Spring semester, 1973, eleventh grade. I was sixteen. First day back after winter break, the principal called me into his office and told me that he was putting me on OJT, no more curriculum, no more math, history or French, no more cutting up frogs. On the Job Training was two morning classes a day and a job and that was fine with me. The two classes were the OJT class (we learned how to balance a checkbook) and a gym class; the work experience was to provide the rest of our education. This all happened after my grey-haired French teacher caught me cutting her class for the umpteenth time and sobbed in the principal’s office. In fairness to Madame, it wasn’t just her class, I’d had attendance problems in all my classes.
The first job my OJT teacher found for me was at Apache Carwash at Apache Plaza, a strip mall a few exits up the freeway from my mother’s house. The job paid $1.60 an hour. My co-workers were mostly on work release from the state prison.
It was a full-service carwash. Customers drove in one end, got out of their car, walked to the waiting area at the far end of a long, narrow baby blue concrete hallway with sagging ceiling tiles and paint peeling off the walls in Wheaties-size flakes, then drank stale coffee or not and watched through the fogged plexiglass window for their car to come squeaking and jerking out of the steaming wash tunnel.
Most of the time, I worked on the entry end where we vacuumed the carpet, washed the floormats and pilfered the cars, sifting through the ashtrays for change amongst the cigarette butts, groping under the seats, giving glove boxes a quick rifle. One guy found a snub nose .38 Smith & Wesson under a driver’s seat, put it in his pocket and carried it around for a few days until he lost it. Another guy found a leather blackjack but had to give it back when the owner came looking for it. The pilfering was finders keepers, there was no sharing. When the mats were clean, one of us would idle the car onto the chain and roller belt that pulled it through the sprayers, brushes and dryers.
On the far end, when the car rolled off the end of the belt, the outside was hand-dried, the upholstery wiped down and the inside of the widows cleaned. The best job on that end was driving the cars off the line across seventy-five feet of wet concrete to one of the two overhead doors; the challenge was to spin the tires to get up as much speed as possible then explode the brakes and skid to a stop before you hit the door. One of the guys smashed a Corvette through one of the doors and that slowed things down for a few days.
One afternoon, a guy drove in with a dark grey Lincoln Continental, mid-sixties, suicide rear doors, nice car but grimy like it hadn’t been washed in while. As the guy was getting out I looked in the back, garbage covered the back seat and floor up to the top of the front seat; burger bags and boxes and paper cups and fries and chicken bones and chunks of fish burgers and bits of meat patties and half-eaten buns dry and greasy with mayonnaise and ketchup and wrinkled tomatoes and pickles, the whole mass sticky from coke-colored soft drinks splashed over the pile like he’d thrown the cups over his shoulder when he was done being thirsty.
The driver, smirky guy, thirties, wearing a suit and tie and an overcoat, saw me looking at his mess, “All yours, buddy. Have fun.”
I opened the rear door and trash dumped onto the wet concrete floor at my feet. I yanked the yellow rope that shut down the line and Petey, the guy on the passenger side, he’d done time for assault, he and I got to work grabbing fistfuls of the nasty shit with our bare hands and dumping it in the steel trash drums. Frank came stomping back in his rubber boots to see why the line was down. Frank was the manager, he was maybe thirty, rumor was he’d done time for B&E. He saw what we were doing and yelled in my face, “You’ve got my fucking line shut down for this shit? Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him if he thinks I’m going to be his fucking garbage man. Fuck him.”
Frank grabbed the keys out of the ignition, opened the trunk; golf clubs, golf shoes, leather brief case, suits and shirts wrapped in clear plastic from the drycleaner. Frank picked up the drum I’d just filled and dumped it on top of the golf clubs. And then did the same with the drum on Petey’s side. The garbage overflowed the trunk and Frank couldn’t close the lid until we’d tucked and crammed it into the crannies and the three of us slammed it together. We had fun, just like smirky man wanted.
