"The Peyote Coyote" kalff/marino editions, 2008

A Spare Change Publication
Printed by Sal's Mimeo
Preface

The Peyote Coyote is a series of pastel recollections and semi-literate rambles about my haiku hobo days hitchiking and traveling through the American Southwest in the Sixties. It was a tie-dyed altered states purple hazed time of desert, mountains, cactus, cerveza and cantinas. It's a visual portrait of people and places, Route 66, Santa Fe Railroad, Phillips 66 gas stations, old dusty diners, old Mexicans and New Mexicans. It's a microbus microcosm magic carpet of blue haikus and dharmabumming in a time when all things seemed possible. A revolution of spirit was underway and yes, the times they were a' changin'. I spent years living on the beach in Hawaii, beach bummed and broke and eventually made it back to the mainland to live on the streets of Sunset Strip and then on to the kaleidescope known as Haight Ashbury and settling down finally, in the beat North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. It was during 1966 while living in Northern California that I began exploring the deserts north of the border and south of the border and more than just a little to the left of Tom Joad. The road prophets I met along the way are all ghosts of memories now except for a few old friends who remain, but mainly it's a desrt painting of my altered states alter ego, Sandoz Diego Cerveza and his adventures with Doc Yucaton in search of lost chords and the elusive Peyote Coy
... Chapter One - The Cantina

Juarez, Mexico - 1966

Tequila & Marijuana Cocktails

Double-dazed and purple-hazed, he had journeyed from the cheap wine and endless row of topless bars that formed a phallic phalanx along the fog drenched streets of San Francisco's wet dream North Beach...caressed the Golden States left coast as though fondling an asphalt breast...whoopin' and hollerin' and campin' and campin' it up and down on the Pacific shores at Big Sur with love. Then, Death Valley with its shimmer, dunes and mountain hues, purple and copper in color, and then crossed the border into Old Mexico looking for a new life among old mexicans and even older indians who held the secrets of peyote . He was already high when he walked into the dusty hot sun baked village, himself as dusty and tired as the old siesta men already asleep against adobe buildings. Holographic mandalas appeared as the mescaline hit he had taken just an hour before began to take effect, causing them to swirl in the air to the strains of a marching band, bold as brass. He marveled too at the hallucinatory batons that were silver, tossed high, higher than he had ever seen, high into the bosom of the sky by young zen cheerleaders in revealing skirts of catholic plaid. Haiku visions followed him down the streets and into the cantina, visions of poets and hemp happy hipsters spinning out of orbit with a post-beat cadence, swimming and sailing as great Ahab whaling ships in search of a great white whale in a kaleidoscopic sea of murals filled with mermaids. Beastly large frescoes, obscenely obese as magneto generators deep inside the industrial vagina of old Henry the Ford's not enough eyeliner, yet, too much Rouge Plant, downriver, back home, years back, eons ago, in Detroit. Now he was well beyond home, and far past the exhaust of a creative blaze orange blue collar sunset



The mescaline massaged him with gentle fingers of hallucination as the dust swirled at this feet as he entered the cantina and ordered a drink. Soon he could see only the dilated vacant alley eye socket stares of the institutional disabled and he could now eavesdrop on those silent screaming voices in the victims head. Victims imprisoned in wheelchairs, straight jackets and hoped up on narco midnight pills while interjecting injections of sweet dreamy morphine. Drug induced circumnavigating their own private Polar Ice Caps, past giant icebergs, round and round the Cape we go, circular explorations they were, easy to negotiate, except for those 90 degree corners of fleeting reality that appeared only as more hallucinations obscuring what they really were. Those recesses, the corners, the 90 degree forks in the road, were illuminated in deep shadow by electric currents, pulsating and twitching in orgasmic release as the tequila he was now drinking in the cantina, had wormed it's way home to the grand nerve central station, exposing the masks of drunkards with tankards, comedians and Dexedrine. The broken mirror in the men's room fired back olfactory warning shots over the head and as he ducked he could see the pile of neon lipstick tubes lying in the bottom of an empty William Holden swimming pool, empty except for Holden floating on top with a bullet in his back, on the fading estate of old Sunset Boulevard. The drugs finally shielded him from the visions of bright lights emanating from a very secretive Left Bank French underground, thick with homosexual transsexual mascara that penetrated deep into the bowels of the cabaret underworld of a bereft Berlin. A socialista workers paradise appeared in it's glitzy place, forewarning of a possible fornication as he sat down on the floor of the bar to watch Tom Joad and the False Maria getting it on, electing eventually to erect monstrous and preposterous monuments to Karl Marx, Frederich Engles and Papa Ooo Mao Mao! The subliminal droning of the Industrial assembly lines hummed a tune that was a delightful color, and as colorfully imposing as Diego Rivera's blue-collar steel-grey Soviet Stalin hues. I looked around, my head spinning around and then...I stumbled, I tumbled and swore as I fell, face down, ass up onto the cantina's jukebox floor - passed out and pissed off in Ciudad de Juarez in 1966. Dreaming drunk, vivid and vibrant, I walked the dog of Chihuahua through the desert of the same name. The desert, now deserted except for techno-color fragrance of nighttime, dream time nightshade and bella donna blooms. I could have been snorin' in Sonora with a senora or senorita or two, dos, passos, pesos, but instead traveled in suspended cartoonic and catatonic animation through fully phallic fields of the cactian cosmos astride a fully loaded, fuel injected heavy metal steely dan saguaro..locked and loaded. I found buttons in the surrounding hillsides, and ate one only to feed a hunger and to quench and squash a thirst. Soon I was assailed by the sounds of laughter and unfamiliar dialects, not chinee but mex me thinks, with the dust swirling like little dust bowl tornado's created by little brown feet belonging to the little brown kids of the little brown mestizo village who danced delirious in the dormant dirt of the dusty catholic plaza..Saint San Shit or something or other. A lone tree, stood, still, silent, leafless, but flashed on and off with liquid-light, bright with Robert Johnson hues of blues and the hot reds of deep south negroid rhythms, bumps and grinds, bullfrogs, gators, bayou crickets, and big invisible swampy snakes with blank faces.



The mescaline band, mucho mariachis in hand, performed a flaming tight pants'd flamenco with a flamingo of dubious gender on the table, tanked up on too much tequila. Then the trumpets, blaring out festive fiesta fandagos with a serape serenade for sweet Scheherazade, with wave after wave of music, like lyrical tsunamis crashing to shore, deep inland and further yet to reach the lagoons and indonesian caves. In my dream, or someone's dream, can't remember now, I stood alone, with all the others, fixed in place fixated on all the empty eye sockets of the other prisoners of Zen, in the Jesuit jail, white stucco'd, Caucasian caulked and adobe'd, surrounded again like Saturn confined to rings of debris, by anxious urchins, begging, imploring to fill the pinata with more peyote and tequila dreams. I lowered the mache of paper to the dusty ground below, filled it, packed it like a pirates cannon full of shrapnel words, not in any particular or peculiar order of sentence or structure of any kind. Then it was raised by the numerous Pablitos by its frayed rope high above the blindfolded assemblage who couldn't wait to swing a stick at it like Mussolini hanging upside down in the square like a slab of fascist meat.
Sticks swang and swung and swinged, wildly, no hits, no runs, no errors until ol' Number Seven connected with a direct hit. As the ball flew out of the stadium, words, so many of them, fell from the punctured pinata complete with punctuation, like so many pieces of pretty candy flying out without wings in every direction. It was an explosive array of metaphors, verbs, nouns, some were renowned nouns while others merely unknown nouns. The cascade of the english language fell not to the ground but found sanctuary on the linen pages of a book waiting for them in illiterate alleys, for their very arrival, survival and grammatical revival. The children, the smart ones, not the adults, gathered up the little candy like words together, and together they spent the morning forming sentences and paragraphs until the no-sense finally made sense, mainly socialista mumbo jumbo about a lady named Frida, Che Guevara and the flats of tortilla. Soon the words became sentences, the sentences paragraphs, and then it was a book, a tome, that I read a little of. Soon in my dream my eyes became heavy with drink and mescaline and I had to rest. I laid the invisible book on the invisible table next me and was glad to sleep. The alcohol and peyote were wearing off as the plaza and the pinata began to fade from view and my reach. Voices disappeared too, decibel by decibel until there was only a loud silence. I had some tea in a cup and it smiled back at me, a weird Cheshire cat got your tongue grin, and then I doubled over and threw up..
Next Day

