don’t even like smokers. Ironic. My nana (who I loved so much) murdered by Lucky Strike lung cancer. Butt… we can’t have my little dick slipping out the boxer’s crotch crack for an indecent exposure tack on to this fine.

    Decent, I step out of the car and walk over to the patrol vehicle, where the officer readies my ticket “You know you passed 18 cars?” he says again. “Why so fast?”

    “Just trying to get out of the desert,” I say. Act cool, I’m thinking. Maintain some air of definace in this cop’s face. “I may not be cool, but I’m hip.”  Take me to prison, fuck me in the ass. You know the rap. More time than money judge. I step next to him to see what he is writing.

    “Can you step in front of my door please.” He’s standing inside the open car door. I see the shotgun on the rack. He has a battery operated radio playing some shitty mellow muzac. There’s an ice chest too. The barren expanse of the desert, myself included, reflects in his sunglasses. Raybans, ooo. I step the wrong way. “In front of the door!” he spews at me nervous hand jittery like he’s going for gun, stick, mace. I’ve never had a cop hold a gun in my face. Not even after that Bad Religion //Vandals gig went sour with no permits in 88’ at the old Palisades Roller Rink on University. The S.D. cops flashing badges and hormonal gonads that night, throwing six hundred punks who had spent ten bucks cold cash each on gig entry with no possible refund out into the streets. A crazy move considering all the glass window shops next to the rink. Twenty plus cop cars. The mayor even came down to monitor the situation from a nearby Winchelle’s  Donut Shop. We saw her making council with several officers, the fluorescent light illuminating her bad hair cut. Sticks out, helmets, a police dog took a chunk out of a kid’s leg, the punks decided to sit in for a while, to test these cops intentions. All we needed was one clear voice of decent and the place would have went riot. It would have shown all those little for-show anarchists the true meaning of that circle A sewn on their leathers. The cops would have loved that. The punks would have loved it too (stories to tell the grand-kiddies.) McBean was there with his camera snapping photos of the whole thing. They turned out double exposed because sidekick Clay Wyrdbyrd handed his mentor the wrong film. Alaska and I decided to bail out, cause our daughter, Melody Lee, was at home with grandma less than a year old in need of parents and all that. We saw the Mayor nervously stirring her coffee.

    Melody Lee is at the religious grandparents, getting the brain wash and wax so we can have our cheap kicks, but her grandparents love her so I don’t resent their influence in the sake of balance. It takes temple working Mormons to balance living with me. Thanksgiving dinner, prayer time: “Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub” she says. I’m thinking of five year old Melody Lee, my daughter, in the face of this nervous cop. Last week she told me she wants to be a police woman when she grows up, “a phase” I told her, “You’ll grow out of that notion.”

    I step to the correct side of the door. It is a shield between us. “Why’s the left lane is bumpier sir? I ask.

    “Too many trucks driving over it.”

    As I sign the ticket, I ask, like a victim, “How did you know I passed 18 cars?” As he began his answer I realized too late that he had been itching to answer that question like a Jim Carroll on crotch crickets.

    “Remember when you saw me as you were coming up?” I nod dumbly. “Most people slow down after that. I turned off onto the frontage road and slipped behind you. Not you, you kept on speeding, passed eighteen cars, I was careful to count each one.” I stopped short of asking why that was significant. More uh huh nods and I walk back to the car. I break loose a few all natural non-corporate sodas from the trunk for the gang. Might as well make a picnic. The watermelon I bought at Boney’s market sure looks ripe, but I want to abandon the scene, “Hey, hey what does it mean //got a full tank in my killer machine // use the power to abandon the scene // it’s a killer, killer machine.”  I stocked up on tasty eats. It’s time for a cherry soda and handfuls of granola and banana chips. The officer waits behind his car door until we depart.

    SeyMour has his camera out. “Hey Jazz, let’s get a photo with the cop.”I look back as SeyMour hops out the passenger side. The air seems angry, sweat evaporates as soon as it oozes out my pores.

    “Can we get a picture?” I ask gesturing to McBean with the camera. The cop shakes his head affirmative. I put my arm around him, but can’t force a smile. His face is stony, each lens of the Raybans hold an image of the sun.

    Before I drive away the officer says, “If you’re going to speed, be careful, use your mirrors.”

    I’m thinking he’s kind of a nice guy after all. I should have laid a copy of my last book The Sub on him. But I’ve only got three copies in the car. The cop’s demeanor wasn’t overbearing or diminutive . Despite the pride he flaunted in catching me, this donut swilling pig (sorry) was more humble than arrogant. I like the guy. I deserved that ticket. I was wrong to be driving so fast. I feel good. Like James Brown might in a sober moment in his jail cell. He would have autographed a donut napkin for the cop. I hope these thoughts bring on a change in the karma swing. Alaska says, “Bad things happen in threes.”

THE ROAD TOWARD YUMA

Hot as a toad. I pull away from the curb. The seat belt goes back in place. Buckle up, “It’s the Law.”  The seat belt on this car presses hard on my rib knob. It’s irritating. Plastic on bone. There’s only a mile left of California, my birth state. “The more I drive the more things get worse.”  “It’s as hot as a bitch // I should have been rich.”  Who needs the radio when you have music in your head? We proceed to freeze out some of the pain with the air conditioner shooting its coldest breath on us and guzzling the cool drinks straight from the ice chests to our sweaty pallets. Glup glup. I hope aluminum doesn’t cause cancer. Even after the long cop stop the 65 speed limit seems like doing The Crawl through this vast wasteland. "Exit Two" Yuma looking lucky in our crap shoot for kicks. Exit we do.

YUMA

Yuma is one intensified sweltering hot desolate place. Denny’s and Shell proving that filthsome weeds can grow anywhere. Getting out of the car hurts even more here then it did along the roadside. The hot dusty wind jumps down my lungs. My heat sensors must have been partially jammed by fear and anxiety waiting for the ticket. This is hot, this is the meaning of heat. Burn, flames of hell char the brimstone. Here the cold drink in my gut starts to boil out into sweat within seconds. It evaporates into nothing just as fast. I’m drying up. Scaly McBean with his eczema lizard skin looks at home. Like he’s at the BB-Q flipping burgers wearing a big silly white chef hat, or getting his dick jerked free of a sperm burden by some nubile cutie with perky natural brown breasts and big pillow lips hovering in front of a thick mane of jet black curly locks. He has that smile on his face. Tan, shirt off. Fine trim musculature. He’s handsome. SeyMour has three years on me. He saw X and D.O.A. at the Starwood in ‘80 with cynical Cecil Gonococci. SeyMour turned thirty in January. An eye bugging out at the head scanning your useless life for what it’s worth experience . Before January, we were lame duck artists– the painter without a canvass // the poet without a pencil. We were just passing through life, merely living. It wasn’t that we didn’t have good times. We fucked and farted like men do, we danced in the streets among other places. Something happened after we started recording our experience, we looked at things differently. I’ve accused my sub-conscious of sabotage for the sake of drama. Life become book fodder, or canvass matter. The potential for art is everywhere and we intend to milk it. “Poor cow you’re just plain Jane.”  Poor Betsy the guernsey, my life the cow. Plug that nickle or write me a check. Hallelujah!

    We exhausted half a tank of gas on the road to Yuma, so I spend ten dollars on fuel and we blow the dust off Yuma, just as quick as pumping gas, bye bye Yuma, thanks for nothin’. Hello Arizona.

THE ROAD TOWARD TEMPE

Yuma was like a pit stop in our road race toward Phoenix. As it vanished in my rearview, a thought grew totally unexpected like a wild accelerated vine leaping around the hothouse in a frenzy of mad growth. Yet, as the botanist father of this thought, I was surprised because I hadn’t noticed the seeds. We never do. A bird flew over and shit on my field when I wasn't looking. The soil was rich enough. The monotonous road reined by the left brain, straight forward, the loneliness of the pilot on the deck alone with his sea, his private ocean of thoughts. The ancient mariner. The potential for any thought in season, yet, again, the one that came was unexpected. This miracle which I would take credit for, and be hailed “Genius” because of, was an accident, a fluke, a sham.

    It started in the Shell station lavatory in the mist of evaporating urine. The stench of urine was strong. I winced. My stomach churned. I felt weakened from my experience with the speed, the cop, the ticket. I resented the taste of urine crawling in my nostrils, and around my pallet. It was peeking in my ears. The urine had become part of the oppressive heat. It made the air heavier, and more dreadful. Even sinister, like it was a plot to spread disease, famine, plague. I don’t flush the toilet at home when I piss (I’m trying to save water) and Alaska doesn’t dig that. She will flush the toilet before she pisses. There is something so sanctified about her bodily functions that she can only pee on clean water. Her urine shouldn’t have to mix with mine. She flushes again after, as if my urine didn’t have the clout to lay itself upon hers. Hence, no water is saved unless I can successfully pee on my own piss before her bladder rings its princess bell, for the regal emptying. The pomp, the ceremony, the drama, the spectacle, “Alaska is going to urinate!” Alert the media. The proclamation shoots around the minds of the peasants playing arsonist to their imaginations, “The queen is going to piss.” There is a cult organizing with a specimen cup brimmed with her golden liquid waste. This is their holy relic. They copped it from a med lab. Alas, I diverge in hallucination. I exaggerate, hyperbolic.

    My urine arced into the porcelain chamber, right on to the face a monstrous roach. It was dead in the urinal, it’s limbs twisted like my mother’s polio foot. The insect was three inches long, winged, his voracious mandibled cousins and spawn skulking behind the walls waiting to lap up my piss from the filthy cracked tile. Wait. “Whoa, when I say whoa.”

    We stopped for gas; I pissed. It shouldn’t be worth remembering. Yet as the details of the scene combine or recombine here in my twisting jazz mind a feeling more than subtly eerie grows. The thought is a crazy one: Why were we allowed to leave?

    The Shell station was busy. Yet we were the only ones buying gas. There were guys going in and out of the piss room. There were people standing around. Everyone looked beaten, by the heat. Their faces dragged. No one had eyes. They weren’t alive, devoid of animation. There was a station wagon on the fix-it rack with its underbelly splayed to visibility of the mechanics. Here with the road feeding me mile after mile of black tar, I’m having trouble picturing the mechanics. It’s almost like we weren’t allowed to carry their secret out of Yuma. I want to say they looked like bat-winged monkeys, but that’s absurd. I remember the wrack face of pain belonging to the car owner, father, penitent, beat by the heat, he hadn’t put enough oil in the spigot. The breakdown was his fault. He was swimming in blame, shame bones. It was grinding his bones to dust. He would blow away with the desert. His soul would be trapped here at the Shell station. He had once thought about fucking the Laker girls– all at the same time, from behind, he was obviously a sick and twisted man, a pervert, a sinner. The engine was dead, and the fiddler was calling to be paid. The man’s credit card was maxed on illicit expenditures. He was still trying to hide the verdict from his wife. He was turning sick little circles, unsure where to go. He was trapped. The sentence was eternal death, in Yuma.

    The gas station attendant! He was standing outside in the heat taking money. He had brown skin, black hair, brown eyes. I didn’t see my reflection in his eyes. He was the only one who greeted us. He had a goatee on his chin, like the chollos back in East D’ego, but he didn’t have their citified finesse. The beard wasn’t groomed, not manicured, it was a wild growth of hairs, individual twisted hairs coarse and black. There was no anger in him. He was calm and pleasant. He was an integral part of his environment. He was part of the heat. Gasoline fumes oozed in and out of his cells. He knew something he wasn’t telling us. He was wise. We asked the way to Phoenix; he smiled. “Take 8 through Gila Bend, then 85 to 10 to Phoenix.”

    I handed him the money. He seemed satisfied. He looked at our car, he looked us over. He knew us. We weren’t the ones, somehow not the tourists he'd been waiting for. His hands like wood blocks carved and inked for printing. The black oil soaked into his pores. I saw the ten spot tuck into the drawer, it wasn’t marked by his prints. Like he hadn’t touched the money. The Shell sign loomed over to remind us where we were. There was a ball cap on his head, stained with grease. It didn’t seem to fit, askew to the left, pushed up funny by his hair. He was wearing a blue collar shirt with a name patch, like the ones McBean and I got at the thrift store for kicks with virile he-man names  like Jock and Harley. Through these shirts we access our alter egos. We transform. I can become Wayne. SeyMour has one the says, ‘Hatrick.’ That’s his photo handle. You can pick him up with it, even when he’s hot.

    McBean just switched on the radio. He’s fiddling with the static knob searching for music.

    When I wear the Wayne shirt I can fix my car, I can fix anything wearing one of these shirts. The Shell man has that same magic about him, looping around him like the visible halo of gas fumes. “That’s it?” I asked. He just nodded Yes. That was all; we were free.

    We weren’t stopped by that cop at all. That cop helped to scrape our dead asses off the pavement. We sped, we died. I was drunk, SeyMour was drunk. Alaska never woke up. When she died that full bladder bag in her stomach bounced along the road shoulder and was carried off by a coyote into the brush. We took that stationwagon full of mom, pop and the kids with us, to hell. Hell is located in Yuma! And the man who takes the money for gas is the goat-faced fiend, Lucifer Diablo Satan the first– hisself. The name on his shirt patch was Jesus (hay suese).

    I'm going crazy for lack of anything better.

“Aaaaah, Aaaaaah, Aaaaah, Aaaaah, Ah, Ah, Ah, uh, Aaaaah.” SeyMour struck tune on the radio. It’s a high pitched whine, taking us down scale, and up intensity. The road here is open, vast and straight, burning off in rubble rolling expanse of nada in either direction. The way, the Tao, the now through time is the long black line we follow at 65, now 70 mph. It’s Iron Maiden. “Aaaaah, Aaaaaah, Aaaaah, Aaaaah, Ah, Ah, Ah, uh, Aaaaah.” We bang our heads to the music. Our hair is too short to really shake, but the sweat has knocked the grease loose, and I can feel the clumped strands flipping back and forth. We mock the genre. The metal scene is inane, full of useless, drug addicted loser ass… Grumble, grumble. We don’t like their music as a rule, since our music set off on a mission in ‘76 to bury stadium rockers with their rock star attitudes. Since capital  ‘p’ Punk didn’t annihilate the enemy, we are destined to become them.

    Take the Cadillac Tramps for instance. You can walk right up to them before, or after the gig and just rap about anything. Regular guys. Alaska met Gabby (the Colonel Sanders-chubby Menudo expatriate reverend of the alligator beat) at a Halloween gig a few years back. She was dressed as a girl scout with black stockings and garters, showing cleavage. But Alaska didn’t have to give head in his limousine to befriend him. Gabby seemed genuinely touched to meet our little alternative family at the Adam’s Avenue street fair shortly after that. We shook hands. Melody Lee smiling approval. She senses sincerity in human beings. There are some people she just doesn’t like. The Cadillac Tramps played for free that day. Since then Gabby has either put us on the guest list or snuck us in the back door. I like to think that he understands how hard gigging can be when you need a baby-sitter. I’ve never really talked with him about it.

    He turned us on to a bum rush at the back door of Winston’s and after the bouncers tried to exit Alaska he went outside and said, “She’s with the band.” She walked back in with him. I had walked right past the bouncer, backwards like I was examining the commotion, then went to chill in the men’s room. The secret to getting in gigs for free is acting like you belong there.

    Gabby is cool as cats. Out in the street before a Casbah  gig we offered him sips off our cerveça, and he explained  his on-the-wagon abstention racket. “I’ve been clean for awhile.” I think the whole band is sober. It’s amazing they can get as wild as they do from the music alone. But Gabby doesn’t lay down the, “Thou shalt not drink alcohol” line. He recognizes that he can’t handle it, and leaves it at that. Alcohol affects people differently. Alcoholism is a genetic reaction to the drug. Also I believe that there are addictive personalities susceptible to substance abuse, be it alcohol, sex, art… The trick is to channel that wild energy into something less destructive. Alaska uses alcohol to transform her personality. She can get bubbly and friendly when she’s loaded. She can get violent dangerous too. It’s all interlaced with estrogen/progesterone/testosterone cycle. Alcohol, plus time of the month, plus pissing her off can equal calamity. The bottle will come flying, backed up by curses and nails, and me sleeping on the couch. This may sound typical of drunks, but Alaska, say two days before or after, would react to the same nothing incitement meek like kitten. Sober: seldom a cursing “fuck” or “shit” verbatim spew from those lips.

    Alaska sits on the green electrical box sipping her beer. The moonlight sidewalk in front of the Casbah club is dirty, the street signs are covered with band stickers. “The last time I drank, I woke up naked on top of a school bus,” Gaaby says. His talking voice charged with the same mythic energy he puts into the songs, like an old blues man's voice. He takes a drag on a cigarette. “The children were coming around. It scared the shit out of me.” I swallow the last sip of beer unsure what to do with the empty bottle .

    I don’t know the rest of the guys in the band. I picture them standing stage right while the opening band runs through their riffs nodding their heads to the tunes. A lot of bands sit in the dressing room, or crash out in the van. To me this denotes integrity.

    “Aaaaah, Aaaaaah, Aaaaah, Aaaaah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Aaaaah.” We sing along. Alaska cracks a laugh in the back seat. Her thin white arms spread like wings resting on the front seats. She’s just watching us, smile-wise. “Come on, Shake it,” says McBean. After a minute she starts to shake her hair too. For the first time we are together, in unison, united by silliness. The inhibitions have slipped away. Our heads get more radical, in time, dugga dugga dugga with Maiden. “Aaaaah, Aaaaaah, Aaaaah, Aaaaah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah, Aaaaah.”

    Metallica comes on with some long guitar-hero crap so McBean flips the station. He finds cool jazz, John Coltrane blowin’ horn, but that’s overruled by the static judge, so he puts the squeeze on the dial. He finds National Public Radio news for the middle of nowhere. All things considered we mellow out still giddy from goofy metal attack, and listen to the world’s gossip which sobers us up with a lot of depressing political crap.

    I used to be news addicted. I listened to NPR hour on hour. I was an informed citizen. But then I read Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronomous Bosch. (I never saw the oranges) and he said, “I don’t watch the news, or subscribe to any newspapers. Anything you need to know, someone will tell you.” So true that I don’t listen to the news much any more. Alaska, wise ahead of her years, never did listen to the news. Maybe the next generation will understand her. I sure don’t. And I’ve known her for 8 1/2 years. As soon as I figure her out she’s on to something new. McBean doesn’t give scraps to dog about politics either.
GILA BEND

The sign says Gila Bend. McBean lights on “A whole lotta lovin’” the oldies station, AM 960, jump back to 1957. As we drive time warps. As we enter the town, the businesses at the side of the road are vanquished by time. Time has left it’s heavy footprint all over the buildings. The whole gang must have rolled through town. The wild ones: Time, Sun, Wind, and cousin Neglect. They stole all the money! They spray painted their names on the crumbling brick walls. There’s an A &W Root Beer joint. The last one of those closed down in S. D’ego maybe 12 years ago. I remember sucking down a root beer float with my dad, his tennis partner neighbor and little son Johnny who was maybe two years younger than me. The tennis partner told us some gruesome story about how he had his skin taken off at the hospital. The doctor’s had taken off his skin in prep for surgery, except the drugs wore thin and he got up wandering the hospital without a face. He scared some nurse at the elevator and us over an A &W root beer.

    The parking lot of this joint is like a face without skin. The asphalt mostly missing and pushed up in places by Earth shift. Cracked by quake. The texture is intricate with dirt, gravel, pieces of limbs, it’s just chaotic. We pull the white renta-car  into the driveway. “This town is coming like a ghost town.”  There are no other customers. The way the sun reflects on the windows, it’s hard to see if there are any workers. The whole place looks broken down– lifeless. The wind breathes its desert breath. I’m like a dead duck inside an oven, except I suddenly wake up. I don’t realize how hot it is until I hop out of the pan and walk around.

    Alaska wants a root beer float. I step up to the window. It’s plexiglass with a hair crack running diagonal across it. It’s started to go yellow. McBean and Alaska stay in the car. No sense all of us dying in this heat. Then a worker-girl comes up to the window. She doesn’t slide it open until she’s sure I’m ready to order.

    “Root beer float.”

    “Two eleven,” she says. An older woman sits reading near the soft serve machine. Maybe she’s the teenager’s mother. The girl pushes her blonde hair back while she fills the cup with ice cream.

    “What does A &W stand for?” I ask. She just giggles. She doesn’t know. She looks over at her mother.

    “What does A & W stand for?” Her mother doesn’t know, shrugs, looks back at her book almost immediately. “She doesn’t know.”

    “Or she knows, but she won’t tell us,” I say. I’m putting on the sinister Joyce Carol Oates’ Arnold Friend just blew in from Yuma act on her. So I pipe up real loud so both can hear, it won’t have to be relayed from daughter to mother back to daughter back to me like I’m courting the fair maiden this time, “What the hell is root beer anyway?” Neither of them know. I walk back to the car shaking my head.

    “Hey gang do you guys know what A & W stands for?” They don’t know either. McBean laughs. Alaska sucks the float through two straws. “I’m thinking we should take this little girl with us. We can put her in the back. She can borrow Alaska’s clothes. We can hip her up real quick and turn her on to the gig in Tempe. She could shack up with McBean.”

    “I’m not into blondes,” he says.

    “Maybe we’ll leave her in Phoenix. She’ll find someone else and continue east in a light blue Chevy van. Maybe tour with the Cadillac Tramps. If we get sick of her we can drop her back in Gila Bend.” I assume every person with the faintest bit of life in their veins desires liberation from Gila Bend. I’m a locationist. A prejudice elitist bastard. “It’s everyone in this town’s country-ass best interest to come with me to the city.” I unlace my shoes, take them off, pull off each sweaty sock becomming more Huckleberrry Finn and country living comfortable.

    We roll down the main drag, which isn’t a drag, in fact there is some joy even in the desolation. The 25 mph speed limit too fast to absorb every detail. There’s a hotel, probably hip hop happening around the end of the nineteenth century, rodilating high on gold dust; it appears to be boarded up.

    Just beyond the hotel is a vintage car lot. I’ve never seen this many cars, this cool, in one place. “Hey slow down, make U-turn,” McBean says. Easily done. We roll into the driveway. The lot is surrounded by rusty chain link with barbed wire icing. 1961 convertible s and hardtops. $8500 price tags. These cars are hip. A thick desert dust coats the chasis. There is a sign rising out of the midst of the cars “Jimmy’s Dirt Hauling.”

    “It’s a sign!” McBean shouts.

    Radical vehicular manslaughter. Wow! We are having a great time looking at the cars. Just being near the cars. “SeyMour, have you got $8000 on you?” I ask. “I was wondering if they’d take a check?” It would take me a hundred days work to pay for that car, that is if my Unca didn’t take his share out on either end. Taxes paid for the road so I can’t complain. I could live in it for fourteen months, shower in high school gyms. Yeah! Melody Lee could put her toys in the trunk. Alaska and I could easily sack in the back seat. Wait. Hold on to one second if your fingers can grasp it. Alaska doesn’t like to have sex in cars. She “grew out of that.” Forget the whole thing. If I was alone, I’d live in a car, write, do as little work as possible for gas money. McBean snaps a few photos leaning on the fence so as to get close to the cars. He catches a piece of skin on a barb.

    “OW!” he says. A little blood trickles out of his human sandpaper hands.

    “Scratch those prickly hands of yours on my back will ya? But don’t get any blood on me.” I’ve got many zits itching which I neglect to mention. EARLY CHILDHOOD MEMORY ALERT: my dad’s back covered with these same itchy pimples, it’s 1969, dad stomach-down on the carpet, we live in Costa Mesa, mom squeezes the whiteheads. Alaska squeezes the whiteheads on my back. Yikes! I’m living the life of my parents. McBean scrapes his palm around on my back. “I feel good!” I proclaim. We hop in the renta-rocket bat mobile style and say hello to freeway 85 our guide to the 10, to Phoenix, and to all a gig night.

THE ROAD TOWARD PHOENIX

The air conditioner blows furious (sorry Earth mother, cousin ozone I’ll miss you.) The radio’s on “Road runner, road runner//about a thousand miles an hour.”  Real life rapid legged bird crosses in front of us, luckily we're going 40 mph and not a 1000. She runs out the other side. The road loaded with killed carcass, charred black by B.B.Q del sol. The furry mounds of greasy grimy gopher guts stock the five hundred mile shelf between San Diego and Phoenix. I like to believe that these animals committed suicide, to get out of the heat. But there goes my prejudice again, fronting its ugly head. At any rate Nietzche’s atheists were right “Dog is dead.” And its bloody carcass rots on the road shoulder just outside Gila Bend, Arizona.

    We’re driving and singing along to oldies “Shoop Shoop.” When “To Sir with Love” comes on Alaska says, “This is my favorite song!” I turn up the volume. She sings along.

    “I saw Lulu on MTV humming along with Soul Asylum whose cover version just hit the radio waverings,” cover tune maniac McBean says. Just last night, I overheard him schmoozing some local band, “Do you do any cover tunes?” Back in the college radio days we spun 20 cover tunes in a row. Mad Parade doing “One Tin Soldier” M.I.A. “California Dreamin’” D.O.A. doing “War, hmm, what the hell is it good for // absolutely nothing // Say it again” Social Distortion playing “Under my Thumb.” Front man Mike Ness used to sing “she knows how to come when I tell her to // she’s under my cock.” “For What It’s Worth,” comes up on the radio. The Buffalo Springfield. “Something’s happening here.” Plain Wrap (a band I saw in ‘85) covered that. Almost every song on the oldies station has a punk rock version. Those were the days, or are these the days? Driving out here in the middle of this roadddddd– Shit. A bird just flutter-swoop-dived in front of the car. I grilled it. The feathers mushroom in the rear view.

    “Damn. I hate killing animals. I don’t even kill roaches,” I say.

    “Let's go back and bury it.” McBean says.

    “Poor little birdie,” Alaska adds. I look at the blue digital clock numbers on the radio. “Fuck, we don’t have time.” We have a gig to get to. Time to kill, no time to mourn // time to consume, no time to recycle. That stupid bird is going to bring on the serious negative karma swing. Karma works like a pendulum. Up swing, down swing. I can feel it coming down.

    “Damn. Shit. Dead feathers.”I turn the radio off. Give the little brown bird a moment of silence. I’m thinking what a kick it would be to be a bird, and what a kick in the ass it would be to get my freedom swiped by five hundred pounds of steel– splat! “Shit, that sucks!” I bang my hand on the steering wheel. “Sucks having your beak grinded on the asphalt.”

    We drive in silent homage to the courageous life crawling and winging around this desert. I’d like to honor those souls dead on the roadside. The testament to survival. The adaptability of the species. This line builds hope in an absurd life. We cruise this way for twenty miles, silent, contemplative.

    Finally McBean turns the radio back on. “Rockin’ robin //oh rockin’ robin won’t you rock with me tonight?”

    “Not tonight,” I say. “Some motherfucker hit me with a car.” I can see the little bird’s corpse rolling to a stop on the highway. The feathers scatter in the wind. I can see the next car that comes along pulverizing the body, and the next and the next. By nightfall the little brown bird will have returned to the desert dust, compliments of the wind and Jimmy Jazz.

    The next song comes up and I shut off the right brain and sing-a-long. “My little run-a-way, run, run run run run-a-way.” And “The Wanderer” with Suzie on my chest comes up after that taking me a few more miles toward my destination, with peace in the guilt mind. I remember when Social Distortion covered “The Wanderer,” that gig at Tijuana University. Those were the days. I talk like an old man. A month ago, working as a substitute teacher, I was daily mistaken for a high school student.

    I was doing the sidewalk tour in front of the Casbah a couple of weeks back. Pushing my book The Sub. I met this girl, an acquaintance of Alaska’s actually. Turns out she wrks as a sub during the week. On the weekend she’s a clown, which is the perfect second job for a teacher– 900 shows a year.

    “Clowns to left of me // jokers to the right // here I am // stuck in the middle with you.” Tune after tune carrying us toward the 10.

    Then, suddenly, a sign.

    This is a message, a beginning, a hint to the reader how desperate we are for drama.



The sign reads:  Roadside Table.

McBean and I roll in the poetry of this as if it were somehow funny. Alaska seems disinterested. Immediately it goes in the book of band names. Roadside Table, tonight with Suicide Door, Manic Hispanic and The Cadillac Tramps.

    This reminds me of Jello Biafra. People always bug him for band names. I saw him speak at UCSD where he rattled off thirty or so band names in his routine. I was eavesdropping on Mojo Nixon the other night in front of the Casbah (I tell you the Casbah sidewalk is where things happen.) Mojo just did a country album with Jello, they might tour. At least that’s what Mojo told the drunk he was talking to.

    When wino Cecil Gonococci was down last week, he scoffed at our sidewalk ritual. “Thirty years old and can’t afford a gig.” There was a twenty year old out on the sidewalk with his face pressed against the window. That kid wanted in so bad. He was a long way from beyond experience where SeyMour and I reside. I lived there myself not so long ago. One day the kid, and maybe even old Cecil Gonococci will see that outside on the sidewalk is where it  happens. Things grow on the sidewalk. We create there, it’s my sales office, my inspiration zone. Who cares what the band looks like anyway?

    Cecil was the one who said people in San Diego totally dug the Cadillac Tramps because of their tattoos. He’s not all wrong. Showmanship is a bonus, a pro boner to help the music. We are there to be entertained on all fronts. Why shouldn’t my eyes get their kicks at the gig as well?