Tex, tall, faded 501s, t-shirts, Mickey Mouse boots, Army field jacket, his last name, Dallas, sewn above one pocket, US Army sewn above the other, long hair, heavy beard, salesguy smile. He’d done a couple of tours as a grunt in Viet Nam. After he got out, he drifted around the country until he ran out of money and tried robbing a gas station. He got busted and learned his lesson and gave up armed robbery. Now he was peddling dope: weed, crosses, reds, blotter, black beauties, junk, blow; whatever a guy asked for, Tex knew where to get it, what was good, how much was too much, what was a fair price. He supplied the whole carwash.
After a couple of months at Apache, my teacher found me a job with Associated Motor Carriers Tariff Bureau, Inc., AMCTB. The company compiled and printed trucking tariffs; my job was to proofread pages and pages of columns and columns of numbers and once proofread, hand them back to one of the dozen or so floral-dressed, high-heeled, big-haired old ladies in the typing pool clacking away at pistachio-green IBM Selectrics. When they were done painting out their mistakes with lumpy whiteout and vaguely aligning the corrections in the rows and columns, they’d slap them back down in my inbox and spin around and click click click back to their desks all the while not looking at me like the mistakes were mine. I’d print them on the company’s AB Dick offset printer, collate and staple. The job paid $2.50 an hour, a nice little bump from the carwash.
My immediate coworkers were Dicky and Catman. Dicky was working to make AMCTB a career, he was short, skinny, balding and thirty and had diabetes and a wife. He was our boss. Catman, good looking guy with good hair down to his shoulders and a skinny black mustache, was 24, eight years older than me, and lived in his mother’s basement in a wood-paneled apartment that he’d built for himself. He had a waterbed and no plans for a career beyond five o’clock.
I’d get to work at 10:30 and at noon Catman and I would take our lunch break. On Wednesdays, we’d take his car, a yellow ’66 Impala, 283 V8, automatic, black vinyl top, chrome Cragars, and head over to Mr. B’s, blow a number on the way if one of us had some weed. Mr. B’s was a tired, street-front bar with blacked out windows facing University Avenue that on Wednesdays hosted a lingerie show, Mr. B’s Lunchtime Lingerie.
We’d been there a couple of times, me sucking down screwdrivers, before the bartender got around to asking for my ID; I showed him the draft card I’d made on the AB Dick and that was good enough for him and forever after, when I gave him the nod, he’d mix up orange juice and vodka with two maraschino cherries on top and a little plastic straw and hand it to me with a wink. Drinks were sixty cents, I’d give him three quarters.
Once the show got going, Catman and me and twenty or thirty other guys would stand in a press to watch, guys in dusty work boots standing next to guys in shined dress shoes, all of us, drinks in our hands, heavy-breathing the hot fog of cigarette smoke, Mennen deodorant and sweat, shuffling and shifting our feet on the butts and spilled liquor.
And the skinny girls with ribs you could count and no butts and no breasts, and the fat girls with G-string floss disappeared between wobbling cheeks, and the girls trying to hide yellow bruises behind silky scarves and makeup that looked like latex paint, and the girls with scars or bandages or missing teeth just trying to get through their set, would, one at a time, clump around that little stage in their platform high heels, painted fingernails clenching the smudged stainless steel pole as they peeled off their costumes and bras while pretending with no enthusiasm to dance to whatever music was on the cassette tape they’d handed the bartender. And we whistled and yelled and threw coins on the stage and went back to work.
In June of 1974, my high school gave me a diploma certifying that I was educated.
I got out of the Army in March of 1978 and stayed in Europe. It was cold in Germany and I hitchhiked south. I met Clayton at a campground in San Sebastián in northern Spain. Tall, skinny, scuffed leather-soled wingtips with no socks and food-stained khaki shorts, Clay had been a shoe salesman in London. He had an Isles complexion, a perpetually startled expression, and drove a faded blue Renault station wagon with a dented-in passenger door. He was twenty-eight and on the run from his pregnant girlfriend.