The sun rose in the east as I suppose it feels it has to, that is what we hired it for after all. It warmed my face as I sat up, refreshed in spirit with a hollow stomach. Sitting in the corner, quiet as a saint was the mysterious Doc Yucatan, a haiku hobo of recent acquaintance from Denver. "Damn Doc, I had the weirdest dream last night, or I think it was my dream and not someone elses. It was one long string of dream beads or shells strung together." Doc motioned for me to get up as it was time to head out, so we both got up to leave old Mexico after I had splashed rancid brown water on my face and grabbed by backpack by the bedstead. Doc and I walked through the sleepy village and down the sleepy road where even the dogs were to goddamn lazy to bark at us, we lit a joint and walked out into the desert.the Haiku Hobo and the Dharmabum in search of the Peyote Coyote in the kingdom of cactus... Doc led him, drunk and hungover much of the time through the looking glass, tumbling down Mad Hatter rabbit holes on sojourns through Death Valley in California, and the desert lands and sands of ol' New Mex and Arizona. Two madmen doomed on the dunes, without gravitational attachment to hold them to convention nor conformity. It's also when he began keeping his writing journals to become a journalista and peyotisa. So much to absorb in this mystic region. Plentiful pastels had aligned in secret conspiracy with the allure of desert sky azures of the old 'Merican southwest and was attracting flies to their deaths on flystrips, and more than it's share o' O'Keefes and Ansels. While this macabre dichotomy of life-art and bug-death raged quietly, it conquered the hearts and dreams and fostered schemes of cool conquistadors, including the king of cibola cool, Coronado and his chaotic, Quixote quest for seven cities of gold. He searched for amazing amazons in possession of just one breast apiece who dominate and rule the herds of male livestock in the pastures and fields of the false isle of California.. baja to you-hoo! Later, in time, the region would become awash with the meandering wanderings of the lost dutchman and his fabled fabulous, fondled shaft searching for gold with one hand, while one finger was deep inside a dyke. California, Old Mex and arid Arizona, locked and loaded with lore and legendary figures and tall tales of their own, can't compete in the open air market of turkish madness and madmen and mayhem, ahem.amen.ah-women.with the bastard bandito chile called Nuevo Mexico . cut now to saloon scene with whore wars underway, soiled doves in can-can boxing matches and prostitutes racing in the streets for the sports as the players placed their bets on the naked runners.win, place or show more flesh The bare stage of the smokey cantina is set. Drunks, bad whiskey and worse, desert bad asses drink, swear and spit as the purple curtain opens, the crowd goes wild with approving applause and they can't get enough of the outlandish outlawry of Billy T. Kid, the James Dean of the wild west firing off mirthful salvos from a pearl handled six shooter with silver city bullets packed lethally with equal measure of angst and lead. The Lincoln War Regulator without a cause, unchecked and unbalanced, left handed, right handed, got to hand it to ya.guns blasting away with the ferocity and velocity of Mr. Gatling's gun..letting loose an orgasmic ejaculation of hot lead and death. Geronimo! the avenging Apache with more Apocalypse Now attitude, machismo, and bravado than Brando's marvelous Col. Kurtz, the king kong of the Mekong on Vietnamese methamphetamine.racing across the border skewering mex-ca-bobs in redskin retaliation for brown skinned transgressions and incursions that massacre'd mescalero women and children. Mustachioe'd Poncho Villa, viva Villa, Viva Las Vegas, it's a gas, gas, gas, the bandito's bandito and bandit saint of the southwest second in importance to only the Virgin of Guadalupe, or her sister, little latin lupe lu.Poncho on the march, pillaging villages with Black Jack Pershing in hot anglo pursuit south of the border, s.o.b., north of the border, norte, sur, sur, norte, nick, nolte.
1947

Good Golly, Miss Goddard! Sci-fi hi-fi so high saucers from outer spaced, stonehenged, stoned age and crashing just outside of Roswell with a klaatu, barada, nicto thud, loaded with debris and Michael Rennie-gades who now become the alienated of the alien nation - born in lunarcy, and cloaked in secrecy with lunar cretin secretions giving birth to bug eyes, anal probers and wild eyed UFO'gists! This all on the helter skelter heels of Rockin' Robert Goddard's rocketry revelry and associated atomic badda - bing badda boom boom bomb tests near A-Bomb Alamagordo, Flashback Gordo! "Waitress, could I get a big ass plateful of radiation and isotopes with a side order of mushroom clouds please?" Muchas Garcias, Martinez.Holy Hiroshima, Batman! Nagasaki nuked, Fatboy Wonder.duck and cover, duck and cover..and damn, do I miss the cold war. The bomb wasn't all bad after all hell it gave us silver screen scream direct from the new mex white sands wilderness, giving birth to Gojira and the 50 foot wo-myn, the atomic hula with large, massive coconut breasts the size of Jupitor, cleavage as deep as the Grand Canyon and as delicious as Venus in a wet sweat of passion. Outer space implodes and exposes inner space with Aldous Huxley Little House on the Mental Prairie, windows wide and doors unlocked and open..inside in the dark and cobwebs strung along like electric wires the Peyote Coyote howls with Ginsberg chanting a yiddish yin and yang and yanking all the time to a new mexico mandela mandala.om, sweet om! Hemp, hemp, hoo-ray-gun! Hallucinogens and dream catchers and dream creators, the southwest is a pipeful of mindful illusions..chinee opium dens wove silken patterns from pipes, long and hollow, as naked lute and flute players played to the opiated and doped up cowboy cowpoke pokin' a cow, o-boy and flying high above the clatter of the stampede. Marijuana made it's lewis and clark cheech and chong trek, crossing the line at the rio grande from old to new..mex..to entrench itself, muy bueno, into the hempadelic fabric of Pancho's pancho at the el rancho. The loco locals of the locale also had other ways to get whacked out, Gringo.Mucho mescaline mined from small spineless cacti called peyote kept many a medicated medicine man or woman hopped up and happy for many moons. If haight ashbury was the fort knox of LSD, then the southwestern pueblos packed enough of a peyote punch to knock out Muhammad Ali..down for the count.out cold. Racing though out all it's history, coursing through arterial lava tubes was a thick mass of asphalt, artery cloggers with speed limits in the limitless expanse of the sand of reservations.ghostly ruts of the Santa Fe to the kitcsh kulture of Route 66.the Original El Camino Real was real heavy with burro traffic, spaniards and indios, then the 20th cent paved itself over externally while we were combusting internally and the auto engine replaced the desert injun in blazing new trails amidst the redskins red rocked mountains majestic..soon, tourist from Tucumcari to Albu-Quirky snatching up every cheap knockoff navajo souvenir like rez junkies looking for a back alley wigwam welfare fix from some imaginary free clinic..war bonnets and rubber tomahawks, woven blankets, rugs and cool kachina dolls to hear the ka-ching of mucha wampum..oh yeah, got a buck? Pose with the chief along the roadside with a spittin' image of Tonto from Toronto..all for one u.s. greenback. Flash forward, cross the border to today, time and space.Billy the Mysterious Kid. Is it brushy bill in tex, or the kid in sumner fort? Aliens or Area 51 military secrets kept guarded and hidden and purposely misleading? Smoky bear..is it "ey" and "The" or just "T".?? Our search through the mist of history and the desert days searching for the buttons of holy altered altars.Doc exclaimed, and how many people actually "exclaim", THE PEYOTE WILL FIND YOU! So while we searched for the peyote, apparently the peyote was tracking us like a pitbull in heat in search of prarie dog meat.it was also the first illumination that the journey itself is part of the destination..a journey that began long ago for me through the portals of journalism, pop culture dumpster diving, drugs and sexual revolution.it's where I learned the difference between gonzo and ganja from my purple hazed and double domed double dazed alter states and altered ego.dr. sandoz diego cerveza.and where the hipster haiku began with a lineup of assorted sordid train-hoppers, pill poppers, junkies, trannies, anarchists, artists, activists, dykes on bykes, atomic hulas, dharmabums, haiku hobos, peyotistas and socialistas.and not just a few Tom Joadistas..it all began in the American southwest desert in 1966 outside in a parking lot at a place with a broken sign that read."Eats" in neon..

