["New" rantings from February of this year]
"He's got this dream about buying some land, he's gonna give up the booze and the one night stands, and then he'll settle down in some quiet little town and forget about everything." - Baker Street, Jerry Rafferty
Ever heard of a town called Amboy? Neither had I until a few years back. My friend Endo is obsessed with the place, an obsession which likely began with the film Baghdad Cafe, a decent little character-driven tale of another middle-o-fucking nowhere place just up the road from Amboy. Baghdad is naught but a dot on the map now, its ghosts left with not so much as a tree or one vertical 2x4 to haunt. Whatever was there is since wiped clean.
Endo would, had he the means, buy the whole town of Amboy in a heartbeat. Not that there's much to buy. But there's enough. There's a twenty or so unit motel, half a dozen cabanas, little cabins for rent, an old school, a church, a 1950s cafe in cherry condition, a handful of houses ( a few of them occupied by actual living people) and a post office that's about to close down because, alas, the town just went into foreclosure last month. That's the motel office in the picture, the vaulting fifties-style structure with the gigantic arrow sign pointing down on it.
Amboy's been owned by a couple of crusty old fuckers for a decade or so during which they've poured half a million into restoration of the place. God bless em for that, but for all the exploding development in southern California, Amboy is still an hour's drive from the nearest, well, anything. Awhile back before they went bankrupt, they put the town up for sale on eBay for half a million cash. This little stunt won them national attention on NPR, but apparently failed to attract a buyer.
Anyway, Jack here. Reporting live from the blooming Mohave of late January rains. Iggy pop serenades greasewood and cholla, the kangaroo rats and me. Yah, you heard me right. Rats. One more rat-infested shelter from the elements, a hideout in the Bonnie & Clyde sense of the word, a loosely legal squat square in the Mojave Desert. It's Saturday night and..
I'm in Pine Grove Furnace State Park in southern PA throwing snowballs and flirting with Coyote.
Early this afternoon I was in Oakland, CA handing a guy named Diamond Dave $1800 cash for his 32-foot Clipper Marine sailboat. I' m gonna be happy because the boat's gonna give me that much-needed "place" to call my own.
But I'm not in PA and I'm not in the Bay Area and I didn't get the boat and I didn't get the Cai-yote.
Nope. I sat here twelve miles east of the Amboy Crater on old Route 66 and did nothing instead. I slept fourteen hours last night in a bombed-out modular home from the sixties, rose at 10:45 a.m., my friends Endo and Tech long since gone at dawn. I was asleep in my tent inside my room in the bombed-out modular, which I imagine is what it feels like to sleep beneath heavy mosquito netting in Africa or something. For me, it was the kangaroo rats. They're cute and all, but I don't want them crawling across my face in the night.
Now it's Van Morrison. In a few minutes it will be Hendrix. From now on, when folks ask what kind of writing I do, I think I'll answer that I write the way Hendrix jams. Granted he's dead and I've outlived him by a decade so far, but this five-gigabyte bundle of Hendrix jams and outtakes and bootlegs my buddy Tech gave me, man! It's Hendrix as I've never heard him, Hendrix ad infinitum. Hendrix without an off button. Hendrix endless.
To say nothing of the presumption of equating my talents with those of Hendrix. Blasphemy, I'm sure. Oh, fuck it.
To quote Benicio del Toro as Dr. Gonzo in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, "What the fuck are we doing out here in the middle of this goddamn desert?" In the film, it is silent but for the crunch of del Toro's bulk against the leather of his seat. Crunch, crunch, crunch. I can hear it clear as a buzzard's beak on a road kill armadillo.
What the fuck are we doing out here in the Mojave?
Nobody exists out here. Like a bereaved Bill Carter in Fools Rush In, I am firm in this illusion that nobody can see me, that I am become transparent. Fade to black. Fade to the green and blue and desert beige behind me. I am invisible.
We go in for extremes these days, it seems. Like Houston. Why Houston at Christmas? Answer me that one. Everyone wants to know. I have no answer but Mary. I went to Houston to be with Mary. That's all. And Houston without the art cars was boring and flat and aesthetically contrary to everything my eyes hold dear: forests, mountains, deserts, beaches, log cabins, adobe huts, mansions tastefully done or falling into decrepitude, even cities, but more in the New Orleans crumbling-beauty sense than anywhere suburban.
Flash forward:
Sitting fireside now out back of the mobile modular home (yes, I noticed recently that is has wheels and a hitch) listening to Luciano's band Big Milk wail out a tune that almost coulda been made into something. Until he clocked out one year and four months ago.
