SCOOTER ORANGEWOOD AND THE ALIENS
ANECO- MAGICAL REALISM NOVEL:
COMPLETEWITH TRAINHOPPING,
TREESITTING, GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS
ELVIS,THE ALIENS
ANDMUCH MUCH MORE...
I bought this oldVW Jetta for $300 and started driving it around industrial areas ofEast L.A. by myself late at night. I was seventeen years old, asomewhat successful porn queen and living happily on my own terms inthe weird, small basement apartment that I rented out in Hollywood. Still, life made little sense to me. I called my parentsoccasionally, who kept suggesting that I go to business school withthe newfound capital I had been earning.
"You won't beyoung and beautiful forever", my mother told me. "You shouldinvest the money you have in your future now, before it's toolate."
Since I wasonly seventeen, I didn't imagine that it was going to be too lateanytime soon, because youth and beauty are, of course, the eternalpresent. Otherwise, my parents were of very little help and totallypreoccupied with this new account they had at their agency, whichinvolved the marketing of Dolly Madison snack cakes to conveniencestores around the country. They sure were making a lot of money, butsomehow their lives still seemed empty and unfulfilling to me. Theproduction and consumption of products, although it is necessary tosome degree, never struck me as the most important thing in life. Onthe other hand, I was having a hard time figuring out what was.
I loved thesurfers and the sleaze, the gay body builders and flea markets ofthe city. The absurdity, the glitz, polish and poverty of thedifferent neighborhoods took me to other worlds. And late at night Iwould go to the train yards. The organic chaos of the cars humpingand smashing into each other really turned me on. I'd watch themfor hours on end, traveling in and out of the yard in east L.A.
Late at night,leaning against the hood of my car I would dream of a fulfillmentI'd never felt before.
Cinnamon, one ofthe girls that I worked with, was from a small town in Alabama. Shetold me about how, when she was a little girl living on her grandma'sfarm, she and her brothers and sisters used to sit by the traintracks for hours and wait under trees in the shade for the freighttrain to go by. Then, they'd jump on the ladders and ride a mileor so to the other side of her grandma's property before theyjumped off and walked back along the tracks. Once, her olderbrothers and sisters had already jumped off the train when sherealized that the train was now going far too fast for her to stillget off at the end of the farm and she ended up at the next crewchange, somewhere in Mississippi. She got off the train at the nextyard and, being six years old or so, the railroad workers called herparents to come get her.
The romance andbeauty of this small child rushing across the southern landscape ofmythical shacks and sharecroppers, wild, wet heat from the southernsun burning across her limbs and other spaces made my skin prickle inthe LA night. In that moment she was a small child and terrified.Embarrassed and guilty, but completely free. Riding along on theAlabama train through a different landscape of internalized desire. Riding through beauty and love. Riding through the sun.
So here I was, inEast L.A. Waiting late at the train yard in the L.A., Mexicalisummer night. And...I just got on. A junk train full of boxcars,gondolas and grainers pulled up and sat across the road from me and Igot a warm jacket and an old blanket out of the car, one of thosewool Ecuadorian ones that I got at the flea market. I grabbed agallon bottle of water and some granola bars and just got on. Iwasn't even planning to. Ever. I just sort of did it. Somethinginside of me wanted to escape the bounds of what was here and gothere. Something inside of me wasn't rejecting anything, butmoving toward something else. The train was like a boundary toanother dimension I hadn't previously seen. It somehow symbolizeda Jungian shadow side of myself that I'd never really explored. Itstarted from here, but headed off into there. Into some other type ofinner space where the psychological and the physical intertwined. Jung always said that outer and inner space were a dialectic, meaningthat as you have more external stimulation in your environment youhave less internal stimulation. You have less internal dialogue anddaydreaming, less imagining as more things happen. The train yardwas weird in that, although there was a lot of stimulation, carscrashing together and shadowy shapes of trains and workers and lightsflowing by, it was still like a fugue state. There was a lot ofstimuli, lots of movement, but it was very boring and monotonous atthe same time, so the physical sights and movements of the train yardand your thoughts, feelings, ideas and desires all came together andbecame intermixed. Dreamlike. Intertwined in your psyche until youweren't sure where one began and the next ended.