In a campground in Madrid, we picked up Beau. He was a Kiwi who’d worked as a stevedore in Tauranga before coming abroad. He was 5’8” or so, thick legs, heavy shoulders, hard, short-fingered hands, untrimmed beard, bald head, and a round face that looked like back on the docks he might have taken some hard punches; thick, crooked lips, smashed-flat nose, cauliflowered ear, his left ear. The three of us jammed into the Renault with our backpacks and from Madrid, we traveled south through Cordoba and Sevilla to Algeciras.
The Lonely Planet Guide warned us that Morocco was dangerous, that travelers should be experienced. After several weeks sleeping on the beach in Spain, we declared ourselves experienced and got off the ferry, filled out customs forms, waited to be waved across the border and drove west along the cliffs toward Tangiers, the Mediterranean with its glassy waters far below becoming more intense and shockingly blue as the sea got deeper. As evening set in, we followed a tiny switchback track to the beach and set up camp under the trees fringing the sand, just like in Spain. Clay set up his tent, Beau and I threw our bags down on the sand, the canopy of trees with the stars of Orion glittering through as our tent. We built a fire and threw a frisbee.
The axe handle blow to my head made a deep, cracking noise that echoed through my skull and shattered my consciousness into small pieces, each piece part of a larger reality, a jigsaw puzzle dumped out. It was quick, the blow and its echoes, so quick that I didn’t feel it in the moment, but only remembered it afterwards. Putting the puzzle back together took time, and yet, all the while my mind was struggling, my body was twisting and writhing. And that’s when the pieces came together. We’d rolled out our sleeping bags at some distance from each other, I was closest to the car and took the hit. Trapped in my bag, I rolled toward the car and shoved my head underneath trying to protect it from the axe handle and the punches and the stomping feet.
Forever moments later, I heard Beau bellow in his Kiwi accent, “Bloody fucking hell!” as he charged into the mob standing over me. There were six or eight of them and they were focused on kicking the shit out of me and he took them by surprise. As they turned on him, I got to my feet and together we fought, Beau and I, leaning back on each other, shoulder blade to shoulder blade. I remember hearing an animal howl that didn’t stop, that didn’t pause to breathe, that was a constant in our struggle. I wondered what it was as I shoved and kicked and punched at the shadow shapes in front of me before realizing the howling was me.
One of them had a flashlight, the beam slicing through the dark giving my memory of the event a black-and-white cinematic quality. As we struggled, I grabbed a rock from our firepit, perfectly formed to fit my hands and just heavy enough, an early man’s killing tool. I lifted it above my head and brought it down with the force of a hundred and eighty-five pounds of military fitness, adrenalin and terror just as the light flashed across a neck and bare shoulder and that’s where that rock hit, exactly in that confluence. He collapsed on the ground at my feet.
That was the end. They yelled and called to each other and ran into the dark, hauling with them the man whose neck I’d crushed. We called for Clay and got no answer. Frantic and terrified, we felt our way through the trees and underbrush where his tent had been searching for his body, certain that he was unconscious or dead. After many minutes, a faint “hello” and then another. We returned the call and Clay stumbled into the ruins of our camp clutching his hatchet. He’d heard the attack and had ran off down the beach and was unhurt.
We stuffed our wrecked and bloody gear into the car, drove up the switchbacks and spent the rest of the night in a thatched roof truck stop smoking hand rolled black tobacco cigarettes and telling tough-guy stories and bad jokes while the town doctor yawned and set my arm and sewed a dozen stitches into my head and six into my arm and another dozen or fifteen into Beau, all without the luxury of anesthesia.
The next morning when we should have been driving, we went to the police. That was inexperience. My French was horrible, my Arabic non-existent and Clay and Beau didn’t try. The cops were hostile and aggressive as though we were the suspects in our mugging; I didn’t understand much of what they said. I told our story over and over and at four o’clock in the afternoon, after waiting for hours perched on a wooden bench in a small room with concrete walls, no windows and a locked door, they gave us back our passports and let us go.
