It’s 115 degrees in a ten-mile Sunday desert traffic jam, the loathing
of leaving Las Vegas. The part Hunter S. Thompson never wrote about.
A horde of hungover, newly broke people slewing back south, uncaring,
impatient, distorted by the heat haze, crawling in front of us.
214 miles from Los Angeles. The ideal place for The Silver Bullet, my
12-year-old VW, to splutter out pathetically, muscled out by the newer cars
which are still panting like mechanical dogs.
We rapidly reach a boil without air conditioning, but nobody gets angry.
I think about Nic Cage for
some reason. This never happened to him in Vegas. He just stayed drunk. Or
married Sarah Jessica Parker, if you watched the wrong movie.
I grimace and choke the car hard until something sparks the last bit of
life out of it and I can bully it onto the hard shoulder. A miraculous 15
minutes of the Bullet’s death throes get us clenched-jawed to the only refuge
from the sun - Whiskey Pete’s. The first or last place you can gamble in Nevada
depending on your direction of travel. Either way you look at it, a desperate place.
We shelter from the heat in a choking haze of
cigarette smoke, in the dark, sad, last gasps of Nevada’s gambling problem.
Hard to believe Vegas was originally a Mormon trading post.
My girlfriend and I eat small ice creams from McDonalds and make calls. Eventually
a large, jolly man of about 24 with beads of sweat running down his face
appears and almost wordlessly loads the car onto his truck. My girlfriend falls asleep in
the back while I make awkward conversation. There are very few places to notice
on the on the 275 mile drive between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, none of them
remarkable.
The smallest is Baker, a collection of mobile homes and fast food outlets willed into
existence on the very southern edge of Death Valley around 80 years ago by a fairly
unremarkable prospector. It was originally a railway stop.
People call Baker a town, but officially it is merely a ‘census
designated place’. Nobody from a city stops for more than an hour or recognises
anything past the bleached junk food signs.
The ‘Worlds Largest’ thermometer, Baker’s sole tourist ‘draw’, reads 99
degrees, even though it’s now completely dark.
Behind us the hum and lights of the sluggish funeral-like motorcade
toward Los Angeles continues, the only sound - no crickets, no cicadas. Who
would live here, but those running away, or with something serious to hide?
On the edge of this place there’s a hastily erected pound, a chain link
fence keeping in the rusting remains of cars the desert is trying to claim.
Some of these metal hulks spill onto the front by the side of the road, some
sort of invite.
It’s the only garage open and, by that virtue, the only place busy. Three
gnarled mechanics ignore our presence as I push the car into the pound.
There are a pair of stranded teenage sisters on their way back to San
Diego and a wild eyed computer game developer waiting for their cars to be
fixed.
I watch the mechanics - one a burly, black-haired greaser with a mean
pair of eyebrows and blue overalls at least ten years old. He looks incapable
of anything above a grunt, but is enthusiastically trying to get the girls back
on the road. It’s costing them though, I note.
A sulky boy in his early 20s with dirty brown hair in no particular
style and freckles lurks at the back, pretending to busy himself with some
equipment.
The third guy wears a short-sleeved shirt which appears fairly clean. He
must be the gaffer, and he seems friendly. Mechanics are never friendly. He
looks like your friend’s dad would if he’d been left in the desert for twenty
years. Truly, men without women.
His name is Marc. There’s small talk as he sizes me up, then he gets me
to start the car, which it now does, as if nothing had ever happened, a cruel
trick it has played before.
He checks the alternator then lazily decides the problem must be the
fuel pump. Seeming satisfied with this, but by no means checking the part, he
declares the work can be done first thing tomorrow. $100 advance Of course. You’re
in the desert now, boy. The hotter the place, the slower the pace.
There’s one motel in Baker. Run by people who don’t speak English, but they’re
cheery enough. The room’s clean and has a big fan, but offers little shelter
from the sweltering desert. The cold tap spews hot water.