    And when Gabby comes out on that stage looking the way he does (hair greased upright, black silk shirt, trousers sagging, Ray Charles dark glasses, huge belly shaking with confidence and barbed wire tattoos) on top of the band’s instrumental intro, and he hits the microphone with that voodoo laughter the air turns to electricity. I get thrills and chills on every synaptic tangent. Hah, hah hah hah ha haaaaa! With every chortle razor sharp. Damn straight the Cadillac Tramps look as good as they sound! They are art. They’re like the cartoon Adams Family. When they set into a tune, you know that they get off on the music. No body can stand still. Guitar player Brian Coakleyis jumping and wandering like a nervous jungle beast, caged and tormented by the poking sticks of children. He wants at the audience. And Johnny “Two Bags” Wikersham sways fro and to licking his guitar to flames. And Warren Renfrow lurches around with his bass, his shy Frankenstein demeanor, near-motionless cool, slowly uprooted and possessed by the music, changed into motion. Spanky, back on the drums must lose a few pounds at every gig. You can tell he gains it back at breakfast, lunch and dinner. I’d hate to fuel these Cadillacs. Six gallons to the mile. I can see the blood crashing through Brian’s jugular full of complex carbohydrates and adrenaline, it’s going about as fast as we are right now. I look down at the speedometer which has crept up to eighty-five.

    I come back to my senses with leadfoot off the gas. I must have been driving on the right side of the brain, because I can’t say what the road looked like for the last few miles.

    Alaska is in the back seat reading Look Homeward Angel. SeyMour has his sketch pad out. He’s sketching. I’m working like a big experience sponge soaking up all this drama for poetic translation. I’m the describer, a jazzed up historian.

    I’ve been that way for a long time. Back in the days I was a video documentarian. I had a huge scandal running with McBean & Smokey Meyer; we video taped all the major punk rock circuses that rolled into town, the promoter (now owner of the Casbah) let us in for free, we sold the bootlegged tapes at Off the Record on El Cajon Boulevard. Still a very cool store, though they had to quit the bootleg trade after a police raid. Forgive the shameless plug, but they are selling The Sub. We taped Jane’s Addiction, The Cramps, The Red Hot Chile Peppers, G.B.H. If it was punk in ‘86-’87 and it rolled through San Diego we taped it. Only one three letter initial band threatened to sue us, but who am I to mention those dirty rotten crossover sellout bastards anyway?

    There were plenty of bands that didn’t want to be taped like theBad Brains.

    NOSTALGIA TRIP: Friday, July 11, 8:00 pm Marquees and fliers never list the year. The Cramps were playing at the California Theater on Fourth avenue in downtown San Diego. The theater is literally crumbling into rubble now, the pigeon crap saturated marquee has a huge gash in it. The windows are caged and boarded up. It looked safer then, which only goes to prove how deceiving looks really are. The Cramps wouldn’t let us in the building with our camera. Tickets were fourteen or seventeen bucks. It looked like we were going to sleep this one out in the dirty asphalt beds of the homeless. We arrived at the gig very early. I remembered this story local punk Cliff Cunningham told me about the infamous Mad Mark Rude. According to the story Mark Rude went to the top of the building, eight stories, and climbed through an air conditioning duct, pitch black with rats and cob webs to free gig entry.

    The door to the adjacent building was open so SeyMour and I ventured through it. We checked the doors on all the floors. Finally we found one open. Bango bammo blammo it went right into the California Theater. Remember rule A-1 for sneaking into shows: Act like you belong there. We walked right past the security forces carrying the video camera, McBean’s 35 mm, the video tripod, extra batteries, tapes etc. in the gear box with a cold six pack. We walked up the stairs into the balcony. The California Theater is immense when it’s empty and we stood out. The Cramps were on the stage gearing up for a sound check. Singer Lux Interior wearing dark sun glasses. We looked around for a place to hide. No crowd to lose ourselves in. Posion Ivy is wearing a skirt so short she seems naked behind her hollow body Gibson. Then SeyMour looks up with an idea. The projection room window at the top of the theater. We calm and cool like made our way to the hole. It was solid black inside. The lights in the balcony were dim. It was like stepping into the unknown. I went first. Headfirst. After finding the floor, I signaled McBean for the gear and he followed. We were flying high on adrenal fear, excited is not wicky enough a word to cover it. I groped around for an electrical outlet. There was trash on the floor. I kicked an aluminum can. It did it’s jangle thing trying to give us away. I found a plug. Or did McBean find the plug? I inserted and swoosh the little red ‘functioning’ light lit right up. I set up the tripod and one of the legs just kept going down down where there should have been floor. There were holes in the floor. We were certainly going to die and be devoured by the unseen rats, both of us were sure had us pegged for snacks during the movie. The tripod finally set, I put a piece of electrical tape over the little red ‘dead give away’ light and we were set.

    The theater was a vast room I’d visited twice before. The first time I came with Smokey Meyer in ‘85 to see Dead Kennedys. Another story. McBean and I came with his x-girlfriend, Lucretia Menses, and her pal, now mine and the Cadillac Tramps pal, then Sondra Lognado. Sondra being a professional photographer, a historian with a vision like myself. Neo-Greta Garbo black and white star radiating beauty-enhancement sex-erotic exotic captivator of moment-um, image la prisoner celluloidal tendency for magnanimity objectifier par excellence. That Sondra. We saw heard felt smelt Social Distortion and The Damned in this very theater. I’ll never forget Dave Vanian, undead crooner for The Damned, coming up from the trap door, rising from the underworld; Rat Scabies banging on the drums twirling his sticks high… I don’t think Captain Sensible was playing with them that time around. I think I’ve seen The Damned’s final gig ever three times. “Tell the dinosaurs, they won’t be back tomorrow,”  and “Smash it Up” for me. The Damned are blessed in my book.

    Where am I? Crashing toward the 10. The air conditioning is freezing my toe bones. We switched the radio back to NPR. Waitress/poet/social commentator Amanda Greenly Waylen is declaiming the evils of air conditioning. Go Amanda. Back to the oldies station.

    We just passed a big sign that says Rip Griffin’s… something. Truck stop maybe. The three of us kick the name around for a mile or so. Rip Griffin’s travel pit.

    “Rip Griffin, great name.”

    Then we see The Cosmo road stop, bar and grill, families welcome. There’s a big U.F.O. rodilating on the sign. “We'll catch that one on the flip side.”

    We press on toward our destination. “I’m driving down the road and everywhere I go // I don’t need no traffic to burn my flow.” That song was on the Cadillac Tramps first single. They re-did it for their second c.d. Tombstone Radio. Cadillac Tramps + songs for road travel = synonymous. “Take me to that Cadillac Hearse,” “I’m driving way too fast // it’s never going to last.” I love the way Gabby puts his arms up on the imagination steering wheel of that Cadillac Hearse to act out and make visual the song. That simple arm gesture builds a whole big black vehicle in the air. The coffin in the back about to bounce on out, cause the driver is revving up to a hundred with a dip approaching, and no slowing down…

    This road is getting complex with the memory detours. The zone we are crashing through now is a little scary. Signs every thirty feet:

       Trucks check your brakes.

                 Run-away Truck Ramp 500 feet.

It is a 6% grade which is trouble for the big rig, but it’s 55-60 for us, bye bye trucks. I secretly hope to see a run-away truck. We pass one truck, it’s brakes smell like burning plastic right through our rolled up windows, over the air conditioner. For a second I think maybe we’re on fire. But then I see it’s the truck so everything is okay. I wish Alaska would get the wild hairy idea into her head to massage my shoulders. This driving is getting to be a pain in the neck. Did you know that Jack Kerouac didn’t drive? He rode all over the country, but didn’t drive. Sheeeet. Maybe I’ll pull a Kerouac on the way back. What’s your soda lack jack?

    “There's the 10.” McBean says “West to L.A. East to Phoenix.” No word on Tempe. We’ve been told to expect Tempe before Phoenix. It’s a suburb of the big town. Tempe is where we’ll find Arizona State and Club Río. That’s all we know about it.

    And what we know is questionable. One guy told us we should have taken the 15 north outta San Diego up to the 10, and jetted straight east into Phoenix from there. Besides adding over an hour we would have cut out Yuma and Gila Bend.

    “Traffic is flowing through the valley, watch for a fender bender just outside of Tempe…” says the oldies station radio voice. Tempe is mentioned. It exists. Brief moment of paranoia, what if somebody planted this idea in my head to go see a band in Tempe as a joke? What if there was no Tempe? What is Tempe? A ploy invidiously put together by someone who wants us to look foolish. A rumor disseminated by a rival for my spot on the bookshelf no doubt. You'll write a whole book where nothing happens, ha ha.

    Just past 99th avenue we hop into the carpool lane. Traffic is light. We swim towards our destination. I am nervous looking for the Man. I’m locked into the speed limit by paranoia. “Paranoia, self-destroyer.” The kinks in my back are aching. This car isn’t that great. No sacroiliac pump. The white renta-car looks good flashy past ye on the freeway, but it’s no Cadillac. No temp gauge. I can feel the window knob breaking off in my hand two years max. Reminds me a little of my ‘72 Ford Pinto. My found on road dead Ford Pinto.

    We’re on the urban freeway again. I’m impressed by the cleanliness of the freeway leading into Phoenix. Maybe because it’s unfamiliar, and flashing past at 60 mph I don’t see the imperfections. San Diego has been lit on fire by a graffito trend. It’s sad because most of the tag names aren’t very aesthetic, hastily scrawled black squiggles. My own house was tagged recently by Whisper and Klown. I didn’t like having that on my house. I felt invaded. They came after midnight, probably giggling. They probably peed on the house too, to mark their territory. Señor vendetta Cecil Gonococci peed on my car the other day. He’s an obnoxious bugger, mad because I threw the remains of an old caulking gun at him which I found up on the roof. Like a drifter or a tagger he just whipped his little pee pee out, about 5 pm, let loose. It wasn’t like he hadn’t gotten me back; he had been chucking rocks at me which sailed over into the neighbor’s family car wash. Cecil has to return triple damage severity. Say, if I screwed his girlfriend, he would find the ash earn of my dead granny and jerk off into it. That’s Cecil.

    It was only two nights ago after the Cadillac Tramps gig that he started a global nuclear war in my car. Some idiot sponsor of the show had the bright idea to hand out free cans of shaving cream to the lusty beach goers. We, being the freebee hounds that we are, stocked up on several cans each. McBean was driving home in his own car. I was taking Cecil and Alaska home, because Cecil had been drinking the brew-ha-ha on the beach and wanted to keep his buzz going. Alaska had a cream can, I had two cans and one stashed away. Cecil had a can. This was the stand-off. The whole armed deterrence theory put to the test. No one would be crazy enough to shoot off a first strike because total annihilation was guaranteed. It was true that Alaska and I were allied powers in the front seat, though when things came down to war, we didn’t really trust each other. I mean I would collect big rush off seeing Alaska with shaving cream all over her breasts. Cecil was in the back seat, alone, ready, missiles ready. I had multiple warheads aimed in his direction. Then, as should be expected by intelligent readers like yourself, like in the big political world, there is always some crackpot who presses the button. This was our greatest big picture fear as children. We grew up with it, and here was our unique opportunity to set our greatest nightmare into action. I’m saying it was inevitable.

    After it was over and we were all covered with shaving cream (the inside of my car is still covered with shaving cream, because I never cleaned it up) we must have looked pretty ridiculous. I still had two cans, though I can’t call myself the winner. Our little psychological experiment turned out to be proof that no one wins. We were sitting in heavy traffic trying to get out of the parking lot where thousands of people had inadvertently heard the Cadillac Tramps while waiting to see fireworks. What else was there to do but turn the left over arsenal on a new enemy. Some guy in traffic flipped us off. The fool. We let fly on the driveby from both windows. We riddled him see– duh duh duh duh. That’s another thing I’ve been feeling while driving around San Diego lately: that those people I might have flashed up the angry rigid digits at a few years back are riding with a .45 on the shotgun seat, waiting.

    Alaska and I had seen the Cadillac Tramps on Saturday night and Sunday at the beach. Now we are at 70th Avenue toward Phoenix, to see, hear, feel them again. We are the roadies, groopies. Proving that you don’t have to screw the band to feel like a band slut.

    Saturday night the Cadillac Tramps were playing a big July three independence ball, put on by the Casbah, not at the Casbah, but at the ritzy La Jolla Marriot. Tickets were $16. We do not, as a rule, pay more than seven dollars for anything. We are spoiled I suppose. Alaska and I went down to the Marriot anyway. I was sitting in the cushy lobby chair, near the elevator. Leg crossed over my knee like some big important artist, making the café society scene. Alaska was powdering herself in the ladie’s powder lounge. It seemed like we'd be shut out.

    Alphonzoe Mediterraneo was in the doorman position. I had just set his sister up with a medley of old videos from the punk rock days. He didn’t beckon us to free entrance, I feel over self-conscious about these things. He probably didn’t think of it. All he said was “Where’s your date?”

    So I was sitting there wallowing in the creeps from the awkward surroundings. The Marriot looks just like the inside of the Mormon temple, and like irritating. I think it’s the faux elegance that bugs me. It’s a lot like this car too, the La Jolla dollar sign high rise white renta-car. I can't feel comfortable where I am forbade to spill.

    “Wouldn’t you like to have a new car like this? Alaska says.

    “No,” I say. “I like my beat up old ‘79 Toyota Corona. Can you imagine Cecil launching Soap War III in this thing?” She doesn’t respond.

    Then Slim Chance (Casbah owner //gig promoter) walked by. I felt a little stupid, because he always sees me eavesdropping from the sidewalk in front of his club. And now he won’t see me inside later so he’ll think, “There goes Jazz on the sponge again. Sponge is dry this time. Ha ha.” Not that he’d really think that (though he might) but that’s how spontaneous guilt works. Feeling guilty for being poor. Alaska comes out of the powder room, powdered.

    “Hey Jazz, hi Alaska,” Slim said. Alaska smiled. Shit, he should know I can’t be spending money on gig nights, with Melody Lee so needy for clothes and food, and shelter and toys. He’s got a baby of his own on the way, he’ll find out the cool truth. He should let us in. Then again how many other us-es are there? I don’t ask if he'll put us on the list. I haven't got the guts or the gall in my bladder. He doesn’t know we don’t have tickets. Why do I expect everyone to be a mind reader?

    So Alaska and I are getting ready to pack it in. Rent a movie or some low price, no life gig like that. We are put in the position of waiting: a new truck waiting to be stolen, an old building waiting to fall down, a young girl waiting to get fucked… a shiny tooth waiting for a cavity. Bam! Gabby appeared. Gabino. Mr. Cadillac Tramp himself. He wrapped his big barbed wire tattoo arms around Alaska pulling her into his belly for a happy hello hug. I was secretly glad to see him. I say secret cause I played it cool. “What we do is secret, secret.”  I uncrossed my leg in the relax lobby chair and reached up to shake his hand. “Shake!” Like two businessmen ready to make big deal over lunch. “The business man really did upset her.” 

    He asked if we’re going in. Alaska laid the low-fund sob sob sponge story on him. He slipped his all access bracelet out of his pocket. He handed it to her. Alaska gently folded it around her wrist trying to quell her enthusiasm. More huggy hugs, thanky wanks. I’m not really good at receiving gifts.

    “Sorry man that’s all I got.” He turns his pockets out like he might pay my way if he happened to find sixteen dollars in there. He speaks the truth. These punk bands can’t just let in everyone they want. It isn’t really their show. But that made two for one, eight dollars each, a little more than our limit, but this a big big ballroom holiday time thing, and we threw caution and expense accounts and principles to the window. “I love the sound when I smash the glass.”  We blew a few seconds on small chatter, and Gabby went back into the gig. Sister Double Happiness was already on the stage wailing out their first tune.

    After he’d gone Alaska said, “Gabby is so generous.” I nodded unable to add anything.

    I handed the money to Alphonzoe. He took my $16 shamelessly. If McBean were present, Alphonzoe would have slipped him a deal. The other night in front of the Casbah Alphonzoe ran out to his car and brought SeyMour a box of chalk so SeyMour could draw on the sidewalk. Clash city chalkers strike again. I think maybe Alphy is sweet on SeyMour.

     ROAD REPORT: We are at 40th avenue toward Phoenix and no sign of Tempe. Traffic is light and everything is fine.

    The Independence ball was sizzling with social pyrotechnics. Immediately we began to run into the followers of the Cadillac Tramps. We see the same people at every gig, we bop and hop next to them, but don’t talk to even a fourth of them. We don’t get close to the ones we do talk to. Scenes tend to play out that way. Either that or you've slept with everyone in the room by the associative property.

    We saw enough people that we knew. Chuy, hair slicked up like El Vez sporting suspenders (what else can you do but “sport” suspenders) with Joanna (law student approaching the bar) who bought The Sub on the Casbah sidewalk for five smackers. “Hey” and “Hi” as close and deep as we get.

    We rounded the scene, checked out Sister Double Happiness. They were rockin’. Female drummer dressed in old glory shorts.  Everything was fine. There were about five hundred people at the Marriot who I had never seen in my entire gig life. Some were older (late 30’s-early 40’s) probably fans of the headlining Beat Farmer’s. B.F. Later that night the Tramps played kazoos and sang chorus on “Happy Boy” the Beat Farmer radio song. For the first time, staged with these old guys, the Tramps looked novitiate, young, not fully in control, housing grade school candy shop grins, like happy little boys. “Hubba, hubba, hubba.”

    Pulling familiar faces from the crowd is always fun. We saw Sondra the photographer. We talked ketchup. We saw Audrey Wackerly with two odd looking characters. Audrey used to sing ska for Gangbusters, and she’s big pals with this little hippie p.c. chick I used to bang around with. (Just kidding Jenny.) We can’t thank Jenny San Francisco enough for letting us use her pad as a flop house. We can’t thank Audrey enough for being Audrey. For that little dance she does when she sings. One of Audrey’s friends looked a little like Peter Murphy, Ziggy Stardust and somebody’s really tall sister.

    Hey whoa hey. An old pal from high school, Mike Lions. I hadn’t seen him in years. We used to sit around in the back of class, 9th grade, and draw cartoons of executions. I used to see Mike at all the major punk rock functions,post high school. And we went to college at the same school. But we never really became hanging around friends. Parallel roads don’t merge.

    The Cadillac Tramps took the stage. Alaska and I jumped up front. We bounce shoulder to shoulder with the other kiddies. Everyone here is over 21+ I.D. required. We moved right into the wild hoodoo grip, up two notches on the joy counter. Click click. I was bouncing to the duel guitar rhyme, “the bass beat drum hump.” We were both doing some wacky shaking. Whenever Alaska looks into my eyes I know she sees the meaning of my madness. Our love is in there too, behind a crazy mask of shared joy. The music is our master. The Tramps themselves were like experimental rats on the evil psychologist’s electrified grill cage hopping. Two Bags has a new 'doo. Reminded me of a Mike Ness (crooner for Social Distortion) bondage vampire look circa 1981.  Shoots of blonde bleached locks held placid by a nifty Dobbs of New York chapeau.

    ROAD REPORT: A sign! a sign. It says:

     STATE PRISON
     DO NOT STOP FOR
     HITCHHIKERS

    Of course we slam the car over to the right lane. As we approach the next one (I knew there’d be another) I ease the brake and glide slowly to a shoulder stop in front of it. We can see the State Prison on the other side of the freeway.

    “I want to pose for a photo in front of the sign with my thumb out.” Alaska laughs. SeyMour gets his camera out. I'm not dressed. I have a Dickies brand shirt in the trunk that looks like prison wear. The Phoenix traffic is rushing past us. My superego kicks in. I’m worried about the price tag on this trip. It’s probably more than advisory not to stop here. It’s probably illegal. What if a prisoner came out and hijacked us? Another ticket? Fear puts us back on the road. No picture.

    Where was I? Oh yeah.

    The Cadillac Tramps were wailing away on their intro, warming us all nicely to the evening’s festive hop. Gabby came on the stage. He stepped, one two, hard and quick up to the microphone, like he wanted to get in its face. His mouth enveloped the mike, swallowing the head. His magic mime fingers pointed up like two palsy-constricted flowers cradling an imaginary set of grapefruit sized testicles. His fingers squeezed, and I felt my own balls constrict, it was voodoo, as he emptied a big belly full of evil laughter. “Ha ha ha ha ha!” The evening like the grapefruit and my testicles was ripe ready for a little rock and a lot of roll… the Cadillac Tramps had us by the balls and/or ovaries. Goooooooo!

PHOENIX

"Downtown Phoenix" reads the exit sign. No sign of Tempe. So we turn off, slow rolling up this foreign off ramp. There’s an uptown and a downtown, both with high rising steel and glass. Alaska's in the back seat excited. McBean is ready. We’re thinking a few jolts of iced caffeine would swiftly perk up the dangling limbs. Plain iced coffee is our drug of choice. The joy juice, the schwing-a-ling, the go lotion for the stomach lining. The ancient java which grinds my shit to liquid. The sign that points uptown says:

     Arts Complex

I point the rocket (from the crypt) uptown. We roll up the negatively desolate Phoenix street. There is no one around. It’s like Gila Bend. It’s only half past six pm (later I find out it was half past seven – time zone change) and all the stores are closed. This section of uptown is one dead red herring, anti-Saturday night fish fry.

    “We drove here in four hours and change,” McBean says.

    I think I mentioned that Alaska and I had come to Phoenix once before. We stayed in this big hotel riser Hyatt zooming into the sky. Very chic, free oranges on the concierge podium, free towels for stuffing in your suitcase down by the pool, except inside these hotels you don’t know if your in Los Angeles, Long Beach or San Jose.  “They all look the same yes they do.”  Everything is clean and sterile here; it doesn’t feel like home. It doesn’t look like we’ll find coffee, cold and black toward my heart attack. It’s not that the place is teeming with wealth. The streets, the buildings are not castles or mansions, they’re just buildings. Not that La Jolla old money elite snob-cold-and-sterile ooze vibe, it’s the angles. Everything is dreadfully flat and straight. Vertical versus horizontal. Phoenix is flat like big pancake on the great griddle of the desert.

    We do find a gas station, so I’m in for directions to Tempe. There’s a craggy little man, filling his air with tires. His hair thinning, yet he wears a look of gratefulness. McBean rolls down the window. The heat blasts in, reminding us once again, just where we are. The desert. Alaska leans forward one arm on each seat back. The sun is headed for the big western nap time and it’s still as hot as fuck. SeyMour revs up the old charm voice. I hate asking people for directions. I don’t like talking to people I don’t know. Quirk one dash be complex.

    “Excuse me sir, could you tell us how to get to Tempe?” SeyMour says. If he can’t something big wrong is happening here. His license plate frame is an ad for the Arizona State football team. “I’m a lonely frog // ain’t got a home // I sing like a frog.”  The man has obviously had throat cancer. His voice strains out like squeezed vegies, raw, like stringy vegetable fiber, hard for my ears to swallow. His voice like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music  hurts to listen to because it sounds like it hurts him to form each phrase.

    “Turn left, down seven blocks, right turn, east on Freeway, exit Broadway, ask further directions there,” he croaks. He has my vote for sainthood.

    “Thank you sir,” we chime in chorus.

THE ROAD TOWARD TEMPE

Nothing interesting or exciting. No time. No reflections. No thoughts.

TEMPE

We get off on the assigned street. We drive among the University and its machinery of shops, bars, dorms, and lecture halls; a college town peopled with homogenous (in age, class, and race) students. But the layout is bigger than we thought so I lean out the window for directions. The kid in the car next to us at the red signal stall begrudgingly rolls his window down. His hair is clipped a little funny. I think his mom is driving. She’s dressed in black. He pulls himself out of a slouch as if his mom told him to sit up straight. The heat rushes in while I ask him where Río's is. “You mean Club Río,” he says.

    “Yeah, Club Río,” SeyMour pipes up over me.

    Then I hear the person I thought was a mom say, “That’s where we’re going, follow us.” Fall in. Line up. Let’s go. The kid resumes slouch this time with his foot up on the dash so we can see his combat boots, his punk intentions, so we can read his politics. It’s an assurance that everything is okay and that we speakum the same ideology. Mom stops at the yellow light on the next intersect, so as not to lose us. We continue as her tail, until she pulls an odd U-turn with the shout back explanation, “We missed the turn.” We follow in our blissful ignorance sure that everything will be all right.

    Club Río looks just like a country club, or a bank. It is no place to see a punk rock gig. The lawn is beautifully manicured and green. Palm trees sway in the breeze. The hot desert breeze. The building is Spanish style, with stucco and those rounded brick orange tiles on the roof. The whole thing is either kept up very well, or only a few years old. There are high gates around what must be the beer garden. Our guides move to park out front and we rodilate towards the back lot, wave bye bye, on the lookout for the Honey Glaze van, and our promised entry tickets.

THE GIG

We are a mess. I couldn’t answer the kid in the car with like punker wear lingo reply, because I’m practically naked remember, just my boxer shorts, snorting little piglet sweating beneath. My back is sweat-locked to the seat. My hair is a mess. Strands stranded. My stomach is beginning its repel over my belt. (If I was wearing one.) Dog bless gravity. I feel like caca. Kipling's Kaa the snake crashing through the treetops in search of monkey flesh. Irritable edgy Kaa. Hungry Kaa. Ssssssssssss. SeyMour isn’t ready to gig. He needs to adjust his baseball cap. The sudden and easy appearance of Club Río took Alaska totally by surprise. She is digging for the make-up bag to let the zoom grooming begin. I always give Alaska a little crap about make-up. It’s my theory that guys have traditionally paid for dates at the movies, because the girls spent all their dough on lipstick, liner, blush, brushes and zit cleanser. I don’t even use deodorant. I stink. I’ll admit that. If I can throw in that we have been programmed to abhor the natural smell of the human body. I’m thinking about shaving my armpit hairs and starting over because these old ones are foul. I scrub a dub dub with soap, ajax, scouring pad, bleach, gasoline and the smell lingers. Maybe its kin to one of those regenerating worms, the stink. Cut off its tail, it grows anew. At bottom, I think Alaska looks goody-goody hot rockin’ without the make-up. Who’s she trying to impress with it ?

    The cars of the little gig consumers are already beginning to stack up in the park lot. The van of the Cadillac Tramps is in a corner, parked, unloaded. We see the Honey Glaze van too. Things are looking good. The punkers here in Tempe look cleaner than the ones in San Diego. They look younger too. Fresher. They don’t seem to be doing it right. But then again, this is Phoenix, not the Circle Jerks. Many 15-16 year old girls buzzing about. This must be an all ages joint.

    I step out on to the cooling pavement. I stretch. My back is aching. I think I left a few vertebra on the drivers seat, jangling like a bag full of teeth. Though we are almost consumed by that forboding self-consciousness, the locals don’t seem to be giving us the heavy stare down. They don't seem to notice us at all. The sun is setting; everything is fine. I walk around to the the trunk. Insert the key. The trunk opens. I rummage for my back pack o’ stuff. I find it and carry it, together with my vintage trousers which were folded atop my sleeping bag, Alaska’s bag, and SeyMour’s ruck sack o’ fun. SeyMour had a pillow and blanket in the back seat with him. Alaska grabs her groom bag. McBean decides to put on a clean T-Shirt.

    He had been wearing a SeyMour McBean original cartoon expressionism masterpiece acrylicked by himself. I do mean a t-shirt that he painted on. He tosses that into the trunk. I re-sit in the driver’s seat, drop the renta-key in the zipper pouch of the back pack, put on my pants, plug in a clean shirt. The shirt is an ochre colored barber shop model. I think it’s cool. McBean gave it to me when I helped him change a flat on his dad’s gold ‘72 Cadillac. He was driving it for awhile, in between vehicles. We called it the Curmudgeon Mobile. We came across that word “curmudgeon” at a topless bar in San Diego– The Dairy Mart– with Cecil Gonococci in attendance. There was this really weird old man. Bald as chrome. I swear the dancer leaned over and licked his bald head as he slipped a G. Washington bill in her garter. He was the original curmudgeon. The word stuck to us like… uh, you know, and this is the first time I’ve used it in at least six months.

    I reach into the sack, voilá my grease, my hair holder extrodinaire. Royal Crown Hair dressing. It’s really just plain old petroleum jelly and perfume, but I dig it anyway. Even the packaging is sock hop. Just thinking about it makes me want to swing swing swing.

    I grease up the hair, shape it up with my Unbreakable black pocket comb. It takes about one minute. Gloop and swoosh. I’m ready. I add socks and my dark blue Doctor Marten shoes just for kicks. Now I feel hot, sweaty.

    McBean is ready. Alaska is putting on a the final touches, dab dab swish. She’s done. I’m feeling a little excited, will we find Gary? Will we get in after driving all this way? The drama mounts. I walk to the back of the car. McBean is by my side. He puts his ruckus next to Alaska’s sleeping bag. I throw my bag on top and slam the lid. It bounces back up.

    I hit it again, slam slam slam, three times. McBean helps me readjust the ballast. He picks up my back pack and moves it to the other side of the trunk. I look over at Alaska, she’s combing her hair. “Do you need anything out of the trunk Honey?”

    “No no,” she says. I shut the trunk.

    Then as suddenly as a trunk or a kitchen cupboard, a shower door or any inanimate thing on hinges shuts, I am stung by an ominous feeling. I walk over to the driver’s seat. I stare at it. It’s a driver’s seat. Alaska is in the passenger seat. She’s ready. McBean is ready.

    “Let’s go,” she says.
    “Do you have the keys?” I ask.
    “No,” she says.

    “SeyMour, do you have the keys?” He pads his pockets. He digs his ancient hands in each. He shakes his head, no. He has his camera bag hanging at his side. I start looking under the seat. Between the cracks. I run my hands across the dash in case they’ve turned invisible. I look under the floor mat. The sun is setting. I’m getting a little crazy. The pain of the speeding ticket chooses this moment to be heard. It has joined together with the realization that I locked the key in the trunk. Life is mocking me, hee hee. I am beginning to feel like shit. I can hear my mother’s voice, “Idiot.” I continue looking through the car. I look in Alaska’s bag. I shake it more with frustration than hope. I search the back seat. I feel between the cushions of the back seat. I get those dusty little crumbs under my fingernails.

    SeyMour and Alaska are watching me. I step out of the car inflamed by anger.

    “Just go and find Gary, see if he has our tickets.” I hear my voice. It sounds snappish. Like a petty evil. “Like a snapping turtle when it bites.”   It was a product of self-despisal. I always do things like this; I am a loser.