Chapter Two - Neon Eats

Southern California - Mojave Desert - 1968
Dust, dirt and diesel, dead flies on the window sill...."Order up!"
The diner's rusted neon sign had long ago bled dry; evaporated along with the flowing stream of highway traffic that used to flood the two lanes of the now cracked, aged California concrete. In it's day in another era, it was a two-lane Mississippi river of commerce as migratory tourists searched every prairie dog hole for those elusive invisible jackalopes that don't really exist and stacks of cutesy, kitschy "wish you were here" postcards to send home from the open road to the folks back home in cold, frozen, plaid and proud Minnesota. Khaki clad GI's ready to lock n' load poured across the desert two-lane on their way to Ord and Longbeach ready to train and end the war, any war. They jammed the jukebox with quarters, musical ammo snug in the slot, as the lonesome whistle country blues sounds of Hank Williams rose like an angel on wings, and Bill Haley one o'clocked, two o'clocked, and three o'clocked around the clock. That, however, was before the intrusion of the interstate. The Red Ball Highway that won the war in Europe, now declared war on the American Southwest, decimating the diners, cafes, gas stations and warm beer juke joints. Blew them to smithereens with a steady, unrelenting bombardment of four lane super highways. Artillery shells of progress and prosperity, exploding, leaving the legendary two lanes, bleeding and lifeless, debris now, relics with fading signs on forgotten, forlorn, rusted and abandoned on old roadsides. Hollywood itself, all glitz and glamor, stopped by the old place back in the heyday '30s. "Hell, Clark Gable hissef' et here once I'm told by my Grandpappy. Yep, him and Carol Lombard too on a couple o' occasions. Big cars and mink coats. Hoowee, them was the days, boy, them was the days. Ain't lak that now, though, I tell ya. Nope. Seems ole Ike, hell of soldier, President to, before that Catholic feller Kennedy got us all messed in Vietnam. My daddy voted fer Ike, but the General had this here idea you see, about that autobane or whatchacallit in Germany. Bigger cars, faster roads, people in too much of a hurry today if'n ya'll ask me. Anyways, done came through here in '66, maybe '67, and kilt the town. Now don't that beat all. S'pposed to be progress, and kilt the whole damned town. Shame is what it is, a downright shame." The Roostertail Cafe had been a California desert landmark since 1930. Nobody was even sure where the name came from anymore, nor cared. Stan, along with Janet, his only waitress and also his wife and lifelong mate, ran the old place and tended to business, what was left of it, like his grandfather did when he opened it, and like his father did when he took over after Stans grandfather passed on to that great filling station in the sky. Stan laughed, thoughtfully to himself. "What's so durned amusin' Stanley?" Only Janet ever called him Stanley; to everyone else it was just Stan or Stosh, a nickname he earned in Korea. He laughed again and banged the table with his hand. "Life's crazy. Never thought I'd be running a restaurant, let alone a rundown one, and now, I get ready to sell the joint and I won't know what to do with my time. Live life like a broken down millionaire I suppose. Take up pottery or get a telescope and look at stars all night to fill my free time." Janet smiled and let him have it. "Remember when you got home from Korea? Said you'd never settle down in the desert and stay put. Took a job on a Colorado railroad as a brakeman and damn near killed yourself, hated that. Then you made custom cowboy hats in Wyoming and you hated rodeos...but Lord, when you took over the cafe, why I've never seen you happier. You may think you hate this desert, but you don't, not really. You just think you're getting old, slowing down, running out of neon like that old sign out front, and well, you are, and I am and that's life." Stan smiled broadly and felt better, full of neon and full of memories, good and grand memories. He remember the hustle and bustle of the old days, the good old days. Used to have small cabins in back, the diner itself a porcelain grease palace, stools and tables filled with customers talking about where they've been and where they're headed. East to West, West to East, North to South and South to North. Could hardly keep the gas pumps going. "Check the oil? How's them tires? No water for miles so better check that fer ya too. Goin' to Los Angeles, are you, well say hello to Mr. Gable when you see him for me. Stops here sometimes, yep, sure does". Some days there were so many Packard's, Plymouth's, Chevrolet's and Fords, the supply couldn't keep up with the gas guzzling internal combustion demands of those piston pumping petrol hungry heavy metal mo-sheens on some days.

Big neon signs out front, like shimmering mirages in the heat of day, lit up the night sky for miles, brighter than Times Square on V-E Day. The cafe announced in simple easy to understand neon lingo, "EATS". The cabins beckoned with a big neon welcome, "VACANCY". The wooden cabins were filled at night with tourists glad to be off the road for a few precious hours of rest after keeping the beat to the steel belt concerto. You could hear the children's cacophony of muffled laughter in the knotty piners, parents laughing too, right along with them. The soft glow of the lamps within cozily illuminating the floral print of the cheap curtains. Every now and them, the urbane family, constrained and shackled by months of claustrophobic skyscraper concrete, would walk, float in a dream state out onto the gravel parking lot at night to wonder in awe at the horizon to horizon palette of stars that filled the clear desert sky, natures nocturnal canvas. The succulent smells of the sand plants, the crisp, black night air..The Cactian Kingdom of the Great Southwest. Next morning, refreshed, born again, they'd pack up the car and then head into the cafe. The flickering neon sign still on in the fading early morning hours as it made ready for the brilliant sun and the heat of the day. "EATS" was all it said, all it ever said. Story goes that when asked why it didn't say more, Stan's grandfather replied, "It says enough." The customers would wolf down big plates of fresh eggs cooked to cuisinal perfection, drink coffee strong enough to wake the dead, and feast on peppered bacon and thick slabs of sourdough toast with fresh butter and jam, homemade by Stan's wife. Afterward some would buy some to-go food for the road, long trip after all. A postcard or two with a cartoon character Navajo chief on it, taffy candy and small pecan rols in a bag for the "are we almost there yet" kids in the back. They would then pull the cars and campers around to the pumps, fill 'em up, have the oil and tires checked one more time for good measure and buy a .25 road map to help guide them to the Pacific Ocean across the sea of sand they had to cross first. On occasion, to have some fun with the tourist, Stan's grandfather would sell the kids souvenir bags of "rattlesnake eggs" and stuffed toy rabbits with antlers glued to their synthetic heads. "Jackalopes is what they is. Lot's of 'em round here." The kids eyes would get wild eyed wondered, and the parents would smile at this obvious farce and tall tale. Road ready, mom and dad would load the kids, along with a bag full of memories, genuine rubber injun tommyhawks, plastic feathered headdresses and rubber tipped arrows for plastic bows and maybe a coonskin cap or two for good measure. Never know what you'll run into out in the mirages and heat of the merciless Mohave. The town of Rogers, California was a thriving port in the automotive seas in those days. Hardware store, mercantile for linens, grocery store for food and even had a a small pharmacy in back. The Roostertail had one of the first soda fountains in California, and experimented once with bringing food out to the waiting cars to speed up service and increase profits. Grandfather noticed though, that then the harried motorists would hurry on their way, the cabins would sit vacant. He quickly but an end to his experiment marriage curb service socialism and carhop capitalism. The old movie theater in Rogers advertised "100% Refrigerated Air". The Carswell family, who had opened the small theater in town just before the war, opened a drive-in movie theater in 1949 on some ranch land they owned. Showed all the latest films from Holly-weird, and by the mid-50's the kids started to come from miles around, sometimes from as far away as Eastvale in the next county on Saturday Nights. It was a revved up processional of souped up '32 Fords, '49 Mercs and '57 Chevy's. The movies sooned changed, and Errol Flynn was swashbuckeled by an atomic monster from Japan called Godzilla. Families that had enjoyed cartoons, shorts and main features now kept away, as the kids enjoyed sexual discovery and paradise by the dashboard light in the backseat vinyl with rock n' roll on the radio up front. On the silver outdoor screen, Bugs Bunny bested Elmer Fudd every time. and who could resist the magnet of madcap that transfixed us with the eye-poking doink-doink "Soitenly!" mayhem of the Three Stooges. "Times was good" the old timers chime in, but the times, as the song says, were a changin'....