I got on and thetrain didn't stay there that long. Now, here I am. Late morning,stopped dead in the middle of the desert on a siding. I figured I'dget off and walk up the train a little bit and see what washappening. I was starting to think that possibly the engines haddisconnected or something. I went up a few cars when I heard peopletalking, and then I saw them, all in black velvet, some with goldlame jackets and some in evening gowns. One busty person (I hadtrouble telling if they were male or female) was even dressed in somesort of absurd white jump suit. It looked like it was made of whiteleather and the top was in a pseudo biker –motorcycle motif withlots of buckles and zippers. What was way over the top, however, wasthe crazy Count Dracula, Las Vegas werewolf collar that extended wayabove the top of that person's head. It had sequins and littlemirrors and sparkly things worked into the leather in beautifulgeometric designs that reminded me of the night sky. I was sure thatI could see the Big Dipper, the North Star and Cassiopeia all alignedproperly through the medium of metal studs on the collar.
"Hello," said awoman with a kind of black curly 1950's duckbuttish, pompadour hair doo and gold lame jacket.
"Andhow are you doing today out here in the desert?" She asked.
That's when Inoticed that each member of the group, one man, one woman and oneindeterminate, all had the same haircut. This kind of pompadour,piled high on top in the front and shaved down the back. The manwore short, bushy sideburns.
I wasn't quitesure what to say to the woman, with her dusky dark skin and deep,husky voice, but I thought that she was really cute and I'm afraidI just stared.
"You're welcometo come up and join us." Said the woman.
"My name isElviris and these are my friends, The Blue Suede Tools."
That's when itstruck me, they were all, more or less, dressed up in some period ofElvis garb except for one man who physically looked quite a lot likea young, perhaps thirtyish, hip shakin' Elvis. He was, however,wearing a dress made of black velvet with a little gold lame shoulderwrap. I'll have to say, he looked rather good in it.
"Are you somesort of performance group?" I finally managed to get out, afterstanding there awkwardly looking at them for a bit.
"Yes, actually weare. We're headed to Las Vegas to do some shows. We always liketo travel by train. The scenery through the desert really isbeautiful and we feel less responsible for supporting fossil fuelconsumption than if we drove our own car."
"What do youmean?" I said, still somewhat taken aback by the unusualness ofthe encounter with these people.
"Well, you areprobably aware that there are a limited amount of resources in thisworld, trees, iron ore, natural gas, petroleum, etc. Maybe you areaware and maybe you're not that it hurts the earth to remove thesethings from it. You have to cut up the land in order to get insideto things like petroleum and iron and cutting down trees is kind oflike cutting off your hair and leaving your scalp to burn and freezein the blazing sun and the night wind. We live in this Americanworld, but we don't really support the fact that these things arehappening. Back in L.A. we have an old ambulance that we convertedto run on vegetable oils that we get from the refuse of fast foodrestaurants, but long distance, we like to take the train. There'ssomething more beautiful, more nineteenth century about thelocomotive. Something that makes me happier and stirs my spirit. Something that makes me feel more free because, though security iswhat we're always told we have to get, freedom is always what wereally want."
"Really?" Isaid.
"Well, don'tyou think so?" said Elviris. "Are your deep inner longingssatisfied by a drive past the 7-11's and Denny's on the highway? Are you fulfilled by the housing developments and corporate officebuildings you see? Is your hearts' desire satisfied by beinghassled by the cops at the rest area and being told that you can'tsleep there or by a nice chicken fried steak and buttermilk biscuitat Elby's Big Boy?"
"Well, I doreally like those big, plastic Big Boy statues they have outside therestaurant." I admitted. "I think that the subtle irony ofoverblown kitsch somehow speaks to our hearts discontent over the waythings work. There is something about that life-size, pink, plastic,Campbell's soup kid with a big orange burger hovering by the doorto make you feel that, no matter how overblown and gross consumerculture is, it's still somehow, within its' own superego, mockingitself. Like there is some sort of Ubermind, cosmic justice thinggoing on without society itself even quite realizing it. I guessthat I get some sort of satisfaction from that."