    “We’ll call this the loser tour. When we get home, if, remind me to sign up for the zero zero one losers club.” SeyMour hums “Baby I was born too loose.”  I am seething. If I was a bull I would snort steam, plthpppp! “Just go!” I almost yell this. Alaska and McBean turn and walk toward the club. Best to leave me alone, with myself. My own worst enemy. I continue looking over the places I’ve looked. I’m also searching for a way to open the trunk from inside the car. My mom’s Camry has a trunk opener under the driver’s seat. I search and search. Nothing. This sucks. I look for the owner’s manual. The only thing in the glove box is a checklist noting they cleaned the ashtray after the last use of the car. I grab the rental car information. There is a number for the San Diego office. I put the info in my pocket.

    McBean and Alaska are back. SeyMour has two orange tickets in his hand. “They only had me plus one,” he says. I’m looking under the seat for the third time. I’ve got two fingers poked into the hole where the seat belt dives into the seat. Fuck.

    “You two go in. I’ll see if there are any Nifty renta-cars around here,” I say.

    Alaska tries to put her hand on my shoulder, I shrug it off. I’m in no mood for pity; nor do I intend to be a martyr. “Jimmy, once we go in they won’t let us come out,” she says.

    “What do you mean you can’t come out, is this some death camp in disguise,” I say. No one laughs. I re-examine the exsterior wall of the compound, note barb-wire under the ivy.

    “We can come out, but there’s no re-entry,” Alaska says.

    “They won’t let us bring the camera in either,” McBean adds. Our talk ping pongs around like this until I send them in with instructions to find Gabby to the rescue. At that point I hear the familiar guitar roar and drum sound of Honey Glaze.

    “The show's starting it's only seven o'clock!” I proclaim.

    “It's eight sharp,” says a helpful Zonie on his way into the gig. He looks at his watch and smiles dumbly.

    “I get confused flying over the time zone,” I say to Alaska.

Just then we see the roadie for the Cadillac Tramps walking out to their van. The three of us met him briefly at the beach two days ago. “Hey, what’s up,” we say in stupid chorus. He looks at us like he’s never seen us before.

    “We're from San Diego,” Alaska says.

    “We met the other day,” SeyMour adds.

    “What are you doing here?” he says like we are the most complete morons on the face of the Earth. This makes me feel real good (dig the sarcasm.) He's got a lot of poorly executed skull tattoos decorating his arms. I think it worsens my mood mostly because I don’t have a snappy answer for his question. I don’t know why we just drove five or six hundred miles to see and hear this band play, again.

    “We’re on vacation,” I tell him.

    “And we only have two entry tickets,” Alaska dumps on top of it, like hot fudge. She's sometimes very good at swindling. He complies with some b.s. and the nuts on this sundae are that we won’t be able to get the camera in at all. Which means even if I did get in, I couldn't leave it unguarded in the car. Shit is piling up and starting to stink like runny orange cat shit.

    My two dearest friends in the world go into the gig. I’m alone again to face my own self-misery. Left alone again, with nothing to do but do something to change this piece of bad karma around. It’s that bird. Now is the time for action. The smart thing to do would have been to get a screw driver and pry the trunk wide open. “It’s insured, someone tried to break in the trunk on vacation, that’s typical.” It's a tall tale you can believe because it fits in with what you know.

    I remember when we lived in Pacific Beach, California. Alaska, Melody, and I all crammed into a tiny one bedroom. The cottage was on an alley. I had just ridden to meet the girls for Sushi over on Garnet Street. I just got back, huffy, out of breath. I’d ridden Alaska's bike. I had left my Schwinn inside our fenced yard, leaning against the porch. When I got back my bike had been stolen. I rode around on Alaska's bike looking for it. Nothing. There were about six kids walking in the alley.

    “Hey are you a surfer?” one of them said. They didn’t have my bike.

    “Have you seen my bike, a chrome Shwinn with a baby seat?” I must have sounded like Pee Wee Herman.

    “No. We ain't seen your bike man,” the shortest kid said. About a half hour later, I pedaled up to them. They were rummaging around in their car. I stopped behind the car. Thinking nothing. Then one came out with a stereo in his hand. He looked at me, I looked at him. There was another car waiting for them.

    I said, “Hey.”

    They ran. Three teens jumped in the car. Two jumped on the back of it, holding on for their very lives as the car peeled out around the corner. I gave crazy chase on Alaska’s one speed cruiser. There was another car waiting for them on the street. The kids holding onto the trunk rolled off and hopped into that one. I was chasing two cars, with a total of ten Asdian gangsters, down my block, on a bike. I got the license plate number of the rear vehicle. The police dispatcher said I was “stupid.” Later I rode over to the crime scene. The trunk was pried open. It wouldn’t shut. The light was on. It had Arizona plates. Poor stupid tourist. I left a little note explaining what happened under the windshield wiper. I should have known when the kids asked if I was a surfer, that they weren’t from Pacific Beach.

    I should have busted the fucking trunk right open, but “Don’t destroy things, build things” is one of the first precepts I tried to teach daughter Melody Lee when she would get her kicks knocking down the wooden toy block towers we liked to build. I wish Melody Lee were here to hold me right now.

    I feel like crying. I haven’t cried in at least two years, and I don’t think I actually could, but I feel like I should. Bizarre. I feel like abandoning my composure to tears, would be some help. Of course Hi-ball drinkers have their solution, and junkies have theirs. I guess I’m just a big baby.

    I ask one of the uniformed security guards if there is a phone with a directory around. “Three blocks that way.” He points his over-muscled, “Big big monkey man”  arm to the North. I walk around the building. There is no phone at all on the perimeter. I look up the street. I can see the faint neon of a mini mall about a mile up the road. Forget it.

    I re-approach the security man. He and his compatriot are frisking everyone who enters. She pats down the girls. He pats down the guys. The second girl in line says, “Is this where we stand to get groped?” The guards don’t really have much of a sense of humor. There’s another security man behind them, for that superior musculature look. He is sitting on the wall. I’m waiting for a sign of Alaska or one of the Cadillac Tramps. I hop up on the wall, holding McBean’s Camera bag. I’m there for about thirty seconds and the extra muscle man who appears to be doing absolutely nothing but looking massive tells me to get off the wall. I guess I found out what his job is. Fucking hypocrite.

    I watch about a dozen kids go in. I crack a little joke. “The male groping line is over here.” The next punk to be frisked looks at me like an ape through the zoo bars. The guard gives the same look, like I'm an alien.

    Eventually I'm able to communicate up to the earthling in charge of male groping our situation. His name tag reads: Steve. He doesn’t react to my story with anything like human emotion. Then he says, “You can use the phone.” I see now that there is a pay phone five feet beyond frisking around the corner in the entrance way. There just isn’t a phone book with it. Steve needs explicit commands. I begin to walk over to it. He grabs my arm. “Could you leave the camera here.” A look of total disgust takes over my face. I control it before a sigh or a “Ttt” sound comes out. I set the camera by his feet.

    I try to call information for the number, but I can’t hear over the Marshall stacks roar of Honey Glaze. I nod my head a little to a familiar song. The show is happening without me. I didn’t get the number and the phone doesn’t spit out the quarter. The price tag for this gig is soaring. Twenty-three dollars and gas is long gone.

    I walk back to the car for more change. I remember seeing a pile of coins under the seat. Still no sign of Alaska or Gabby or anyone. More and more minor hipsters fill the parking lot, lining up for the big night.

    I approach the guard, drop the camera at his feet, get frisked again and take my place at the phone. There is a girl talking on it. I tell her friend that this is Honey Glaze’s best song and that they should be inside checking it out. She says, “Why aren’t you inside checking it out?” Good fuckin’ question bitch. Damn, what is it with these questions I can’t answer?

    Her friend gets off the phone, the two girls enter. As the door swings open for them, the volume jumps up five notches. Instead of jumping right on the phone I ask one of the three ticket sellers for a phone book.

    “I don’t think we have one,” he says like he can't be bothered. I tell him the story: How Far We’ve Come. I divulge my own piece of grand idiocy. He decides without my asking again to look for the directory. “White pages or yellow?” he says. Here’s a question I can answer.

    “White,” I reply. The sudden upturn in fortune registers as surprise in my voice.

    I look up Nifty renta-car. I call the local office. I can barely hear the agent. Then Honey Glaze stops. That was their fifth song. It’s 8:30. They are done. They drove 600 miles to play five songs. The Tempe agent tells me to call Nifty in S.D. and ask for the “Seck code.” He says there’s nothing more he can do for me. Last time I rent a car from Nifty. I call San Diego, collect, fess up once again to my stupidity, tell a lie to the agent that my mom is right around the corner (she’s supposed to be the only one driving) and eventually get the key number. I don't like to lie, accept to big corporations. That’s all he can do for me. Thanks for nothing, Nifty.

    Now there is guilt compounding my emotional self-destruction. And there is a looming pesky fear that the agent will call my mother’s house, and try to catch us in the lie, scandal, prison… I’ll never become a professional high school teacher. My dreams are shattering all around me, a rain of broken glass, all because of a little vacation, and my own stupidity.

    I decide to go for a little walk around the building. The kids are really piling into the show. There is a big line stretching down the gang plank. I’ve never seen so many young, fine looking girls. They are the hip hop generation. They are influenced more by Yo MTV Raps than Sid Vicious. Many little ones, baggy jeans sagging on top of the hip, half shirt with major stomach exposure lighting up much potential sex in the heat air. Oh, to be little again. Not that I’m that big. Never mind this bollocks my sex pistol has more serious things to think about. I pick up the camera and trot down the ramp. In the park lot, I meet Alaska and SeyMour. Here we are together again. The bestest buddies in the West. Are we still in the West? Yes, yes the wild west.

    They have an all access sticker for me. Brian, from the Cadillac Tramps laid it on them. I’m in. Then I find out that we have to get in quick because the Cadillac Tramps are taking the stage. They are playing in the second position, practically opening the show. There are about seven hundred kids inside. The line is growing longer. The night is a juvenile.

    With this pass I walk right in the back door, from zero to sixty, from no one to someone, toting the camera on my shoulder. When you are on the inside you are cool, you can do anything. Those rules posted on the door are for saps who don’t know any better. It is hard for us to overcome our superegos, our mother’s voice still guides/bars the way. Sad at 27, but that’s the way it is for America.

    I’m inside. The Honey Glazers are hauling their gear out the door. “Hey Gary.” He’s carrying one end of the bass head. He asks me to hold his about-to-spill water. “I missed your set.” He’s gone out the door. We walk around the gig checking out the scenery. Very clean, big. Big lights. Big sound system. The stage is facing the wrong way. I hadn’t pictured it like this outside on the phone. My sense of direction is thrown off, my gyroscope is wacked. I’m not even sure which door I was standing in front of while talking on the phone. Most of the Tramps are on the stage. Brian is tuning his guitar. Spanky is putting test foot to the bass drum. Two Bags adjusts his guitar strap. I don’t see Warren. They are all wearing the same clothes I’d seen them in on Saturday night. Brian’s wearing those farmer Dickies. Two Bags sporting his chapeau. And there’s Gabby. He’s standing beside the stage. Alaska hadn’t seen him during the Honey Glaze set. He was suffering the heat in the dressing room. Unusual. He looks up as the Tramps step into they’re intro in a bolt of pure rush electric energy, like the first bolt of heroin in the arm of William S. Burroughs.

    I’ve never used heroin, nor can I explain my fascination with users. I knew B.S. who checked out with a needle in his arm at Slim’s pad. I loved Johnny Thunders. But this “Sad Vacation” is percolating with the tonnage of pure joy music jam session lighting up every nerve in our bodies. We are all connected by the music.

    Gabby looks up. He sees Alaska and I. We are standing at the side of the stage. He comes out for hugs and handshakes. The music is wailing. The Tramps are hopping around. The crowd is starting to move.

    “I gotta do this thing.” With a hand motion that indicates he’ll be right back to talk to us. He breaks for the stage, and I can’t help thinking, right there, that this is a job for him. It's like he punched the time clock. He's the cartoon sheep dog reporting to watch the sheep. And I, of course am Wile E. Coyote, also on the clock, about to steal his sheep. Afterwards, we'll clock out and have a drink together.

    McBean has the all access pass. He is in front of the stage snapping b/w photos. We hope to write an article for 619 Magazine on the Tramps. Sondra is somehow connected with the mag. It would be my first professional publication. Not that the article is written, or the pictures developed yet. I can hear those fame chickens clucking. No, no it’s just the pure adrenal zap of the Cadillac Tramps. Alaska and I move to the other side of the stage for a better view. Most of the sound pounds out of Brian’s amp which is right in front of us. The song is “Hoodoo Guru,” the same song they opened up with on Saturday and Sunday. Gabby jams the mike between his lips, he gives the imaginary testicles a squeeze and let’s that laugh roll out. The vocals are loud and clear. And both Alaska and I start rocking in our shoes. Brian is skittering around like that electrified jitterbug. I see McBean catching some fine moments on film. From where we stand I can’t really see what the crowd is doing. There is a wall of people around the “pit” area. They don't seem to be dancing, or even fighting.

    I recall going to see the Cadillac Tramps two summers back in Long Beach, at Bogart’s. Long Beach is pretty close to home turf for them. Bogart’s being a bar, strictly over 21. But the people were going absolutely crazy. They were slam dancing, pogoing. They were flying off the stage. One guy out of the audience dropped his pants around his knees and got behind Gabby with the train kept a rolling shuffle. That was one of two times I saw the girl who sings on their first album, and heard her wail and moan. Oooo-eeee.

    The best time I ever saw the Cadillac Tramps, hands up like shooting around zippy roller coaster curve and hands down on the table finger nail inspection truth, was at Winston’s in Ocean Beach. A small joint. I think the Tramps play better in a small place. Their energy ricochets, not lost in the rafters. Both times the Tramps played Winston’s they blew the doors off the joint. They played two hour set’s playing every song to their credit and then some, scraping cover tunes out of the rusty dusty attic of spontaneous what a party go go go!

    The Tramps are into their second song. It’s a new one. Not yet recorded. This is my third time hearing it, my third time this week. “On the American streets” and “We’re driving way too fast” are the only lines I can make out. I find it hard to get totally off abandoned to songs that are not infused with my psyche. But it sounds good, and I know it will keep the Cadiallc Tramps rolling up there with my favorite bands for a long time. Maybe forever you cynics.

    Gabby has both his hands on his big belly, shirt pulled up. I can see the look of awe on the kiddies’ faces. They’ve never seen anything like this. The band breaks into “Shake” and again the part of me in control surrenders to the music. “When they push the button in // feel the ground– SHAKE!” My body, limbs, torso, eyebrows and all are quivering in a mad dance. I have temporarily forgotten my two game losing streak, and my down attitude. This is amphetamine rush without a hangover. It feels so good, it shouldn’t be legal. Then Gabby’s pants slip around his knees and he shakes his dimpled ass in the timid face of America. Suddenly things aren’t as legal, there's a bad moon on the rise, and I feel a little better. More balanced.

    The kiddies around me are cracking up, like they’ve never seen a fat man’s naked ass. I’ve seen this butt shock therapy enough times to be immune to it, but I still find it difficult to look at. I seize the moment to dig the crowd. To my surprise there are a lot of people not even watching the Tramps. There must be 900 audience types running around now. I see a few kids sitting on the floor, completely unaffected by the music. What are they dead? Are they insane?

    The Cadillac Tramps are absolutely tearing the shit out the air, with the greatest barrage of pure joy this section of America has ever experienced and these kids are sitting on the floor talking about… whatever? Ten years from now they’ll say, “Oh yeah, I was there in ‘93.” Listen buckaroo, You are not here. I am the only one in the universe that feels this good at this particular point in time. I am here.

    Gabby goes into his speech about the evils of South African apartheid. The song is called “South Africa.” They didn’t play this one on Satuday or Sunday. I’ve always wanted to ask them, “Why South Africa?” I mean with California Apartheid in full swing, the Hispanic population pushing 60% and not even close to 60% power or ownership going to the Spanish speakers of California. I want to hear “California Apartheid.” Sometimes I think about writing the song I want to hear some Cadillac Tramps tunes in Spanish too.

    “The white man leave South Africa //Leave the black man poor and old.” I am bounce bobbing to the music again. Alaska is rodilating with heavy head nods herself.

    This is the part where Gabby usually leads the club goers once around the hall doing the mambo. Perez Prado band leader mambo king he is. I remember last New Year’s eve, dancing around the Kansas City Steak House (in downtown Diego) where the Tramps were headlining a huge New Year’s Eve bash. I was shaking my tin noise maker with right hand. Confetti in the air. Confetti in everybody's hair. Earlier I lost fifteen dollars at this dive bar, the Star Club (on E Street) where we loaded up on cheap beer. It must have fell out of my pocket. Take the spirits down one notch. Alaska and I walked back and forth between the Steakhouse and the Star bar several times looking for it.

    My other mambo hand was lit on the hip of Theresa the gum girl (Dentine queen of the swing dance scene who always hooks me up with a stick of bubble yum.) Spirits go up one notch. Alaska and I had been separated in the line. She had both her hands on Gabby’s hips for awhile. Someone cut in front of her. Someone cut in between me and her. She got farther and farther away, receding like falling. Gabby was leading us in a crazy train through the smiling minions of the more inhibited. I too sat out the first few mambos (Long Beach, Winston's…) But that New Years eve my resolution was toward dancing like Nietzsche says “Zarathustra the dancer… dance as one must dance, away over yourselves…”

    And Gabby’s powerful hypnotic voice, “Me and the Cadillac Tramps aren’t gonna buy a motherfuckin’ thing from the sick government of apartheid.”  And the instruments crash down a big exclamation point! The song passes with no move to mambo.

    Gabby is like one of those sidewalk preachers, those traveling healers with the power of god in his palm. His voice quivers, sinners fall to their knees and crawl up to his shoes for a blessing. He is also like a voodoo priest. Bloody chicken’s foot created by the moment.

    Then the band breaks into “Life on the Edge” and I get really excited. This is a Cadillac Tramp standard. It is the first song on their first LP that jumps out and says We’re the Cadillac Tramps and this is your new favorite song. “Let me tell you a story // about a little man // he lives his life on the edge // in the garbage can // ‘til he met that woman // she gonna tear him apart // he needs a brand new life //he needs a brand new start // Do it.” And then the band breaks out into this power chord riffature that blows the roof off your skull drops your brain in the blender and mixes your emotions into pure grain alcohol, again with no ill hang over. Now I begin to see bodies flying up out of the crowd in front of the stage.

    For a second I think about going in. It has been awhile since I’ve flew of of a stage. The bones, even at 27 start to ache a day later. Stage dives are for the young. In fact my leg is bunged up from where I tossed Cecil Gonococci around the “pit” at the beach. There wasn’t any one else in the pit at the time. It was beach sand. We were tipsy. I always get obnoxious around Cecil. We did a few spinning laps. It was kind of funny because there was a girl there whose science teacher I had been for a week. She was just standing forming what could be interpreted as the edge of the pit, if there had been more people. She’d never seen the Cadillac Tramps before, and certainly never seen one of her high school teachers pogoing around the slam pit. She probably calls it “moshing.” I think that’s the current term. I’m too old too fly off the stage with grace and composure.

    Oh I could tell you a few stories about the exhilaration of floating on the hands of the people. It all fits in with Gabby’s shaman image. It’s part of the ritual. He is the witch doctor, “The Medicine Man // he’s gonna take you away.”

    The band rolls right off “Life on the Edge” into “Barbed Wire” and I'm feeling better and better by the second. Suddenly McBean is by my side, one roll of film shot like smoking cowboy six gun. He’s slapping the ass of his horse, in fact the three of us are, ride a cock horse to Banbury cross, as the bands breaks down the barbed wire fence of inhibitions, and we gallop dust cloud rising in our wake across the infinite prairie of the American West. The band has plopped us down with “the Indians and the Buffalo.” We are riding high. Something about this song just makes me want to put my arms in the air. I never know how to hold my hands. Thumbs up: too corny. Middle finger: too hostile. Metal head goat: right out. Fist: doesn’t express the freewheeling feeling. The open palm: gives me the creeps with the Nazi allusion, but it will have to do. Because the arms must go up. It follows that where the arms go the hands follow. The holy spirit has entered my body, I rise above the crowd. Hallelujah. And then the song breaks off.

    This is the place where they usually move non-stop express lane into “Take that smile off your face // I’ve been looking for you…” This is the first time the Tramps didn’t play “Medicine Man” on the back of “Barbed Wire.” Something strange is happening.

    It’s another new song. It’s my third time hearing it too, but the broken pattern of pure sing-a-long joy shoots the kick into the mother-fuckin’ garbage can. I notice that I’m a little sweaty from the aerobics, and despite the air conditioning in this place, the Arizona heat be still the Arizona heat.

    McBean is back on the picture front, snapping photos in time with the music. Alaska and I decide to catch a new angle. We walk toward the room rear. The sound is better, but we can’t see as well. There are still too many people not paying attention. We go over to stage left. But the view is blocked by the p.a. column. We duck around behind the stage right back where we started from.

    I hear Gabby say “Shake ‘em down Two Bags.” And as we watch Johnny is literally shaking the riffs out of his guitar. Take me down two notches, mmmm hmmm.

    And then the “Train to Fame” starts rolling down the tracks. It’s an old Santa Fe zipper grey ghost taking the hipster hobo Jack Kerouac from L.A. to Frisco in one long midnight bolt. This is where Gabby proves once and for all he’s the king of the alligator beat. But this train slaps me like big unhappy insult. “Train” is usually the last song they play. Usually they inject another tune in the middle, a wicked Howling Wolf, or “Low Ri-der” or something special unexpected, wild memory lane time thing. Usually the train comes to a stop to take on water. Gabby addresses his audience. They are his by this point, mesmerized, willing, brains washed, slates clean, sins absolved, cripples healed, most ready to drop from exhaustion. How can a man put that much energy into a performance and be that fat?

    I’ll never forget when we docked at the station and he started talking about our punk rock roots. His voice was building something. It leaned like a train toward anticipation. What would it be? “1977!” he shouted. “London’s Burning!” Duel guitars crashed. Gabby and the Cadillac Tramps tore “Out across the town out across the night //everybody’s driving with fog head lights… on the face of new religion //everybody’s sitting around fucking television.” And we were driving through the London fog with them: McBean in the shotgun seat holding onto his hat, Gabby standing like G. Washington in the row boat wagon train forward! except he’s a mad laughing skeleton, and Brian, also become skeleton is at the wheel with a wicked grin. Alaska and I are cuddled in the back seat. It’s a convertible Cadillac. It’s purple. There is no law that binds us. We are the terror of the road, driving way too fast.

    Just like Sunday, the train to fame comes to the final stop with no toy surprise in the pack. It’s over. I’m living on memories, trying to jam more into my vein to brain fendering off the stupid details of reality. On Sunday I was shouting, “London’s Burning!” leaning with the gang against the anti-hoard barricade. “London’s Burning!” Cattle gate to keep throngs of fans from pushing stage over. Gabby looks at me. He heard me. And he says, “Great fuckin’ book man. Charles Bukowski and Emily Dickenson all rolled into one.” Alaska had given him a copy of my last book– The Sub (excuse the shameless plug.)

    Except Sunday on the beach, the Tramps came out and played a four song encore. Here in Tempe, the second band of four, they are unplugging their gear. They won’t be back no matter how hard we chant or pray or curse the management. “Cadillac Tramps! Cadillac Tramps!”

    Gabby clocks out soaked with sweat. His job for the night is done. “I’ll catch up with you guys after a shower,” he says. The Cadillac Tramps played seven or eight songs. We drove six hundred miles. My keys are still locked in the trunk.

    This big line of depression takes me to the pay phone, in search of someone who can make the key from the “Seck code” cheap.

POST-GIG REALITY: THE TEMPE BLUES

Since I’m inside the show, the Cadillac Tramps locked in the dressing room, me without the all access pass, I have to use the pay phone in the bar. Again no phone book. “SeyMour, I’m gonna make some phone calls.”

    “Hey, Jazz, we called the renta-car place, they said you should call San Diego collect and get the key code.” Deja vu? McBean and Alaska had called the local Nifty renta-car place right after I did.

    “I already called those bastards.”

    “Great minds think alike,” McBean says.

    “And great assholes stink alike,” I say, trying to put a happy mask over my wracked and devastated soul.

    “Yeah, the guy said ‘Didn’t you just call?’”SeyMour says. This gives us a few chuckles on the brink of despair. I load the first quarter in the telephone machine. Information gives me a number for Home Despot, the imperial tyrant of do-it-yourself. Information keeps my quarter on this phone too. I dial the number. A stupid little robot voice tells me I need to dial the area code. I try it again. Same thing. Shit. I try to call information again, but the next band has started. With Sister Double Happiness roaring I can’t hear a damn thing. That’s seventy-five cents lost to phones. Home Despot, Tempe is most definitely closed by now anyway.

    We go in and watch ‘The Sister’ play their set. I don’t know any of the words so it doesn’t affect me. We stand next to Gabby and he says, “This is a great band.” It sounds good, but it isn’t possessing my soul or even my feet. I can’t make out the lyrics so right now it isn’t affecting my brain either. I’m like those kids sitting in the corner. During and after the set we fill Gabby in on our situation.

    “Hey can we sleep on your hotel floor?” I ask. But he seems distracted. I’ve been called both shy and antisocial, and now I feel like I’m schmoozing on a fame-grabber trip rather than sailing a genuine friendship with the guy. I want to just walk away. I am bugged. I need to get out. “I don’t need anyone.”  I don’t know this man, and I’m begging him for a place to sleep? I mean we’ve never really sat down and rapped human to human all too human. Both Alaska and I have this feeling that he’s as sweet as a churro in “his great big heart”  and he’s literate, he dug my book, or he said he did, and he’s got one hell of a stage presence, but we’re not wartime trench buddies or anything. In fact we’ve never shared so much as a quiet cup of coffee.

    He grew up around the vato loco gang set in Venice, did some time in Orange county. He lived in L.A.’s ‘Skinhead Manor’ with that whole nostalgic gibe which I know nothing about. I grew up in “My Safe European Home”  a supersuburban community called Mira Mesa “Don’t want to go back there again.” All the houses look the same. It’s a slum waiting to happen, give it twenty years, but it was quiet a “nice” place to raise children back then. The lawn and dog thing. The two car garage set. The “tv’s on but nobody’s home” evening to quote McBean.

    “I'll check with the rest of the band as far as accommodations,” he says. His face beleaguered by imposition. A calculating grimace. But there was also a tinge of serious concern for our welfare.

    I excuse myself. The place is packed now. There are over a thousand kids, most young girls. All that peppy brand of beautiful and boisterous. Their belly buttons showing. They came to see some band I never heard of, apparently the head honchos in these parts, the Funky Munkies.

    I want no part of that. I’m out the door of no return to the pay phone with the book. I tell McBean to hang in, try to find Gary Glazed and get us a place to sleep tonight. I don’t know who put me in charge. Whoever it was should be bent over and given the prickly prison enema. Gary had implied that we could stay with them, but no arrangements, “no direction home” had been set in our alms cup.

    Outside, aych oh tee, HOT. It’s after ten o’clock and still dripping down one degree at a time from 90. The moon is high. There aren’t many stars even though the sky is cloudless. Phoenix must be bigger and brighter thing than I erroneously surmised. Alaska is at my side; so things can’t be as bad as they seem. The vehicle is in tact. SeyMour's blanket is still here. I look around under behind in next to the seat one more time. I look under the car again too. I look under the car parked next to ours. The key had better be in the trunk. If it isn’t it must have went to that place where socks go. The socks on my feet now don’t even match– one navy, one black. So what?

    Alaska and I lay on the grass for a few quality momentos, absorbing a little serenity from the natural elements of the scene. I hear a horse whinny. There are crickets chomping on a classical melody somewhere in the background. The air is warm. That can’t be said enough. It’s like bath water that you’ve soaked in too long. Our skin is pruned by it, it affects us that way– the heat.

    There are several youngsters who couldn’t get in for one reason or another bopping around the park lot. “Are they letting you wear hats in? a kid ask me. What is this Nazi boot camp? Fuck off squid. I don’t say it. In fact I’m too flabbergasted to even acknowledge him. Punk rock shouldn’t have any written down dress codes. There are many unwritten laws in the punk scene. Such as never wear a T-shirt of the band that is scheduled to play. This should be construed as a false attempt by poseurs  to look like they’ve been around. Having been around is a punk rock coda of a different sort. It’s more of a value in our morality system. We value what/who has been around. There is a hierarchy of cool in the scene. Stupid, ironic and possibly hypocritical but true, nonetheless. “I’m into the Stooges, Thunders, early Ramones, man. I saw Black Flag in 1969.” Wow! This guy is a major minor hipster.

    A few kids are sitting in cars, stereos on. Four sit on the wall tangent the gang plank. Mr. Boffo security guard must be slacking. I leave Alaska to watch the car. Walking up the ramp, a kid, decently attired asks me for spare change. Maybe this is the Circle Jerks. Nobody does that in San Diego. We just stand outside like good little Bodhisattva beggars.

    The last time a punker asked me for change was at the Olympic Auditorium in downtown LA (pronounced doe rae me la.) Myself, McBean and another of his old pals Johnny Kat, prince of the litter box, went to see G.B.H., Decry, Heavy Dirt, Love Canal and a couple other bands. The place was packed with 3000 screaming punks, all as mad as anarchy. See how cool I am?

JOURNAL ENTRY ALERT: Drunk in the Days of Punk Rock.  8/03/91

…SeyMour has been reading Kerouac with an 18 year old girl at his side: dirty old bum. He’s 28. He reads me a stream of consciousness blab of Dada which his springtime pouch inspired him to. We talk & talk. He never let’s me complete a thought, so excited with his own thang. He wanted to go to Megalopolis & deliver some pictures to The Clints who were playing there fo' free. We had two more Miller Genuine Drafts while The Clints beat our ear drums blind. The Clints gave us a free cassette before ripping up that small club with blazing guitar riffs and livid harmony. We abandoned the scene 1/2 way through their set, which wasn’t easy, and only proliferated by the lack of foxy hipsters in the club. I hate to be prejudice against people for something as meaningless as appearance, but… The appropriate car, flying with reeling tunes down the freeway. We call that gold Cadillac  the “Curmudgeon Mobile.” Man! It floats like my brain in an alcoholic sea.