We drove out of that town and stopped the car. The conversation, and I remember it well, was about whether or not to leave Morocco, whether or not to turn around and go back to the ferry, back to Spain. I argued, leaning against the Renault me with my arm in a blood-encrusted sling, against leaving a country we hadn’t seen. Beau agreed. Eventually, so did Clay.
* * * * *
We needed a place to sleep. As we talked, Taibi and Aref, carpenters working on a house across the road, came over and squatted down and brought out their kief and a pipe and passed it around and I told them our story. Taibi invited us to stay at his house. It wasn’t far. I translated his offer and Clay shook his head no, “Let’s try to get to Tangiers tonight.”
Beau said, “We won’t make it, mate. It’s getting dark, road’s shitty, we ain’t slept in two days. Probably thieves and bandits out there, besides.”
I said, “Let’s stay with Taibi.” Clay didn’t say anything.
Aref grinned and waved and shouldered his toolbelt and walked away down the road and the four of us climbed into the car and Taibi gave directions, pointing us down desert dirt roads until he told Clay to stop in front of a prickly pear cactus hedge. The hedge was ten or twelve feet tall, maybe four feet thick, neatly trimmed and dense so you couldn’t see through it. We grabbed our gear and he led us through a tiny wooden gate into a dirt courtyard with a small concrete house with a flat roof in the middle. The hedge completely surrounded his house.
Taibi set up a tarp on poles in the courtyard and we laid out our sleeping bags. His wife brought us dinner, couscous and chicken. We sat cross legged and ate with our fingers, copying our host. When we were finished, Taibi wanted to talk. Sitting side-by-side on the ground, we talked world politics, carpentry, fishing, scuba diving and I don’t remember what else. We talked in French and when Beau and Clay couldn’t follow the conversation, they went to sleep. That went on, him talking to me in French and me nodding until it was 3:00 in the morning. Finally, I gave up and told him that that I needed sleep and he nodded and shouted a command in Arabic.
A young woman, his daughter, stepped around the corner of our tarp as though she’d been waiting and stood silent in front of us. She was fifteen, maybe, and teenage-skinny. Her hair, in the flickering yellow light, was a thick, wavy auburn-black that she wore pulled back over her shoulders. Her complexion was smooth, clear, the gold color of the North African desert but darker, more complex. She was wearing a white kaftan with gold embroidery that hung straight from her shoulders, touching her body only lightly at her breasts and hips. She was barefoot.
At first, I thought her eyes were black but as I looked at her and she stared back at me and her father talked, I realized that in fact her eyes were the same unfathomably deep blue as the Mediterranean viewed from the cliffs above. A soft smell of citrus, tangerines or maybe mandarins, surrounded her, the scent just detectable over the stink of kerosene. She stood, her lips tense and pinched, her feet together, her arms stiff at her side, her eyes never moving from mine while her father proposed our marriage. It took a while for me to understand.
Tangiers, Rabat, Casablanca, Fez, we spent a month in Morocco, camping in campgrounds patrolled by uniformed, no-nonsense guards with rifles. Our days we spent walking the narrow, thousand-year-old cobblestone streets, drinking mint tea in the markets under cobalt skies, canvas tarps shading us from the desert sun, and in the evening, smoking joints rolled from a mix of hashish and black tobacco.
Beau and I became quite close. Clay became increasingly bitter and distant. The Renault was his, he was our driver, and so we were forced into an uneasy truce when we were in the car and when not, we separated, Beau and me, our tents side by side in the sandy campgrounds, and at some distance, Clay’s tent, the nylon sagging around the aluminum poles bent in the struggle. We never talked about it, but the attack had ruined us.
We left Morocco the way we came, on the ferry from Ceuta to Algeciras. Clay dropped Beau and me at a train station. I took the train to Nuremburg then to Rhein-Main Air Base, got on a C-130 and started college that fall.
Have you ever had a conversation truly free of consequence?
People pick up hitchhikers because they feel sorry for them standing in the rain, the blowing snow, the bitter cold, the cruel sun; because they’re bored; because they’re shitfaced and need somebody to grab the wheel; because they want to call another person home to Jesus; because they need somebody to keep them awake; because they’re people who recognize that another human’s miles of need don’t disappear just because they’re no longer in the mirror.