Outside is a huge flatbed truck with Idaho plates, repainted in a badly
applied matte black. It looks like a huge wreck, as big as a whale. As we step
outside to go eat I notice a pair of beady eyes. A tweaker - what else – in the
driver’s seat. Around 5’ 2”, bulging muscles and a huge, burly, badly tattooed
chest. He’s breathing heavily and fidgeting wildly. He’s not really watching
us, or anything that exists but he’s watching. He’s shaking a little and
twitching, but mostly harmless. Tweakers breaking in and steal stuff from hotel
rooms. The lock on the door is little more than a catch. Of course there are
only three rooms occupied in the whole motel so they put us right next door to
the tweaker. I take my important things with me.
I look longingly at the slowly moving streak of colour blurring down the
interstate. Maybe the car would make it now? But its late, and we’ve paid for the
room.
We eat, get water, no beer, and I phone my boss and make my excuses for the
morning. I get ice from a freezer in reception. The lady behind the counter is
brushing her teeth when I walk in. She smiles nicely. The tweaker is around,
just out of sight. I can sense him twitching. He follows me back to our rooms,
but doesn’t go into his, preferring his car.
We watch TV. I hold my girlfriend tight, precious to me today. We fall
asleep.
I dream of bandits breaking the door down and casually pointing guns at
us. Of the tweaker and a group of other zombies smashing in the place and setting
fire to the room for no reason. Of the sandstorms drawing in and my mouth
drying out, the whole of me swallowed by the desert.
At 4am our neighbor is shouting. His silhouette was frantically pacing
and smoking outside of our room and making threats into a mobile phone. He was badly
attempting to blackmail the parents of the mother of his children. Hopefully
the children are with their mother in… Idaho? He swung between aggression, pity
and pleading, a sorry sight from the bottom of the desert.
We left the motel about 10, of course the garage wasn’t open, so we
found ourselves wrapped in a 114 degree blanket with nothing to do. We sat in
Denny’s. In the morning Baker didn’t want us anymore. Its nowhereness had set
in, stark and hot and I could feel the resent of its legitimate residents.
The coffee wasn’t being refilled anymore. I tipped a decent amount, but we
were still pushed out.
At the garage an unknown lady was now sitting on a stool in the middle
of the shop floor. She was next to the fan with a goofy grin of cracked, bad
teeth. She had large fake breasts, spilling out over her particularly tight,
short top.
“Say, come here - she’s got a story for you,” said Marc.
The lady proudly offered her hand, which appeared to have a computer
memory stick in it.
“They got the cameras all over the house. They got me filmed and they’re
coming for me, so that’s why I had to get out. My husband isn’t who he said he
was when I married him. He’s part of it, they’re going to get me,” she garbled
with a childlike, dumbfounded grin on her face.
Another deserted druggie. I told Marc about our friend at the motel.
“Yuh,” he said, adding, “he was
here yesterday. Wanted to trade that rusty thing in and take a car. Says he’s
got to get to Vegas, his mother is going to wire him money.”
The lady was a different matter. She had been deliriously wandering
around in the heat near the garage when Marc appeared, so he had taken her in,
given her a bottle of water and placed her under the fan. A slither of
tenderness or paternity, I noted. Marc must be a family man after all.
Of course, these distractions don’t get my car fixed, and the part
hadn’t come in yet. Of course. It never would.
Two more hours passed with us watching flies in Dairy Queen, observing
the inhabitants of Baker. There’s as much to do on Monday in Baker as at any
other time: Eat bad food, stare at the road or nothing.
Marc came back with the bad news. They’d bought the wrong part. It was
going to take longer and he started to talk in hundreds of dollars. I had other
ideas.
He would give us a lift to the nearest place to hire a car: Barstow, a real
town. I’d come back for mine when it was fixed.