The coming of the Interstate also brought with it a social whirlwind of change. The next generation of Rogers progeny realized they didn't want to farm or ranch anymore. Profits were too low to eke out an existence and preferred perfume and cologne to the smell of manure. Some went on to college, others joined the Army to to stop the Communist Domino that was devouring Asia, and others just simply left town and dropped off the face of the earth as they knew it, never to be seen again. Some of them were plowed under the subsoil of finance, to the banks, and others sold out to corporate farms and huge behemoth American conglomerates. Sold land, pennies for the dollar just to get out from under. Families moved away, back east to places like Indiana and Illinois, for God's sake, richer farm land to be sure. As the towns population was let out like air in a slashed tire, the merchants too began to feel the loss. Had to cut back on merchandise and service. Raise prices on products that nobody could afford anymore. If you listen closely to the past, you can hear the voices of a family traveling on vacation. The radio on, tuned to some obscure daytime AM station in the middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere. Count Basie pounding out the beat to perfection. The preachers voice, loud and proud looking for donations while preaching everlasting salvation. The kids making contorted faces at passing motorists. Time to stop at that cafe, been here a thousand times before on this road, but have to get fuel for the car anyway, and grab one of those giant burgers and homemade fries. The creme soda is also to die for. The years passed. The kids have grown and gotten married and have families and little face contorters of their own now who rule the backseats and still ask, "are we almost there yet?" The families get together, as always for the holidays, sit through innumerable hours of 8mm film and Kodak slides, and reminisce about the good old days. Like clockwork, the conversation invariably gets around to those wonderful old roadtrips. "Remember that diner we used to stop at, in Rogers, in California I think, and those huge burgers? Those were great burgers. I wonder if it's still there?" The Rogers school too now stands empty, a panhandler, a hobo on the side of the tracks. Crumbling concrete and the phantom sounds of ghost football voices that cheer no more on Homecoming Night. The echoes of the past still reverberate through the empty, decaying halls. The windowless facade stares from empty eyesockets as though seeing the past as clearly as we see the present." I think it was '39" say the old timers. "Yeah, it was '39..that year we won the division in football..what was that kids name? God, he could run." The school emptied itself of seniors every year, out to the cold world, away from the warm blanket of youth, scholastic routin, friends and familiarity. Some to college. Some to war. Most, all married now, blown and scattered across America like dandelion seeds. Every now and then someone pulls out the Yearbook from a box stored in the attic, opened slowly and carefully as though a rare Gutenberg bible, centuries old that threatens to crumble like a rotted shroud. Each page studied carefully. A smile here, a tear there, then recognition. "Yeah, I told you it was '39. Billy, that was his the kids name. Got us the champeenship that year." Then a pause and a sigh. "Billy died in '43. Okinawa I think, just a kid at the time. Man could he run". As you walk by the empty school now you can almost hear the cheering from the stands as Billy's memory lives on today. Man, could he run, but not fast enough. The drive-in is gone too. Weeds fill the empty lot, the old screen is tattered and aged, like the Gloria Swanson character in Sunset Boulevard still waiting for her closeup Mr. DeMille. The speakers were stolen or sold for scrap long ago, and the concession stand a testimonial monument to vandalism. Instead of the roar of Godzilla, now all one can hear is the scream of the wind at night as it blows through the empty lot, once full of life, teenaged angst, sexual discovery, heavy metal and chrome. A lot of the merchants folded up long ago, to seek new fields of retail riches. The town, once numbering 365, now was somewhere around 62. Two lane tumbleweed riding the asphalt that remained, heading out to nowhere in particular towards the endless horizon. Some of the remaining townies had been here since birth and would remain until their death, clutching the past in their hands. Sadie, who used to ranch with her husband Earl, for long hard hours until he died in '72 was now "the crazy lady" who lived in a broken down trailer with no running water but plenty of warm booze to numb her and give her comfort. The property they owned had long ago gone into forclosure, and what little money they had saved up went to pay for his burial and her seemingly endless supply of soul burning Vodka. In the good years, she hauled bales of hay to the far reaches of the spreading fields. Hungry livestock came at a quick pace when she was spotted bumping along the field. Ernest Tubbs' new record was out and it played on the lonely country gospel station, KPSD. Earl heard that song for first time on the Opry driving that old truck at night, that magical analogue time of the evening when WSM in Nashville would fade in and out on the radio half a continent away. The farm was filled with supplies most of the time brought in from town. Food, grains, feed, fertilizer, gingham and always, a little present for Sadie. Earl always hid it under a sack, and when he pulled up in the truck she would smile because she knew it was there. On the stove, Earl's favorite meal was cooking, her present to him. They both worked hard not only at the farming and small ranching but at making each other happy. He's long dead now, and she sold the land and moved to town. Earl still lives in her heart, and together, they're never far from that farm, a piece of them still remains on that land and will be there for a long time to come....until Crazy Sadie finally drinks herself to death. The meat markets gone too. You could always get more than just the freshest meats in town. You also kept up on the latest gossip in the neighborhood. Turns out that "nice" boy the Carson girl's been dating is AWOL from the Army and been arrested. Did you know Sally Hellstom is pregnant again? Also heard that one of them new fancy supermarkets is coming to town, at the edge of the road out by the Meyers property. Sure, some folks will go there at first, check it out, buy a few things, but in the end they'll come back here. Why, I have the freshest meats in the entire county. They'll be back, you'll see. Say did you hear about the Peterson boys? They got in trouble again. Stan stared at the heat outside through the dusty windows, A Johnny Lee song on the jukebox. Thought about selling the place for years, and finally did, to one of those large interstate truck stop chains. Been home for years, but now, nothing left, but home is where the heart is afterall. Some of the oldtimers still stop by to chew the fat and the food, truckers mostly who still lament the passing of the old days too. Jake brakes and exhaust mingling with the jukebox and the grease from the grill. He smiled and wondered what they would do with that old neon sign that didn't work, hadn't worked in years. The town that was so full of life once, was now just an Exit number on a roadmap. An old decrepit joint in the middle of the nowhere desert soon to feel the crash of the wrecking ball. Memories and road ghosts of the past, mixing with the dust, diesel, and dirt, and a few dead flies on the window sill...order up! Crazy Sadie summed it to Stan one day, not too long ago, when he debated on fixing the place up for one last hurrah. Even having the neon recharged in the old "EATS" sign. She just looked at him incredulously, cackled her cracked laugh and said "Boy, they aint no need for no neon no more".