    Major hipsters are busting the gut of the Casbah. We hit lucky and park with style and ease. The Tramps were hangin’ like a tough set of real life vato homeboys. An old pal Sean from the Social Spit: the movie days is hanging on the corner with Ross the notorious grandpa skin and Vida the only punker girl from high school. I’ll never forget cracking Shaefe's in a midnight Mira Mesa park with John Vance, Robbie Fay, Lee Abram, Vida, and David Morris. SeyMour and I rapped with Sean & Ross about things, mostly drunken nothings. The Tramps are going to open for Royal Crown next weekend in some far away bar. Ross’ brother sings for Royal Crown. Sondra’s brother showed up with a pair of 12 packs and offered us a beer. Nothing like drinking on the Casbah corner with the boys. Making noise and loving life for the moment with nothing beyond the approaching gig…

    Sondra came out of the bar, we hug and yap…Mmmm… We drink and talk and I’m riding the sneaky high that alcohol loaded veins provide. We squeeze into the Casbah slipping in and around leather clad hombres and tattooed testaments to human beauty. I lose some urine in the toilet and find a seat next to Sondra and her date. When this band starts to wail, I think I’ve never felt so good. SeyMour's old pal Johnny Kat is here with Stacey and he’s acting like he doesn’t know me. SeyMour and he had a falling out. But why is he pissed at me? Anyway, The Cadillac Tramps were wild and the crowd was with them bobbing to the crazy beat. Faster, faster! Whooeee. Some confused minor hipster selling cheap sex with great big pushing out tits was sitting below. She tries to make small talk, but I’m deaf in the roar of pain killer music blasting out of the speakers. My ears are still ringing. A too drunk female wearing a skirt shorter than my black T-shirt does a wild grind with both hips shakin’ on the wall above the band near the door. I can hear the Fundamentalist preacher’s cry at the gates of Sodom. But no guilt leaves this bar. Sondra says “I know her!” Later Sondra's brother, the biggest grown-out-hair skin head with the biggest king Triton tattoo, says the same thing to me shaking his head with a goofy grin. The girl with the big tits keeps saying things to me, but I can’t hear much except, “If looks could kill, I’d be dead,” in reference to Sondra. I betray her confidence and tell Sondra, who claims innocence. I see them talking later, some hand clasping. So then I rock & rock and swing and bop. The crowd finally loses all semblance of coolness and goes reckless flying wild. Pogoing to the hard driving rhythm. I drink another beer. That’s 8. I’m bobbing on the wall like a happy little buoy in the blue Caribbean sea. The gig ends. It’s time to file out onto the street like a splayed beast.

    Then something hits me like a cold shower before sex. The girl with the big tits dumped a pitcher of water on my head. I’m mad, and refreshed cause it was hot. I turn to see what the deal was, flicking water into her anxious face. She wants me to hit her, so the big guy behind her, who she probably promised a mouth full of flesh to can defend what little honor her feeble imagination can swell up. Sondra’s turned around, the girl claims I spilled a beer on her. At just this moment some guy is squeezing through the crowd holding his drink high at the apex above Tits’ head. Sondra tips the cup on her head and Tits turns to her big protector, but it’s Sondra’s brother! Somehow this soapy vignette dissipates and Sondra and I and her date head for the door. I give Sondra’s brother some drunken hand signal intending to indicate that he should fuck the bitch and dump her in the gutter.

    Meanwhile, SeyMour is outside arguing with Johnny in the street. The first thing I notice is SeyMour’s drunken countenance, a face I’ve seen many times, always the trouble face. His shirt is torn. I supposed from the wild bop. Johnny is frantic and both are loud talking hateful stupid things. The kind always regretted. Those drunk amplifications of bad feelings. I try to peace make, not realizing there had been a fist fight. While Johnny and SeyMour argued, some skinhead vato clocked SeyMour in the back of the head and kicked his ass into the pavement. It’s a good thing most of S.D.’s tough guys were still in the Catbox (the old Casbah.) So I dumbly tried to explain that they’ve been friends far too long for this petty shit. Stacey is wired with anxiety screaming for her boyfriend’s defense. I give up trying to be amicable and drag SeyMour to the Curmudgeon Mobile. I take his keys and the wheel while he shows me bruises and lumps. He claims he was on a peace mission and Johnny hit him with a souvenir baseball bat. As I drove away I felt like Dean Moriarty weighing the joy with the tragedy behind the wheel of that big loose Cadillac. [end note: SeyMour was just the best man at Johnny’s wedding. I wasn’t invited. After that we never saw J. Kat again.]

    When I’m downtown the street bums hit me up for change or bills all the time. “Hey buddy can you spare a dollar.”

    “Man if I had a dollar I wouldn’t let you smoke it.” It must be my shoes. They make me look like a rich man. “Where did you get those hundred dollar pants // you know that I’d like to rip them up to shreds.”  That aspect of punk rock is a total lie. These shoes I’m wearing now I got on sale for $40, but they look like a 100 clams.

    I’ve been wearing some of the same duds long enough for them to slip out of fashion the way bellbottoms did. Clothing is mostly baggy here in the 1990’s and I confess I feel awkward wearing my tight assed straight leg 501’s. I can’t explain it, but these pants, once the tip top of hip hop, look and feel like square pegs to me. Fuck this philosophy of fashion detour, I’ve got keys to get out of a trunk.

    I re-meet my old security groping friend Steve. He has no idea I’ve been inside, not paying, snapping photos, trashing his precious robot prime directives to smithereens. As I pass by this time he pats me down. It’s humiliating.

    I retrieve the phone book, groan. A very sweet young lady calls information from behind the ticket desk and gets me three local locksmith numbers. The guy says he’ll come down here and make the key for us for 75$. Fuck that. I can feel the price tag on this road trip “ch-ching” as the commercial says. [Only quote television in desperation.] He says if we bring the “Seck number” into the shop tomorrow he can make it for $12. What a fucking rip off! We are a mile and a half from his shop. He knows that, he knows our situation. He doesn’t know how many plastic swimming pools I could buy for Melody Lee with that money. Maybe he needs my money for the same reason. A kid of his own with needs to splash. Shit. “Fuck that.” I say out loud. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

    At just this moment Mr. Boffo and two other macho men drag two young ladies out of the venue kicking and screaming, “You fucking bastards!” One of the girls is absolutely beautiful. Her stomach pooching out like magic genie lamp, her breasts rodilating. Yowza. She walks off calmly with her good looks, regaining her composure the farther she gets from the gig.

    The other one, ain’t so good looking. I think maybe she carries some hostility because of this. She is calling the rented security man whose job (as pathetically undesirable as it may be) it is to toss drunken trouble makers out on their asses “a dirty cock sucking scumbag mother fucking sore on a dead whore’s anus.” She is a little upset (understatement for effect.) She backs down the steps venting the most bile foam of hatred I’ve heard since… fuck I don’t know.

    “Thanks for letting me use the phone book,” I say to the hippie ticket hawker. She smiles with her mouth. They collected eleven dollars from eleven hundred people. Some guy just now handed the girl twenty-two big ones, just to see the Funky Munkies. And they’ve already started playing. I’m thinking I’m not the only idiot throwing his money away in Tempe.

    My parting thoughts with the gig night are that this place sucks. In San Diego, the man would cut you a deal in the closing minutes. At Bodie’s (a club on F Street) you can check out most of the last set of a swinging act like Big Sandy and the Fly-rite Boys after 1 am gratis. Of course, you can’t reason with the bouncers in D’ego either. Where do they find these muscle-bound metermaids? Our bouncers would have excluded Joe Schmoe's camera too. I’d like to think the folks down in S. Diego would have hooked me up with a phone directory a little quicker. But I’m sure, no re-entry law or not with a story like ours, they would have somehow made it easier.

THE PAINS OF SLEEP

Since I rarely remember my dreams sleep is just another hungry detail trying to suck the vitamins out of my shallow life allotment. The car is stuck here in this parking lot. That we know. There is certainty.

    I walk down the ramp passing the girl who was ejected. I pull out my kid glove voice soft as kitten’s breath and say, “Hey what happened up there?”

    “Fuck you! Asshole! Do you want me to kick your ass too!” she screams at me.

    “No,” I reply. I walk the line on past her down the ramp, over to the stranded renta-prison. Alaska is lying on the grass. I lay back on the grass with her. She has her eyes closed. A 767 jumbo jet scratches itself known on the darkened sky above; it reminds us of home. We currently live right rocket under the flight lander path of Lindberg Field. It’s not so bad. Really. The planes only really “Shake” when the wind switches or the fog is thick, requiring those air-beasties to take off over us. The paintings and family photos shake. The neighborhood car alarms go ringing, dog’s howl. The lamp vibrates toward the table ledge. But this plane is way up there, and its dull roar is just part of the symphony of night, with the Funky Monkey noise, the bugs chirrrrr, the occasional horse whinny, andThe Foul-Mouthed Girl’s random curses. Kettle drum roll. “You fucking cock suckers.” Cricket chirp. Clash of symbols. “Die you bastards!”

    While I was on the phone Alaska had talked to Gabby about sleeping arrangements. “He said we could sleep on the floor at their Motel 9. They're on the road you know. They have to wake up early and drive to the next town, somewhere in Texas,” she says.

    “Ohhh. I don’t know,” I say. That ‘Ohhh’ came right out of my stomach– a “Bad taste– something I hate.”  I’m thinking maybe SeyMour will come through with Gary Glazed. The premonition of sleeping in the white renta-car mutates from possible to immanent.

    McBean emerges from the club with a big goofy, like orgasm, grin. At least that’s what I picture my face be looking like after a serious inappropriate multiple ejaculatory moment. “What’s up SeyMour?”

    His camera bag is hanging on his shoulder. He walks like he’s sneaking up on us, tip toe, even though we’ve watched him walk this far. “Did you see any of the Funky Monkeys?” he asks.

    “No.”

    “They have a lot of energy,” he says. Peppy like their followers I imagine.

     “Did you find Gary, boss?”

     “No, but Gabby said we could stay at their Motel 9,” he says.

    “We heard. Sounds like a big imposition, boss.”

    “Oh,” he says like a younger Homer Simpson. “This is Tracey.” It was like he pulled her out of his hat. I hadn’t seen her, or her two little friends before SeyMour mentioned her name.

    Behind us The Foul Mouthed Girl screams “You cocksucker!” The show is spilling its eleven hundred patrons into the park lot. The Foul Mouthed Girl has two guys with her. One of them has taken up her role and is addressing the renta-guard. “Fuck you! and get some heart.” The kid who said this is between 17 and 20. His hair has that pre-dread lock look. “You get your kicks beating up kids don’t you?” If I was the guard, I wouldn’t even answer that one. But the guards seem like they are having fun with it. They are on top of the ramp, behind the wall. The kid is down in the parking lot. It’s like that Monty Python movie Holy Grail where King Arthur is being taunted by the French. Le renta-guards hold the power position. The kid continues his barrage of insults; the guards parry and thrust their wits forward.

    “Tiny brained wipers of other people’s bottoms.” The mood is decisively hostile.

    “Fuck you, I get my energy off love. You morons thrive on violence and intimidation.” Articulate sentiments, I’ve thought that way myself. I hate it when bouncers rough the kids up. They always go too far.

    A vision of an Iguana's gig down in Tijuana comes to mind. I don’t know who’s playing. The bouncers have been headlocking the kids who are bopping around near the stage. The are cardiac arresting anyone who looks like they might stand on the stage. The guards forget the band is playing. Their massive bodies block the view. Oh yeah, Keith Morris is singing, The Circle Jerks. I can’t even see him. The guard leans out into the crowd to grab the leg or neck of a booted youth floating on the hands of the gig patrons. He leans over too far and is sucked into the pit. For him it must be like falling into quicksand. He disappears under the bodies. The grains of sand are bees or stinging ants. This has got to hurt. He is at the mercy of the crowd. A few inadvertent boots step on his ears. But then the punks help him up, surprisingly unscathed. Our energy looks like violence, but it’s love.

    While I was mulling these thoughts the kid was delivering more hostile, “Fuck yous!” And then the friend of The Foul Mouthed Girl  says, “I believe I am a powerful person. I have magic. And I wish you would get shot between the eyes and die.” This hits me strangely. His line of reasoning may be valid. If the guards push people around, they are likely to push the wrong person. Gun comes out of the glove box in the car. Bam! it’s over. This parking lot is too much like the California freeway.

    The renta-guard says, “If you keep this up, we’re going to call the police, and you’ll be cursing at me from jail.” There are about two hundred people standing around watching this exchange. Other very drunk people are flaring their tempers. Someone throws a beer can at the guards. I’m surprised the police aren’t here already. I remember when the Fire Marshall stopped that Dead Kennedy’s show at the California Theater. I have never seen so many police in one place. They were lined up on both sides of the street with shields, helmet, dogs snarling. The punks just walked silently past wondering why they were there. Jello Biafra could have told them.

    But there are no police here. The Frenchmen seem to be up to something in the castle. They cut the friend of The Foul Mouthed Girl off in mid-curse with a stream of cold water from a hose. They are spraying the crowd with a garden hose. It doesn't matter which way the wind blows. There is no fire hose velocity behind it. It’s probably refreshing, after a gig night in the sweat box. I look over at Alaska. We consolidate our stuff, McBean’s blanket, into the car. We both look at the car. We’re stuck here. The guards seem to be inciting riot. We are going to be arrested for not leaving the scene when they give us 30 seconds. I can see the tail lights and windshield getting smashed. The destruction looks ugly. It seems so useless and avoidable. The funny thing is no one will remember why it got started.

    The Foul Mouthed Girl riot of ‘93.

    The renta-guards are moving down the ramp. They are wearing white shirts. The crowd is clad mostly in black. From our vantage we should have no trouble distinguishing between the teams. The guards are physically dispersing the crowd. They are telling everyone to leave. They are pushing at the slow ones. I hate when authority figures order drunk people to drive. It’s so mix-messaged. They ask us to leave. So Alaska, McBean, myself and SeyMour’s newfound entourage cut along the rear flank of the guards and sit by the Honey Glazers who are loading their van with amps and instruments. There is a soft grassy area to sit. The riot isn’t developing into anything, so we chat among ourselves.

    The three of us, the weary travellers, “kinsmen of the Western sun,” saddle sore wrangles of the steel horse, cleverly begin to pick the young ladies apart for the lonely details of their desperate lives. SeyMour’s friend (he calls her his new pen pal) has curly brown hair. She’s the shortest of us all. She uses the word “fuck” in casual conversation as a spacer, not really with hostility or even as an intensifier. “Fuck, What’s going on tonight?”

    “You’re asking us?”

    She is a girl in search of an after party. The conversation sniffs along this trail for awhile, diverging long enough to find out that the other two are sisters.

    The oldest sister says, “We came here to see the Tramps. I saw them twice before in California.”  This is looking like a place to stay. “I went to college there. Psych major…”

    Her little sister is the angelic picture of innocence, the human translation of youthful beauty. My hormone radar tracks the blonde fuzz along her arms and inner thighs which proliferates the illusion of purity. Her breasts perhaps shouldn’t be mentioned, since she can’t be more than fifteen. I’d say fifteen. But they are pointing straight at me crying to be noticed under her overall straps. “My name is Peanut.”

    “Peanut? why not Cashew or Macadamia?” I am more serious than flirting especially with Alaska holding my hand. McBean picks up on it and carries the question forward so that it has to be answered.

    She says “Peanut because I’m small.”

    We gather more details about the girls’ lives. I think McBean would like to cruise along to a party with them. I think he’s kissed the short one with the brown hair. McBean doesn’t kiss and tell, so we’ll never find out the gory details. I don’t know what gave me the crazy feeling that this girl sucked his dick. We’ll never find out. The girls live at home with mom and pop, which cuts short on sleep-over potential.

    I walk over to Gary Glazed. “What’s up?”

    “I don’t know,” he says. This whole trip seems to be balanced on that precept. We looking to Gary or Gabby for something; them unsure. “We’re staying at the guitar player’s X-girl friend’s parents house, but the X is out of town. The band’s going over to sleep.” Gary is giving off that all too familiar aroma of imposition. I think he doesn’t like imposing on people’s sleep and home for a flop either. Our added presence would make this la grandé imposition. As I’m walking back to the gang, he relinquishes to his own sense of pity, or charity. Gary must be the kind of guy that feeds stray animals. “Why don’t you guys follow us over.”

    “We can’t. The car?”

    “Oh yeah. Well I don’t know how far this place is. I don’t know how you’d get back here,” he says. He looks like he's going bald under his hat. “You can squeeze in the van and take a taxi back.”

    “Thanks anyway Gary, we don't want to impose,” I say.

    “You guys can stay over at our place,” the older sister says. “Mom and pop won’t mind.

    “Could you give us a ride back here in the morning?”

    “No. It’s twenty-five minutes, and I have to be at work in the other direction,” she says.

    The park lot, the camp ground, is clearing out. Our conversation has been accented with the sound of tires crushing bottles. Other bottles rolling on asphalt. Bouncers arguing with drunks. I even saw Mr. Boffo push a guy, personal-off-duty-type-brawl push. Though it could be in his job description, since though the guy was leaving a leak on a Club Río bush.

    A security man approaches us. He seems more mature than your average hunk of muscle crowd control robot. “Are you the ones locked out of your car?” Great not only does everyone in Tempe know what an idiot I am, it shows on my face. I look like the type of guy that would lock his friends out of a semi-comfortable carpet or couch sleep. Come to think of it the karma register owes me a sweet floor or couch sleep on the gig road.

    When SeyMour and I lived together back in the days, we put up bands and their roadies multiple times. Frontline from San José camped on our couches twice. The first time, I think McBean smooched three of the girls they brought with them. But of course I can’t be sure because SeyMour does not kiss and tell. Your kisses are safe with him girls. Feel free to feel free. Your reputation won’t suffer denouncement in the stupid American double standard consciousness that controls these things. Not with SeyMour.

    The head renta-guard tells us that the place does not have night time security. We don’t have to worry about the renta-rocket getting towed off by the uptight law. He seems concerned about where we are going to sleep. We don’t share our decision to sleep on the gig lawn with him. I’m not sure the secrecy evolves out of embarrassment or fear that he might intercede with another “No no, children robot rule.”

    The girls have found a party to attend. The parking lot is almost clear of gig patrons. Another bottle drops to the asphalt. A car peels around in a reckless circle. The tires are squealing, awake to sudden speed. The driver whips past us on his way out. It is The Pissing Man Who Got Pushed.

    He should hook up with The Foul Mouthed Girl . He shouts “Fuck you all!” as his car burns rubber out of sight, lingering in mind, but out of sight. Wouldn’t their children be lovely?

    Honey Glaze is gone. The three girls from Phoenix who dig The Cadillac Tramps are gone. We sulk over to the car. McBean and I explore the local bushes for a bladder empty. Alaska only pees outside in extreme emergencies. She decides to hold it until morning. Few things are as loaded with heavenly satisfaction as urinating out of doors. I feel so wild, primal. McBean peed right on the sidewalk behind the dumpster. But I had to climb over a little fence and pee on bushes and dirt. I wasn’t afraid of being seen with my wiener out. I’m on this trip for as many spiritual kicks as I can lay into. This is like tapping the source. A full bladder emptying in a warm golden arc. Ah, that little plashy puddling sound like rain rolling off the roof of home. Home, we are far away from that.

    Alaska climbs into the back seat. She lays her cool body out with her head nestled in some of her extra clothes. Our sleep rolls are sleeping in the trunk. McBean and I recline the front seat, I’m still driving. He will navigate us to a sound sleep.

    We adjust and squiggle like uncomfortable worms. “I’m not sleepy.” Alaska has already sawed her thoughts and reflections on the trip into the dust of pleasant slumber. McBean seems like he might start to whine.

    “My back hurts, “McBean says.

    “Mine too. I’m sorry buddy old pal. So truly sorry.”

    “Whatever, don’t worry about it.” I have become responsible for his sound sleep. I never wanted to be in charge. I’m supposed to be on vacation from that shit.

    I take out my current Little Black Book, the seventh in a series of pocket journals I use for recording thoughts. I’ve only been writing in these things for seven months. I suppose that’s how long I’ve thought of myself as a writer. I turned McBean on to the Little Black Book too. He was resistant at first. He found it difficult to cage his thoughts on such a small piece of paper, but the rocket convenience of the thing turns the ills to nothing. I gave Alaska one too. I don’t see her write in it much. She doesn’t carry it with her. Writing isn’t her trip. She takes a lot of dance classes. “Can she dance?”  Even little Melody Lee has a Little Black Book. She draws in it. She can write her name. She’s an abstract expressionist. Though sometimes she strays into surrealism. There’s a great picture she drew above my desk at home. It’s me. I have a huge smile on my face. It’s exaggerated, almost absurd. But it radiates happiness. My arms are raised with pure joy- fueled exaltation. The surreal part of the picture is that my nipples have completely left the body, they have jumped off, abandoned ship. They hover underneath my outstretched arms. I used to have a roommate named Pamela  who loved Kandinsky. I hung a whole show of Melody’s work around our cottage, with title’s like “Kandinsky Overload.” I think Melody Lee was heavily influenced by Kandinsky.

    I write, “a big black bug just walked under the the car. It crawled away. Can’t even see it now.” Another little detail reminding me of home. My first book, House of the Unwed Mother, was written under the influence of opaque black bugs just like that one. The fear and revulsion of these creatures drives me toward art. They inspire me. This one might be even bigger than the California variety. The place we live in now has roaches too. We had a mouse too until I set a trap for it and broke his furry little grey back. I nearly puked as I carted his corpse to the trash. I threw it away still in the clasp of the trap. The regal presidential gaze frozen on the mouse face by death, has been frozen in my memory. But we can’t have rodents crapping in our pancake batter, can we? I loathe killing. No wonder soldiers get shell-shocked. The man who learns secret to killing other humans is a powerful man I guess. I am weak. I am dreadfully near sleep.

    McBean steps out of the car and lays pillow and blanket on the grass under the stars. I think maybe I should tell him about the opaque black bug, or warn him about scorpions or something, but my faculty of voice has shut down. I wouldn’t want to stain his potential for a comfy rest-packed night in nature…

    The renta-guards are picking up the cans, bottles, patron-trash from the parking lot. A bonus on their job description I hadn’t expected. Control the crowd or clean up after them. Things become recklessly clear as you fade out.

 WAKE UP!

“Wake up and the whole world’s gone.” This song illustrates the danger of rock and roll. I had seen G.B.H do it. I had heard it on tape. I sang along with the chorus. “Wake up and the whole world’s gone” (x2) The guitar licks played secretary and filed the thing in my memory drawer. I didn’t have control over it. It wasn’t until years after I’d heard it, that I got the title of the song: “Limpwristed.” “Wake up and the whole world's gone–limpwristed.” This is an anti-homosexual ditty. Anti-homoism, smells like anti-semitism. When are we going to grow up and just live? Aren’t there enough hungry people to worry about feeding? Can’t we concentrate on the positive, instead of hate? Maybe not, maybe hate is our prime directive. Look at history– a chronicle of wars, murder… death. Even this personal history is feeding off the drama of violence.

    My eyes open to the blazing sun. The atmosphere is like a giant toaster oven, and I am white bread turning black. I can feel my skin turning to raw carbon. The other elements are boiling out. It must be noon. We are alone in the parking lot. The cars that were parked with us as we passed into la la land, are gone. Did the drivers walk over and check us out as we snored? Did they take our pictures? We don’t know.

    SeyMour knows a lot about what happened while myself and Alaska were completely ruled by the sandman.

    “Fuck. A trash truck picked up the garbage. Some Mexican hobo types were poking around. Some kid attacked the venue. He was talking to himself. ‘Kick me out will you. I’ll show you ha ha ha ha!’ I think he was trying to break in. He was pounding on the door. The alarm went off,” McBean relates.

    “What?” I say in disbelief. I want to think that SeyMour dreamt some of this, I don’t sleep that heavy do I?

    “The sprinklers came on before dawn,” he adds.

    After I step out of the car I realize that I was woken by these giant monstrous tractors grading a huge tract of land on the other side of the fence where I peed so gloriously the night before. We are up. Awake in Tempe, good morning Arizona, thanks for the heat blister breakfast.

LONG WALK TO THE LOCKJONES

The shop where we can get a new key made from the “Seck code” (whatever that is) is about fifteen blocks from where we are now. We set out across the long lawn of grass that jets out from the southern side of Río's. We must look like the new mod squad from a distance. At first I’m not sure in which direction lies the lockjones. The street is fairly populous with off-to-work commuters. As we approach the street and sidewalk I see two bicyclists pedaling. It should be easy to ask directions. Río's is really the only structure for several blocks in either direction. We can’t cross reference the numbers without a half mile walk. That kind of commitment, considering the heat, leaves us contemplating longer than we might have under different circumstances, under a friendly sun. Of course as soon as we reach the street there is no one to ask direction. The sun feels like noon, but this is the lowest angled noon I’ve ever seen. The fiery yellow ball of our soon to be heat-stroked deaths appears to be just taking off from its eastern cradle.

    Luckily the plot of land just to the north of Río's is literally a series of plots in this plot against us. It is a graveyard! Good thing we didn’t know this, because I know that Alaska is a hefty believer in nether world spirit activities, and ghosts “good booze” or no are likely to scare the sweat out of her. Alaska is afraid of too many things in my opinion. I myself am afraid of nothing of course. Nothing except dying in this heat, or telling mom that I got a speedo ticket, and/or that I locked the key in the trunk. And crawly bugs. I use them, but the kick is pure fear. Alaska really bugged me with that fear just last week. Vice versa, switch boots on that thought, I guess I pissed her off pretty heavily too. Alaska and Melody Lee and I had gone down to the cove to play in the sand. It was a week day. I’m not planning to work a stitch this summer (aside from writing) so the beach is easy. I got the wild hair on the shoulder that keeps growing back even after you pluck it again and again idea to jump off the Clam. The clam is just a sandstone diving board into the Pacific Ocean.

    I remember my first trip to the Clam. My uncle Scott had taken us down to the Cave. You pay I dollar to walk down musty stair tunnel through the cliff face all the way to the sea with waves in the cave. I love that place like I love my uncle. He said, “There's the Clam.” I thought the Clam was a real giant clam floating just off shore. I was like one of those sheep peasant dupes in the “Emperor's New Clothes” fable. I didn’t see it, but I said I did.

    The cove, the Cave, the Clam– more than a set of four letter words, this is the best part of La Jolla, California. The Wind ‘n’ Sea niches of topless female sun bath are a close second. But that kick is obscured by a lot of foreign studs showing us their bulging cocks through Speedos with hairy ass anal floss on the flip side. And who really wants to see that? Yuckkkkk.

    I wanted to jump off the Clam into the ocean. I’m a writer in search of drama and all. This would be like standing up to a childhood fear and duel slapping it across the peachy mug. Alaska got right up to the first major descent and didn’t feel like going further. There isn’t a sidewalk that leads up to the diving point. We’d been down there before, we even took Melody Lee once. We saw a seal either sleeping or dead on the rocks. This time Alaska wasn’t going. I pressed onward, downward, carrying Melody Lee. From my view the terrain was perfectly flat and safe. Alaska was thinking her baby would be killed head smash and dashed to death on the rocks below. She was afraid that Melody would be nabbed by the freak and treacherous hand of the sea and spirited away to live with the mermaids in Peter Pan’s Neverland lagoon. Alaska was paralyzed with fear. I of course being the pig that I am took Melody right to the edge. We looked over the jumping spot. Melody thought it was cool, though I could sense a little of her mother’s fear (common sense) in the grasp about my neck. Alaska stomped away fume angry snarling. I thought for a few seconds about why I’d lived around this thing my whole juvenile life and never jumped. Shit, my Nana told me stories about how she jumped off higher towers than this cliff when she was a kid in Ohio. I didn’t have time to work it through, though we stayed down longer than we should have. I had to ascend to Alaska’s level of thinking, and charm her socks off with some major apology.

    “This is just another example of your utter disregard for my feelings,” she said like a hammer hitting my nail head. It was true, men were guilty of it for thousands of years in this culture, which “doesn’t make it alright.”

    Apologies are always pathetic.

    I don’t know what that has to do with this graveyard. Another example of her irrational fear. The place is well tended. There are a few flowers on the headstones. The headstones are very close together. I don’t like these space and money saving boneyards. The grass is too mowed, the trees have too many leaves. The sun and sky are too damn shiny. Give me a gothic burial on a fog shrouded hill with a gnarled oak. I want my headmarker to be an erection of grey stone carted off in the night from a castle ruin on a Transylvanian moor. Ha ha ha.

    “There’s a dog biscuit sitting on one of the headstones.”

    “That guy must have been a freak. His wife probably had him cooling in the dog house when he croaked. Ha ha.”

    “I think the person next to him croaked too. The name on the headstone is Kermit.”

    “This is a pet cemetery!  Creepy.” We slept a hundred yards away from the rotting corpses of little girl’s kitties, puppy dog tails, snails and… little grey mice snap back in traps by murderous villains. “I don’t wanna be buried // in a Pet Cemetery.”

    In fact I would prefer not to buried in my own grave. Just let it mark my time in this world. Quote me on the headstone. I would like my body to go to practical use. My skeleton should go to a high school biology class. My heart, eyes, spleen whatever you can salvage can donate to some needy person with his/her works shutting down. Give all my blood to the Red Cross and eat a donut for me.

    Oh, my soul should go to a metermaid, or a gig bouncer.