My biggest complaint, my biggest fear these days, is that I will reach the end of my time here on Earth having never published. It's entirely possible. Two examples, one close to home, one far away and all the more dismal for the very genius of the man. First, friend Bill Carter says he suffered through 120 rejections for his brilliant Sarajevo memoir Fools Rush In, and someone suggested that such should give me hope. HOPE! Ha! Okay, so he got published at last. But I haven't the stomach or the patience for even 50 rejections. I'm too proud and I'm incensed at the abuse of my writing time constituted by such pissing-into-the-wind propositioning of industry pimps and their pimply-faced illiterate gate keepers.
Second, Leonardo da Vinci saved everything he wrote with the intent of passing on his knowledge, but he never published and much of his work was lost. I could go on. Van Gogh? Crow-k'ed in a wheat field. Sylvia Plath? Stuck her head in an oven. Anne Frank? Another oven. Am I reaching here? Yes, I suppose I am. But these days I think a lot more about death, not in an irrational, unchecked-depression kind of way, but logically. Thoughtfully. I'm quite sure I will leave this body of my own choice, if it isn't taken from me first. Not any time soon. But certainly when the joy goes out of the writing, the living. Certainly before my parts start falling off, or apart, whatever. I doubt very much that I will die an old man.
So, Dearest Leonardo, though I be not a whit so smart as you nor historically important, please help me get published. I mean, REALLY published. Not just this hand-stapled chapbook shit. It's not that I profess to have anything worth saying, that anything I'm saying is new. It's that other people believe I do. And they read, Leo, they read! And they are inspired. By me! So let's publish, eh? For them. Quick, before the Patriot Act-ors stick me in a shipping container in Guano-tome-o-no Bay for libelous treason or non-payment of student loans
"Jesus gonna be here, he gonna be here soon." - Tom Waits
I sit on a stack of manuscripts and poetry collections and perhaps 400,000 words of articles and short stories that if anthologized, would constitute half a dozen works of their own. Atop that, four novel-length travel memoirs (ie: Kerouac's On The Road), three feature film scripts, two novels, over 300 poems, and a veritable Lechugia of underground tunnelings into my mind, all posted to my website, Jigglebox.com. But
How odd is this? This illuminated screen of my iMac so closely juxtaposed against the fiery backdrop a campfire burning, the fire of some cutting edge future tool vying for my attention with its ancient sister, a woodfire burning, smoke in my eyes and all. Orion is oerhead, as with every night out here in the Mojave. He crosses my night sky like a figure on the face of a child's clock painted only in images, no numbers, and the image Orion rises at nine and sets at three, touching twelve along the way. But by standard time, its passage is more like five to midnight, on my watch anyway.
Endo has come and gone. Endo moves faster than Orion, but is just as sure.
So last night I drive 100 miles to the nearest truckstop for supplies and a shower. A hundred miles. For you East Coasters, that's like a coupla states or something. But out here in the Mojave, it's naught but a long straight line highway at night, not a soul in sight. "That's a long way to drive for a shower," says Kate from Bisbee in a hot-flash almost-instant message-like response to my email to her from the trucker's lounge. This is the other reason I came to the Flying J instead of stopping at the first store I hit at 70 miles out. I drove the extra thirty miles for the WiFi access advertised on their bigass sign I eyed a week ago on my way here via San Berdoo and Barstow. Anyway, what I really needed most was the shower, and you gotta hit a truckstop for a shower. But still, a hundred miles. Putting that in perspective from my Appalachian Trail hike, a hundred miles is the longest stretch I hiked without a supply stop. The 100-mile Wilderness it was called. How odd to drive 100 miles of equally barren land, but now it's the desert not the forests of Maine, and it's me behind the wheel of a BMW 535i cruising at 90 mph, a whole different trip, an equal and opposite buzz.
In all the confusion in the four months since I finished the Appalachian Trail, confusion both intentionally manifested by me and then plenty thrown at me in the names of culture shock, family, whatever, I remember this much. That almost every evening of some two hundred nights passed in the Appalachians Mountains, I would watch the sun set in the west and feel my body being tugged with it. As I sit here now in the Mojave Desert sixty miles from the nearest soda machine or payphone, gas station or store, and watch the sun plunk down in the high desert toward the sea, I don't feel that tug anymore. Because I am here. I am where the land ends, where night comes last in continental America. No doubt if I were to spend some time in Hawaii, time enough to live, a month, a year, what have you, perhaps I might stand on California beaches and feel that tug for a place yet further to the west. Because there would be more out there. More of America. And I would yearn, as I did in Appalachia, for that extra hour or two or three of daylight, of life. But I have never been to Hawaii. Nor have I been to Japan or Thailand or anywhere else the sun goes on its long passage "thataway."