Hitchhiking is getting involved for a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, a thousand miles with a person you would never know were it not for happenstance, luck and a shared fate. At the end of the minutes and miles, parting will happen and there will be no last names. Conversations are rattle-mouth stupid, deeply personal, ego-laden, spellbinding, dull, giggly and high, slurred and drunk, cries of despair so wrenching a driver pulls his longnose Peterbilt onto the shoulder to sob out his loss, all entirely free of consequence, no debt to upbringing, environment or occasion. And no shared future.
Once in a while there is silence, no conversation at all, the driver doing right and nothing more.
Everybody — doctors, cowboys, housewives, tie-dye hippies, traveling salesmen – everybody picks up hitchhikers (except lawyers, lawyers never pick up hitchhikers). They drive shiny Cadillacs, rusted Beetles and loaded Freightliners. They pull over slowly and cautiously or explode the brakes and skid smoking tires onto the shoulder, flashing right red invitation. Through the open passenger window, cautious greeting, assessing, judging, sometimes bartering (windshield sticker from the day, “Ass, Grass or Gas, Nobody Rides for Free”). And, of course, the questions that determine the future: “Where are you going?” and “Where are you going?”
Standing thumb out, back to the horizon, watching fate motor toward you and wondering whether this one or that one will be your ride into the future is hot, cold, wet, frustrating, boring, infuriating, and, ultimately, liberating having cast off the bonds and obligations of dollars and schedules, trading them for the largess of humanity, offering in exchange for a flick of the turn indicator and nudge of the wide pedal, entertainment, companionship, sated curiosity, the joy of giving, bread broken and shared, and maybe, just maybe, a damn good story.
Of course, there’s risk. For everybody. People die out there.
It was December, 1974 and I was living in Solana Beach, California. I’d joined the Army in October but wasn’t going on active duty until April. I’d been trimming trees and painting houses since I’d graduated from high school in June and I was broke. My mother had moved to Minnesota and I thought I’d spend Christmas at her house, maybe get something to eat while I was there.
Standing in the dark on an onramp to northbound Interstate 15 in Barstow, a fifties Chevy truck braked onto the shoulder, Gold’s Plumbing stenciled on the blue door in chipped and faded gold paint. The window stayed closed and I pushed the button on the door handle and the door swung open and the guy in the passenger seat fell out of the truck into my arms. I caught him and the guy driving, young guy, grabbed his sweatshirt, and between the two of us we wrestled him upright onto the seat, “Kid brother, fell asleep. Where you headed?”
“Minnesota.”
“Louisville. Money for gas?”
I had twenty on me, I could spare a couple of bucks for a good ride and part way to Kentucky was a good ride. I nodded, “I can help out,” and threw my bag in the back of the truck, pushed the kid into the middle of the seat and climbed in.
“Skeet.” He nodded his head toward the kid, “Eddy,”
I reached across and shook hands with Skeet. Eddy reached out his hand and I took it, his fingers were cold and limp and didn’t return my grip. When he pulled the hand back, he let his body slump against me and laid his head on my shoulder.
Rumbling up the freeway at fifty miles an hour, Skeet asked Eddy if he wanted a cigarette. He didn’t wait for an answer; he lit a Kool and handed it to him, Eddy reached for it and dropped it. It was glowing on the floor between our feet and I picked it up, took his hand and wedged it between two fingers. His head didn’t move against my shoulder when he put the cigarette to his mouth and took a pull. Skeet offered me the pack and I took one, too. Skeet had the truck heater on high and the windows closed. The air in the cab was a hot, thick fog. It was a good ride.
We stopped for gas just off the freeway, seems like I remember it being a Texaco. Under the fluorescent lights, I got a look at the two of them. Skeet looked tired. Standing next to the truck pumping leaded regular, his eyes were a faded grey-green, his skin in the flickering blue light yellow and dry like he hadn’t slept in a long time. His hand on the nozzle was big for his body and muscly and stained with what looked like mud or dirt. His upper lip was smashed and scabbed black.