Chapter Three - Tom Joad & The Haiku Hobo

The times, they were a changin' in the purple hazed and double dazed days of the spare change Sixties. Political and social change were waging war on the status quo and old icons were being replaced. Even Route 66 was changing. At one time it was the main vein two-lane connecting the Midwest, where I am originally from, through the desert southwest to California, where I was living in Haight Ashbury at the time. The old road, once proud, was now being replaced section by section by the new interstates and fast becoming a fading memory reminiscent of Norma Desmond in "Sunset Boulevard." Being the vagabond that I was I was fortunate to have traveled through the deserts on Route 66 by thumb and by micro bus before the last asphalt curtain call. Route 66 kicks the doors of perception and imagination of open road freedom into fuel injected high gear. Mainstreet USA has carved out it's own iconic niche worldwide as the ultimate long and winding road by using it's machete of nostalgia to cut an asphalt path through eight states including the southwest American desert. More than just a "road", It's in your face roadside culture that wears the intoxicating perfume of nostalgia and automotive history. Phillips 66 gas stations, Harvey House and the Harvey Girls, old diners and cafes, motor courts, roadside and natural attractions, along with enough motels bathed in pastel neons to light up the Vegas strip. Yes, you do get to travel across the country on the old concrete girl, but also back in time along John Steinbeck's River of Immigrants, as it meanders through the cactus kingdom of the great southwest. The 2,200 plus mile Mother Road is a mother lode of legend and lore, and the desert states it spans has all the innate beauty, ethereal elegance and maddening mystery of Ingrid Bergman. Hitching rides on the Mother Road always brought to mind the character of Tom Joad and the days of the Great Depression I had only read about. Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" published in 1939 was a mirror of the daunting times of dustbowlers loosing everything, packing up possessions and heading west to the golden coast of California to rich, lush fields with a cornucopia of crops that needed harvesting. The main character is Tom Joad portrayed by Henry Fonda in the film version released in 1940 who along with the rest of the Joads head west along Route 66 from Oklahoma to the promised land of California for a piece of the American dream and instead dead end on a one way street of prejudice and brutality. Both the book and the film were considered socialist propaganda at the time, however, the book won the Pulitzer and the film won Oscars. Hooray for Hollywood and three cheers for Tom Joad! In the post-war baby boom Cold War era, the new prosperity brought new life to the old road as America headed west on vacation to places like Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, and the Petrified Forest. That's when family travel was a family adventure and is best exemplified in parody in National Lampoon's "Vacation" as Chevy Chase and family make tracks for 'Wallyworld." The Sixties burst like a lava lamp on steroids and the post-Kerouac rucksack revolution was literally, on the road. Young people from across the country hitch hiked Route 66 or what remained of it as it was fast being replaced by Eisenhower's Interstate System, section by section, to California and then up the coast, north, to the psychedelic Disneyland of Haight Ashbury. I was living at age 15 on the beach in Honolulu and by 16 in 1965 had returned to the mainland living on the Sunset Strip in LA. Eventually I moved north to begin my tie-dyed days in Haight Ashbury from early 1966 until late 1968 and had opportunity to thumb it on the Mother Road heading east to visit family, then west again. Sleeping on the side of the road outside Barstow, California or Winslow, Arizona, I can still see the sky full of stars, hear the sweet howl of a coyote in the distance while sitting by my small cook fire sculpted with available scrub and creosote bushes, then settling in for the night playing an old beat up harmonica I found on the sidewalk in North Beach, It was one of the few possessions I carried with me on my treks and to be honest I wasn't Paul Butterfield, but the coyotes seemed to howl back at it, and that was all that mattered at the time. I would hitch hike south from the Bay Area on Highway 99 to Bakersfield, hop onto Highway 58 past Tehachapi and on into Barstow when heading back to the Midwest. The northern mountain route could be Siberian at night at the higher altitudes but the desert route offered cool and crisp nights under the canopy of the heavens but not cold enough to transform you into a hypothermic poster child. Route 66 was still heavily trafficked in those days with automobiles and big rigs high balling it to the tune of Dave Dudley's "Six Days on the Road" gear jamming it all the way from LA to St. Louis in record time. On one trip I was dropped off in Barstow which is located in California on the western Mojave Desert on the river of the same name. You had to walk through town to the other side before sticking your thumb out again as the local police viewed long haired hitch hikers with suspicion as Bolsheviks or worse, liberal Democrats. Once outside of town an old beat up pickup truck driven by a Navajo gentleman stopped and took me about 20 miles out of town past Daggett and announced, "Gotta let you off here because I live over there," pointing up a small two track dirt road that headed up into the hills. Thanked him and got ready to put that practiced thumb to work again. It was getting close to dusk by this time and decided better wait until daylight to begin again. Never know who'll pick you up at night, and I hadn't even seen "Deliverance" yet. Setting sail on foot in the high seas of desert sun and sand was not for the Eddie Bauer chic. A good pair of worn hiking boots, an old flannel shirt, denim pants and a canvas pack does not a fashionista make, but traveling light and sturdy was a holy mantra. A good hiking stick has as many uses as the Swiss army knife while hiking the desert, woodlands or the roads of America. It aids in providing an extra boost while walking up steep inclines and can have the effect of shifting into low gear when traversing downhill to you don't pull a Jack and Jill and go tumbling down the hill. The desert is alive with wildlife that can be dangerous to your health. Yes, you are trespassing in the home of the rattlesnake and scorpion, so a hiking stick can be used, deftly, to deflect an attack, well, most times anyway. If you are hiking the woodlands you can tie a good piece of string to the end with a safety pin attached along with anything you find to use for bait when you come across a small stream, river, lake or pond and you're well on your way to having a small bass or feisty bluegill on the fire spit before you know it. The stick can be propped over a campfire to hold the kettle over the flame to boil that bouillon and most importantly, it's a companion and your best friend when traveling alone. Water is worth more than gold in the desert so a good canteen or lighter weight bota can be a lifesaver. Finding water in the desert along Route 66 can be miles apart when hiking those long lonely stretches and it's a search that will test the Indiana Jones in all of us. One technique I learned was to construct a simple solar still using a small sheet of plastic, a mes skit cup or other collector, and with a little patience and good karma, you can extract water. There are many blueprints on line and in the library but basically, you dig a hole in the sand and in the bottom of the hole place your cup or jar. Place the plastic over the top of the hole you just dug making sure the bottom of the plastic in the hole goes directly over the collector opening. Putting a small stone in place will make the plastic peak downwards over the opening. Weight the sides of the plastic down on the outer rim of the hole and wait for the Mother Roads mother nature to take her course calling upon the forces of condensation. I flunked science but in a nutshell condensation will form on the plastic, run down it as it gathers and droplets will then fall into your container. Don't expect Niagra Falls either as it will take time but you will get enough to keep you alive. If you are hiking in monsoon season in the desert and have a piece of tinfoil you can fashion the foil into a funnel running into your canteen or bota. Yes, basic cistern low tech, but it works. he landscape bordering Route 66 is a panoramic painting of cactus and succulents including what I call "the peoples plant" or the prolific prickly pear. It has a beautiful bouquet of purplish fruits and it's familiar ping pong paddle shaped pads combine as a wild source of food and drink. Bear in mind that these plants are not the spineless variety found in the produce section of yuppie supermarkets and the spines can be brutal to extra care and caution are advised to make sure you remove even the minutest ones, or pay the consequences. I shared a campfire one night with another roadhead who was traveling west to my east but shared a campfire that night at our own individual paths juncture. He was a former rodeo clown from Spokane, and he wasn't clowning around when he told me that he had heard that early Spanish explorers and the Native Americans of the region used to fashion the prickly pear pads into an organic bota. I've never seen one nor made one but rumor has it that it can be done. If you've made one let me know about it. Camp cooking along the side of the road can be a rustic four star affair, depending on your outlook and state of mind. The desert is sparse in wood so at times getting enough kindle can be a problem so to circumvent that I picked up an old collapsible Sterno stove. Sterno, known as "pink lady" to the bums and winos of skid rows everywhere, is liquid fire in the desert and the trusty little contraption can claim the title of the Mini Cooper of camp cookery. It's a classic. Another appropriate appliance for arid region cooking is the humble hobo stove. I first encountered one while hiking along the Oregon coast near Seaside. Two other wanderers had me join them for a scrounged seafood and seaweed dinner and amazingly cooked it over an old coffee can. The design is simplicity itself. Take an old metal coffee can, Folgers will do, Maxwell House, it doesn't matter. With the lid removed punch holes in the bottom of the can, which will now be the top of your cook stove. From the lip of the open end, cut a line through the metal the length of your pinkie finger then 2 and half inches apart, cut another similar line so the metal flap is still attached but will open and close. The reason for the flap is that once a fire is in the can you can control the heat output by closing the flap or opening it all the way for air to stoke the fire to get the water boiling fast. Buckminster Fuller couldn't have designed a more efficient apparatus. I made my own stove and it's use in the desert is particularly welcome. First, it allows for minimal amounts of small wood and tinder, of which there is precious little of to begin with, and secondly, you can put a covering over the bottom end and as you hike along during the day you can gather what wood you need later as you travel and it makes a great carry container for that purpose. Campfire cooking in a can. Besides if camping off the side of the road, which may be illegal in some areas, it helped keep the flame of the fire from being seen from the road by passing police cruisers, as you could get arrested for vagrancy. Another trick learned was to make sure you always had a ten dollar bill on you, tucked in your shoe for safety. Most laws stated that if you had ten dollars, you weren't a vagrant and couldn't be arrested for the high crime and misdemeanor of poverty. Today I travel the old stretches of Route 66 that still exist today, only now by car. I still camp, but at rustic campsites and on occasion in a concrete wigwam motel. Towns like Tucumcari try to carry on the two lane traditions and there is enough nostalgia to go around to keep the light of the Mother Road alive. Even when I race along on the interstate portions, I still look off to the side of the road to see who might be camping over there, hidden in the blanket of desert beauty at night. The sky full of stars over their heads and the distant coyote howl to sing them to sleep to the strains of an old harmonica playing Red River Valley. Tomorrow, they would get up and hit the road again. haiku hobos by choice or circumstance. If you're traveling in the desert and some soul has a thumb out, at least wave as you drive by for encouragement if you don't care to stop. You never know, it could be the ghost of Tom Joad.