"Well said."Said Elviris.
Then I heard a loudpopping sound. Kind of like basketballs being run over by elephants.
"That's the airbrakes cutting." Said the man in the dress.
"You should comeand hang out in the box car with us."
So I got in the carand as they say, was transported into a reality different from myown.
CHAPTER TWO:
Itwas beautiful. It was charming. I was glad I was in the habit ofwearing dark colored clothing. For all the glamour and beauty of thecrazy western landscapes you go through, you can't really say thatthe train isn't dirty, loud and often uncomfortable. The bottom ofthe boxcar really was dirty. It was a beautiful, old wood floor butit seems like, at some point, things were stored there which werepacked in an awful lot of grease. Like maybe car engines orsomething. I put down my jacket to sit on. It was one of thoseCarhardt ones with the blanket lining for chilly desert nights anddidn't mind the grease too much. It was soft and comfortable tosit on and I dug my hands in my pockets to find some old receipts orsomething to wad up and stick in my ears to keep out the thunderingnoise.
You never thinkabout the train being so loud, but it is. Especially junk trainsmade up of mostly empty box and grain cars. The train is light andsways and bounces. It continually shakes from side to side makingthese crazy rattling, crashing and quaking sounds as if pieces ofmetal were clicking and bashing against one another. Then, everyonce in awhile, the most intense sound begins. There is thisscreeching, starting at a high pitch and just getting higher until itseems like the pitch or the frequency or whatever is about to recedeout of the range of hearing. But then it doesn't. It justcontinues and gets louder and louder until it's this banshee wail. Really chilling. Shrill. The sounds of metal wheels grinding againstmetal rails, but it's blinding. This wrathful, shreiking howl. Asif something inside of myself were literally on fire.
"I'm Elvin"said the person who was wearing the white leather jumpsuit withcollar.
''And this isMelvis." S/he said, indicating the man wearing the black velvetdress.
"My name isScooter Orangewood. So, are you all Elvis impersonators?" Iasked, indicating their guitars and shoulder bags, which werepresumably filled with different sorts of Elvis period costumes.
"We prefer to saythat we are channeling the spirit of Elvis." Elvin said.
"There is nosecond coming and no one can perform the King except himself. So weprefer to feel as if we are mediators. Channels between this worldof shadow and the one beyond, of pure archetype if you will. We feelthat somewhere there is a world Platonically more real, charged withdivine force which we can channel through us as we perform. Inreaching out to a space of pure spirituality; we can help ouraudience feel that through our performance. We look at ourselves asshaman. Mediators betwixt and between these two worlds of purespirit and pure force. I'm sure you understand."
"Well, I did dropout of High School before I managed to read Plato." I said.
"Then that shouldleave you at an advantage." Said Elvin.
"Institutionssquash the spirit and cut people off from divine forces andutterances. Full people can't spend their lives behind a cashregister or computer console or in front of an assembly line staringat machines."
"I agree withthat, but don't you think that the whole thing about channelingElvis, of all people, is about as hokey as it gets. No offense; butit kind of seems like you're trying to do the equivalent ofchanneling divine manna through a Donald Duck Dixie cup. I mean, whyuse elements of our mass-produced, absurdist culture to try to bringabout a spiritual revival in the people? It just seems like an oddchoice."
"Well, it is andit isn't. I mean, Elvis was one of the first people, after Freud Isuppose, to bring sex out of the Victorian Era. He wasn't a greatmusician or anything. He never wrote any of his own songs. He justsang and performed. I think that he was wearing this very sameoutfit that I am wearing (the gold lame coat and black slacks withloafers.) when he first went on T.V., on the Ed Sullivan show. Hewent out on stage and started wiggling his left leg and the crowdwent wild. I guess he didn't understand why and looked to hisstage manager and said, "What am I doing? Why are they screamingthat way?" And his manager said: "I don't know, but just keepon doing it."