Eddy, he stayed in the truck, his head leaned back against the rear window. Standing next to the open door, I could see that his left eye was scabbed and crusted with pus and sticking out in a swollen lump. Below his eye, the side of his face hung limp like the bones had been smashed and what was left was pulpy flesh held up by sagging black and purple skin. His right eye was open looking back at me. He was smoking another Kool; when he took it out of his mouth, he crooked the fingers holding the cigarette to motion me close and I leaned in so my ear was near his mouth. “Out of the ballpark,” he whispered so I could barely hear him. I stepped back in time to see the lips on right side of his mouth twitch upwards for just a flash like he was trying to smile.
Skeet saw me talking to him, “He’s okay, he’s going to be fine.”
“How old are you guys?”
“Thirteen. I’m fifteen.”
“What’s in Louisville?”
The handle of the nozzle clanked. Skeet banged it back on the pump and walked around to the passenger door, “Come on, Eddy, let’s take a piss.” Eddy put his arm around Skeet’s neck. When he tried to stand, his legs wobbled and buckled like he couldn’t control them. Skeet grabbed his belt and mostly carried him into the gas station. I leaned on the truck and smoked my cigarette.
Back in the cab, Eddy asleep on my shoulder, I asked Skeet what happened.
“The old man was drunk and beating on me. I heard Eddy yelling at him to stop and when he didn’t, I guess Eddy grabbed his slugger and came up behind him and hit him, hit him so hard I could hear the hollow crack of it and his blood sprayed on my face and the wall. The old man turned around like it was nothing, like he hadn’t been hit, grabbed the bat and hit Eddy in the face with it. Eddy went over backwards and the old man dropped the bat and stood there staring at him lying on the floor bleeding and not moving. I picked up the bat and hit him in the back of the head with it and kept hitting him until he fell on his face on the floor and quit moving. I took his keys and wallet and we got in the truck.”
Two o’clock in the morning, we rolled into Las Vegas, got off the freeway and drove around looking for a gas station. We were headed back out of town when Skeet ran a yellow and a block later the red lights lit up behind us, “Fuck, rollers. Eddy, we ain’t going back, don’t worry about it.”
The cop came up to the window and asked Skeet for his driver’s license, the red lights bouncing off the windshield and flickering through the cab. When Skeet told him all he had was a permit, the cop told us to get out and stand on the sidewalk.
“Let’s see some IDs, boys.”
I handed over my license, “I’m just a hitchhiker,” I told him. He ignored me.
Skeet had his arm around Eddy holding him up. “Let’s see some ID, kid.” The cop held his light up to Eddy’s face, “Holy God, what in hell happened to you?”
“He fell and banged his face. He’s okay, he’s fine.”
“Where you boys from?”
“California. We’re going Kentucky to live with our mom.”
“Whose truck is that?”
“It’s our dad’s company truck. He works for Gold’s.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
He fiddled his gun belt for a while just looking at us then he said to me, “You, over here.”
He stood with his back to Skeet and Eddy tapping my driver’s license against his flashlight, tap, tap, “I’m off in a few minutes and I don’t want to deal with this shit. So, here’s what we’re going to do; I’m going to get in my car and you and those two boys are going to get in that truck. You’re the only one with a driver’s license so you’re going to drive. You’re going to go straight for three stoplights, you’re going to take a left at the third one, you’ll see signs for the interstate. I want you to get on 15 and drive until you pass a sign for the Las Vegas city limits. Once you’re out of my town, I don’t care what you do. But if I see you again, you’re going to jail, all of you. I’m going to follow you just in case you get lost.” Tap. He handed me my license.
I got behind the wheel and turned the key and pushed the starter pedal, the truck coughed and fired up. I squashed the clutch, ground a gear dropping it into second, first gear was a granny gear in those trucks, and we rolled down the street, took a left where he told me to and got on the freeway. The cop didn’t follow us up the ramp.
