30 – Mojave Desert
Lance had read about the Mojave
desert his first time through it on the bus, a bit of tourist bullshit to keep
his mind occupied over the long miles. He remembered being shocked by some of
its information, about the short distances between the highest peaks and lowest
valleys. And while the van came no nearer death valley than the bus had, the
desert seemed terrible enough, stretching out on either side of the narrow
road. The growing dark gave no reprieve to its utter isolation, blackness as
bad as the heat had been as far as the eye could seen. There should have been
lights. Lance was used to lights, except for that year in Nam.
The brochure had talked about transforming the
desert, cattle ranches, fruit groves, grain farms tinting the land back to
green. But if anyone had started such a project, no sign showed, only the
occasional shack light glowing in isolated answer to the spread of uncountable
stars.
The little green Lance remembered had come
with the hob-nobbery of Palm Springs during the ride out, where the world's
wealthy teed off on golf course greens as the dust in the distance settled
around chicano laborers digging talc, boron and tungsten out of the mountains.
Now, Lance saw mostly what came and went with
the headlights, the mouths of dirt roads opening and closing at the side of the
highway, or other headlights rushing towards them. Signs passed claiming towns
right and left off the highway.
"Ghost towns," Dan said. "Some
of them are tourists traps. Most of them are old mining towns abandoned when
the mines went bust."
Lance closed his eyes, aching for the
undisguised obscenity of Los Angeles still many miles away.
Civilization began again with the
mountains. Tokens of the previous pioneering spirit popped up along the road
side in shacks marked "Souvenirs." But higher up, and over the rise,
housing developments appeared, islands of house-groupings that looked odd as
the van climbed, as if whole segments of city had been plopped down in the
desert. Instead of gold, people came for the good life and fair weather. Lance
envied them-- though wondered about California itself and what made off-beat
people seek it.
He had come here as a fluke, staring out with
the idea of San Francisco only to be dissuaded by people on his bus saying it
had gotten bad there.
All junkies and perverts, the people
had said. Try L.A. They say it's still pretty cool there.
In the back of his head he had made plans to
build a little love nest. Sarah waited in the mountains of Colorado. He had
received love letters from her in Vietnam, telling him to come after he got out
of service.
But he'd felt so dismal after the army let him
go, empty and directionless. He had learned nothing the whole four years, and
nothing in the army had prepared him for the changes in America over that time.
The America of 1969 didn't even remotely resemble the one that had sent him off
four years earlier. Even the Beatles looked different, like hobos pretending to
play music.
And Lance had dreamed of being someone after
his discharge-- a full grown man. One prepared to face the world and survive in
it. Even his discharge pay seemed inadequate without a job to build on, and he
wandered for weeks the streets of New York, getting drunk and progressively
more desperate, looking for answers in prostitutes and dark bars.
Finally, nearly mad from his own excesses, he
snuck down into his uncle's shop late one night and wedged off the safe door
with a chisel, removing bundles of cash.
Ten thousand dollars worth of future, he
thought at the time, scurrying by cab to the Port Authority, then a series of
buses west, rehearsing the whole time the speech he would give Sarah.
I've got this little place...
But the bus let him off on skid row-- a long
dark street filled with vomit and piss, far worse than the Bowery in New York,
each of its residents eyeing him as he walked, as if each knew about the bundle
of cash in his pocket.
And there were cops, squat in parked squad
cars on each corner like lords of the street, watching him, frowning over him
as if his face told them everything.
For weeks he hid out like a forties movie
villain in a chicano rooming house in East L.A., afraid to do more than walk
from his room to the store and back, the talk of the neighborhood's housewives.
They speculated consistently about why a white boy would want to live in their
world.
And Sarah ate at him. Sweet Sarah
waiting for him in the mountains of Colorado. Waiting for him to come
and get her.
Not yet, he told himself. Not till
he had a place worthy of her.
Eventually, he came out of his cage and
discovered one unalterable fact: he hated Los Angeles. Not the Chicanos. Not
the blacks. Not even the lazy sprawl of hippiedom that had transformed whole
neighborhoods around Hollywood. But the bleached white suburbs that surrounded
those places, flat-topped houses stretching out from L.A.'s center like a paved
road, flattening everything they touched.
He should have felt at home. They echoed his
uncle's love of normality with green lawns stretching out in front of their
houses, with dogs and kids and two cars in the driveway. Yet it felt less like
a place to live than something built from a photograph, all the outer images
perfect without the least pretense at content-- like a movie set with nothing
more than the faces of the buildings.
And the loneliness had driven him insane. Over
and over he read Sarah's old letters as if just then receiving them, pretending
he could hold on here without her until he couldn't bear it.
Lance? she'd said upon hearing his
voice over the telephone. Where are you?
California, he whispered. Can I come
see you?
Of course you can come see me, you crazy
man! she'd said. And he went. And there seeing the Rockys around him, fell
in love with them, thinking about them the whole time taking Sarah back to
L.A., plotting his return to them as if they were his lover.
And rolling over the dismal California
mountain and down into smog-stained L.A. now, he felt as if the cage door had
reopened, accepting them back into its zoo, the keepers grinning at him at the
rest stops, gas stations, and camp grounds-- all of them saying he should never
have gone. What other place wanted him? Only Los Angeles. And as the highway
turned into freeway, the overwhelming feeling came upon him that he might never
get a chance to escape again.
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