"Well Elviris, soyou think that he was subconsciously playing on young women'srepressed sexuality at the time." I said.
"Something likethat. Have you ever heard of the medical term hysteria?" SaidElviris.
"In thenineteenth century, women would sometimes have fainting spells,nerves, mental agitation of many types which doctors would label ashysteria, which was supposed to be caused by women's dangeroussexuality. So, doctors of the time would remove their clitorises'in order to calm them down. I guess that was a period of time whenwomen were shut up inside a lot, with nothing to do except wear thosereally tight corsets that laced up and be sexually and personallyfrustrated because they weren't allowed to do anything except bearchildren and hang around the house.
Sort of like the1950's, the period when Elvis became popular. In the 1940's,women were not only allowed, but encouraged, to work in variousindustries in order to help the war effort. After all the freedom ofmoney, jobs, and societal sexual license (they had to keep up themoral of the troops you know.) Women got shoved back into the home,got fired from their jobs and ended up drinking and taking a lot ofprescription drugs to deal with the mental strain."
"That's true,Elviris; I've read that abuse of prescription drugs, mostlytranquilizers and anti-depressants, by women was at an all time highin the Fifties'. So you think that Elvis somehow unleashed all ofthis sexual and personal hysteria in young women through hisrockabilly southern sex appeal? I guess he was publicized as a whiteguy who could sing like a black guy and you know how white culturesexually mythologizes black people in this country. People in theFifties' were lucky. Just a few decades before, someone might wellhave gotten their genitals cut off for that kind of behavior.Probably the women."
"You'veobviously had some education in American history, Scooter. Or wereyour parents just big Elvis fans?" said Elviris.
"Well, you knowElviris, I've been working in the porn industry for the last eightmonths or so and it's definitely made me rethink a lot of thingsabout our society, including it's gender roles and sexual mores. There was this girl I was working with in L.A. who is getting herdegree in Womens Studies at UCLA. We got sort of close, being thatwe were having public sex together and she gave me some books toread...There were definitely a lot of things that I didn't knowabout the history of women's sexuality that someone maybe shouldhave told me. I was reading about sacred prostitution in Babylon. That seemed like a really positive thing, where not only would womenhave a societally defined way to express their sexuality out ofmarriage, but there was also an ideal formed that women and theirsexuality were somehow linked to the divine. In that society, if menhad gone to war, for example, they could not be readmitted intoregular life until they had gone through a healing sexual ritual withone of the goddesses at the temple. Babylonian society still hadsome idea of the healing power and possibilities that women's'bodies might contain.
It'sfunny how people seem to get so tripped out about sex. Yet it'ssomething that we all so desperately want and need. It seems to besomething much closer to our real wants and desires than all of thecommodities we create put together. I guess that's why we have totry to market all of those things we produce, all of thosecommodities, by linking them with something that people really dowant and need. Namely sex. Look at any magazine rack that you passby. Ninety five percent of the covers are pictures of beautifulwomen. It shows very clearly what people really want. Freedom,beauty and emotional ecstasis."
I took a long lookat Elviris and she seemed to be smiling. Nobody else could hear ourconversation because you sort of have to shout to be heard on thetrain. She had a conspiratorial grin and her piled up Elvis hairdosuddenly looked kind of punk rockish. Like in the Eighties, whenshaved sides and back of hair was "in" in punk circles. She tookoff her jacket and her black button up shirt, as it was getting hotout in the Nevada sunlight and was now wearing just a black tank top. She was starting to turn me on a little.
"Have you everbeen up to Roseville CA.?" said Elviris to me.
"I think thatthere is someone there that you ought to meet."
''And who isthat." I said.
"There's thisguy, Donald McRonald Pelinger who runs the train museum there. Ithink that he might have some things to show you." Said Elviris.