So I felt the tug. I loved the Appalachians for many reasons, perhaps the biggest of which is just the knowing, learning, that they exist. I have walked them now from end to end and no one can ever take that from me. No one can tell me the Appalachian Trail is a myth, that all that effort and teamwork and community-minded kindness and government money even, lots of it, isn't real, didn't happen. It did, and it is glorious. Toss in its social aspect and you have the best self-propelled post-graduate inner growth and physical fitness program ever created.
Now that I've completed that mission, the tug, despite efforts to return to the East to the Doyle Hotel in PA to write, to the Ruck (the thruhiker gathering last weekend in PA), to my father in Maine, the tug keeps me here in the West. My home. Here when the sun says goodnight I feel only joy and bedazzlement at the awesome expanse of desert and all the colors she can muster in those final moments of sunlit day. The purples of the surrounding jagged mountains are the best, my favorite. And so tonight it was Prince singing Purple Rain and Let's Go Crazy while I put my back into shoveling burnt refuse into barrels and then gathering huge armloads of sticks, fuel for our nightly fires. I say "our" though I do not know if Endo will make it here tonight. Tomorrow for sure.
Endo and I have much in common, though on the surface one may never guess it. He is industrious to a manic extreme, and I, by contrast, am as laid back as a Jamaican playboy (most of the time). Around the house, I have no interest in anything save writing. Pull me in to some madcap adventure, and I'm all there, collapsible keyboard in hand, beer in the other. But when relaxation and the quiet in which to write are available, I lay low. Endo, however, can drink whiskey and command cement trucks and build decks and swimming pools and houses and manage a half dozen flunky tenants (of whom I'm one) and wrangle lawyers and Hollywood bigwigs to push into production an independent film and still manage to drive 150 miles out here to the middle of nowhere every coupla days to sit by a fire for a few hours and bask in his dream of acquiring and refurbishing and old route 66 restaurant, the very place where I now sit, glorified security guard but basically squatter plugged into the electricity that Endo had turned on for the first Time in thirty years. Here I sit writing to you.
Postscript: That night or the next (I can't recall), a sheriff pulled up behind a car containing the owners of the Road Runner's Roost property on where I sat and thought myself something of a house sitter. Endo had done "due diligence" in an attempt to contact the property owner to express his interest in buying the dilapidated old Route 66 cafe, and after the owners failed to respond to half a dozens entreaties over several months, Endo "moved in." To his credit, he did a hell of a good job cleaning up the property in preparations to squat his way into ownership. Unfortunately, it turns out the county assessor gave Endo the owner information for the wrong parcel. He'd been writing the wrong people all along!
Well, Endo finally succeeded in "finding" the owners, and here they came, sheriff in tow, to oust the trespassers, in this case, me. I handled it beautifully. Cool as a moose, I laid the old Jedi Mind Trick on the cop and the suburbanite inheritors of a property so deep in the desert and so long out of business that they'd likely visited it once maybe, just to see the crap pile they'd inherited. I just sat there calmly by my campfire, laptop aglow with one of my screenplays, and explained to them how Endo was a film producer and I a script writer, working on location to get the flavor of the place where we were going to film The Time Tunnel On Old 66.
There was actually so much truth in what I was saying that it could in no way be called a lie. Endo was sidelining as a film producer. I was a writer of scripts. Endo was working on acquiring the property. And we really had written a script set to take place right where I sat. The trick was confidence, high-sounding titles and proper phraseology. When they said we had no right to be there, I countered that I knew only what I'd been told by the producer, something about the purchase of the property being in negotiations.
Needless to say that was the last night of our glorious Mojave squat. Because I was just following orders, ignorant of the production company's dealings, I was politely escorted off the property, and that was that. It is amazing how differently one is treated when viewed as a professional and not just some gypsy writer. I am both, but in this case it was quite necessary to ACT the former and not the latter.
Thank God I'd been ready for them. I'd half expected a visit from the law since the day Endo, Tech and I had run together 47 extension cords from the trailer out back setting alight the stunning old 70-foot-tall neon Road Runner sign out front, probably for the first time in 40 years. What a sight that was! Wow.
-Mohave Jack