The sun was coming up when we stopped for gas, we’d been in Utah for a while. Skeet shook Eddy, asked him if he needed to take a leak. Eddy didn’t move, “He’s asleep,” Skeet said and got out and filled the truck with gas and I gave him ten bucks. From Utah, there are a couple of routes across the Rockies, Interstate 70 through Denver or Interstate 80 through Salt Lake City. Skeet had told me they were planning to take the southern route through Denver. I’d told him then that either route worked for me, that it didn’t matter. Now it mattered and I told him I was going north through Salt Lake.
Interstates 15 and 70 come together in a desert on the western slope, desolate, gray, enormous and, other than long curving slabs of interstate concrete and the occasional tiny truck or car, empty of humanity. Skeet pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the eastbound 70 exit. As I was getting out, Eddy slumped toward me, his good eye closed, his eye lashes resting on the pale, young-child skin of his cheek. I touched his neck, feeling for a pulse. His skin was cold and after a minute I said, “Skeet, I can’t feel his heartbeat.”
“He’s still sleeping. Push him over here so I can hold him.” We laid him on his back so his head rested on Skeet’s lap and I closed the door. As I grabbed my backpack, I saw a baseball bat lying in the bed of the truck; it was in two pieces, split longways starting at the label and running through the barrel, the long, straight grain exposed by the split a pure and shocking white against the stains.
I shouldered my pack and walked back down the ramp toward northbound 15. As I walked, I kept looking over my shoulder. The truck never moved.
Remi (brown poodle brat) and I are driving to Death Valley to take pictures of the Geminids meteor shower. We left Saturday morning. We spent Saturday night at a truck stop in Valentine Nebraska, our camper truck parked in a line of idling semis, a sort of bring-your-own-sleeper-cab bunkhouse. The truck stop had a McDonalds and I had an Egg McMuffin. I didn’t tell Remi, although I think he was suspicious.
We left Valentine at 5:30 Sunday morning headed west driving Nebraska Highway 20 which runs along the state’s northern border. Good road, cliffs and buttes and curves in unlikely juxtaposition to movie-set ranch scenes and vastnesses where the prairie meets the horizons all around. It’s a beautiful, beautiful part of our country.
But in the morning, driving into the western dark, you can’t see the towering sand and stone geologies or the grazing cattle in the pine-treed and hilly distances or the snowy, hay-bale dotted expanses, all you can see is the headlight tunnel and the road and the hood and the blue, white and red gauges.
For many miles Sunday morning, the planet Mars, thirty degrees above the horizon and winking red, aligned exactly with the dashed white center line of west Highway 20 and the furthest reaches of our headlight beams while in those same moments, I watched in my mirrors as the eastern sky behind us turned red to blue. And the only sound was the murmur of the diesel and the gossipy whispers of the tires to the asphalt.
In the quiet, I thought about life being so quick and jerky and that it’s in these moments when fate and good fortune put us between the stars and the sun, that joy and peace are relearned.
I grew up in Del Mar, California, a little beach town just north of San Diego. I was born in 1956 and so was just gaining consciousness in the late sixties, early seventies. The Monkees are on my sound track. Del Mar wasn’t Berkeley but it wasn’t hick, either. Today, Interstate 5 hauls the vast majority of goods and people in and out of San Diego but in those days, the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway, Highway 1, was the major north-south thoroughfare and all that traffic went right through Del Mar which at the time had two stoplights, 3999 friends and neighbors and me, and a decent break at the Eleventh Street beach.
This is a story about Gabriel and Judy and their business making and selling white cotton robes out of a shop in Del Mar. It was a little light blue stucco store front, east side of the highway facing west toward the ocean, a big window for displaying the robes, a laundromat next door, a little office above, half a dozen parking spots in front.