"He's sort of aguru type and has a lot to say. He's a friend of the person youcould sort of say is our manager. They're both older guys and metduring WWII or the Korean War, I can never remember which. Anyway,they were somehow stationed in New Guinea together looking forrenegade Japanese soldiers in the outback when they had a sort ofreligious conversion with a shamanic type way up in the mountainsthere. Now they both claim that they can still communicate with himtelepathically and... Well you'll hear the whole story eventually. You'll just have to go talk to Don. He's a very interestingperson and since it's summer, he'll probably be there getting hismodel train exhibit ready for the county fair."
"He sounds alittle creepy to me." I said.
"An old guy who'smaking model train exhibits and touting himself as a New Age gurusomewhere in the central valley? It must be blazing hot there too. Summer in Central California is just beginning to really heat up. But then, it's pretty hot here too. Who's your agent anyway? Ishe some guy in L.A...? Or...?"
"No Scooter."Said Elviris.
"When we are noton the road we live at the prostitute's museum in Butte, Montana. Our agent, who, you could say, recruited us, lives there and runs theplace. We spend a lot of time in Los Angeles and Las Vegas thoughand only stay in Montana part of the year. We keep in close contactwith our agent, Aeron, by E-mail so that we can use different codesto get important messages across."
"Did you everhear of Cointelpro?" said Elviris.
"No." I said.
'Well, they'rea group of people that are part of the F.B.I. They were created inthe 1950's to monitor un-American activities such as the communistparty and labor unions. They continued into the 1960's monitoringthe civil rights movement and black power movements such as The BlackPanthers and The Nation of Islam. Later, in the 1970's MOVE inPhiladelphia came under their scrutiny. In the 1990's Cointelprokept track of all sorts of groups such as environmentalists, laborunion organizers, right wing militia movements and the United FarmWorkers. So, you just can't be too careful." Said Elviris.
"So, you'resaying that e-mail is somehow safer?" I asked.
"I think that itis maybe a little trickier to monitor than phones and mail. But westill only impart information, even in e-mail, in our own sort ofcode, just in case."
"So, what do youthink that Cointelpro is up to these days?" I asked. "I mean,the days of the Black Panthers and the Vietnam war protests are longover, so who is left to surveil?"
"That's a verygood question."said Elviris. "It seems to me that the waragainst dissenting or troublesome populations at home didn't stopafter groups like the Weather Underground or the Black LiberationArmy were destroyed. It hasn't stopped with the end of the Vietnamwar protests and certainly surveillance of minority groups hasn'tlet up, it just seems as if it has taken on a new guise.
Scooter, did youread this article in The San Jose Mercury News a while back abouthow the CIA. was and is involved in the trafficking of crack, cocainefrom Honduras and South America and selling it to minority members inbig cities in the U.S.?"
"Actually," Isaid. "I did. As I remember, not only did they make a lot ofmoney which could be used to fund the Contras in Nicaragua or otherprivate projects, but the people targeted for the drug sales, namelyurban blacks, were ultimately, in the view of the C.I.A., marginalpopulations which were not serving any other real purpose in oursociety other than to deal and ingest drugs in order to fund thevarious activities of the intelligence community. It seems like theywere viewed as a kind of national sacrifice zone. Sort of like thepeople living in rural Nevada and Utah near nuclear test sites in the50's. The government knew that they would be affected by theradiation somehow, but thought that it was more important for societyas a whole to do the tests than to let it be stopped by the landrights and presence of a few rural rednecks." I said.
"It really allworks well together." Said Elviris. "By selling crack to youngurban blacks, you end up completely dehabilitating a potentiallyrebellious population and at the same time create a hysteria."
" It'sinteresting." I said. "How, by spreading crack to the homies, youare creating both a reason to target and monitor minority groups thatyou wish to surveil anyway and at the same time, you are getting allof these poor urban dwellers to unwittingly produce all of thespectacular fuel that the government and the media need to createthe drug war."
"It's true."Said Elviris. "What do you imagine all of these impoverished and disenfranchised people are going to do when presented with theopportunity to become instant millionaires. And, of course, in anysituation where there are large amounts of money involved, there iscompetition and violence."