Chapter Four - The Santa Fe Rails

Mike's hiking and thumbing across the desert southwest, catching rides by rez injuns in pickup trucks, and sleeping off the side of the road on Route 66 with a can o' beans and church key cuisine was to have the sky as a roof and no walls from horizon to horizon to pen you in and up and beat you down. The Road of Joad was a mighty fine road, some of the time but, at others, hot days, no ride days, it was Route Sixty Sucks. Lizards scattered and skittered, snakes shaked, rattled and rolled and the orange fireball engines of the Santa Fe line screamed with whistles blowin' at the top of diesel lungs across the ghost paths of pioneers. Ruts, rails and trails, swallowed up across vast landscape waves of Houdini praries, where Hunter S. buffalo roam and the dear antelope pray as they witness the approach of the iron horse of the Santa Fe..so fey.heavy metal machismo and cast iron balls high balling and sparking as the rip across the boxcar void, prominently laid out in precise chinee opium lines with pure asian precision...precisely. Meandering rivers with frothy mouthed foam and hidden obstructions, towering lego-like mountains of lincoln logs and paper mache stand bare, baring stoic granite witness in mute testimony to the philosopher Testicles of the coming of age of the rail age and second coming of the blaze orange Christ fireball fireboxing into the decades of diesel to come across the canvas of sand of blank chihuahua and the savvy mojave and into and across the bad waters of the valley of death with panamint hues framing the mirage of photograph like likenesses of Ansel Adams himself, self portraits really. Look, black and white ansels with the innocence of adam in the early eve. Lesbian lizards, salamander sissies and transsexual tarantula's watch the brush strokes of Santa Fe engines blur the desert scene, past painted deserts and scared stiff petrified woods in Bogartian movies shown Martian theaters along with the haints who hang out in Harvey House on Haunted Hill. Reminding me of wild west ghosts of a smoke stack past. The pinto stands with rider astride, with reservation on the rez, as the iron beast steely dans it's way through Indian nations and smashes the pueblos into dust and smithereens leaving only shards of acoma pottery and memories of sweet peyote dreams.. The transcon trains first transfixed, then transformed the traverse across the american-con into a transcon magical biblical tour of mystical proportions.whizzing by a passing parade of far west histoire and a peek through the curtains of a horseless future propelled by petroleum dreams and eastern schemes by schemers and dreamers with deep back east pockets. The railroads saw rushes for gold, races to madness for land in Oklahoma, the sooner the better the sooner. "Thars gold in them thar hills. Black gold, yellow gold, one to be hoarded the other to be sold." The infernal injuns of combustion rolling off of Detroit's assembly lines proved that Hank had a hankerin' for a'tinkerin' with plugs, sparks and drive shafts.later day land and rail barons would follow in the two rail footsteps of the mighty Santa Fe. Two rails, two steps, two tokes, the course was now set for the auto to lay lanes down next and parallel to the rails of old Santa Fe. The House of Harvey would also follow along with Phillips 66 and reservation tricks.. The broken shards were glued back together by the tribes who rallied to the rails and now the two lanes of Route 66. Culture for sale on the cheap from the side of the road. The trains roar by but the autos stop for that special Kodak moment of a snapshot of a real live savage in a rather feminine yet, heathen headdress dancing like a chicken in a pen for pennies on the dollar. Rubber tomahawks and cheap whiskey have replaced shamans with she-mans. The trains have ejected their passenger freight from St. Loo to LA. Cattle now, freight and goods, but it was also the hobo highway for the guthries and the dust bowl tribes of the freight yards, Kerouac's brakemen and Dylan's railroad men who drink your blood like wine.three legged cows and one legged men share the legacy. The car is king these days, and railroad an interesting museum piece. The indian now hides on the rez and in the Walmart. The Petrified Forest still waits for Bogart to bestow a blessing that will never come and the old towns and old alignments vanish in a 75 m.p.h. blur. The ruts of the old Santa Fe trail are rare and few and far between, Dodge City in old rectangular Kansas is one reminder of them..but if you look out across the desert, away from the grey of the steel grey-hound you'll see the fireball blazé of orange racing across the rails, sparking and clacking, cutting a path and slicing a swath across the land, the desert, the prairies, history and against all odds..painting the desert a portrait of it's nostalgic self.an O'Keefe relief.

Chapter Five - The Greyhounds from Asphalt Hell

Hipster Hibbing and it's Minnesotans and the hounds of grey, terminal passengers about to board. Abort! Abort! Abort the boarding, and run like hell from the hounds of hell! Leave the driving to us, natty dressed, hemorrhoid infested drivers with pulp fiction ralph kramden hats.Luggage with stickers that say, things like, Kansas City..San Francisco.others from Mobile load up into the beasts belly as unwitting travelers step up into the steel and aluminum volcano heading east, west, south and yes, magnetic north..north to places like Fuckin' Fargo, Bullshit Butte and Woosed Out Washington where Spokane is spoken in hushed northwestern tones, in complete nez perce secrecy..a totem of their esteem. Leg room, head room, no room, scenic cruiser view of wide open Wyoming and claustrophobic Connecticut, cities whip by in the wind as you view them through hair gel stained plastic windows that could blind a seeing eye dog.you have landed in the eye of the hurricane, past the forties, past the fifties and collide now head on into the groovy sixties.'cept now, your trapped in Downtown Denver.down and out..further down..alone! Bums who talk to them selves about religion and spare change wash their holy feet in the drinking fountain mumbling a blessing as your are now deployed, annoyed the Church of the Diesel Depot. You head east, but change buses like underwear at a junkie needle exchange program in Switzerland that exists in Barstow, the Mojave, the California Mojave. Backpack heavy, legs stiff and down to three crumpled cigarettes and not one fucking match. It's 1:45 am, three hours to kill for layover, to kill or be killed in Denver, a mile high in a lunatic lunar bowl of smog, smoke and skid row streets. Transfer on the bluesline to St. Louie, Louie, transfer again in old Capone Chicago and switch to Trailways for the I-94 leg of the trip to downtown motown, Now cramped and stubble faced and smelling of three maybe four days on the road from Oakland, fried chicken, sweat, same socks and the stench of the bus toilet won't leave you, like the smell of death on the field in Vietnam.piss stopped and cig stopped until your head spins like Linda Blair, and nothing but stores with magazines about rodeo's. Cig break over..butt'm and board, re-board, as you make way for the girl from Oregon, why, I don't know, except they are easy game under the cover of night and your jacket to cop a quick feel as they snuggle close under your coat, your sometime pillow, sometime blanket. The steel belt serenades the bumpkin with pink skin next to you as you sit quietly her fully formed breast nesting in your warm hands,eventually getting a hand job before Hannibal looms on the horizon. Depot food, fit for hounds, not people, rewarmed dogs on a roller spit, warmed up and served up by Mel Tomaine, torpedoing the digestive system..outside in the loading area, bums on bikes, hells hobo's and divine butch dykes watch the narco angels that free the demons in their heads.outside a cornucopia of crazies, breathing in the diesel screaming out expletives among the excrement s the big engines fire up and head up out of El Paso, don't you know we're riding on the the texmexexpress..soon you arrive where you aimed, constipated and bleary eyed, shuffle your duffel inside to wait in gates, the lines snake back, like chinee dragons for miles, a Thai drag queen sits beside you as you lie on the floor using your backpack for a pillow, number four inline and you ain't giving up that spot ..low murmurs in the depot, dull denizens in denim and that rodeo hobo from Missoula you made temp friends with, that kid, that kid that you met that reminds you of you, younger dazed and he gets off in Reno and of course missy breasty got off long ago, and thanks to her, so did you.now shes home, safe from you and them, giggling at her memories of her night dance under the leather veil under your jacket in the backseat of a greyhound from hell, with a blue eyed stranger and making 1200 miles of hell into a garden of hedon!

Chapter Six - Death Valley Dazed

California is a smorgasbord of yin's and yang's

Southern California, is the Pacific coast playground of the rebel without a cause hot rod car culture and Surf City, where, the Beach Boys promise, there are two girls for every boy. Northern California however, is the John Muir high country of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the majesty of Yosemite. Coastal redwoods and mountain sequoias, woodland giants in a rich Lord of the Rings environment that encourages contemplation and meditation. The City of Lost Angels, home to lights, cameras, action! Hollywood! San Francisco to the north, is where the North Beach beat goes on much as it did in the Kerouac era of cheap port and poetry, and Haight Ashbury in the Sixties was the gravitational center of a new spiritual and political universe spinning out of control in a psychedelic orbit. California Dreamin' was becoming an eight mile high rolling paper reality with it's non-stop influx of youthful immigrants from the middle west middle class seeking an upbeat Upton Utopia that turned out to be as disorienting as an opium dream at best.