Gabe and Judy’s business plan was to ride the wave of the biggest menswear style-makeover in all of history; men, and also women, were at the same moment, any moment now, going to realize the inherent superiority of the white, all-cotton, calf-length, long-sleeve one-piece robe and throw off their rigid, socially conformist, uncomfortable, unhealthy, expensive, environmentally ruinous, flammable, uniform-of-the-man garb in favor of the wear anywhere and everywhere, always in fashion, You-Are-The-Power cotton robe. Gabe and Judy wore robes throughout their daily lives to show how truly comfortable and free they, the robes, were. Gabe and Judy were in their twenties and thin and had good hair so it made sense. Also, Jesus wore a robe. I don’t know what Gabe and Judy wore when they went to the bank. I never went to the bank with them.
While the robe hasn’t happened yet from a fashion standpoint, I do think their plan had merit. And they did teach me some things about business. Their primary new store, go-to-market initiative was to offer free homemade hand-cranked ice cream on Friday nights with a little open house so that the local moms and dads — college professors, engineers, navy pilots, our parents, you know, robe-types — would have some ice cream and try on a robe. Well shit, there were a dozen kids, ten to fourteen years old that I hung out with in that little town with no movie theater and within hours the Robe Shop had become the place to be on Friday night. And we’d make it an event, taking turns cranking and eating ice cream out of cones and paper bowls and coming up with new flavor ideas, strawberry, raspberry, banana, mango, apple (didn’t work very well). We suggested candy bars but Gabe and Judy were purists. Yet, despite all the fruit, heavy cream and cranking, no parents ever showed up. In fact, nobody I knew or ever heard of ever bought a robe from the Robe Shop. Nobody. Ever. But their ice cream was spectacular. From that I learned a couple of things about business; first, you can’t sell a bad idea with good ice cream, and second, good ice cream is really a good thing.
Another thing Gabe and Judy taught me about being successful in business was the importance of a diverse revenue stream. It seems they’d discovered this new market opportunity where guys who’d just run the border from Tijuana hauling weed often needed to liquidate a little product to fund their ride north. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to be carrying a lot of cash in that illegal border-crossing business. Small, independent guys, guys hauling half-a-dozen, maybe a dozen keys, would pull into one of the parking spots in front of the Robe Shop and walk out with some twenties and a friendly wave from Judy at the office window. She paid a hundred bucks a key. Sure, Grade A Mexican, you’d get twice that in the Bay Area, easy, but you ain’t in the Bay Area, Bro, the Bay Area’s five hundred miles north and you need gasoline and maybe something to eat to get you there. Gabe and Judy would break those bricks up and put the weed in baggies and sell lids, four fingers for ten bucks. Judy sold most of the weed to the rich kids in La Jolla, although some stayed in town. Gabe bragged to me once about all the money they were making. They disappeared after a couple of months. The robes just weren’t selling.
In Death Valley, there is no obvious wildlife, no insects, a buzzing fly every hour or so is an occasion. Aside the fly, the silence is not complete; a steady ideology of military war planes doing war plane things keeps the roar dull and constant. Sometimes the soundtrack is accompanied by an air show.
For breakfast, I had oatmeal. I threw in some golden raisins and mixed nuts and Leaves of Grass to bulk it up. There’s something about the desert that cracks open the mind to language; maybe it’s the scarcity of words, or the arid, hard-edged reality all around reminding you that life is brief and precarious, or maybe it’s just the thin, dry air. That’s not what this is about, but there it is.
My photos are diminished by my wretched technologies. The telescope is controlled by my phone, but doesn’t connect readily to my phone or disconnects from my phone or randomly makes me “observer” rather than “controller” or disagrees about passwords or some such random annoyance. Got some shots anyway.
I bought an old camera from a friend (hey, Paul) and had it modified for astro. Oh, happy me! The super hydrogen-sensitive sensor is washing my pics red; still red at lower ISOs but maybe useable. I shot a bunch. We’ll see.
But here’s the thing, when you lean your head back in your camping chair so that you’re staring straight up and the sky is flooded with stars and you can feel their photons that have travelled tens or hundreds of lightyears to pass through the lenses of your eyes and your skin and pour into your body so you’re filled with the light of eternity, the fucking trophy photos just don’t matter.