"Ah, the drugwar." I said. "Where squishy, white people in the suburbs andsmall towns of America quake in their boots as they see mediaportrayals, over and over again, of young Black and Hispanic men withbig, baggy, black pants and automatic rifles terrorizing the streetsof inner cities and ruining our country. Weird and hilarious."
"It's aninteresting media event, isn't it?" said Elviris. "I guesswith our big, evil enemies the Communists in economic and socialcollapse now, our extremely large military, police and intelligenceforce has a lot of extra time on it's hands to deal with whoevermight threaten their power here on the home front. Selling drugssure is a great way to make a lot of money off the books for secretintelligence projects and at the same time completely collapse theLatino and Black communities here in this country while making theirmembers continually criminally suspect."
"The drug war iskind of like the cold war, I guess." Said Elviris." It allowsthe government and the media to manufacture a sort of frenzy or"state of emergency" in which peoples' civil liberties mighthave to give way a little bit for the good of all in exchange for theeradication of that great social evil: drugs."
"Makes a lot ofsense," I said. " The CIA both gets to make a lot of money bydistributing drugs, and then is also given an excuse to interfere inthe politics of minority communities in this country as well as thatof other countries which are supplying these drugs. That sure seemshandy whenever we want to go mess with Columbia or Bolivia orwherever and tell them what to do."
Elviris went on andranted quite a bit about her views on the government, with the helpof the other members of the band. It seemed as if her and The BlueSuede Tools were these crusading, Elvis impersonator, sacred sexactivists who not only did these cross dressing Elvis inspired rockshows but also these crazy live sex performances for privateaudiences of bigwigs with Elviris and Melvis going at it and Elvin,who was a transgender person, sometimes acting as Elvis, sometimes asPriscilla.
They had kind of aweird scene going and I wasn't quite sure how it all fit in withtheir social issues /activism thing, but I liked hanging out withthem anyway. They genuinely were nice and funny and a lot of fun tobe with. Within a few hours, I felt like they were my friends.
The journey across Nevada is blurry, tan colored and dreamy. Thereis a section where we go hours and hours without seeing anything butwheat colored grasses and a single Native American school sittingunder a lone palm tree in the middle of the desert. No other people,no roads until Las Vegas arrives across the horizon with a blur ofpost apocalyptic white light. You literally come around the bend ofa set of sandstone mountains in the desert and there it is, risingoff the plain, like a mirage. Still no water, just bright, neonlights shining below you while you ride the sandstone ridge abovethe city and wind slowly down and in.
Weird,after the stillness of the desert, but strangely beautiful still aswe run a gauntlet of chain link fence through the industrial centerof town. There are little shacks and overhangs made by the homelesspoking out from their hiding places behind stacks of tires. Pink,rotting couches sit in the open air against the backdrop ofindustrial buildings and cinder block walls, presumably waiting forpeople to recline on them.
Iwonder how people get away with it, squatting in this richest ofcities? I guess the mafia or the police or whoever is in charge justdon't care as long as the homeless stay away from the tourists andthe money making parts of town. Perhaps in such an economy of greedmore of a live and let live attitude prevails, or more of an attitudeor awareness of the mechanizations of survival.
Elvirisasks me to come with them as we get off and hide by a highwayoverpass near the tracks. "There is something you need to do."She says.
"Itold you about my friend who lives near the Roseville train yard andruns the railroad museum there. I bet you'd like each other and Ibet you'd like getting there. You should enjoy a bit of life onthe rails for awhile. Roseville's the largest train yard on thewest coast and you'll go through the Mojave Desert on the waythere, it's beautiful." She said. "The sense of subtlychanging light and color you get in the desert is different than you see anywhere else. Please take this and hopefully it will help youget to all the places you need to go..." Said Elviris as shehanded me a little booklet of maps and drawings of the L.A. and LasVegas train yards. It had a bunch of information about how to get tothe yards by public transit as well as where to hide and how to tellwhich trains went where.