I had been living in the Haight since early 1966 and by the time of the Summer of Love Normandy Invasion of 1967, the streets had lost their luster, and were now a charlatans cacophony of spare changers, speed freaks, heroin dealers and predators. Hip was dead and buried, and I packed it up for the insane sanity of North Beach. My girlfriend at the time, Myrika, was a German artist and musician who had come to the states for a short visit and decided to stay. She sketched and painted while I spent hours writing in my journal, as our North Beach days were spent in exploration of the artistic and literary abstract, along with some of the best Italian sausage and vino in town. One night while walking along strip club infested area of Columbus Avenue near our apartment , she asked about the American deserts. Germany, famous for forests, lakes and rivers it seems, did not have a desertstrasse to save it's life and wanted to experience the expanse and tranquility only it can offer. Infinity itself, defined in terms of endless horizons and a vast ocean of sand, plants and animals. She wanted to sketch "stories" as she called them of the desert diversity and illusions it can create. She also just wanted to hear, experience and tape record the howl of the romantic Cary Grant leading man of the desert, the coyote. it didn't take much to persuade John and his girlfriend, Olivia, good friends of mine and kindred spirits in Berkeley, to gas up the aging, coughing VW Microbus he owned to take to the road and head to Death Valley near the Panamint Mountains in southern California. Both were aspiring filmmakers so this was a f-stop opportunity to photograph and film a day in the life of the desert, except that day would turn into two weeks of more than just Ansel Adams antics. The peace symbol festooned magic microbus picked us at our apartment and was already fully loaded with Nikons, black & white film, two movie cameras, 16 mm film, cooking equipment, sleeping bags, food, wine, books, tripods, two kites, lanterns, built in camp cook stove, and a load of wood for fires John always kept handy for the many trips we would make down the coast to Big Sur to camp on the beach. The bus had been named Big Sur in the beaches honor one night around a big blur of a drunken campfire on the big beach at Big Sur. We did Big Sur it once again that night as it would have been blasphemy not to and headed out the next morning after a magnificent sunrise for the land of borax, mule teams of twenty and a saltwater lake called Bad Water. On the road again, cutting over to San Luis Obisbo, then Bakersfield and then into the valley of death rode the microbus four. Death Valley National Monument, as it was first designated in 1933, was elevated to "park" status in 1994. Tourism was off and running from the starting line in the 1920's as Henry Ford's assembly lines went on blue collar factory overdrive to mass produce automobiles at a pace and price within reach of the motor mad masses. The supposed curative powers of Death Valleys natural springs attracted tourists during the flapper era of the Roaring Twenties like buzzards feasting on roadkill. Roosevelt, Franklin, not Eleanor, had the WPA programs include the blazing of trails through the Panamint Range of the desert area and campgrounds were set up to accommodate the new trade of auto-tourism. We arrived in Death Valley near the end of the day so decided to park it and camp it. In those days you could pretty well just pull off the side of the road and set up your rustic version of Xanadu and rule the realm, and we made it to Bad Water which is about the limbo pole low as you can go in the continental United States at a basement foundation depth of 282 feet below sea level. We unloaded the sleeping bags, cook gear and food, along with one of the kites, three bottles of wine and flannel shirts for later in the evening. Limited campfires were permitted in those days, and a pit dug in the sand sufficed as fire pit. John, in his Muir-like wisdom had brought an ample supply of firewood along for numerous small fires as opposed to one that would reach the sky and herald the opening ceremony of a Burning Man gathering of the tribes. We got the camp stove fired up, black beans and rice ready to be transformed into the eighth wonder of the gastronomical world and as the sun began to set we started the small fire, broke out a guitar and my harmonica as Myrika sketched madly away in her book, Olivia unloading her camera for some color shots of the sunset, John strumming away on the Gibson to his own tune, and me playing along on harmonica, as best I could, to a desert blues tune. Sunsets have a mystical sense all their own, but a desert sunset framed by the changing hues of the Panamint mountains is a Billie Holiday command performance at Kennedy Center. The Bad Water low point's highpoint is Telescope Peak, which is worn by the mountain range with all the flair of a ruby tiara adorning the head of a goddess. The peak changes hues in perfect harmony with the setting sun playing on it's rock solid surface, transforming it into a granite lava lamp 11,000 feet tall. At least that was the impression, and yes, it could have been brought on by the wine, or something. We talked and at times, not talked for timeless hours witnessing the sky darken itself into coal black, revealing the stars turned on as stage lights on opening night, filling the galactic auditorium with a band of diffused light that crossed the sky. The Milky Way was now Broadway and we had balcony seats for the big show. We heard the first note of the coyote chorus around 11pm and Myrika dashed for her tape recorder, which was one of those old, solid as a '57 Buick reel-to-reel portable jobs with pro model microphone, and watched her as she hoped for the best in capturing the call of the wild. The rest of the evening was spent emptying the cheap bottles of wine, watching the dying embers of the fire and basking in the glow of the camp lantern hung on the open side door of Big Sur. Not enough room to sleep all inside so we took turns each night. John and Liv one night, Myrika and me the next, and so on, so on, so on. Sleeping on the desert floor with it's surrounding silence, organic surface and night scents was more intoxicating than the wine. Yes, life is a cabaret old chum, but it's also at times a delightful Cabernet. By the way, we never did fly that kite that night. One of the highlights at night was the influx of AM radio signals that reached out across the dial like the tentacles of an analogue octopus. Fading in and out, one in particular was a strange gumbo of country, gospel and preachers. "Mansion in the Sky" would segue into "Walking the Floor Over You" by Ernest Tubb followed by a real fire and brimstone preacher whose voice would break as he hit crescendos in his plea to his audience to seek salvation. I listened to him every night, studying his voice patterns and one night I jumped up from the group sitting around a small fire and started in on my best imitation of Elmer Gantry at a tent revival on steroids. At sunrise on our first Death Valley morning we were invigorated and ready to explore, so we packed up the gear after a light breakfast of sourdough bread dipped in black coffee, a chunk of cheese and an apple (regular breakfast on the microbus road) and the Bug Sur Expeditionary Force was on the march to the great sandy dunes and the rest of the valley. We began to fancy ourselves old grizzled prospectors with burros or what is what like to be a muleskinner at the helm of the borax mule teams in the 1870's hauling the prized evaporite out of the valley and over the Panamints to the town of Mojave and it's railroad spur. Leaving the muleskinning to those better suited to it, we made forays into the Furnace Creek area on Highway 190 which intersects with the more remote Bad Water Road. Passing on the "wish you were here - it' a dry heat" postcards and any sort of guided ranger tour we avoided the human race and it's excuse for civilization as best we could. Not that we had anything against it, but when you live in an area where you are packed tightly into a sociological sardine can as San Francisco was at the time, it's nice to be in your own oblong headlong orbit in your own oddball solar system, at least until it's time for re-entry into the tie-dyed atmosphere of the times. Not only that, but we all had adverse reactions to uniformity and uniforms of any sort, including park rangers. (In the early 1970's I actually studied and trained to be one, and passed! Gasp!) Big Sur was a feisty bus and dutifully carried it's human and other cargo through the valley and up into the Grapevine Mountains near Furnace Creek. We had old food and wine stained maps of the area at least 10 years old at the time but it turns out it was a treasure map to a colorful portal called, appropriately, Golden Canyon. A gorgeous gorge of sandstone in multi-layers of Cibola gold, sunset reds and fireball oranges. We parked the bus, grabbed a couple of camera's and hiking sticks to inspect the canyon on foot which in those days was a solitary affair and silence was as golden as the stone. Today, it's one of the most popular hikes tourists tackle and though it's not quite a pedestrian traffic jam it was nice to experience it one on one. Seeking the roads less traveled we purposely avoided sites and sights such as Scotty's Castle and the visitor center as we wanted to feel the desert as it was meant to be felt. Personal, natural and spiritually organic. Death Valley is more than vast expanses of sand and dunes. Diverse eco-sytems manage to live as harmonious friends in this arid version of Mr. Rogers Natural Neighborhood. The sand dunes are devilishly playful as they reach deep inside to the child in all of us to slide down them, run down them, tumble down them and even somersault down them at top speed as spaced out spacemen bounding about the surface of the moon in this lunar like landscape. Other areas are home to a Garden of Eden of desert plants and bushes including creosote, mesquite, pinon juniper, Joshua Trees and the signature plant of the desert, cactus, cactus and more cactus. There is surprisingly a bewildering array of wildlife so if you thought Death Valley was just lizards, rattlesnakes and spiders, oh my, you'd be wrong. Birds abound as do reptiles, fish and mammals including bobcats, mule deer (those lovable mulies), cougars and bighorn sheep in the higher elevations. Geologically speaking there are granite mountains and sandstone cliffs, but it is also the home to a freak of nature Frankensteinian creation called the fulgurite. Not vulgarite, fulgurite. This tubular tribute to the power of electricity is created when lightning strikes the sandy ground and fuses the particles into bizarre misshapen hardened tubes, some with an opacity to them. Try to imagine a circus clown forming animals out of balloons in the center ring. Not exactly, but it is the closest analogy I could come up with. Days were spent sketching, journal writing, movie making and photograph taking, not to mention kite flying. No trees or telephone poles to get tangled up in and if the thermal drafts were feeling generous you had an air show worthy of the Blue Angels. Photographing the sand dunes and their rippled patterns were a past time that kept the ever changing mystery of the desert fresh each day. The shapes would change subtlety while the shadows played tricks of light on the ridges of sand. It was the deserts own effervescent light show and more interesting than anything we had seen at the Filmore during a Grateful Dead concert. The oddest moment was when a family in an Airstream pulled close to our campsite, but far enough to respect privacy, and turned out to be a family from San Diego, he a fireman, she a housewife, the shorter ones just kids. We had already been there for around a week and enjoyed every moment. He, the fireman, came over to say "hello" so we said "hello" at the juncture when middle America meets the liberal left. He invited us over for coffee later that night and we brought our wine along and offered it to them. Then the most puzzling utterance occurred when he said, "We're only staying a few days and heading to the Grand Canyon, so what is there to do here to kill time?" Kill time? Time was a non-concept in Death Valley and besides, why would anyone want to kill it? We told him to go fly a kite, and at first he looked insulted, at least until Liv went to the bus and returned with one of the kites to give to his kids. Soon it was time to say Happy Trails to Death Valley. We had managed to enjoy her serenity, her solitude and the bounty of her gifts of beauty and mystery of nature. Now it was time to pack up and head back up California for the Bay Area. We decided on the route that would take us north to Yosemite an El Capitan fix before leaping headlong back into the Bay Area madness that was the Sixties. We'd miss the coyotes and the sky full of stars, but had memories and impressions that would last a lifetime and to this day visit Death Valley whenever I am in the area as though dropping in on an old friend. Myrika eventually had to go back to Germany, bad visa, John is now since long gone and buried, Oly bolted to Minneapolis in 1970. Death Valley however remains as a reminder of those days. I only wonder what ever became of the microbus. Oh, yeah, the desert made such an impression on John, that he renamed her Bad Water.