As Marc moves some cars around, the younger mechanic rolls in, sour
faced, from having been sent to fetch something. The surly, brooding,
bad-attitude mechanic is in the shadows at the back of the garage. I catch the
end of Marc telling the young one “…don’t let Danny get to you. C’mon, chin
up.”
We load in and reverse. As we leave the rusting garage and exit Baker, it
all comes out. Now, Marc’s not going to take us out into the desert, take our
credit cards and dig a hole, no sir. He’s going to educate us.
He starts, waving in the direction of the boy we’ve just left: “See,
he’s a good kid. My son. Mixed up in drugs. He got into heroin and then that’s
all he can do. He’s been in rehab, up in Oregon, but didn’t finish. Now he’s
here and there’s nothing here. Nothing. Just rocks and sun. I hope he doesn’t
go back to it, but he will. Nothing out here to do.”
Then came the whole sad story. Marc had been planning to become the King
of Barstow, or the mayor at least. Big plans. Started running weed over the
Canadian border in the 70s and did time for it. Five years. Undeterred, he grew
a horde of pot plants back in SoCal, and business had thrived. He then owned a
gold mine and was prospecting.
But mining for precious stones didn’t work out and the only other thing around
was cars. The garage had originally been in Barstow, but all the trade was from
Vegas anyway, so to head the other mechanics off at the pass and bought the only
garage in Baker. He hated Baker and it was too hot to work in, too hot to think
in, and too hot to live near, but that was how things were.
Danny was his brother. Danny had issues though. He wasn’t a nice person,
and wasn’t one for messing around. He never suffered fools, or customers.
There were astronomical figures given about money gained and lost, and
how Marc knew heroin because he’d bought a few grand worth and done it all
himself. He’s not got addicted because he’d refused, things like that were “all
in the mind.”
He liked folk-rock on the radio, but liked to talk a lot more. The plan
was to buy out Barstow as a businessman. Instead he’s overcharging people in
Baker.
Then there was the paranoia. Marc didn’t like cities, he didn’t like
masses of people, he was sure the government is up to something. The army is out
on manoeuvres in the desert, he said. They’re training up hundreds and hundreds
of troops for something. They’re embedding troops into everyday life, into normal
communities, to spy on us - the man who shines your shoes, who serves your
food, who drives the bus. This continued. I liked Marc. He didn’t listen when I talked or gave opinions,
but he was kindly enough. He wanted to be friendly, but why I couldn’t tell.
The further we got from Baker the more normal he became.
We got back to LA and continued with our working week. I personally bought
the part for my car and sent it to the garage. Promises were made and not kept,
money went down the drain, the sands shifted around Baker, but the Silver
Bullet never moved an inch.
Friday we got up early and drove back up there, in my girlfriend’s car. Marc
was the only one there. It was fixed. He refused any tip. Said he didn’t need the
money. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that one bit.
I saw the matte black whale the tweaker had been driving in the rusty
lot. Marc said the short, stumpy man had been back. He’d got money. Marc had
shown him a car, and before he could even get the title for it, the tweakshow
had bolted. He’d been in touch with the guy’s mother, who had sent the money
down. Where he got her number from I was unsure.
She said her son had driven to
Vegas and crashed the car. He’d left it wherever it crashed, in the middle of
the street. He’d been found by some bad people who he owed money to, probably
for drugs. He’d been badly beaten and was taken to hospital. Once he decided he
was feeling well enough, he’d also fled the hospital. That was the last anyone
had heard of him, family, Marc or otherwise. Nobody mentioned his kids.
The tweaker woman had been escorted back to wherever she had come from
by a local part time sheriff. Marc’s son was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t want
to say where he was. Danny, in his malevolent blackness, wasn’t there.
And that left us. I was happy to be back in the Silver Bullet, and it
roared into life. We headed East toward Joshua Tree and around 100 miles later
my car spluttered out again, exactly the same, in a tiny two street place in
Johnson Valley.
(Written October 2015)