"We make them upand photocopy them as reference for ourselves and all our friends." She said."Ronald Mcdonald Pelinger, Just remember that name. He'seasy to find. The Train Museum is right across from Rainbow Bridge. It's sort of shaped like a rainbow, or more like the 'M' of thegolden arches. Anyway, I'm sure you'll find it, just asksomebody. Sometimes they show free movies in the afternoons and it'scool and dreamy in the shadows of the museums' basement."
And then they weregone. Waving like shadows of my dreams in gold lame and blackvelvet. I felt like I'd just woken up and couldn't quite remembereverything that had occurred, yet still had this feeling of beingsure that momentous events had just taken place. I felt like I wasin the vacuum after a storm; A sense that events had rushed past meand now I was standing in a vacancy of their aftermath.
Somewhere behind the windows of my eyes, there was still scenery andevents plunging by. More cactus and dark sand formations than mybrain could really process. More surreal visages of lovelorn Elvisnymphs in drag than I could come to grips with in a lifetime ofbehind the scenes 1950's high school prom mystery dances. Too muchrapid imagery and stimulation, also excitement of the desert sky andlurid casinos glowing lights in the distance.
It'shard to describe, but coming off the train is like coming out of asacred space. It's weird because, although the train trackssometimes parallel or intersect the highway, they usually don't. They are running on their own sense of nineteenth century geography,down river basins and across salt flats, far away from the Denny'sand 7/11's , removed from the Motel Six and all the othermanifestations of our plastic, consumer oriented world.
Therailroad, instead, has a different sense of sacred geography thatfollows natural features and runs through old ranches and homesteadsfrom long ago. Even when it does emerge from pure, outdoor spacesinto the urban, the train tracks still seem to pass through a versionof the industrial organic. The tracks are usually far from malls andchain stores and instead pass through an older, more industrial partof town full of old warehouses and jagged chips of metal, down nearunloading docks and factories full of pallets and huge pieces ofmachinery all crusted over with grime and oil. It's a window intoa time where the sources of our abundance or the ugliness of ourtechnology were less hidden and our feelings about these things couldbe more easily explored. The train constitutes its own fairy worldwedged between the industrial and the natural, sacred and secularspace and the 19th and 20th centuries.
Thetrain is it's own magic and after the long beautiful hills of thedesert I had no urge whatsoever to cruise into the weird Disneyland,tourist hell of glitter gulch in Las Vegas with it's artificialnighttime sky. So I decided to bed down near a bunch of broken fortyounce beer bottles, King Cobra, between a short concrete building andthe wall of the freeway overpass and sleep.....
UntilI hear a train coming the other direction and then I am in L.A., Cityof Angels. Moving my things and packing my backpack, water and foodand warm clothes and shorts. Showering and watching my blackclothes, swirling in filth as they circle in the washing machine, andI am in the junkyard down by the L.A. River...heart pounding afterthe walk from beautiful Union Station, with its candelabras and huge,ornate bathroom reminiscent of a baroque, gothic city from anotherera, maybe another world. The clean, orderly Amtrak passengerswaiting in another dimension as I walk to the East Diamond, far downfrom the security cameras as the helicopters fly incessantly over,landing on the police station roof, like strange, warrior insects. The police station itself is a disturbing, 1984 style, distopianmegaplex, shining its lights into the hazy nighttime sky. It lookedsomething like one of those stalags, or concentration camps from oldreruns of WWII movies, with all of its spotlights rotating into theair in all directions.
Thereis the body of an old, green pickup truck or the front cab of one,anyway that I like to sit on as I wait, pretending to be a farmhand,maybe from an old version of the wizard of Oz. Waiting to burst intocolor. The junkyard is a great mound of things. There are car seatsand pieces of vinyl; old pieces of compact discs scattered around onthe ground. The actual junkyard itself tapers off into this earthenmound of rubbish which has long grass and even little trees growingon it. It must have been sitting there a long time. It's funnyhow the junkyard is the only small site of greenery over miles andmiles of the tarmacked L.A. river basin and as the train comes, Islowly pull away through the backs of warehouses, slowly, slowly intothe Mojave Desert, then emerging into the Central Valley, uglyfactories and back lots of decaying small towns full of car parts andmajor appliances lounging amongst weeds.