Chapter Seven - Doc Yucatan and Narco Marx

El Paso. Texas 1976
Doc had died from too much life. Needles and cooked spoons and booze had tolled it's bell in the tower of the hunchback but Doc had left Mike a legacy, an Alexandrian library of knowledge with rolls of parchment scrolls of hobo stoves, skid row survival, and flop house philosophy. He was now piloting himself solo on a river of no return through the junkie infested homeless Tenderloin districts of the West Coastie train hoppers, pill poppers, junkies, hookers and hookahs, trannies and whores. A journey into a Dostoeyevskian vortex where the Narco Marx Brothers Karamozov kept mum, stunned by the impending impaling of marxism and marijuanaism and socialism on a single skewer. An experimental ka-bob that would prove beyond the meager measure of a kilo of doubt that they cannot, will not have the self discipline to live as syncopated planets aligned like brakes on a car, but rather as a great collective sludge of stoned to the bone Bukowski expats, humping and hemping up and down, in and out, strung out, keeping time to a ferocious beat of survival on the streets to a melody played by an equally strung-out quartet controlled by puppeteers selling cheap Sterno drinks by the bucket on the Pink Lady's Skid Row. Haiku hobos, runaway kids at 15, dharmabums and all of their zen friends were confined now, at night, in Marceaubian cubicles sharing filthy buck fifty flea infested pee stained mission cots crowded with private demons, sisters of mercy and schizophrenes on amphetamines. In between sermons and hot meals served by volunteers, they were drunken composers with tremors creating symphonies, (old deaf Beethovens) that play majestically, filling the orchestral halls of the gang graffiti alleyways, sound bouncing acoustically as whispy, flickering motel neon off the broken bricks. Together, in a circle jerk, the audience, sitting on dumpsters suck on Oedipal hookahs for a taste of naughty nirvana while moored in secret coves of Polynesian islands waiting to go ashore in skiffs where missionary tempting thighs await them along with pipe bombs and pipe bongs hidden in tropical forests of cleavage, sweat, and sweet tasting coconut brown breasts. The bums, the tramp, wander, walk with hiking sticks made of the grass of bamboo with little bobblehead toppers, jap miniatures made in little jap factories, as art, later the workers indulge in origami self abuse for the sake of sake and orgasm. The haiku hobos, the homeless holy men and women walk on clouds underneath in caves suffering from arrested development while firing the kilns full of black tar, processing opium and distributing it as holy communion for the literati and the illiterati alike. The Ugly American, fat and greedy with the gristle of corporations clogging the arteries of the late, great United States suffer now from guilt, green dreams and primal screams, carnal knowledge and coyote ugly.marveling at big haystack mounds bigger'n Nebraska piled high with hashish smoked deep into the lungs by the big male transgendered Negress with masculine thighs on Beaubien Street. Groucho's and gaucho's, printing press poets on sal mimeo's distributed by Gestentner pamphleteers to every juke joint, deep south, pork ribs, drawling bayou junkie searching for one good vein in vain.not collapsed and dark green bruised almost black, but a rich mother lode to the head.jamming the needle into the soles of the feet and under the tongue don't have effect anymore.the body of christ cooked in a spoon soon seizes control of spectral hallucinations of Lang the Fritz along with his cat of the same name..visions of metropolis german expressionism with Charlie Chaplin lighting the city with his own light and power.Diego Rivera amused at his own heavy metal mural of industry, Steinbeck joining him now in a kayak with Upton Sinclair, crashing down the rapids towards the shores of Left Coast boxcars together on a river of immigrants, dust bowlers, poor and the indignant indigent, all the while not noticing the pirouetting beauty of a ballet being performed in tiny silk slippers nearby on shore by the sirens of serenity promising to replace poverty with a'plenty. Even the Statue of Liberty shops now at the Salvation Army, itself tired, hungry and poor, one big huddled mass of French metal weakened by the elements and the Lady is now at liberty turning tricks in the boardroom brothels. The psychedelics kick in the doors of perception like Storm Troopers on Krystal Nacht, stomped on and attacked in retaliation by 50 foot amazons from the inner space of fantasy and illusion.subjugating male society with whip and wit and taking him as her prize and pet and property..can she run society and bring societal cohesion to bear.are large breasts alone, enough to govern and rule? The answer..a resounding yes! The poor of skid row become a universal non-reversible, non-returnable, discardable field of energy..not the speed kills kind, but a driving pulsating creative savant mass, a glacial thrust of the ice age pushing rocks and mammoths ahead of it's bulldozer advance, then receding in 10,000 years time leaving fertile soil to till gardens and seeds for planting as testament to the new Tenderloin..not a solid force, but the rings of Saturn, loose, individual particulates orbiting alone at colossal collision velocity as a whole, together in unfathomable and incomprehensible harmony. The skid row, the new skid row takes it's cue from it's own past that has since passed, the northwest past where he man loggers and not Kerouac's sensitive east coast lumberjacks or French Canadien Paul Bunyan's rule the gates where the sun sets in the west..In skid row, at night, with moon bright, the stars electrifying the skies, mirror the broken glass of cheap wine bottles in North Beach alleys with old piss soaked bums lying around on saturated cardboard cots..in Seattle this used to be where logs were skidded down the hill, into the tom swift rivers and carried downstream like lubricated hard ons..The loggers you see lived in shacks below the "skids" in rows of houses..eventually the loggers logged the area out, the town grew away from the row but the name remained.the old skid row whore waited for the new residents, the new poor to nourish or perish in her bosom.she enticed them by spreading her legs apart, enticing those who would succumb to her moist secrets that she held fast and tight in the midst of the mist of her sweet and tender loins..

Chapter Eight - Blues, Booze and Haiku's
CharlieParkerplayedtheblues,JanisJoplinsangthe
blues,withrthym,soblueblues,jeansareblue,eyes
areblueandskiesareblue.Somenametheirdogsol'
Blu,andSinatrawasoldeyesofblue.Seasareblue,
moodsareblue,berriesareblue,springhowever,isgreen,
Huesareblueand
evenchimneyfluescanbeblue.Foodisblue,at
times,ifnotred,andsadisblue.Fewareblue,Iam
blue,youareblue,yes,BLUEISBLUE!


Kerouacwrotetheblues,roadblues,highwayblues,
andhighwaybooze.Keseyscuckoo'snestflew,onewas
blueandflewoverthebluetotheotherside,green.
Haikusareblue,17sylableblues,or17musesblues,sibyllblue,
herbeautifulhues,hersensuousblues.


WorldWarTwowasblue,allwarisblue.Whalesare
blue,some,andartcanbeblueandpaintcanbeblue.
Lifeanddeathareblue,andshirtsareblue.Pirate
crewsareblueonoceansblue.Flagsareblueand
policeareblue,cruelblue.Revolutionisblue,Che
blue,HoChiMinhblue,BerlinWallredthenblue,
Fidelblue,ChicagoSevenblue,Chechoslovakiablue,
Hungaryblue,Gdanskblue,TianamenSquareblue,Lenin
blue,Lennonblue,Marx,KarlandGrouchoblue,Bessie
SmiththeQueenblue,RobertJohnsontheKingblue,
jazzisblue,fusionisblue,heartsareblue,trueis
blue...BlueIs.....


lastlineineasyrider......"weblueit!"

by Mike Marino

www.angelfire.com