    The heat. The address on the first building tells us we are traveling the correct direction. Praise dog. We’re not gonna to make it. All this heat energy on the outside, and nothing but raw determination fueling us from within. The gang wants to go to Jack in the Box. Aaaagh. I boycott burger joints, don’t eat cows, rationale from methane production to global warming, I like rain forests… you know the platform. The heat make a gallows out of my ideals, let ‘em be hanged. “The corporate deathburger joint is sure to be air conditioned.”

    Enter Jack-in-the Box. Alaska heads for the ladies room. I asked the senor citizen behind the counter, name tag reads Beverly,  for the time. “6:30 am,” she says.

“6:30!” “6:30!””6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!” “6:30!”

    McBean can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Alsaka cannot believe it.How could it possibly be “6:30!” in the morning? This is incredible. Truculent, virulent, acerbic, obdurate– inexplicably diabolic.

    The Jack-in-the-Box is the freezing opposite of the outside heat. It is as uncomfortably cold in here as it is hot out there. McBean orders himself curly fries. Alaska and I share a super jumbo ice tea. She orders an egg pocket. McBean orders himself an ice tea. We sip that tea. I start watch Alaska eat. “No you can’t have a bite, get your own,” she says.

    We freeze our damn asses off, trying to kill the hours before the key shop will open. When we get too cold we step outside, warm off, and step back in. I once heard a story about a man who drove himself to an out of body experience by alternating states of extreme hot and cold. I don’t think the Tempe Jack-in-the-Hole was involved.

    The chill sets me shivering. Whenever I get cold like this I have to dump, poop, crap, shit, defecate, release bowels now! I am literally overcome by the necessity to shit. It feels like if I don’t get to a toilet I might crap my slacks.

    Alaska and I shoot back for the public lavatory, but the men’s is occupodo. So I duck into the ladies’ with her. It’s just like a mensroom, sans urinal. There is also a tin mail box of some sort. I pull one of the life preservers out of the rack, place it on the seat. My pants are down around my ankles. I am straining the muscles on that hole to hold it in, until I am in the right position. Somebody scratched “Kim is a hoe” on the stall door. An air-con induced movement is a movement of liquid quickness. “Don’t sit down,” Alaska says. She has copped another life preserver from the rack.

    “Here, put one in the water and it won’t splash on you when you poop.”

    The paper thing goes in the water and directly train to fame on top of it is a rush of brown liquid. It piles on the paper island, soft serve, and sinks the whole thing.

    “You don’t get a disease from sitting on the toilet, you get it from the dirty water splashing on you,” Alaska counsels. “You can get worms too. Did I tell you Heather got worms from the toilet at school. Her mom found them when she wiped her butt.” I’m not going to ask why Heather’s mom was wiping her nine year old daughter’s ass, but I am curious.

    The smell is coming up into the room and the time for philosophical digressions has elapsed. Alaska is out the door. I stop to wash my hands in the ladies’ sink. Water, squirt soap, paper towel and bye bye.

    SeyMour is talking to Beverly.
    “What's your social security number?” he asks her.
    “I can't tell you that,” she says.
    “Is there a locksmith around here?”
    “I don’t know the area very well,” she says.
    “How long have you worked here Beverly?” I ask.

    “About twenty years.” She must have misunderstood me; I pray and hope. While sitting in the Jack-in-the-booth we hatch another hair-brained scheme.

    “Why don’t we ogle the Grand Canyon on the way home?” We start planning, calculating. “This is the Grand Canyon State isn’t it? It can’t be too far.”

    “Beverly, how far is the Grand Canyon?”

    “You know I can’t really tell you. I’ve never been there myself.” She starts to get confused as an order comes into her headphones via the drive-up window. “Oh, she’s so confused // oh no no no mainliner.” 

    We decide to leave Beverly alone. We kick the idea around until a customer comes in. “Sir. How far is it to the Grand Canyon and how do we get there?”

    He starts by laying elaborate turn right then left directions on us, ending with “four hours from here.” I’m wondering is that four hours there and four back and seven or eight back to San Diego? Or is that four hours and then it turns out to be some miraculous short cut to our home in the very western corner of the continental USA.

    “I’d recommend  Red Rocks, Sunday, bloody Sunday,” he sings.  What a dork. “There’s a slide rock there that goes perfect with two pairs of jean shorts”

    “Whoooooo, dip into the slide,” McBean says. After each scenic sight recommended the man notes the temperature variation. “Ten degrees cooler here.” “About five degrees cooler there, plus the splash factor.”

    “How can you possibly live in this heat sir?”
    “We like the heat here, it keeps the population down,” he says.

    Good answer. The survey says, 25 points…ding ding ding– egggghhhX. We are up and out the door into the heat. We have a mile to walk to the lockjones. We’ve only killed an hour. I hate killing things, especially time.

    We drag our sorry butts down the sidewalk. I have my thumb out, thinking positive hitch-a-ride thoughts. The gang just drags their sorry tight white asses in a dejected mope. We pass a lot of uninteresting nothing minimalls that I wish the heat would spontaneously incinerate. At least we’d have something to do like roast a vegie kabob.

    Finally, we get to the ycleptive mall. We find the lockjones, locked up tight. We sit and watch a guy cut the fronds off two palm trees. His little helper man partner novitiate is gathering the limbs, “gather your limbs gather your limbs”  heaving them into the getaway truck. They are listening to country music. Blah.

    “This is great fun, what a vacation.”  SeyMour seizes the moment to catch up on a few Z’s. ZzZzZz. He lays back on the grass and closes his eyes. Alaska and I are trying to share a spot of shade from the two foot palm behind us. The guy said if we’d gotten here earlier he’d have shown us how to climb, with the belt and spiky boots. If ‘facetious’ was in this joker’s vocabulary I’d say he was trying it out on us. We sit staring at the locked door to the lock joint for about twenty minutes. Even the frond choppers have bugged off.

    I try to coax Alaska into a little heavy petting behind the building. It looks like there’s an alley there. We explore it. She’s not into the pet thing at this moment. It must be the heat. Bury my hormonal flare in the pet cemetery. We perch on our curb, our sit stoop and stare at the locked building for five more minutes. Waiting for Godot. Then I see the lit neon of beer bar open. Three doors down from the lockjones is a bar. It’s open. McBean is out hot.

    Alaska and I step inside the door. Newfangled c.d. playing type jukebox. We kill a few minutes browsing the tune selections. They have Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, The Doors. It’s a dollar for three plays. The place is air-conditioned. Pure relief after the long march. The radio is on, no need to play the juke box. They are hooked up to the oldies station. This is like a miracle.

    There is a pool table waiting to played. There are eight to ten barflies loading up the morning with whiskey drinks. It’s 7:45 am There is no one remotely Bukowski-esque, no Faye Dunaway Wanda Wilcox trashed by a life of abuse. The people are invidiously plain, and unremarkable. They are too plain. It’s not the old Homer’s on Adam’s Avenue with crazy drunks yelling stories, making heated points in wild argument, or Club Naha with old rum and coke Tom Mix cowboys taking seven minutes to align a billiard shot downtown, or anyone of a thousand rummy joints between here and home. The place is like a seven am Cheers. Nobody knows our name. They are clean, plain.

    Even the bartender is plain. She isn’t anything like the wrinkled Chinese opium-den-eyes ladies who serve Coors, and rice at Naha. She asks us if we want anything, caught me bending over with two coins for the pool slot. “No, no, we’re waiting for Godot,” I say. She looks at me blankly. “For the lockjones to open.” She thinks I'm insane. “The A-1 lock and key next door.” She nods affirmation. Asks if we want to play the juke box. People in Tempe are so friendly. I let the billiard balls fall with a loud rumble.

    Alaska goes to the bathroom as I rack ‘em up. When she comes back I ask her if she wants a drink. “Nope.” A bloody mary like the one they serve at the Jewel bar on sixteenth sounds divine. We decide to abstain from drinking.

    Alaska and I kill the forty five minutes shooting pool. We spend a dollar fifty on the game. It doesn’t seem like waiting any more. We are having a good time. SeyMour is outside sleeping in the blazing sunny sun. The bar patrons are drinking, watching tv, listening to the radio. One guy is shooting electric darts. He has most of the bars’ attention. People amaze me daily.

THE LOCKJONES

We leave the bar the same people (in body/soul/mindset) as we entered. Doesn’t everyone? Except we are forty five minutes older. It’s funny how you get forty minutes older so easily.

    The bar clock read 8:30. The Lockjones ain't here. SeyMour is still on the grass with his eyes closed. Alaska and I resume our place on the wait-stoop. Waiting. Tick, tock our life is seeping off with our bodily fluids.

    Then we see him drive around in a big lockjones van. He parks in the alley behind where I tried to grope Alaska. He saw us waiting. Five more minutes pass. We are just staring at the door. “SeyMour wake up. He’s here, he’s here. The lockjones is here.” Oh joyous day.

    The man finally opens the shop door. He has a crazy handlebar mustache. He looks like the kind of American man you’d want to be your grandfather. There are sea captain stories hidden deep in his personae. He has trouble expressing his feeling, though his machismo is a part of him worn like a mask that can be broken down, dismantled, and discarded. Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever looked that deeply into someone on a first appearance.

    “Are you the ones with the key locked in the renta-car?” He knows us. He has recognized us. It’s a sign, a miracle.

    “Yes!” I give him the “Seck number” and he sets to work designing the key. There is no auxiliary conversation, no small talk, no words wasted. We are beyond that.

    The shop is quaint enough with safes for sale, pad locks, hide-a-keys. I try out the dead bolt display models to see how they work: there is an intriguing fancy push button combo which occupies a few of my precious minutes. The key seems to be taking an inordinate amount of time. SeyMour, Jimmy and Alaska all in a row on a little redwood slatted wait bench. Somebody should take our picture.

    I whip out the Little Black Book and write down a patent idea I’ve been working on. It comes to full fruition on the waft of a SeyMour McBean trademark fart. The invention is called the “Fart Visibilizer.” I see it as the new rage in rave culture. I see colorful trails of gas, rocket red, fashion fuchsia, emerald city green streaking and twisting around corners in the hallways of swank parties.

    The Visibilizer consists of a piece of plastic pipe jammed into the sphincter, held tight by a Spacely's sprocket “ass gasket.” There is a filter that transforms the invisible gas expelled from the anus as waste into a colorful stream of pure fun. Imagine if farts were visible.

    The three of us are sitting on the bench trying to out fart each other. I can see the yokels in that bar passing time/gas this way, but us? The Western kinsmen of the sun? The ultra-hip twenty-somethings of generation X? The Cadillac Tramps? It doesn’t make any sense.

    We are amusing ourselves by reading the packages of locks and hinges on the shelf. We're reminded of a local San Diego band, Deadbolt, and their song “Who the hell is Mrs. Valdez?” This song is stuck in my hide like those golden burrs that wedge themselves into your socks when you walk across a field.

    Another band name, a piece of found poetry, “Welded Steel Chain Fastener.”

    “This is what I’m calling my band if I ever get it started,” I say

    “That or Roadside table,” McBean chimes in.. It’s weird how a group of friends can be sucked into a line of purely ridiculous fantasy, though Alaska seems disinterested. I write it all down in the Little Black Book.

IDEA:

Start a band: Welded Steel Chain Fastener

–Replacement Hardware: vocals
–Sheila Luv Lock: bass
–Swing Bolt: drums
–Sunrise Hiway: Guitar

    This was how we spent the time while grampa lockjones with the twirly mustache sculpted our key. He charged us two dollars for the key and ten dollars for something else. The price of gigs today.

LONG WALK BACK TO THE CAR

Psych! We only walked half way back through the most intense blashing heat, suffered only a little, enough to exercise the soul, without sunburn, then hitched a ride in a brand new luxury high performance leather interior air con sedan all the way back to Club Rio, our gig site and campground.

RITUALS

I approach the lock, key erect. I run my fingers over the newly grooved metal of the key; it has sharp angles, not yet rounded or softened by time. A more reverent soul might pause for prayer. I stick it in (sans foreplay.) I have to force it a little, It’s OPEN! The trunk pops open.

    But for some reason we can’t just hop in the car and jump back on the wild open road for home. Perhaps it’s the sudden unexpected ease at which we got back here, or the elation that a more positive karma is with us, and the miracle: the key actually worked!

    Inside the trunk we find a veritable feast– a garlic and poppy seed bagel, a cooler containing cream cheese, and a gloriously ripe cantaloupe. Alaska finds the mango I bought for her. McBean finds a banana and parts it off three ways. It's sweet, over ripened by trunk compression. SeyMour eats a nectarine, slurps the juice loudly. We sit for a bountiful repast on the grass, a fine picnic of summer is ours, an estival festival. The sprinklers mist the air all around us as the immaculate Club Río lawn is being given it’s daily drink. The sprinklers belt forth in noisy staccato arcs, like the Yosemite falls blessing the Earth with nature’s most precious gift: Water!

    We feast on the cantaloupe, gorging into it like Roman orgiasts. Alaska sliced it into the crescent shape of smiles. The juice dribbles down my chin, soaking my hands, my clothes. I don’t care about anything because my stomach is happy full with the fruit of the Earth. Yummmmmm. We don’t even talk we just eat, feasting on bread and cheese and fruit.

    The tractors are still rolling noisily at their work and two grounds keepers are restoring Río to it’s edenic state. It is more like a country club than a disco. It’s nothing like a river. It still looks a little like a bank, or perhaps a library. It has a political air about it. The Sumerian garden of Ninhursag before she trusted Enki and Ismud to watch her plants. Bring on your distractions, you can’t dampen this feast. “To health and safe travel,” Alaska says.

    I strip off my hot shoes, and my sweaty cantaloupe soaked shirt. I toss the camel shorts on the drive seat; I’m feeling boxer breezy. The heat, for once, feels good on my body licking it with intensity. My hands are sticky. I sneak up behind the sprinkler, the wet grass cool on my bare feet and lower my hands into the pulsing jet stream. The water pummels them clean.

    “Hey, let’s run through the sprinklers,” Alaska says. A fine idea. Recall last summer when we drove to Thermal, California for a job interview. Similar trip though without McBean. We stopped and ran through a rest area sprinkler. It was this same hot.

    “Hey, let’s run through naked,” I say. I’m always urging people to take off their clothes at parties, inciting nudity, wondering what keeps us clothed and quiet watching televiosion, instead of copulating in the streets. Until this point, it’s been a safe dare, no one has taken seriously.

    The tractors are rolling 50 yards to the South, busy with their own dusty work. The grounds keepers are on the other side of the park lot. I can see them, but they can’t see me.

    SeyMour jumps into the car. He grabs his camera. “Okay you first, señor exhibitionist, drama hound,” he chides.

    “Okay boss, here goes very little.”

    I drop the cotton boxers and break into a glee sprint through the water. Jubilee. Something takes a hold of me– the spontaneity of the moment, the rush of pure nakedness lifts me up two notches. “Jimmy, you nudist!” Alaska shouts.

    The traveling companions are already rolling with laugh ha ha’s. “Pipe down, ya clothists,” I retort. I jump and run through the sprinklers. Okay, I’m a latent streaker. Psuedo-retro Ginsberg. The water hits me like a cold bullet. A freight train of cold bullets. No slowing down my exhilaration. I’m doing these cartoon video-game man leaps with the water dispersing on my chest. Slap some tights on me, lose the sprinkler and I’d be grande jeté culturale, prim arena ballerina. People would pay to see this, more like Americans to pay to watch this kick than just do it themselves. What would happen if we all ran out of our homes naked and danced in the street? If the tv told us to, we might think that we did. Let’s make a date for December 31, 1999. Say around midnight. Alaska and McBean are rolling on the ground. Good to see I can generate laughter. I’m a clown, the neo-nudologist jester of the post-clothist be bop set.

    It is strange how people in this society have so much trouble with as small a thing (literally) as nudity. I was born naked, I’ll run naked. And this isn’t a hippie free love statement. This is not a sexual experience, not the next cabal in the sexual revolution. The water crashing over my ass like the cool tongue of my hot lover doesn’t affect me that way. A simple au naturale high.

    The sun, the sky, the air, the framework of the land are wholly solemn. Fixed and silent. Underneath in the little human village of Tempe, Arizona there is a series of five sprinklers spanning the Club Río lawn. A slalom run for human fun. I dash the course. Ride me equestrian style. I am naked like a horse, not like a man. I feel clean. I am beating the heat in “primitive” style. “Socially advanced” ifs youse asks mees. ChkChkChkChk. Whhooooeeeeee. ChkChkChkChk. Get out of here with your clothes you prudish cattle, you sheep, you cotton picking damners of the human body. You plastic raincoat freaks. I am wet. And happy. SeyMour snapped off a photo pictorial from his positing on the grass and I’m already thinking of the joy revival they will bring on the couchside reflection of this excursion.

    “There is nothing in the world more beautiful or significant of the laws of nature than the nude human body. In fact it is not only among artists but among all people that a greater appreciation and respect for the human body should develop.”

    Another dangerous frontier of the unknown has been broken down. The trail is blazed for the exploitation of the masses. SeyMour and Alaska join me in “FROLIC!”  The palm trees sway. The outside world goes on with its work. The two tractor drivers are rumbling and stirring up dust. One grounds keeper prunes a palm on the far side, the other sweeps up a puddle of glass. The shards (the only remnants of last night’s party besides us) seem to me somehow like tears. The fallen lament of those who had to go back to reality, back to work, the job, labor, routine, the clock in/clock out, the grind.

    The sprinkler crashes its cool tongue over Alaska’s body. Her clothing grows soaked. She isn't the kind to run naked. The cold skeletal fingers of the water twist the nipples of her pert breasts. Like two illegal raisins being smuggled across the state line they show themselves. SeyMour’s nipples catch a rise too, as he skips and hops through the spray. We are running. We are doing kicks and twirls in the air off the crest of the water. This exertion would be madness if the water suddenly cut off at the source. We would die, not from humiliation (for we surely look ridiculous with or without water) but as helpless victims of the Sun, that spider rodilating on the web of the heavens.

    Everything is fine, the grounds keepers don’t approach us, no sign of police, no questions asked. For some reason we hopped in the car and began the long drive toward home.

THE ROAD TOWARD HOME

“Peter Cottontail hopping down the asphalt trail.”  I set the cruise control on 55, and calmly roll out of Tempe. I am still in the driver’s seat.

    There is a part of me which thinks that our experience should have changed us. Returning home we should be different people. We left stupidly carnivorous, gang-rushing our game. We crushed the sweet petals of flowers in our haste. Our goal: the fatted buck skewered on a fiery spigot (the gig) drove us mad and blind across mountains, desert and cityscape. The let down (The Tramps only played for 30 minutes) should have guided us to a new understanding, somehow sanely vegetarian. My new understanding should come easy precisely because we return home without a goal. There is no driver struck mad with gold dust in his eyes, no will to conquest. Our eyes should be fixed in the moment. Life has taken on the possibility to be one long orgasm into the grave. The secret lies in working it as the constant search for subsistence. The hawk-eyed discipline to find joy in the minute. The metamorphosis should have been a calming experience. I wanted it to settle on us in the night while we slept. Like vegetables lending their flavor to day old spaghetti sauce. It should have snuck in like the common cold, leaving us drowsy and weak, but also acutely aware of our behavior. We are only aware in moments of pain or pleasure, we must transcend. The thrill lies not in the kill, the thrill should be the hunt itself.

    Nietzsche writes, “Tourists– they climb mountains like animals, stupid and sweating; one has forgotten to tell them that there are beautiful views on the way up.” I carried this with me to Tempe, and I carry it home. I had hurtled across the desert like a tourist. The beauty of it distorted in the flash and blur of our speed.

    And yet I cannot surrender the thrill of the speed. Damn the scenery, and leave me alone with my thoughts at 100 mph. There is only the thrill of the rush itself popping against the windshield like tiny bugs. My heart is the lair of speed.

    Alas, I am full of crap.

     The sign! Seldom does life give us a second chance. But here it is, laying itself on the chopping block, jumping into the pot. A chance to purge myself in high colonic style.

     STATE PRISON
     DO NOT STOP FOR
     HITCHHIKERS

    My destiny extends into the future only long enough to pull to the shoulder and click the shutter.

    “SeyMour, let’s take that picture.”

    “There’s no film left in the camera, boss.”

    “Shit.”

    We've stopped. I watch the sign helpless, at the side of the road. “You’re leaving // seduce me once again.”  As we roll past it, I think maybe it feels as sad as I do. The sign is like an escaped prisoner. But once he busted out (his goal realized) he is faced with the world rushing past him. And it seems so fast and ugly and impossible. The sign must want to just kill something and go back to prison.

    Just as soon as it appeared it’s gone. The cloudless lake of blue has one star burning itself known to all under its dominion. Alaska is in the navigator’s position, buffeting sleep. The radio’s on the oldies station, 960 am. “You give me fever.”

    “What was that band that used to do this, was that Audrey’s band?” Alaska says.

    “No that was Donkey Show,” I say.

    “Whatever happened to them?” says McBean. We don’t know. No one knows what happens to local bands.

    “Where did Rosebud of Night Soil Man disappear to?” I ask trying to open a line of talk.

    “Come to think of it we don’t even know where Mark Baez of the Front is, or Ministry of Truth, Jordy, Rob, Kenny. And those guys were friends of ours weren’t they?” SeyMour says.

    “Our connection was the music. The scene. When that dries up, things fall apart. No second coming, no reunion gigs. John Lennon is dead. The Beatles cannot play again. Things cannot repeat themselves. The Battalion of Saints cannot play again, too many people in the band are dead.”

    “But new bands can cover their songs, they can live that way,” says McBean. The cover hound. He’s so right. Except we don’t know who originally recorded “Fever.” We know that The Jam did it, and about fifty million other bands, but whose song is it? And why does that matter? “Old bands with dead members can pick up new players,” McBean adds.

    “When I'm dead, can someone read from my books in coffee houses?”

    “Why not?” Alaska says. “Melody Lee can do it.”

    We are crawling straight west on the 10. I am sticking to the speed limit trying to read the flashing road signs. I am ready to stop for the slightest kick. And as I drive I’m having a splendid time absorbing the the lay of the land, as always looking out for the Man. “I’m waiting for my man.”  Jim Carroll uses the phrase in Forced Entries. It comes out of that era. Except we aren't in this car to glorify heroin use. The white heat for me, is this line in the middle of the road, rushing just to the left of me shooting east toward America. The line is a rush. There are too many cars around, people watching. I want the road for myself. I’m greedy. The road is my habit.

    The faster we go the more everything around me becomes charged with excitement. The speed limit is now 65. The cruise control button obliges my finger with increased speed for the car. I am anxiously copping kicks off all the signs along the road side.

     Jack Rabbit Road

    “What do you think it would be like to live on Jack Rabbit Road?” Mobile homes. The ground is charred from the shoulder back up over the hill.

    “Spoon fed from a satellite dish,” McBean says. We don’t like television. Did you get that? We are afraid of it. Telephobic. Both of us find it easier to crash couchways and lose ourselves in the tube. I call it smoking the opium hookah. We (the Jazz family) didn’t have a television for a long time. My daughter was growing up without the direct influence of television. That hasn’t been tried in this country in fifty years. (Like Christianity, television is hard to get away from in this country even if you try.) Then my mother betrayed me. She’s a pusher and an addict herself. She brought over a tv when I was at work. A little one, but that's how it starts. Melody Lee was sick, pneumonia, all she could do was lie around. So the tv stayed, with rules. “You are only going to watch one hour a week,” I pronounced after my tantrum.

    “Jimmy what are you doing?” Alaska shouted. I'm holding the box-to-be-eschewed over my head ready to heave it off the balcony.

    “Killing my fucking television”

    “It's not yours dad, grandma gave it to me,” Melody cries.

    “Yeah, Jimmy, you're not the only voice in this family. We can watch some tv if we want,” Alaska states firmly.

    Now if I can keep Melody Lee to one hour a day, I feel good. This is challenging for a parent. You have to set up activities for a kid. Melody has her own art table. She once produced twenty-three works of art in a row, two hours. I can get her talking little figurines or a puzzling over games and puzzles; I bought her a little plastic pool. Things are not the same as when I was a kid; I played outside. Alaska and I talk about this a lot. Alaska played outside too. Melody can’t really play in our neighborhood. She doesn’t write her name well enough to be a good tagger. I see dance class and soccer teams in her future. There just aren’t many kids on the street where we live. Besides the sun will eat cancerous holes in your hide.

    Helios, bitch doggess of the god day afternoon, let us pass unbroiled through your country. The crucible of our flight melts the ore of our metal. This is a test, gambit challenge. What task do you have in mind for us?

     Mile 119: Cruise control locked on 70. Only five miles an hour over the limit. Fear of the Man, the radar man, the microwave prince of tarts, minor trickster prince of scorn for his father’s guests holds us in check. Mate, aye aye mate.

     LOS ANGELES 307 miles

    No sign for San Diego. A sign said Gila Bend: route 85. I was looking for San Diego. I’ll be put to rest by my vanity. I’d expect to see a sign in Chicago: San Diego 2000 miles. We breeze past the 85.

    Workers patching up the right lane, a series of orange cones funnel us into a slow down. There is a moment for reflection, looking back.

    “Do you think we should have turned back there? It said Gila Bend.” No one will help me. It’s like I’m alone. SeyMour uprights himself in the back seat. He’d been stretched flat for nap. The one lane grows into two again as we pass the last orange cone. The workers must not be human, patching asphalt in this heat. Heroes of the American West. For the road is the life line. The trucks from L.A. must pass. The goods from China must pass. I don’t think they give a damn about us. Originally they wanted us to buy cars. But now that all the cars are made somewhere else, I don’t think we have roads for citizens. The road is the vein of commerce.

    Maybe I’m wrong, Arizona needs tourist dollars to flip, flop and fly.

    Maybe I’m wrong there too. Arizona probably exports more tourists than it imports. I've been an amateur economist.

    And then it appears. More than a sign, this is a Mecca. It's the great Capitalist Mecca. The marketplace at the end of the universe. The summation of everything for sale in our culture. The grand Americana: RIP GRIFFIN’S super-deluxe mambo extra fantabulous jumbo diesel mega wünderbah gas station-pool hall-coffee shop-restaurant-gift shop-barber- shoeshine-candy counter and toilet.

RIP GRIFFIN: AMERICAN DREAM MERCHANT

We tour our white petrol driven stallion around the gas station pumps, zig zag figure 8 around the park lot. The place is loaded with cars but no one is crazy enough to stay out in the air. I am stripped up to my skivvies. I’m looking for drive thru directions. We find no direction merchants. Alaska needs to use the rest room. Evidently she needs a little rest.

    El stopo, smack in front of the joint. Right roll between two white lines, ten feet from the entrance. Things are eerie. That too easy eerie. Things seeming like a recycled twilight zone episode eerie. Is this heaven? Were we killed in a head-on collision? Again. All of the head-on dead from America’s roads gather here. It is the hot spot. Paparazzo, snap a photo shimmy shimmy snap a photo. Truckers and tourists alike are making the scene. Ignition key off, the heat sweeps in making me think for a second that this is also Rip Griffin's crematorium. Is that odiferous smell of human flesh riding on the wind? It wouldn’t take much more than the outside temp to fire a body into ashes. SeyMour and I cannot wait in the car.

    I open the door and hold it as an old country American family with seven children files out in stair-step-up height order, but the last child, a beautiful son is taller than the mother. The mother comes out next, with father behind. It doesn’t look like they bought anything. Maybe they ate at the restaurant or dad got a haircut. Dad nods his head, thank you/gracias/de nada/ no sweat. I wonder if I’m depriving Melody Lee by withholding brothers and sisters.

    The first thing you see when you enter Rip Griffin’s Americana is the candy counter. Behind the counter in a cheesy little uniform apron (all uniforms being cheesy) is a young girl with long black hair.

    “She's the most beautiful girl I've ever seen,” SeyMour says. “Let's bring her home with us.”

    What a novel idea. “Ask her, ask her to come with us,” I say. I pretend to look at trinkets as he steps up to her. SeyMour has sharp angular features: shoulders, clefted chin, nose, combined with tan skin and taught muscles that I’ve heard women call irresistible. Alsaka agrees technically, but says she knows him too well to be attacted to him that way.

    “Excuse me cutie pie…” He begins. He leans toward her grinning like a puppy and I can no longer hear. She smiles big, flattered,he says something else, then she points toward the back of the shop.

    SeyMour skips over to the shelf where I’ve been waiting, we walk shoulder to shoulder toward where she pointed.

    “I asked her for directions to San Diego. She said to ask the shoeshine man,” SeyMour explains.

    “The shoeshine man? I thought you were going to invite her along.” Oh shoeshine boy… Melody Lee and I love the cartoon character Underdog. Malcolm X was a shoeshine boy. Hey shoeshine boy, Polly Purebread says in a breathy cartoon manner full of rapture. This particular Rip Griffin shoeshine man must be seventy years old. “Do do do, do do do ahwoo oo oo oo oo ahwhooo. No need to fear Underdog is here!”

    “Remember when The Ninth used to cover that song?” McBean says. I had a theory that the cartoon show Underdog wasn’t in circulation during the Reagan years because Underdog got his power by popping pills. A time when “drug” stores began changing their signs to read “pharmacy.”

    “You got to go back eight miles to the 85 cowboys, exit right, watchout for the Buckeye Sheriff, pass through Gila bend,” he says. A trucker waits patiently for the old shoeshine man to buff his boots.

    “Thanks man.”
     “Thank you.” We both thank him. We are both sincerely thankful.

    “He was cool. I’d like to bring him with us too. I want to bring everyone with us.” I walk over to an intercom on the wall. I depress the button and my voice echoes throughout the entire capitalist complex, “Attention Rip Griffin employees the bus for civilization  leaves in five minutes.”

    McBean laughs. A cashier looks up from making change.

    We walk back over to the candy counter for another piece of taffy. The counter maiden smiles at us again. I nudge McBean. She has curly black hair, lips like pillows; when I get home I’m going to sculpt the pillows on our bed into a smile like this one. I want lips like these, the cover model says to her plastic surgeon before the silicone injection.

