One Night in Baker

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)