    “I could kiss those lips,” McBean says. He tries her lips on for size in his imagination. They fit like wool socks in winter; they fit like a popsicle in a hot summer kid’s mouth. Mmmm. What a great world, where you can find gorgeous as well as sweet candy counter girls in the middle of nada. Rip Griffin’s Americana has something for everybody, even a handful of free kicks for three freeloading hobos of the American road.

    Rip Griffin has samples of twistable taffy in a cardboard big tug boat diplay out front of the counter. I’m not actually sure if they are free samples, but no one seems to mind as I jam one after the other into my watering maw. It isn’t that I’m hungry, I’m just excited about this whole Americana thing, and I love anything that is free. Never buy anything because of a free sample, direct mail, tv commercial or special offer.

    This is the biggest cheesy (Las Vegas Elvis cheap and sleazy) gift shop I’ve ever been in. They have the most ridiculous postcards and hokum souvenirs, priced… on the mega side of too much. The place is big, it’s grand, it’s air conditioned, but they couldn’t be paying too much rent way the hell out here. It’s freezing in here. Demand rules the market. If people are dumb enough to pay these prices, I admire Rip Griffin (It’s a hell of a name at least, Rip short for Ripoff.)

    SeyMour and I wander around the shelves turning everything over for a gander at the price tag. It is freezing, the air conditioning set on polar ice cap. A penguin could live in here. No one would notice. Except Rip, he’d slap a price tag on its tuxedoed ass and try to sell it. What novelty! What enterprise. My bare feet are crying for socks. Aisle 23. I wish I’d brought a heavy coat so that we could stay. I’ll bet Rip has coats to rent while you sip coffee. You come in for a cold drink, you end up buying hot tea, boiling coffee, hot water bottles, thermal underwear. But Alaska is out of the can, and we are leaving Rip Griffin’s Americana. I bet we could buy the candy girl if we had enough dough.

    The heat hits me freight train like. Whooo whooo chugga chugga. Positively torrid. The pavement instantly thaws my cold toes. The air moves into my lungs and sets up sweat shop. The air around here must be relation to Rip Griffin. The ‘grif’ short for grift, the ‘fin’ slang for fiver. This place is a scam, a sham, and to those who need it, probably a blessing. Dog bless you Rip Griffin. The air trying to par boil me alive in my own juices. It is hot. Sorry I couldn’t leave a few ducats in your collection basket. There is also Reverend Rip’s Chapel of the Sun around back.

    I hop to the car in giant exaggerated steps. This whole stop was exaggerated, almost to the point of absurdity. “Let’s go kids.” I look back and think that I see the candy girl observing our departure from behind the window. I imagine that she feels sad. She waves. A turn of the key puts us on the road again. I don’t like retracing my steps, but we are heading east towards Phoenix, away from California. The flash, one second thought, a latent desire says keep going, America can be yours. Meet the Cadillac Tramps down in Texas, keep going, you can’t go home.

    The desire to extend our roadtrip loses momentum the closer we get to the 85 turnoff, replaced by the anticipation of cactus prickles of fun on the road toward Gila Bend. The radio is playing “Hey there little Red Riding Hood // You sure are looking good.”   “Hey 999 covered this song,” McBean says. “Whatever happened to 999?”

THE ROAD TOWARD GILA BEND

Miller Road: more charred ground. The black ash. The flaky flesh of the Earth. The crispy skin like that first pig cooked under the fallen walls and rafters of the burning barn. I could put my finger into the crackling and taste the emptiness.

    Quartzcite: probably the strip-mined rib rack of the Earth. The exposed hip joint of our bedridden mother. The road killed corpse of mother Earth cooked in a cannibal oven by her husband the sun. The devouring element loosed on her here with conspiracy to spread like cancer.

    Along the roadside the once-homes are desolate shells of calamity. Battered down brick pile on a foundation. Twenty-three stones stacked by some anal retentive maniac who couldn’t stand the chaotic dispersal of the rocks. The rocks are stacked for no other reason, but abject paranoia. Wooden plank porch dashed on the hearthless foundation, dipping into the dirt like a ship sinking. The bow end up in the air. Half of it is already gone. The other half wrenched upright and going down. Rusted hulls of automobile, hoodless and doorless. Tires that won’t return to the Earth. The Earth refuses to swallow tires, bury a tire in her gut and she’ll puke it up. Mama won’t eat tires. So they litter the abandoned property of no one. Dorthea Lange postcard poverty. Just add a few hungry looking children. Show healthy well rich fatbellied spoiled brats of upper-middle suburbia in juxtaposition with this scene and audiences will cry for the hungry children. “Feed the poor children.” They will swear that the clean pampered faces were dirt smudged and sallow.

    “What happened to the people who lived here?” I ask. How long have the shacks with the roofs blown off, and the walls carted away to other uses, been empty? Where did the people go? What were they like? What possessed them to live here in the first place? The questions for me are exhilaration, acceleration. I get excited. “Let’s poke through the ruins.” I want to snoop for clues? I want to know why. I want to wonder if I could have worked this land through the hard times that brought ruin, I depress the accelerator.

    “Wow! Look at that shack.”
    “Holy shit. What happened there?”

    We blow right past like the wind, leave the blasted settlement to be swallowed by the Earth. I expect mama will cough up what she can’t digest.

    We jam right down the middle of an ink-red-table meadow of cacti. Giant cacti of the Arizona desert. There is a man/woman couple stopped roadside posing. She smiles with the needled giant cactus mounting the background. A picture to show the grandkids. Thoough the grandkids won't appreciate it because slides don’t capture the inner ejaculation, that she might be experiencing in nature’s presence. That was me in front of the Yosemite redwoods last summer. I could feel every year of that big twisted tree’s life shooting into me like music. The grin of sly connection with nature. These cacti are the redwoods of the desert.

    They seem to be waving at us. Most mustering only three fingered cartoon waves, but there is one with five digits, correctly proportioned like a human hand: thumb,index, bird, ring, pinky. It’s like the cigar store Indian hand raised in greeting, “How.” Is that ‘how’ a question, like ‘how are you?’ or perhaps ‘how could you?’If so, oh ghost of the desert, I am fine flying home soaking up the ghostly energy of every cactus, rock, and grain of sand.

    Dry cactus rot is even more gruesome than the lightning blasted trunk stump of a redwood which terrrifies even from a distance with leafless boney mandrills reaching into your nightmares. But the dying cactus is at its most terrible when you step up to it. It’s like an elephant in the secondary stage of syphilis.It’s like Milton’s conception of Sin, like crawling into the womb of Sin, over sinews, hairs and teeth of tumors rooted in the endometrium wall, like screaming aborted fetuses.

    A slab of rotting road kill, remains on the road almost devoured by biting flies , sun and abrasive wind. Only a forensic expert could tell us what animal it was, after extensive expensive DNA tests. This too is somehow an inspiration. The way the fur is clumped with blood speaks to me with raw emotional impact. I can hear the death squeal of the animal as it was gunned down by truck bumper in the night. The thing just sat there watching 70 mph death oncoming. Few of us are given that opportunity. The agent of the reaper didn’t even slow down. The radio covered the thump, which could have been a pot hole. The carried-away-on-the-bumper flecks of blood were caked over with dust, mixed up with bug guts or licked off by the wind before daylight. The truck driver never knew to suffer from the heaving guilt pangs of murder.

    It reminds me of the time childhood friend John and I shot a whittle bunny wabbit in his backyard. For years I called it an accident. We carted its stiff corpse to canyon dump, brown eye registering the last thing it saw, the simple joy of eating grass. I aimed the rifle. To plan a murder and get away with it. Elmer, what if you killed Bugs with that wascally shotgun? No one ever gets away with murder. I pulled the trigger.

    Karma note: Ten years later, Schmoo, my roommate's pet bunny pissed on my futon.

THE COSMO

The Cosmo road stop is the diametrical seedy underbelly of America opposite of Rip Griffin’s mondo Americana. As I notice a battered plywood sign in the park lot, my motives for pulling over become suspect. “Hey, I decided to pull in even before I saw the sign,” I say to Alaska.

    “What sign?” she asks.

    “The desert’s deepest secrets seem to be revealing themselves to us in signs.”

    “Hoo hoo hot diggedity,” McBean says.



    T
    O
    P
    L
    E   B
    S   A
    S   R
Family restaurant

Ahh, the unique brand ofAmerican perversion, our retail capitalists would like to export to the world. The only patrons for this dive have to be truckers and cynical tourists like us. I don’t know where the topless dance girls could possibly commute from. Maybe there is a barracks or stable out back.

    There is a Spaceman Spiff™ Rodilating Rocketship sign on the roof to lure in the tourists since the 1950’s. It is shrouded in dust, the paint sun faded like the values of both owner and patron (cheap shot). A little car port to casts a mite of shade on our vehicle.

    We roll right up in the dusty lot, in front, next to one other car. We’ve got the spot in front of the pool. There’s a swimming pool with a girl laying out in the tanway, poolside.

    “She must be the dancer,” I say a little too loud.
    “Shhhh.” Alaska cautions sensing the need for decorum.

    Exiting the car again brings on the caloric energy of the sun trying to digest us in our dusty tracks.

    “This place looks like they might have a few porch monkeys or lawn jockies about,” I quip. Alaska could pose as a lawn flamingo. SeyMour would look mighty spiffy in the silks. Me? I’ll just grin and pretend I don’t want to stick a dagger in your back.

    We step in the door. The door his heavy, not easy to open. As it shuts I wonder if we’ll be able to get out. Most of the fixtures didn’t make it out of the ‘50’s. The booths, the counter, the busted ceiling fan. Not that I have anything against vintage furniture (but the shit hasn’t been polished since the fifties.) The place smells like an old abandoned apartment where the squatters found it more convienient to piss in a dark corner than go out searching for a working toilet. It smells like  our 1970first family home in Garden Grove. Me, pop and mom (baby sister in the oven.) It was a “unique fixer upper.” Pops freaked out the neighbors by planting an old wagon wheel in the front lawn. He was ahead of his time as a yard artist. It smells also like those fifteen cockroaches I captured in one Pacific Beach night awake in the wee hours writing H.U.M.  I kept them in a bucket for two weeks tossing in rotten lettuce. The Cosmo smells like the second week of that bucket. We decide just to pee and not buy anything.

    The front of the place is set up like a family café. Sit-down-shut-up-eat-a-burger-and-coke trip for the very hungry. You’d have to be really hungry to eat here. There is a door to the right, a small sign reads:

     BAR

 We bolt through the bar door into a room that’s been painted black. The chipped paint on the door shows a layer of red underneath. The lightingconsits of a dim Miller Lite neon from behind the bar itself. There’s a little stage, black curtain, a dance floor beat to hell by years of boot scuff and dropped bottles, a mirrored disco ball, not in current rotation suspended from time, and the ceiling. A pool table not in use. It’s caped in darkness– looks like it hasn’t been played on for a couple years. The guts of a Mr. Coffee maker are scattered on the felt.

    I am immediately dismayed to see a kid perched on the barstool. He can’t be more than thirteen. He’s wearing a ball cap. He probably lives in the house out back. It’s his swimming pool. His parents own the joint. The pool isn’t deep enough to have much fun diving off the roof. Then I catch a big eye sore eye of topless bartender man with fat hairy tits sagging. Gravity nagged tits wreaking of guzzled beer day on night for too long.

    “You folks wanna drink?” the bartender asks.
    “No, just a quick piss thanks.”

    In the bathroom, above the urinal, which smells like the place where the U.S. Army stored it’s World War II surplus urine samples, hangs a nefarious piece of ass, tit and twat poster. A beer company has convinced the beer swilling sex rapacious sports heads of this country that this glossy anal floss sporting bitch looks damn good. “Ooh I want that pussy.” I swear I heard someone say it. It wasn’t McBean. It wasn’t me. There’s no one else here. The sound seemed to reverberate out of the piss drain. An appropriate accompaniment to the acrid smell.

    McBean and I do some of the fastest pissing the Norman Bate’s two way mirrors of this joint have ever seen. I doff a thank you off my forehead from an invisible hat to the bartender. He looks at me, mustache like some ghostly millipede crawled off the road, big naked chest hairy and ugly, not a word of recognition. He knew we weren’t going to buy anything. Cousin Rip must have phoned that we were on the way. Alaska comes right on to exit with us. The mod squad. There’s no way she could have dumped urine that fast. Our three heroes exit shoulder to shoulder, unified, in agreement: this place smells too bad to stay another minute.

    “I couldn’t pee in there,” Alaska admits.
    “I don’t blame you, this place stinks.” I hold my nose to punctuate.
    “Peppy la pew,” McBean says.
    “I’m kind of attracted to it though,” I say looking back. Stepping outside the door I realize that the joint was actually air conditioned. The ardor with which the air temp sets on us is intense. Could it be another sign? Were we supposed to stay here, and consume beverages against our will until the striptease show begins? Maybe we were supposed to rescue a dancer from humiliation by the rude jeers of lonely road truckers, who stop to blow off a few thousand miles of frustration. I’m sure the truckers don’t stop because they hate women. “What do you mean hate women, I love women you little faggot,” he belches. “Shake those little titties honey. Bring that ass a little closer. [slap] Ha ha!”

    Out in the car we sit in the dirt park lot longer than necessary. SeyMour tells us about the time he ate a prickly pear like the one cactus growing in front of the Cosmo bar and family restaurant. At the same time McBean and I are trying to get an eye and ear full of the girl stretched out poolside. She sits up as the boy from the bar comes out to talk with her.

    “What he do try to write his name?” the boy says.

    As she sits up we can see a series of hickies where the smooth little dip into her living should be. Her chest is covered black with bruise. I’m straining my eyes, but can’t tell if it’s actual writing. Even SeyMour with his Bugs Bunny carrot eyes can’t make it out. We sit in the car, hopefully not obviously staring.

    “Do you think she gets better tips with the hickies?” I ponder aloud.

    “They get better tips if they have tan lines. The bigger the contrast, the bigger the tips,” Alaska adds building on a line of discourse. She knows this 'cause her friend Jesusita dated the owner of The Dairy Mart strip club in San Diego.

    We stay in the park lot, ignition dead, the car becoming our funeral pyre, straining to see something. SeyMour has his window down so we can clip bits of talk, clues. Who did this to her? An older man comes out of the bar joining them pool side.

    “If you can’t be wild, be bored,” she says. There are two palm trees near the pool. The whole thing is surrounded by chain link. A green vine stretches its limbs through the links. A door to the side opens into the bar. At the back is the hint of a little house, a residence.

    We can’t hear what the man is saying. Whatever it is the girl laughs. She is crystal meth-amphetamine thin. Rail thin with boney protruding hips. They might not even let her flash the stubby nubs of mammary in the big city. Her bones are coming out all over, ribs, hips, arms like sticks. The absence of flesh around her face is disturbing. The flesh that’s there is dried out, wrinkled by exposure. She could be writing a book on eating disorders. She could be a PhD holder. She could be a genius. She could have a warm troubled heart beating under those hickies. Who did that to her? What does she really feel about it? She has to put on the tough front. Was she the kid’s sister? Maybe she wasn’t a dancer at all. Maybe she’s a lesbian. A frat girl little sister home from college. Deborah Duckster– the debutante. Maybe the only topless thing in this joint is that fat hairy male bartender.

    “A little pain, and a lot of pleasure” comes barking at the heels of something he said. Her voice is even thin. It is sharp and tough like a New York City switch blade left here to rust by a passing-through trucker. Maybe she’s a biker. He’s talking low so we can’t hear though I’ve almost got my head out the window. The three of us are staring with bald intent. Alaska has her arms propped up on the seat, so that her ear is as close as inconspicuity allows to the window. Our car is a furnace. Someone outside is stoking up the heat. The man said something that he apparently thought was funny. He is clearly laughing low, near inaudible.

    “I knowed I’d get shit as soon as you seen it,” she says.

    Maybe she’s an undercover cop. A runaway white slave. A has-been ballerina. That was the last phrase we heard as we left the scene and became part of the road once again.

BACK ON THE ROAD TOWARD GILA BEND

I am still, for reasons unbeknownst to me, at the wheel, with the cruise control cruising and the radio on. SeyMour is in the navigator position. The remaining length of the 85 passes like scrub and dust by the window. Our thoughts stranded at the Cosmo bar and family restaurant among the hickies on the girl’s chest. The Coasters are singing about a stripper called “Little Egypt.”

    I hand SeyMour my shotgun. My Little Black Book from the crypt.

    “Just let it roll, like the car, write whatever comes out, let’s go go go.”

    SeyMour knocks the seat into recline two clicks down. He props his feet up on the dash. His feet smell like two hunks of the dried out cactus womb of Sin. Just picture his feet rubbing together and let that motion conjure up a smell like little balls of excrement brought to smoke on friction until all the moisture is sucked out and discarded. His feet release their smells like spores ejected from fungi. That SeyMour McBean takes up pen to page in my Little Black Book, here. Nowhere.

GILA BEND REVISITED

As we approach Gila Bend I put the clamps on the speed, nose up on the limit. Not even one mph over. There is an insidious overpass where a trapdoor spider sheriff likely lies in wait for revenue on wheels. Gila Bend indeed is pulling us into a holewith coarse sand walls caving in. Sometimes while driving I like to screw up my perspective and pretend that I’m falling straight down, like in one of those incredible dreams. Had one once. In my old Ford Pinto I was careening madly over a cliff. I ran off the road atop Mount Soledad (snicker at the appropriateness of ‘mount’ as the dark park lot is oft used for make out purposes) by the big white cross which overlooks all San Diego. I fell an absurd distance, down nine hells, and luckily, woke up before a violent crash.

    Slow cruising into Gila Bend is nothing like that.

    Yet the sights are familiar, we passed along this same street less than 24 hours ago. And I am ready to see the town again. I’m ready to dig everything with slow investigative eyes in search of drama. I want to get out, stretch and talk to some of the local folk. I want to milk them for what they're worth. I want to send one of them back in my place, in my clothes, to my job.

    I pull to the side of the road across from the vintage car lot. The ‘61 Chevies are still there with another night’s dust dulling their chrome. The sign still reads:

Jimmy’s Dirt Hauling.

  I have the sense that someone is waiting somewhere in the maze of cars, behind the hill of hubcaps to accept an offer. It’s not Jimmy. It’s a name like Jimmy, conspicuously Anglo. Paul or Pat, maybe Angela. I have the feeling that Jimmy is dead. Maybe it’s the way the letters of the sign need repainting. I feel like Jimmy was killed by a freak accident. Perhaps buried by a truck load of dirt, which his malfunctunate stooge cousin Dan dumped on him. I have the feeling that they never recovered the body. I have the feeling that happens a lot out of here.

    Gila Bendites simply crawl into the desert like sick animals. I feel like crawling a little myself partially because I’ll never have a swank car like that.

    “How can I be a real American without a snazz car? How can I be a true Cadillac Tramp without a Cadillac?” I wonder aloud.

    “You've got the tramp part down,” Alaska says.

    As I fully dig the street with jazz eyes, I begin to see that this little town is not part of America. Perhaps it was American, or at least Americana, at the height of it’s boom, but America has left it behind. You have to look closely at the people to understand what I mean. They aren't putting on capitalist airs. The people here are poor and satisfied. They don’t want anything more. The ones who wanted more have left. The population is pure in that sense. The people wear the clothes that they have, they eat the food they can get, they drive their cars until they die.

    Alaska has a friend in San Diego who just got married. I went to the wedding. The groom has had six new cars in the last four years. He trades in every eight to twelve months. He never gets to know his car. My mother’s first car (green 3 speed Volkswagon bug) was named Beulah. My Toyota is called Scooter. Named by my father’s mother, my grandma, bless her heart. She gave me the car at the funeral of her mother, my greatgrandmother. What a woman she was! A beautiful soul, spry into her nineties, beaming health and wonderfully spiritual. Always a brown bag with a little prize for her Jimmy boy. She called my dad her “philosopher?”

    The wedding was grotesque in the same sense that a new car every few months is grotesque. The wedding didn’t belong to the bride and groom. It was staged for the business associates of the in-laws. The dj didn’t have any records either the bride or the groom could dance to, the food was antisocial, anti-life roast beef, dead and covered with a sauce made from the diarrhea of baby cows locked in dark barn stalls.

    There should be fruit at weddings. Festival. Orgies of food where you can spin from table to table landing and laughing on the laps of your brethren. Singing and toasting to the “possibility of life, and marriage as a symbol of the future itself.” The guests come because they love you, to bless the combining of souls. Not to bring a waffle iron, or dishes and matching flatware (who needs that shit anyway?) There should be music: song, dancing. There should be the distinct ethnic flavor of the old world. But the dj dolled out this blank elevator pop, the BeeGee’s (BG) Barry Manilow (BM) like a whore fucking. “Yeah that’s great baby, I love it I’m having a great time. You’re a tiger, you’re all tigers, whose next?” The dj was wearing antiseptic Las Vegas white Mickey Mouse gloves and a microphone. He did it to us with the microphone, like the whore been done a thousand times. Give us wine to sedate us where we are forbidden to be elated. “We have to be out of the room by seven o’clock,” he said. Weddings not like this should last for days. A young boy and girl should light upon their first kiss, adultrous lovers should make love when they think no one is looking. The dj ran the just-married through a series of pin the tail on the donkey rites (the $ dance & toss the tokens.) Then it was over. We won’t see either one of them until the divorce. We should gather there too, for a real party. I’ve always felt that the friends of the divorcing should come together and provide gifts, duplicates of their original wedding gift, so that the battle for property, the tugging on that cake shovel, doesn’t turn violent.

    As “punkers” we are supposed to be leery of all institutions, and our individual experience with the thing has backed up our negative sold out look. SeyMour's parents’ love boat dashed on the rocks when he was three. I don’t think my parents ever really respected each other, they held on until I was fourteen. “Marriage symbol of security, sign of insecurity” was McBean's aphorism for last week.

    Alaska’s parents are still together. Whatever glue they used came from a time berfore planned obsolescence. Alaska herself doesn’t fully comprehend the family power structure. Is it her dad’s clear strength, or her mother’s subtle manipulation which controls the family? Alaska doesn’t know which one pulls the levers. They got married because they wanted each other, without having to succumb to marriage because of illicit bun baking in the oven. And certainly their Moron religion binds them as divorce would be a sin. Yet also the church provides a structure for their daily lives. They have tasks beyond husband/wife, parent/ child to keep them busy. Not to mention grandchildren to dote on.

    Alaska has dreamed of living with her husband, in a house of her own, in a marriage bed of their own. There are white dresses in her eyes like the jackpot cherries of a ready-to-hit slot machine. She’s just waiting for that third dress to ring up, JACKPOT! She puts quarter after quarter into the slot, year after year hoping, waiting,

    In some ways I destroyed that dream.  I’m still withholding marriage, can’t see a hearth in my future. Jimmy “the dream barricade” Jazz. What a slime ball. Alaska wants to get married, and I don’t. Getting married seems like it would mean giving up something I’m not yet mature enough to part with. We could label it “Freedom,” but I then I have to ask myself, is this my expression of it.

    The speedomter reads 65 mph.

    The dream barricade takes physical expression in my bank account, the way that I secretly budget time and money so that I can be a writer for the summer without slaving for the Man. I'd like to go on tour with my friend Harlan’s band Rhythm Collision next summer. The ability to go go go without anchor. Not that I leave nothing behind, and I carry with me the expectation to return like a bedroll and suitcase. I love Melody Lee so much, and need as much as I need to roam and experience. I wouldn’t have anyone else raise her. Only I know her potential. I worship it and don’t intend to let anyone screw it up.

    The alternating daymare of the air conditioning and oven heat had dried us up.

    “I need something to drink and food,” Alaska says.

    “Let’s go back to A & W. It'll add to the circular structure of my book,” I say.

    “Costs too much chief.”
    “Well let’s go into this market.”
    “We could make sandwiches,” adds Alaska.

    I bump the car into one of the three spaces in front of the Sav- Mart. We hear the oil pan grind on the concrete dip of the driveway. The park lot here, like the A & W yesterday, is torn up, returning to the desert. I reach in the back for my shirt, slip it over my head. No shirt, no shoes no entrance.

    We three travellers approach the market in search of food, eyes wide for kicks, still searching for drama. I'm looking for clues as to the secret of this wonderful town. Information overload: two dozen signs and notices to read before entering:

          Help Wanted, Lost Dog, Health Warning, Prayer Meeting...

Iron bars cage the windows. The store is small, it’s an old style market rather than a ‘super’market. It reminds me a little of Updike’s A &P. It’s most endearing charm is that it’s probably owned by a human. It’s like stepping into a suburban house at random, unexpected. The residents didn’t have a chance to hide the dirty dishes under the sink. The store appears lived in. It has a smell to it. Most supermarkets are careful not to have any associative smells. The seventy year old dairy case gives the whole store the smell of an old dead refrigerator. It smells like old freon.

    We veer right through the produce section on the lookout for any crazy looking locals. The locals have got to be crazy looking, madhouse escappees and fugitives from the law.

    “What should we eat?”
    “I don’t know, let’s cruise the perimeter and scope out the bargains.”

    I see you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. There doesn’t seem to be many customers. The clerk at the register is checking a man out. The man seems like a passer through, like us. He stands fairly still with urbane gesticulations.

    We walk straight to the back of the ill lit store. The stores in California just got the bright idea to flood the aisles with light, high production values for maximum product illumination. The Sav-Mart just sells food to people who are hungry. I’m checking the aisles for unfamiliar brands gandering the scene with contrast eyes, for some local delicacies. Figanini flambée. I don’t recognize all of the brand names though the store carries many national lines.

    SeyMour picks up and puts down everything. We are like a walking circus. Alaska and I carry the ring like two clowns while McBean performs. He will open boxes of crackers, cookies, he will stuff your pockets with handfuls of pistachio nuts. This little bit of shoplifting is his vote of confidence for corporate grocery. He will toss grapes into the air and catch them in his mouth while sauntering down the produce aisle.

    I’m glad to see, despite his expressed hunger, he isn’t nibbling at the store’s profit margin. The place looks like it could go bankrupt at any second. Where would that leave the people of Gila Bend? Hungry. They would have to rename the town Gila Monster because that would be the only thing that could live here.

    We are picking everything up, looking it over, tossing to each other. A can of beans flies toward me. I hand it to Alaska who puts it back on the shelf. A red apple zings almost too high, I’m make the grab, pick up two more from the sparse bin and demostrate my juggling talent.

    “Let’s eat this.” Long pass, miraculous catch. Box of crackers. Right back at you.

    “We still have that watermelon in the car.”
    “I thought we were going to eat sandwiches.”
    “What kind?”

    We are moving along the back wall of the store, the dairy case. I’m scanning everything. Looking for something. Nothing looks edible. Nothing will satisfy us. We see small warming case, where they have a few whole chickens roasted. There are a few cheap too burritos looking ready to eat.

    I reach in expecting the burrito to be hot and flick it around the triangle like a hot potato. When it comes back to me I read the package aloud: “Hey simulated bean and cheese-foodstuffs.” The burrito is frozen in the middle. Before anyone can say, “They’re frozen” we all have one in our hands. Alaska, then SeyMour, and then me, after craning my neck for a microwave oven, put the things back. Isn’t there a taboo about picking up food and putting it back? Why aren’t there used food stores, like used book stores or used tire outlets? This food was handled by the tactless ones, the invaders from California with their foreign bacteria.

    We have likely unleashed a plague that will decimate the population of this small town. The next wave of cynical travellers will find the unburied corpses of the last to die. I think this has happened before. I’ll bet the store clerk got here just before we did. He found the place deserted and decided to earn a few bucks like the time me and Robbie Fay levied a two dollar in-fee to at a party that we, ourselves, had crashed. We stood out front and collected the dough, made thirteen bucks, unitl The Specials “Concrete jungle, the animals are after me” came on inside and we had to forego business for the sake of dance.

    The burritos go back into the pathetic warmer, and I’m staring at the carnage section. There is a large variety of dead animal. Most probably picked up off the road and skinned right in the back. It all looks so bloody. I peel off a sticker from one of the packs, paste it to the inside of my shirt, sly, but with an incredible onset of paranoia. I’m thinking they might have anti-souvenir surveillance cameras. They might give my photo to the F.B.I. At the very least a bunch of guys will come out of the back and beat the skin off me. I might even wind up plastic wrapped and styrofoam packed with a sticker of my own.

    They have the ribs and legs, the tongue, the end, the intestines all wrapped in styrofoam and plastic. With a little imagination you can piece the animal back together. I’ve done this and a holy cow is now carousing the aisles with us. “Concrete jungle/The animals are out tonight.”

    Bags of chips fly off the shelves for inspection in McBean's wake. All bags go back for one reason or another. You can’t please all of the people even some of the time. We split up. I for the cold drink section. Alaska went off to find dip for her chips. I want something a little alternative non-corporate to drink, when McBean comes up behind me. He has a box of Wheat Thins. “They have nothing but name brand soda slop.” I don’t drink that. My sophisticated pallet will have to suffer.

    Iced caffeine is our thing. Alaska sells espresso back home, and I (being the lover of anything free) tend to drink myself into heavy jitters. I’ll have two double espressos with pistachio syrup on ice, and then cop a single vanilla latté on an exit visa. Five shots of espresso has the wallop pack of ten cups of coffee. It is a very subtle trip. The sugar bolt over the horizon is on the spiral down before the caffeine really starts to buzz. So you nod out from sugar crash and lie there unable to close your eyes because of the vibrating nerves.

    Old beta-carotene McBean spots the raspberry iced tea and we are set for drinks. Three cans in the prickly claw paw. Something about my overwhelming thirst or the smell of this joint, or the fact I already ate today leaves me aHungry. We head for the line up, Alaska comes on like synchronized swimming for the checkout line.

    Thar she blows! My indefatigable native. McBean where is your camera?

    The woman is a jangle bang bone cart loaded down with the history of America. She appears to be of African descent. Her skin is like passion fruit. The wrinkles have been dried and sharpened into creases. What’s left of her hair is silver filaments. My amaze is fueled by the extracurricular motions in her walk. Her legs, hips, lips move in ways unnecessary to youth. Her lips are rodilating like cow on cud. There seems to be no teeth left in her jaw. Maleficent lodestar of crazy chatter du mumblypeg looney dada draws her down the aisle like a San Francisco cable car. Perhaps her character is brimming with sweet insanity which took root as eccentricity some years ago. She liked to chew tabbacky, or dress in men’s suits. What a woman she must have been? Brazen, dragging her man off the bar stool in front of his friends. Ella Fitzgerald crooning on the juke one hundred thirty-third street. The men laugh, and have more respect for her than him…

    In the nineteen-thirties, she might have danced in Paris with Josephine Baker. She was a travelling blues singer or a telephone operator. The way her hands are twisted like the roots of old vines, she could have worked on a farm. Her posture is destroyed. The spine bowed. The shoulders are folding toward each other. She is balling up. Sometimes her arms look too heavy to bear. They look as they might fall off like the dead limbs of a tree.

    Here with almost all the life drained out of her by years of hardship she emits a sad beauty. I hope she’s not alone, give her a mother or a bed ridden husband, cats or a gila monster. You can see her using all the remaining energy of her old and lofty soul to keep from folding up into a final fetal ball. It is like the big bang carried out to its final step. The universe is rapidly closing in on itself gravity driven. Gravitational collapse!

    The clerk is helping her. He's half her age. I’d say he’s fifty. He’s wearing a white apron. Pen behind ear. All so quaint, perfect. While SeyMour and Alaska wait to check out the edibles, I go to check out the long glass case to the right of the front door. I pass through the beer section. I have come around full circle. The case is filled with guns. There is an impressive stainless steel magnum .44. Champagne cork pop, let flow the bubbly. This is a big gun. It’s sterile like a surgical tool. Remove your pancreas. There are .38 specials, even one of those riverboat gambler pistols that you can hide in the palm of your hand. The sign says you have to wait two weeks before you can take a gun home.

    “Let’s start a band, Pacifists with Guns,” I say aloud to no one in particular. I have a quick fantasy vision of shooting a kid who is trying to steal my car… it fizzles with him lying dead, hole in head gaping blood waterfall staining the upholstery. The blood is black and thick like motor oil.

    I find another souvenir, an Arizona Lottery golf pencil. I take one. McBean comes up, groceries in the sack, and takes a handful of golf pencils for friends and relations. Exit. The heat almost knocks us down. The store must have been air conditioned. The heat is crawling into my lungs like rats, or sperm hounding the egg. The heat swarms into me.

    Spermicide chaser of iced tea. Cooly toothsome. Glup glup glup. The first thing I do is re-stick the Sav-Mart beef ox tail meat sticker in my Little Black Book.  I take up the driving task again. Why? McBean is in the navigator spot. Alaska is munching chips and onion dip in the back.

    In the middle of Gila Bend, the middle of the middle of nowhere. “Here we are nowhere, nowhere left to go.”  A cosmic moment with cosmic momentum carrying me down the street and the years. We pass the Stout Hotel. Plywood nailed over windows. Not a soul checking in or out. “Five months, three weeks, two days, my baby’s been gone.” Shacked up in this old hotel for men only– cheeze whiz and zagnut bar in the concession machine. Friday night fight telecast to the lobby. Cardboard suitcase with Niagara Falls sticker faded and peeling. Chicago bullet hole, left of dead center: previous owner. Seven pair of silk underwear, and my last clean socks. Extra spats. Shaving brush, straight razor and tooth cream. Half a bottle of Reverend Gabby’s wake-up tonic…

    On the left is Mill’s Ice House. A giant refrigerator. It looks like you can walk right in for an frosty bottle of beer. The proprietor, name’s Rusty, quit prospecting when his mule died, rocking in his chair on the porch, selling racks of sundries and artificially flavored snack foods.

    Here again is the A &W root beer joint. The park lot blasted by time and weather. I somehow expected the place to be like it was forty years ago. I wanted us to do the time warp. The place is still void of customers. It looks closed. I drive by smiling, extra slow. I’m thinking of the teenage girl who worked there. Now hoping that she didn’t run away. “Stay here where it’s quiet little one.”

    We had come into Gila Bend slowly. The iced tea has been drunk and we are still thirsty as we leave the little town. And though we are leaving slowly (radar man fear extant) we passed through quickly. We didn’t speak to anyone, we weren’t invited to dinner, we didn’t make a friend or an enemy. When life passes this way, it seems to pass quickly. So I will say we passed through Gila Bend quickly even if it was twenty miles an hour.

THE ROAD TOWARD YUMA

The mile markers are count downing toward Yuma. I have the cruise control set on the limit. I have beaten my speed habit. Abused it, my speed habit bruised around the ribs. I love you baby. Maybe I only drive fast moving away from home. Maybe I can’t afford another ticket. Maybe this slower safer speed will be interpreted as a will to live.

    SeyMour walks through life carrying a premonition of premature death. “Ttttt. I won’t be around then,” he says.

    “I used to think life was so ugly ‘live fast, die young’ and leave a pretty corpse.”

    Drive, drive white lines mesmerize, digthe repetition. We eat the wheat thins and the chips. Our thirst redoubles. I filled up a two gallon jug of water for the trip. Left it home. I have maneuvered the renta-car so that the left tire is in the fast lane, and the right tire is in the slow lane. I’m expecting something magical, vortextural. I should clear my mind of expectations. I should flush that toilet. The white line that separates the lanes is shooting into my body with medicinal velocity. It’s a physical rush like the road is sharing its essence with me. This is a sexual experience. I don’t know what to call it, auto-erotic?

    “SeyMour you should try this. It’s like meditation.” I steer the car so that the white lines shoot into his body.

    “Hey what’s the date today, boss?”

    I don’t know at first. “It’s the 7th.” I remembered the Tramps gig was on the sixth.

    “The expiration on this dip was the 4th, boss.”
    “Ewww.” Immediately our stomachs begin to ache.
    “Hurl is contagious. He who barfs first, does not barf last.”

    “We're gonna die.” The conversation goes like that for miles. We all take turns smelling the dip. We should be sick in the desert, for drama. If all the moisture wasn’t sucked out of the blop before it hit the street, we could watch it sizzle. If McBean had a pancake turner in his ruck sack o’ fun, we could cook it crisp on the road and bring it home like a dried cow pie. We could sell it wholesale to Rip Griffin. He’d put it on the shelf, little sign: Road Vomit $11.99. But we are forced to agree that the dip smells fine. I decide it’s okay, and dip another wheat thin in it.

    Alaska stretches herself on the back seat for a happy siesta nod. Alaska remembers dreams. She must be living just above the surface of her subconscious. Her dreams are packed with absurdly intricate details: “The minute hand on the killer’s wristwatch ticked backwards. I saw him reflected in a huge Victorian mirror. He needed a shave, a breath mint. He had a watch with Mickey Mouse on it, except it wasn’t Mickey, it was you Jimmy. What were you doing on the night stalker’s watch?” The dream is so real that she, for a second, holds me accountable for questions like that. Her dreams are more complex than any of our conscious lives. I rarely remember dreams.

    McBean continues writing his song of the road. I’m calling out mile markers. I’m day tripping and commenting on every tumble weed. SeyMour is particularly fascinated by a dust devil that sweeps over us. Dust Devil: making lofty roadside litter near you. A Rip Griffin product. The granules of sand scour the outside of the car as we smash through it. I feel like Dorothy going to Oz, except we have air conditioning and the radio is playing “I’m like a one-eyed jack peeping in a seafood store.”

    The song drives my thoughts away. I surrender to peaceable head bobs and the toe (freed by cruise control) is free to tap. Shake, rattle and roll at mile 80 toward Yuma. The next song is a Chuckus Berry. Wail Wail guitar, rock con roll. Heavy roll my brothers. My favorite line in this song is “Rocking the coin right into the slot.” For a long time I thought it was “rocking the corn right into the slot.” Either way you sing it this is a thin sexual allusion. I wish I was rocking the coin into the slot right now. If my life were fiction, remember the film Big Wednesday, SeyMour would be driving and playing the radio loud trying to cover my sex grunts and Alaska's low pleasure moans.

    It is The Rolling Stone Dictionary that defines rock ‘n’ roll as “a blue’s euphemism for sexual intercourse.”

    “Sex, cars and R & R: what a book this’ll make.” SeyMour doesn’t hear me. SeyMour the notorious not listening subject changer. His brain wants to talk about his thing. Maybe it’s me. Sometimes he’ll surprise you by repeating something you said, when you thought he wasn’t listening. Alaska says sometimes I talk too soft, or with my mouth talking away from your ears. That bugs her. So I end up saying “What?” to her even if I heard what she said, just to balance things out. Balance is my thing. Not mediocrity, but the counterweight of two extremes. My life the high wire walker’s pole.

    “I’m sick of driving do you want to switch?” I say.
    “You mean while we’re driving?”
    “Of course.”

    Without a third word I check the cruise control. Set. There isn’t another vehicle in either horizon. I stand up on the seat. My bare feet on the plush seat.

    “I’m road surfing.” My brain is playing the world’s greatest surf tunes. “Police Truck,” anything by the Cramps, and San Francisco's Trashwomen who play surf music from the crypt and scream wearing red fringe bikinis, fishnet stockings and devil horns. I bought their single. Melody Lee gets crazy whenever I play it. She will jump up on the coffee table, or a chair and start yelling, big voice yells, “THE DEVIL WOMAN!” And she will dance that surf dance. That dying of thirst get-that-water out-of-that-well dance. Pull the rope, pull the rope. She can really shake it for a five year old. I’m hanging five on the driver’s seat, cruising down the face of an intense black wall of surf at 65 miles per hour.

    “Wipeout.”

    McBean has the wheel. I dive out of the seat landing standing, now we're both in the passenger seat. My knees dig into his back. We do it all without words. An eighteen wheeler approaches head on one lane over. Our left front and rear tires thump on the center line divider bumps. Thud thud thud. I retake the wheel while he hops into the driving range. Honnnnnnk. The trucker blows his horn. Hold on to your balls, no one is at the brake. Fore, free, too, one!

    It’s over. McBean is driving. I'm the passenger. I have lost control. With the steering wheel, I dump the You Gee El Why– UGLY responsibility for our lives with him. I buckle up, it’s the law and everything is all right.

    A pesky little ear of my responsible self is still with me. SeyMour doesn’t have a driver’s license. The government wants him to pay 100 dollars to renew it, money better spent on paint, or a gig. He drives every day in the city, but here on the open road, “nowhere to hide, nowhere to run to baby” the potential for pull over seems inevitable. Like thermonuclear war seemed when we were growing up. I don’t believe in guilt. Yet, though I don’t believe in Sanity Clause, I accept presents in the middle of winter. If SeyMour got caught he’d be pulling a Leroy Toker, who “spent the night in jail”  in Arizona for driving without a license. Roommate of ours at the time. Toker was a nice kid, his parents owned the TDP ballroom where we squatted. I haven’t seen him in years.

    After a minute in the navigator’s position, paroxisms of do-it-again swell over me These cheap thrills are a cheap high. This time I want to do a three way switch, Alaska to drive, McBean back to the shotgun, and Jazz hop into the back for happy little siesta.

    But Alaska is sawing the proverbial logs. Most of the time her sleep is audible. She looks so sweet lying back there, I’m glad we didn’t kill her in a head-on with some large crossing-the-freeway animal. Accordion car, accordion car, tell us how strong you are made. With your joints a-rust and your tires gone bald, your radiator has bunged a leak.

    The mask is wearing thin.

    SeyMour is goofing around with the car. He’s swerving back and forth creating a slow sideways rocking motion. We both look back at Alaska. “Rock a bye, baby cradle on the road, when you wake up your boyfriend’s a toad,” he sings.

    “Cut it out I’m trying to write.” Perhaps when art becomes killjoy it should die. The first thing I write is, ‘Alaska’s missing the intermittent green in a molten sea of bright yellow all sealed tight with farm smog and blue icing smoothing out the tip top.’

    There is a mountain in the far distance that looks like a skate board ramp. I never could skate, Mom wouldn’t let me. “Just watch the normal boys and girls get aerial on the ramp.” The best view of the ramp is at Mile 47 west toward Yuma. A writer of yore would have known the name of that mountain. Or he would have named it. “Giant’s Skateramp.”

    I lend SeyMour my sunglasses. I snatch the cap off his noggin. Snap it on my own. It fits tight. The trade has become official. We’ve switched uniforms, he is me, the driver, loading his skull with linear thoughts. I am “the passenger.”   Everything becomes a formal escapade of shapes and color theory. If there’s trouble SeyMour can grab my little biker wallet and hand the copper my identification. I tried to use SeyMour’s i.d. once to get into a bar. In my 20 year old limbo days. It didn’t work.

    “Six-tee Minute Man” is on the radio.

    Hey, girls check me out, I’m the new improved double jazzy SeyMour F. McBean. SeyMour McBean your sixty minute man. I write: Big U.F.O. territory. Spaceman landing says, this is a planned palm tree planet . There are rows and rows of palms ripe for the date picking. The trees are stubby short. “Fifteen minutes of kissing.” Perhaps the whole tree is being readied for export. “Fifteen minutes of rubbing.” Go space man, go, far far out daddy-o! “Holler don’t stop.” This is going to be another great book about driving with the radio on. “Come up and see old Dan.” Dig that fat baritone. Rub a dub dub a squeeze and a hug. Come on baby just another second. The palm tree is a frightening piece of evolution, the way the fronds fan out explosive from the top of the long john bite-as-rough-as-its-bark trunk. “Fifteen minutes of blowing my top!”

    Mile 42: Pyramid of junk. Cars, refrigerators, the dead hulls of discarded appliance. And the first squid bush.

    “What the hell is that anyway?”

    There is a range mounting, peeking at us like a migrating whale. Dirt leviathan. And the road disappears into “Got to get back to my baby again.” My baby, Melody Lee. I am missing her. I have a book in the works, milling in the unexplainable machinery of my writing brain, about Melody Lee. I call the book “Growing up on Jazz: the aphorisms of an enlightened youngster.” The words that come out of that girl can be impious, irreverent, enlightening, magnanimous, remonstrant. “We came to know, we came to camp, we came to do everything, but sleep.”  I wonder how she would turn out without my influence.

    “Give me a ticket to an aeroplane //Ain’t got time to take a fast train.”

    Mile 37: The Boxtops are singing “The Letter.” In the side view mirror I see it. It’s a sign, an omen. There is a giant letter A painted in white on the side of a hill. It is so vague and susceptible to interpretation that it has to be a religious message. This is the bent of our pilgrimage, a miracle, a sign, an omen.

    But we blaze right on by and my reflection of its meaning is cut short by the continued bombardment of stimuli. There is another sign:

     KEEP OFF THE MEDIAN

    “Who would go on the median?”

    The lay of the land has been dominated by dry colors. The rich barren browns of the hills, the golden effuse of the alfalfa weeds, even the green in the shrubs is dull. Too much chlorophyll, too much sun absorption, taking in all the heat the desert sun has to offer is death.

    Then the farms begins with geometric rectangles of hay bails stacked by the tracks for train exit. The train track shoots in one long rocket bolt west toward the coast, and an even longer slow rail hum east to America.

    It doesn’t seem fair that human society has forcibly impressed on mother’s desert the rigorous gardens of geometry. The straight edges of the hay bails stand out like swords or arrows in a 3-D movie. The effect thrills you at first, but the plots of those movies are always pathetically shallow, and like the presence of the farm, leave you a-marvel at the stupidity we are asked to endure. Two slamming quadrants of brilliant green. Irrigated irritation for the eye. Humanity defies the sun and the dust to dull the power of a billion gallons of water a day. Water water, not everywhere, just in two square patches cut out of the desert puzzle. Yet, green leaves the eye and the mind at peace. For where there is green there is the possibility of life. That’s what the pioneers said to the Indians.

    Hood up Help! at the roadside, man seething within the steam of his radiator gone volcanic. We blaze right on by at 70 mph. There lies our road-killed Karma.

    The road is littered with the carcass of exploded tire. SeyMour is driving and singing along with the radio. “Walk right in // walk right out.” I’m still wearing McBean’s baseball beany. I turn my attention to Alaska who stirs in her rest, her eyes slit open, unaccustomed to the glare. I reach back for a friendly tweak of her breast. Tweak. Boo bee. I’m thinking she’ll think that SeyMour has gone mad. Recalcitrant desire unleashed. She doesn't know we switched places. Her eyes open wider, double-take, but sleep is too much with her.

    Ever approaching mount-hills barren like dry death– ashen piles of nothing and no view– paperweights on the desert – without– the whole fucking thing would blow off one grain at a time revealing the new skin, the new way, the new fertile ground. The desert is a scab protecting the earth from man’s infection. As of now either side of the road belongs to the creatures. Except for the small farm nature’s biosphere is free to explore the possibility of life. The hawk, the rat, the snake, the underground pantheon of creepy crawlies. What are bugs without Human to bug? Creatures of blesséd faculties and angelic merit in their private ranks.

    “Down in the boondocks, down in the boondocks.” The radio exploits a simple truth. We are still docking with the boons just west of the middle of nowhere.

    “What is a boondock?” asks McBean.
    “There behind that bush clump,” I shout. Point index finger.

    We roll into the dome valley telegraph crucifix repeater. The eye crashes into an art lesson in perspective as we look forward at the shrunken crosses rising. The tele-poles are whisking past too fast to count.

    “Hey Alaska do you want to drive?” asks McBean. His patience for the road spent already. But before she can answer, before we can determine if she even heard the query another sign appears. Everything in the desert is so perfectly understated:

     WATCH THE ROCKS

    They are everywhere. Even if you tried to drive with your eyes closed, their presence would be pressed on your darkened lids. Small rock, big rocks, round rocks, teetering rocks, a billion billion uncountable amount of rocks. Rocks, rocks everywhere. So we drive and watch the rocks.

    “The rocks ain’t doing much,” SeyMour observes.

    Our Plymouth comes up quick and close on the backdoor of a wide load harvester Yuma bound. It's doing about thirty mph. Yuma appears in a cosy valley below looking like a giant trailer park.

    “Yuma looks like a trailer park,” I say.

    Suddenly, the first time since Gila Bend, we have company on the road. Passing the Harvester we find ourselves next to a convoy of lumbering road ogres. We entice Mr. Peterbuilt to blow the air horn on his big built rig. He does. It’s like a trumpet surge. We descend on the city! Beware. “Riders on the storm.”

    As the horn vibrates into the air it strikes a resonance with my bladder. Bladder, bladder what’s the matter. Oh, my bladder is road weary, but my soul is a-wander and will ride the wild asphalt trail.

    “This ain't Yuma It's a trailer park!” The radio is singing about Quin the Eskimo.

    “Exit 9: Yuma. Nothing. There is a rash on my leg more interesting than this,” I say.

    McBean ignores me.

    “American woman.” A-la-ska. “American woman.” A-la-ska. Her torso folds into an upright position. Awake. She is hot and sweat beady. The air-con must not be as intense in the back. My toes are froze. I jump into the back with her. She jumps into the front.

    “Let's do a three way switch,” I suggest. She just stares at me with just woke up eyes that say, shut the hell up.

    I write this little poem in my black book,

“Butte horizon smile
watch the rocks
in the rear window
diminish into nothing,
a memory,
nothing.
Everything is dust desert dust,
dry dry die die go thirsty in the desert dust
and die, dry.”

    “I have to PEEEEEE!” I proclaim. McBean pulls into a Denny's across the street from the Shell station where we saw the devil. It's damn hot.

    “I think the human body dies at 118,” says SeyMour.
    “No that doesn’t sound right,” I say.
    “But it feels right,” Alaska adds.

    I look over at the gas station man. He’s just standing there in the shade, calm, ready to take money for his services.

    Behind him hung on the outside of the station, in the shade too, is a thermometer. It reads 115 degrees in the shade!
 
YUMA

I never thought I’d be running to get inside a Denny’s again. I am trying to put on my shoes. SeyMour is looking for our shirts. The great solar mad scientist is cranking up the flame on the Bunsen burner. Alaska isn’t waiting she’s already at the door of the Denny’s. She has these slip on old Pilipino woman shoes, wooden, with genuine leather upper, black, wide heel. They slip right on and she’s gone. Clack clack clack clack. Will our heroes be cooked alive like lobster? Heart’s racing, body temp on the rise. “Come on up and rise river.” A flood of laughter as our sanity is cooked away like the impurities in a junk spoon – earth spoon, sun flame, human junk. Life addict. The shoes are on and we are that proverbial fish jumping out of the frying pan, into the air-con safety of corporate eats America.

    Beeline buzzing for the urinal. I used to clean urinals at Denny’s. I mopped floors and washed dishes. I dusted the fake plants, and bussed tables. That was a long time ago, in a galaxy exactly like this. I move to pee and pee, whiz, leak, piss, urinate, number one like the flood gates of desert farm irrigation. A billion gallons, of ahhhhhh.

    We’re all back, detoxed, load’s lightened, and Marice is leading us to a vinyl booth in the no smoke zone for a happy little meal. Marice our waitress wears that beaten facial facade common to wait-help in this land. She wears the same uniform and panty-hose standard that you’ll find at Denny’s across the west. Hair balled up so we don’t have to pull the long black strands out of our salad.

    Whenever we three travellers have eaten at Denny’s in the past it’s the garden salad and the cracker boat. Extra ranch dressing for cracker dipping. “Three salads.” Crackers are free eats for our low budget needs. The salad: one buck fifty a pop. “Three tall glasses of water.” The walk from the car to the restaurant dehydrated us.

    We grill Marice for the details of her life in Yuma. She obliges in a forlorn voice, tainted with regret of someone who followed her dreams over a cliff, lemming meringue pie on the side. “With a shaker of formaldehyde from Charles Hitler’s brain.” 

    “I moved here with my husband. We’ve been here four years.”

    “Wow.”
    “Amazing”
    “So what do you do for kicks around here?”
    “Nothing.” Pow. Bullet retort. There is the obligatory silence of the post-assassination moment. Until we figure out who has been shot.

    She relinquishes her hard line and tells us about the bar where her and her husband drink. I’m immediately thinking she’s hooked up with Charles Bukowski as if he was the only man left in America who still drinks.

    “Sometimes we go bowling, sometimes two-stepping,” Marice says. She makes exodus to help less pesky customers who ordered more food and will likely leave bigger tips.

    The air-con chill really sets in to my flesh. It cools the marrow. And it lights my innards a-quiver. I am overcome with the absolute necessity to loose my bowels on Yuma.

    This time I go to the toilet alone. The shit elixir jets out quick before I can even sit down, a brown string onto the naked water. I didn’t have time to get the auxiliary life jacket in the agua. I feel a wet splash on the face of my butt cheek. There is a post movement pain, right under my ribs, where I imagine my intestines to be, like tubes of squeezed tooth paste. It’s an empty pain.

    It takes me way back, 16 years old, I work at a grocery store. They had me clean the meat room. I signed up to bag groceries and they threw me, low man on the totem, to the meat room. It was so cold in there. I was sick anyway. I wore a ski jacket. The uniform white shirt, new shoes (just paid $40 for ‘em) black pants. I was hosing off the band saw. I was trying to aquajet the gristle and blood off the saw teeth. I was washing all the fat scraps into a drain hole filter. The water drains, but I had to scoop out the residue meat and fat chunks manual labor. I was really cold. The room being preservative cold for the meat’s sake. Plus the hose punched up the chill factor. I was wet, the room was wet, both cold.

    And then that need to shit took me completely by surprise. Like when you’ve drank ten beers really fast and think you’re fine, hollow leg drinking man, then blamo, all the alcohol goes to work on you, like three guys kicking your ass, and there’s nothing you can do but pass out. So I passed out. I was new in the store I didn’t even know where the can, the shitter, the head, the crapper, the latrine was. I found it, one, two, three seconds too late. I shit my pants.

    I washed up in the sink with the door locked. I was wet from the meat hose anyway. Shaking like I just got in a fist fight. I dropped my shitty underwear into a trash bag. The smell of shit was still all soaked into my pants. I took the trash out the back, where a bunch of the regular crew coerced me into helping them pitch the store's trash into the dumpsters. I clocked out and went home. [I got the flu, I was fired less than two weeks later.]

    It’s hard to look cool coming out of the rest room, with or without shit in your pants. But I laid to rest what I needed here in Yuma and it was over. I was cleaned out. Happy isn’t the right word. I stop at the telephone booth for a gander at the local Yuma pages. The book is about twice as thick as the one in Gila Bend. In the business section I find one listing for a café– The Garden. I’m in the mood for a little jump juice, cold and black. Denny's coffee makes me shit.

    My salad is waiting at the booth. I sit down. McBean and Alaska are already eating. SeyMour has already ignited a couple of cracker wrappers. They lay waste beside his plate. I sprinkle the black table pepper on my salad. If you can put enough pepper on your otherwise-bland food, it transforms it into something else. I shake that jar for what it’s worth. I shake, I shake, I like much pepper.

    We feast like rabbits, except domestic rabbits don’t eat salad, they eat rabbit chow. We eat like Bugs Bunny chain choking carrots. We have the manners of cartoon characters. In the aftermath the table is a wasteland of perspiration from the water glasses, cracker wrappers, gloops of spilled dressing, the crummy bones of crushed crackers, little pieces of lettuce expelled from laughter mouth. And a thin black blanket of pepper snow. I scoop everything onto a plate, busboy style. It’s all in the wrist, swoosh, the field is clear for frolic. Picaso was an arm busser, Matise was a wrist busser. Alaska excuses herself to the powder room, evidently she needs to powder.

    I grab a napkin from the table next to ours. The unrolled utensils clatter. I begin a poem for our waitress, so lonely here in Yuma.



“Those fat rich
Californians
vacationing at the salad bar
think (sometimes)
that lettuce is chalk full of vitamins
– nutritioso–-
that croutons grow on vines
and that ranch dressing is the exotic
milk of the desert cactus.
And why did he (the cute one)
sprinkle half a bottle of pepper on the greens
And why did they come
to YUMA
Do their lives lack
SPICE
that much?”

    I left the napkin on the table with a dollar.

    SeyMour is stretched out on the booth set for a five wink nap. I being the trendy little follower type that I am leap into the adjacent booth legs curling even before I hit horizontal. My head comes to rest on the crisp vinyl. I can see McBean under the tables. There wasn’t a stick of gum under that table. SeyMour looked over at me. Two resting souls of the great travellers. Looking into his face took me crooked back to the days when we shared a bunk bed. I am leaning over the bed edge my hair hanging down. I’m smiling, but it’s upside down to SeyMour crashed out arm extended doodling on the bed wood, he’s writing the name of his new favorite band. It’s a happy little reflection with all the petty room mate animosity boiled out of it, no dishes piled to the rafters, no don’t use my towel under this Denny’s booth in Yuma, Arizona.

    I close my eyes, and feel sleep ruminate from them in a passive ease across the surface of my skin, and lighting up the junctures of ligament and bone with the twinkling seizure of sleep. But it's damn cold in here, even with my bowels empty. If I had my sleep roll I could crash here, but naked just won’t do. I’m not sure how long I’ve been down. There is something, like sleep holding me.

    “What the hell are you guys doing?”Alaska growls like a frumious Bandersnatch. She came back to the booth. Didn’t see us. She went outside. In the heat. The melodious torch song of the sun didn’t soothe her trip. She waited out by the car for minutes. She looked around, felt abandoned. Perhaps McBean and I ran off with the waitress.

    “I didn’t know where you were,” she states.
    “We were right here, hun?” Hun as in Atilla. She is angry. She pulls me aside.
    “You were hiding from me!” She accuses.
    “We were just laying here,” I say.
    “You'd rather spend time with McBean. I'm sick of you ignoring me,” she scolds.
    “I'd like to see you under the table,” I say.
    “You're just an asshole,” she says.
    “Sorry,” I manage. I feel like I’m always apologizing for my big feet which step hard on the feet of my dance partner. Am I a cad? Am I the very heel of bread? Am I just another inconsiderate pig male, yawn? May be. In these situations a real American man would get mad right back. Maybe slap her across the mouth. Maybe entice her to throw an ashtray at me. But I am incapable of this kind of anger. Instead I feel repentant, negatively Christian. Here slap my other cheek I deserve it. But it will cost you martyrdom. See the holes in the hands, those are stigmata baby, I’ve suffered.

    She hates the way I say “sorry.” She feels like it doesn't sound sincere.

    “Hey why don’t we get some iced coffee, on me?” Besides wanting the go juice I mean this as a serious subject-change mood enhancer. It works! As soon as I pay the check, and say adíos to Marice, we exit once again into the crazy heat of Yuma. Happy as clams ready to bake.

    The heat, as expected, plays fervor inferno with our skin. Wouldn’t it have been swell (not to mention dramatic) if we had come out into a freak snow storm, brought on by a rogue arctic squall. At least a bit of cloud, or a solar eclipse.

    “Who has the keys?” The keys by this time have become a running gag. SeyMour is holding. He tosses them to me, I toss them over to Alaska.

    “You’re in the driver’s seat kiddo.” I realize I'm pushing my luck. Alaska’s dad calls her kiddo. It’s funny I usually call her mom. Kinky Oedipal. I started it so that Melody Lee would know to call her Mama. Alaska calls me dad. Mostly it’s a private family thing, but a few times she has called me dad in front of friends. Sometimes Melody will call me Jimmy and Alaska will call me dad in the same spree of conversation. It’s kind of sick if you analyze it. So don’t.

    Alaska takes the keys gently out of my palm. Throwing could be misconstrued as hostility in disguise at this point. So I hand them, and try to follow with a love peck. It doesn't connect.

    Alaska opens the car door. Ballet stretch, fingers extended, snap, the passenger door is open. McBean claims the back. I climb into the navigator position, ready to ride. Alaska adjusts the seat, the mirror. She takes a few seconds to acquaint herself. Clunk. The transmission is in reverse and we are rolling toward the exploration of Yuma.

    We tour around the streets. There is an interesting little street with a fountain in the middle. It is red bricked, flowers planted along the way. We drive around looking for the café street. We pass through the parking lot of the Territorial Prison. This is the big tourist trap of the town. We are no little grey mice. The prison itself is an adobe oven. Part of it is underground. The adobe bricks rise up. There are air holes poked in the top. Bars across those to keep the roaches in. At first I’m thinking we still have prisoners in there, but would the state charge admission for that?

    It would be something like the execution channel. Step right up and see the man with the most parking tickets in Arizona. Over here stretched on the rack with his fingers boiling in water right in front of his eyes is the guy who drove 90 miles an hour, just four miles that side of Yuma. The convicted must have done dastardly diabolical deeds to be cast into this dungeon. Another death? Heat exhaustion. Hmmm. Imagine that. My grandparents would love to see their neighborhood thugs pitched into this hole. They cringe in front of the electric hookah, shocked aghast at the degradation of their once ideal society. There are a few petty bastard criminals I’d like to see dry roasted for a few days. I’d like to chop the ears off of the guy who stole my car (and the guy at the towing company who didn’t report that he had the car on the lot, but charged me $200 storage, and then sold me a battery for $20 more when we discovered mine missing) and cure the ears like dried banana chips.

    Alaska gets sick of driving without a clue, me saying right turn left turn at the last second. We pull the car to stop. I take the wheel once again. “There’s a crazy little shack beyond the tracks.” Randomly coursing the streets brings us to The Garden before the radio singer can say “espresso coffee tastes so good” three times. I drive right past the address.

    “There it is,” she says.

    The street sign says one way. But reverse is just a backward expression of one way, so I jam the plunger to “R” and zip back 100 feet.

THE GARDEN

From the outside it looks like a tourist grotto. A gift shop. A stylized mini-mall. There is a clothing boutique up front. There are no customers. It is hard to tell if it’s open from the car. I parallel park between a Cadillac and a Pinto. My epitaph should read: He was a whizz of a parallel parker. Zip bang, thirty five in reverse, angle in, crank the wheel, like sex I’m in! Like sex I'm out, of the car and ready. Yuma lend us your counter culture.

    The garden is in the back (literally). The building is dark wood. The boutique owners look like they would phone the police if we walked in.

    “I feel like a mad man,” I say.
    “You look like a mad man,” Alaska adds.
    The gateway to the garden is a corridor of greenery. The first thing you notice is the mister.
    “Mistifying,” says McBean.
    There are pipes along the walkway spraying a cooling mist into the atmosphere of the whole place. Ingenious. Trees and plants bountiful, we have slipped unawares into an oasis. There are bird cages with exotic birds chirping. Jangly tintinabulum ringing in a light breeze. I strike the tune a little harder with a passing finger. It ringles. I touch things like an inquisitive child. I pull the cord on what I surmise to be a bell. It was a light switch. The cord comes off in my hand, like a lizard’s tail, surprise.

    “Ooops.” The green birds with orange beaks stare at me. They accuse. They squawk.

    The mist is misting. There are paper lanterns lying in wait for the night. We make our way into the garden. It is as beautiful as it is deserted. Like the desert maybe beautiful because it is deserted. We will be the only customers. Ideal. We pass a gift shop. We wind around tables and jet up paths that lead to the perfect rendez vous. We split up and call to each other over the leafy maze walls. A table for two, mist misting the intensity off the heat. Shade provided by trees and ivy. The garden. I want to get high on coffee and greenery. Mmmm. I’m in love with the moment. Reverie.

    Then a sign:

CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.

The season? Summer? I suppose coffee sales could dip in the heat. But I need an iced coffee. The closed sign hangs hastily dangled. I think the workers are hiding somewhere. Under the “CLOSED” is an extended note thanking Kim Bassinger and Alec Baldwin for their patronage. It seems they have shot a movie scene here. The message is unclear. Shit, Jazz/Alaska/McBean are here, the travelling trio, the road misers, lulled sleepy by the heat and the sleep song of the white lines, and WE want some espresso. One day there will be a sign here noting, “WE regret having gone on vacation while thee (two e’s) Jazz/Alaska/McBean trio came through.”

    The gang and I wander around paths. We find a table half bussed. Dirty café mocha glass left in the heat. We see trowels erectly poised in the soil. Everything is like the people ran away quite suddenly. The evidence is more than circumstantial. They heard us coming and decided to hide. It’s a joke. As the minutes drag on and the realization sets in that I will not take three jumps up high on caffeine. I feel spited, bitter, like coffee itself.

    The adjacent gift shop is open. The worker is an older woman. Grey hair. June Cleaver looking. We put on the quiz show about the coffee shop. She just works here. Her shop sells all kinds of coffee beans, chocolate go beans, flavored syrups of the rainbow, all the smelly fluf and pot pouri your mother could do without. The store is not working on our demographic. It’s all frilly with lace, and little signs embroidered hand crafted that say ‘mothers kitchen.” Rich mother’s kitchen.

    “Can’t we get a cup of espresso from you?” She has all the fixings. Her shop leads to the coffee shop. No door barring. Alaska can work the machine. Let’s fire it up.

    “No, no.” She is like the collective unconscious source of the superego. When she says “no,” it is with all the reservation of the world’s conservative mother’s with their children asking to sky dive or have a motor cycle. No means No.

    “Oh , whoa Nelly, I forgot to pack my lunch,” she exclaims
    “Your name’s Nelly? Hi Nelly.”
    “No my name’s Clara, ‘Whoa Nelly’ is just an expression I use.”
    “Do you mind if I call you Nelly?” She looks at me like I’m completely psychotic. I think I see her glance over at the phone. I think I see her lips mouth 911.

    Alaska’s concentration is buzzing around the two jars of go beans.

    “What are these?” I ask dumbly.
    “Those are chocolate covered espresso beans. Try one.” I knew she would offer.
    “How much are they?”
    “I think they’re three dollars for a quarter pound.” [12 bucks a pound!] It looks like the free sample is the only jump I’m going to get out of Yuma. Before I can reach in and cop a spilling onto the floor, bean bouncing, handful gratis, she is standing in front of me holding open the lid.
    “Go ahead try one.” She’s something like a drug pusher in disguise. Get the kid hooked on caffeine. She works as a lobbyist for Columbia in her spare time. She’s in on the Starbuck’s conspiracy. Start off with just say no to drugs, and then give them something safe, just as addictive, just as habit forming, only we can levy taxes on it. Alcohol killed itself on the road. We’ll capture the loose change of a generation. Make it seem cool. Bring back beatnik fashion. Dress them all in black. The tv babies will eat it up. Generation X needs a better moniker. We’ll dub them the awake generation. They’ll like that. When selling coffee no longer sweets our purposes we'll make it derogatory in the media– the neo-coffee heads, caffeiniks, Go-bean poppers, the café society who neither wash nor work. We’ll divert the cash collected from Dr. Marten shoe sales to fund secret wars, select coup de tats. “Turning rebellion into money.”  We’ll tell them just how bad this stuff is for them.
    “Go ahead try one.” I reach my hand in the narrow jar and catch two beans between the fingers. My nails are clean, trimmed. I hand one bean to Alaska. She looks at me. We pop them at the same time. We are going down together. McBean is off in another alcove, fingering nic nacs. Picking things up. Scoffing out loud at prices. Trying a chef hat on. He’s reading the stupid poems on post cards.

    “Good-bye Nelly, thanks for the bean.”\
    “My name is Clara,” she shouts at us as we spring out the door, back into the mystery mist. And the sultry heat. Whose benefit all this? Ours? Gift mist for shop patrons. It's inviting. Invitational. Misleading. Ahh, to be misled down one of these paths, Hello Henry and Anaïs, and then left alone for hours with a good book, cool jump juice delivered by Yuma’s solo soho hipster belly button pierced, this lime tree bower my prison, or just Alaska’s delicate fingers twined in mine. Ahh.

THE ROAD HOME

Alaska at the wheel. Another pass by the Territorial Prison. Au revoir Yuma. 169 miles to flow. Goodbye Arizona. McBean is slumped in the back for continuation of the booth napping. About four miles outside of Yuma I spy my man. But Alaska is on the limit, nose up and clean, flash past the radar toting denizen of travellers. He is helping us to stay alive.

    “We just passed the guy that caught me adding unnecessary heat to the desert.”
    “Are you sure it was him?”
    “It was him.” I think I hear McBean cutting logs with heavy breath.

    I purposely keep the air-con off as long as we can stand it. My testicles are the first to sweat. My lower back isn’t far behind. Isn’t far above my behind. I look to the back seat. I look at Alaska driving. Everything is as it should be. My shoes are off first. Shirt second. Then shnorts. I’m riding high and cool in my red polka heart boxers. I adjust the air vent and the boxer flap so that they conjunct like planet and lucky star for good fortune. Freezy breeze job. I perk up the kick with a healthy eyeful of Alaska cleavage. Cleveland. There’s a shiny pool of perspire that should be lapped up by a kitten’s tongue. I put my hand on her knee. I blow kiss-laced breath into her ear. I try to coax her hand on my lap. She locks it on the steering wheel. Gripster.

    I slide my own hand, ice skater like, on the skin pond of her knee. My fingers continue their slip between her thighs. You have to be a little rough when you’re battling denim. The car swerves. It could swerve back to some fine memories, but my intentions are fixed in the moment, bondage determined to create another motor-sex memory for the annals of histoire.

    But Alaska is a little bitter about having to drive, or my ducking out of sight, or my spending too much energy with McBean, business trips to the Casbah every night…

    I know too that she is very self-conscious. She’ll do it at night, under the cover of darkness, the appropriate secrecy working, if she isn’t sleepy, but seldom in the day with someone else in the house. Crank the sex possibility down ten degrees intensity with with McBean dozing just behind the seat.

    “I don’t do cars anymore,” she has said. But this trip is waning, and no one has had any sex yet. What kind of book will this make? My readers, my public, creams their panties for that stuff. I am their vicarious donor. I am the transfusion for the sex needy.

    Despite the air-con blowing me, my scrotum is still uncomfortable hot. I might normally ignore it. Let the thing get all stinky with sweat. McBean appears to be asleep. I decide to let the gonads sun and air. I slip off the boxers. I’m riding naked through the desert. This part of me seldom sees the sun, and I think we should be a little ashamed of our suppression of the human body. It’s not like carrying a six gun in Dodge city wild, wild west. I can control this thing.

    The penis is talking to me. It says it’s itchy, can I scratch it. Alaska is cracking up. I hate when she laughs at my nudity. What a deflator. I begin to bat it around a little. There is a truck on our forward horizon. Alaska sees me diddling. She accelerates with the cruise button and the distance between vehicles diminishes. It’s like a chicken race. Except I know she’ll go all the way. What’s she got to lose? “Wild thing” on the radio. G.B.H. version, “Wild thing, you make my balls swing.” My balls are swinging. I’m erect and would like to play. The truck grows close. We come up on his back door. I’ve got my hand around the stalk. It feels right. Masturbating on the right side of the brain. Thoughts strung out like sky across the desert. As we pass the truck, my pants go up. I have no balls. Ha ha. Alaska wins again. But as the truck collapses out our back door the shorts hit the floor mat. I am still hard in hand. I am pulling for what I’m worth. I’m imagining sex with Alaska to expedite matters. I just want to get it over with. I stroke for miles. 70 miles per hour: the car, not me.

    Mmmmm. My sex fantasy isn’t working.

    “Hey how about helping me out here?” I ask Alaska. I know that one licked finger pressed in the right spot, could bring in the motherest load of mineral this county has seen in a long time. I’m almost there. I’m almost, almost, almost… in California.

    The lights are flashing, it looks like we’ll have to stop for an inspection. All vehicles stop. California is so vain. Arizona didn’t ask to inspect our rectums. It’s just like the Mexican border. Coming into to California your vehicle, your person, your ideology mind are subject to search. We could drive stolen cars or babies or anything into Mexico or Arizona. The agents never ask. Give a desert sprinklers and see what grows: vanity.

    The pants go up. The state border agent, looks us over, trained eye, no questions, she hands us a magazine, gratis. The cover value: $3.00. No wonder the state is bankrupt. The mag is 99% tourism plug. 1% warning about a killer ant. Full page mug shot. Have we seen it? It’s a voracious crop devour monster. “Here’s to you Mrs. Robinson.” The volume is low as too not shudder the beauty sleep of SeyMour McBean, artist, friend sometimes dangerous on waking, son, brother, uncle, born again virgin, American male, punk rocker, garlic lover… the infinite SeyMour McBean on the nod in our Renta-backseat. Hello California.

THE DUNES

I want so much to frolic on the dune face. The anticipation has been building. The landscape begins to change. Reading this land is like rereading a favorite book, or singing along to your favorite Cadillac Tramps song.

    “McBean. Wake up.” He stirs slightly from the ears out across the face crinkling the nose. The rest of the body lies inert, untouched.

    “McBean Wake UP.” A little more movement, he rolls over, face burrowing into his pillow.
    “McBean WAKE UP! You’re not going to miss the dunes again. He begrudges the snap from sleep, but he’s upright and ready to dig the dunes.
    “We’re going to stop. I have to climb on and roll down the face of a dune.”
    “Do you know how hot it is going to be out there?”
    “Probably 130. But I need this. We’re doing it.”
    “We. Tttth.”

    Alaska just drives silently locked in awe in the face of the approaching dunes.

    “What about the snakes and tarantula, and trap door spiders, and quick sand drops up to your neck?”

    Kill joy. I feel oppressed. And then a sign:

     NO DUNES ACCESS

    The dunes border both sides of the road. The western dunes, the ones closest to us are guarded by a watery canal. The canal that brings the Colorado river water to the imperial valley fields and San Diego faucets. We’d have to swim that first. There is also barb wire protecting the canal. The sign itself is interpretable, vague, arbitrary grinding up against my mindset to climb those dunes. It’s purpose may be to stop tourists from killing themselves. We are more than tourists. We are pioneers, bold adventurers, explorers, and exploiters of this world’s natural phenomena.

    I have to grab the wheel and guide the renta-rocket to the rest stop exit. We don’t need rest. We need adventure. If we can jot across the east bound freeway and hop the fence, the eastern dunes are ours. If this was a movie we would be there. The stunt men could do a sand lot of the grunt running. The renta-car finally comes to rest right in front of a duplicate to the sign. Just like a prophecy to blindly repeat itself without further explanation, revelation.

NO DUNES ACCESS

    We decide to obey the request or law of the sign, it won’t be me that tips the scale of the dying biosphere. The freeway is free easy access. I roll my shotgun window down for a blast of the pure unrelenting heat of the desert fresh off a sweeping dune caress. There are mystic lines written in the dunes by something more than maximum randomness. I’m still on the lookout for an extra-terrestrial encounter. What an ending to this novel that would be. They took us up, first above the dunes, then we watched the Earth grow small and insignificant… as we rocketed into time, space and the ultimate unknown.

TOWARD SAN DIEGO: bits of road notes

I’m suddenly wondering who I am, who I was, what I will become. I wonder the same about Alaska. I see a new independence dawning in her. She looks confident at the wheel. She has her legs crossed lotus style, as we blaze trail through the no man’s land. She is facing death fearlessly, cruise control to the number, no human at the brake. She is the picture of concentration, meditation. I think that I should be able to read her thoughts. But I haven’t the slightest idea. I have no clue as to the impression that the purveyance of death in both directions is making on her. Does she sense the emptiness? There is power in it. Tap-able energy for those daring, or crazy enough to ride it. The man who rides the desert is like Slim Pickins riding Strangelove’s bomb to oblivion.

    Our reflection in a milk truck is a dream, a circus mirror showing us the twisted psyche of inner self. For all we know the milk truck mirror reflection, though it seems distorted, may be the corrective lens in prescription glasses cure to our increasing blindness.

    The desert is purged of fertility, abstinent– an ascetic of terrain.

    Got the gonads out again, cooling and sunning, on the paradoxical sweltering popsicle ride. Alaska driving Indian style, pow wow, legs retracted into her body with dance ease. The seat belt cuts a pretty diagonal across her breasts, defining each hilly flesh mound with correct grammar. Though she is fully clothed, I am licking the excited nipples rapidly on my private eyelid movie screen nudie show. I reach over and tap the cruise accelerator up to 69 mph. I’m stiff, I’ll just give myself a few handy strokes. Left hand, right brain. Demolition of healthy erection by traffic bunch up. Penis is a penal colony of frustration.

    Janis Joplin is singing “Oh lord won’t you by me a color tv” The road is doing it’s thing. I’m doing mine. Hay bails line the highway. The stain of humanity: Electric wires feeding the opium brains of a million San Diegans. Fats Domino singing “Ain’t that a Shame.” This station should explore the B sides of these god trodden tunes. I’ve heard this a million times before and I want something new from my oldies. Dirt – rocks, radiator water every 300 feet. Devil’s Canyon #2. A smashing crag picture, like the stair steps of Escher. Dead Freddy Mercury is proclaiming Queen the champions. Alaska is singing along, in a flashback to her childhood. The music takes her away. I hear McBean stirring awake. I pull up my boxers unsatisfied. “She wouldn’t go out with me // cause I couldn’t dance.” Johnny Thunders covered the contours of that tune. Whoa! Ocotillo, the squid bush, like five drowning fingers reaching to the sun– “Do you love me” Ocotillo “Do you love me?”

OCOTILLO

We pull off the road in the town, or road stop, or market called Ocotillo. We pass a fire station. There doesn’t seem to be much in danger of burning down. The firefighters are waiting. The renta-car crushes into the dirt lot. A cloud of dust is picked up by the resident wind. Our dust mingles with half the dust of the remainder of this desert between here and Cuyamaca.

    This is a gas station, a liquor store, a fast food hop. It is like a spore or budding sponge of Rip Griffin’s. It is like the prehistoric cousin of 7/11. It is too big and unwieldy, like the first computers. The wind is etching terrorist demands on the car window. Sand is piling up around the tires. We may be buried before we get out of the car.

    Opening the door brings on the fiercest fanged hungry wolverine heat we’ve yet experienced. Razzorback heat. The air is in danger of becoming dirt. The earth and sky are switching places. The Sumerian gods live here in Ocotillo, they practice doglike mischief with the elements.

    I disguise my fear, by pulling up my shoes and lacing my socks. We have to run for the store. There is an anti-wind wall of Plexiglass screening flying debris from the west. Bits of the mountains slip into the desert on the wind. Species travel on the wind. Little does that spider flying on her web know of the destination. Little is my comprehension of the massive events diluting and shaping all about us.

    There are three picnic tables under blowing mist pipes. The water is welcome, but not enough to counteract the sun riding the wild horse of the wind. Six-guns shooting. Yahhhh. Inside the store we are in search of drinks. Maybe an ice cream bar. Our tongues have been sucked dry by the air-con. The short walk to the market convinced us of our thirst. The air-con in the market is pumping. I'm breathing freon. They have just about everything an American traveller could want. Including a lavatory. I’m first, one stall. I release pee. I add to the stale effluvia of the toilet room.

    I come out with that feeling in my stomach, in my tired limbs, that I’ve eaten too much sugar. Ice cream doesn’t look good. Nothing looks good. I picked up a box of generic fig bars at a truck stop like this on the way to San José last fall. After eating half the box I felt just like this. I decide on another fruit flavored iced tea. We each buy our own drinks. I don’t think of picking up the tab, or taking responsibility for anyone. It is too cold to stay in here. We take our liquid refreshment to the picnic tables. We perch table top to be closer to the mist. SeyMour lays three tootsie rolls on the table. The heat is ridiculous.

    “Can I have the keys?” Alaska hands them to me.
    “I’m going to get the snacks out of the trunk.”
    “The trunk!”

    “Relax, I won’t lock the keys in twice.” I shouldn’t make promises like that. It is like tempting karma. And with the trickster dogs on the wind the keys might very well blow out of hand into the jaws of the closing trunk. I too would be swallowed by that biting mouth. I couldn’t live through it. If I didn’t die of self-despisal on the mark, I would have to kill myself. There is no honor in suicide, but perhaps it is preferable to living life after locking the keys in the renta-trunk twice within 24 hours. Twice in thirty years might be too much.

    Before I shut the trunk I look to see that the keys are really in my hand.

    I take the remaining granola and banana chips back to the tables where my friends cringe out of the wind. We snack idly, indolence a parrot on our shoulder, and sip at our drinks, no longer thirsty. We eat the banana chips with unhungry stomachs. Mechanical fingers keep feeding. At least part of us is longing for the comfort of home. I like to think that part of me yearns for the roads of America, and the byways of the world. There is so much I haven’t seen of the world. There are so many phases of the self to be explored. There are so many wrinkles on my aging face to navigate.

    Two women stop their Dodge for gas. They are wearing terry cloth tube tops. The tops look as if they were fashioned from towels stolen from Las Vegas motels. The women are in their “declining” years. Their weathered teats are being tugged to the ground by gravity. As the taller of the two women (they look and are dressed almost exactly the same) walks toward the market, she stalls with a half turn to ask her friend, sister, lover what kind of drink she wants. I’m afraid that the wind will grab hold of one of her swaying mammaries and throw it up like the direction sock on an airfield. The ladies have lost most of their hair. What they have left is styled short and silver. They look like drinkers. Hard liquor for lonely nights, and sunny days. They live in the desert, in that mobile home park above Yuma. Trailer hags. I’ve come far enough to see that. They don’t spend a lot of money on make-up, but they go to beauty parlors once in a while to give themselves a lift.

    They aren’t afraid to call a man a ‘cocksucker’ if he treats them like dirt. The men they hang around with have circular stains under the armpits of their button down shirts. The bellies of the men are enormous, bulbous. The men, minutes after shaving, have wild stubble coming on their faces like Old Spice. The men’s ears are starting to grow into mutant cauliflower knobs of gravity slope, slop, blah. They have thick carpets of bristly grey hair on their backs. The “girls” still look pretty good next to these men. They still enjoy a strong fuck (at least as much as they did when they were young.) They prefer now (as they did then) the company of each other, friendship, that fits like an old bra. Then again who needs a bra when you have friendship?

    There are five Ryder trucks circled around the gas station, like heap big war party. Mastodons come to drink at the river. Four of the driver’s are huge and sweat glistening black, like invisible men in a blindfold boxing match with the road. They have been asked to cross the country in hemorrhoid punching trucks with impossible haste. They are humping against miles and time. The man has something over their heads. If they don’t make it by the prescribed hour something horrific will happen to the last things on earth they care about: dogs, spawn, parents. They have the grizzled desperate look of convicted felons. The fifth one is like a weasel in facial structure, in temperament. He is driven mad across the States for money, or drugs. He is a skinny film of ash blowing on the underside of one of their trucks. He talks and eats like the others. His laugh is more screechy where theirs is deep and hearty. His hair is hescher long, unwashed. They have promised him drugs. He is the drug addicted American. A speed freak, a tweaker, a crankhead. He has sold his ass for drugs to strangers. Men and women rent their asses to strangers in America every day. We all do. Most don’t come back bleeding, chaffed. He does. The men are speaking a garbled para-language. They are the bonded servants of the road. Moloc. Beelzebub. Greedo. Speedo. And Earl. The biggest one is named Earl.

    They finish eating and climb up into their trucks. They file out of Ocotillo like mastodons checking out of history. Out of sight, extinct from mind. They are a useless anomaly which we will forget about. They are just another in a series of pointless stimuli hurled at us like weapons, by Ra, in his boat. They are the fading sparks from the chariot wheels of Apollo.

    The Man, the law, the thumb screw. A CHP in uniform stops his patrol car in front of the no park sign. He braves the wind, passes us without acknowledgement, and enters the market. We see him talking to the couple who bat flies on the window above the grill. The she bats, then he cleans up the squished fly corpse with spray ammonia and paper towel. The Man is talking, his lips are moving on the other side of the glass.

    “I bet he comes out with a donut, and coffee,” I say.
    “Did you know that cops on coffee and donuts are more likely to use their weapon in an altercation?” Alaska says.
    “I believe it,” I note. We’ve all had the coffee jitters. We know what they could do to a trigger finger. The man, the heat, the fuzz, the bust comes out of the market with a heaping helping of frozen yogurt.
    “I’ll bet he didn’t pay, did you see him pay?”

    Alaska is standing on the table with her face in the rush of mist. She must look like an angel to him. SeyMour is standing too. My compadres are too hot, and beat to get excited about the Man. We are ready to go, but waiting for the Man to exit. I’m sitting on the table, face tuned to the mist, feeling the nausea stream out of my gut, through my veins into the muscles in my arms. We want to see the Man moving east.

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT

We are in a race of our own declension against the sun. Race to the coast. The ocean. The Pacific. Race through life. To the end of the story, to the entrails of time. Rodilate. Leaving Ocotillo I have no idea how the book will end. I have firmly decided that there should be a book. It’s funny how sometimes your life lays itself out in chapters. But what is a book without an ending? I feel that things should somehow wrap up in fancy birthday paper and present themselves to me. The ending should take us full circle. Some fear or object encountered along the road should leap around to resolution. Or something wildly climactic, drama expolisIVE! should launch the three of us to a new understanding of our context, our setting, our fate. We should come in touch, if only for a moment, with our souls, with truth, via the gracious revelation of the desert. Death has been our vehicle. We should conquer the mystery of death.

    The landscape is growing less barren, more hospitable as we climb the Cuyamaca mountains. We are like flies climbing the slick walls of a steaming bowl of smog. Mountaintop: A veil has been lifted revealing what was there all along. Three friends who’ve known each other too long to grow closer, nature, and the road through it. SeyMour takes the navigator’s position and I flop on my back, fix my vision on the blue velvet felt board of the sky. Clear blue mind. I am coasting on a lull-a-bye high. When a hawk swoops and swirls about the scene, I’m not sure if it’s real or mind-created. I sit up. It’s real. Link in the life chain. The desert, the scrub, bush after bush, repeating, but for the hawk each bush is potential home of lunch scrambling for cover, and for lunch-on-legs the hawk is a dangerous predator. Perhaps, to the field mouse, the hawk is evil.

    Swing down the mountain, swing up in humor. Nature is my medicine man, “take me away.”  A glorious meadow! Say it one time in Bambi’s voice, “Mama, what’s a meadow?” and learn to appreciate it. Spring, summer, fall, winter. In all the Southwest this is where mama shows four faces. The meadow slopes around and over hill, chip and dale. Here it is, my graveyard. Bury me here or in the Pirates of the Caribbean. Oak Grove– to sit under that tree and sleep. Aaaaa. What am I doing stretched out in this damned automobile, when I could be lolligagging under the drooping vines? And why does it seem impossible to stop the car and walk out there? Barb wire? No trespassing?

    Maybe home is too close and we are more anxious to get there than I thought? The question comes again, “And why did they come?”

    As the mere sight of the oaks ignites visions of mistletoe, and the imagined laughter of children free from fear frolicking in the tall grass, it seems we came to get away from the routine of daily life. We are on vacation, like Chevy Chase or any family station wagon full of mom, pop and the kids. We came for our measured teaspoon of excitement. Tomorrow Alaska will go back to the espresso hawking racket; SeyMour will go back to mopping, drawing, gigging; and I will go back to whatever it is I do… write?

    We are passing through Native American reservation territory. Sadly, because from the road it is difficult to see if the Natives are still practicing communion with nature. I need to know that someone is talking to the desert sand and god ridden winds, making sacrifices. The casino is already lit up. A white man, thrill seeking, stupid as it sounds, probably on vacation, jumps off the reservation bungi tower. He free falls and springs up before his death. Bungi tower replaces buffalo.

    Not long after that a new community of track homes appears. Civilization, ttttpth. It must be new because I don’t see the radiant blue light of the American heart shining in the windows. Walk around your neighborhood and count the number of tv’s on.

    “Alaska what are you thinking about?” She drives steadily as before. There hasn’t been even idle chatter the last few miles.

    “I was hoping that we didn’t catch any more mice in the traps at home. I was scaring myself with the finding of another one,” she says.
    “SeyMour what are you thinking about?
    “The road. The silhouetted rocks and highway straight ahead.” Pppplt. He punctuates his answer with an uproarious fart. “And farting.”

    We break into twenty questions about flatulence.

    “Alaska, when was the most embarrassing time you farted?” She doesn’t answer for too long. The subject could die right here if the road offered anything remotely interesting. SeyMour tells us about the time he jumped off the Manhattan Beach pier naked. He farted when he landed. There was a girl waiting for him on the beach. He can’t remember her name.

    “It’s funny how you can't remember the details of a sexual encounter but you can recall the fart of ‘79.”
    “I remember the time in 1983 when I farted…” The conversation goes on like this. We are all laughing. Cecil Gonococci said, “that farts will always be funny, to men.”

    Alaska says, “Why do my farts smell so good and everyone else's always stink.”

    “We secretly want to smell other people’s farts,” I say.
    “That’s not true,” Alaska counters.
    “Why do we have so many names for it? Fart, fluf, step on a duck, kick the bunny?” SeyMour ponders.
    “Life is a gas which we pass.” 

HOME: NOW WHAT?

The renta-car needs to be returned full of gas. So Alaska drives into the Arco. I fill the tank. It seems responsibility, at least a certain kind, has returned to me. We rotate:SeyMour to the back, Alaska to the passenger seat, me in the driver’s seat.

    “What’s up?” I ask.
    “Let’s get something to eat.”
    “Pizza.”
    “Lets make a pizza: pesto and feta.”
    “Yum yum, yes, yes, boss.”
    “Let’s go jump off the clam, or see a band, or… something exciting.”
    “Let’s rent a movie.”

    So that’s what we do. We go to the video store where I usually see Gary Glazed, be funny if we saw him, and we rent two movies. I pick out Henry Rollins Talking from the Box. SeyMour and Alaska agree on The Amy Fisher Story staring Drew Barrymore. We go home. We feast on pesto//feta pizza with roma tomato slices and garlic, then fall asleep watching Amy Fisher tell her story.

Appendix A: SEYMOUR McBEAN’S SONG OF THE ROAD