The Sands of Barstow

There is a cold, strange smell that wafts over the desert as if burnt trash and wind-parched creosote bushes fornicated in the rocks of the San Bernardino Mountains. The drive was, as it is to cross a country, both breathtaking and sad. Monuments to mankind's achievements were interspersed with whitewashed crosses, hung not with saviors, but with fattened cash. The trip had taken me from a warming place, a small town in Ohio, to a chilling place, the high desert. This place, littered with majestic and weathered rock piles and buckshot-full couches. Target practice has made a weird, alien world out of the Calicos and the Rainbows and the other turnphrased places here. I had come here to fritter away my time protecting a large remnant to the Pleistocene area…Gopherus agassizii. Lumbering across the pavement, between Joshua trees and forever, they have been passed by time and society. It would be here, with the quiet solitude of the end of the country, that I would die.

Between the waves of change and battered hope, I dreamed. I dreamed not of the land of bats that Hunter spoke of. No. My mind was clear of hallucinogens. I slept and I dreamed that I was a lion. The lone and thundering lion, whittled to a thin rail via a lack of sustenance. I limped along, stepping on spiny melting annual grasses and burnt stones. Under the blurred circle of vultures, looking much like a rattled dark tea, I, the lion, laid myself down. Wearied by the strange sounds and fevered unknown of my new lands, I died. My sun-bleached mane frittered off into the shitting dunes. The same dunes I would find, in my waking life, littered with fringe-toed lizards and Mexican beer cans. I died in a place that, in dreams, was a pale and strange amalgamation of a Merry Melodies cartoon and old-timey cowboy pictures.

Midwestern, overeducated, fattened quail. It would be a few weeks before I found a desert astray and washed with redneck and Mexican garbage, buckshot and left to time.

It had been days since I drove through New Mexico, a vibrant and painted land, seeming to be a white, American and colorful land. In New Mexico I met a woman who offered me coffee at a tourist hole. Pamphlets seemed clean, as if wiped with Windex. The bathroom smelled slightly sweet and quaint. That was a land of cleanliness. Tall cactus stood majestic along freeways, as if to remind me of the filth I would find just hours from Hollywood.

It was a Tuesday when the first homeless urchin crept into my spine and coughed for some gasoline. I quickly assumed him to be a methamphetamine junky, with skeleton fingers and a werewolf smile. I would not give him the satisfaction, in his schizophrenic, drunken thoughts. Was this California? The land of nectar and ambrosia? Barstow wasn't mapped onto the plastic fantastic scene. Oh, no, Barstow was deep within the recesses of yesterday in California. A blow fly cannot land on this corpse. There are none in this desert. Even the world does not take its dead to this part of the Mojave.

In April, I walked in a cool and yet warming wind. It was calm and scarring. I had no job, no source of that income I so haphazardly wished would come into my possession. I was a failed scientist. I was a failed writer and a failed filmmaker. In my suicidal masturbatory fantasies, I would be a lion. I would be a great hero, walking tall in glory, ignoring its fleeting nature. There would be women draped in the pinkish waters, crying in a sad orgasm, as the sun set on the Ganges. My corpse would be burned but the fire would linger. The boat would sink just below the horizon in a plume of purple smoke, like the pen of a grand writer.

Then I was in Barstow. I was in a strange, alien land where a mix of colored races parade in uneasy harmony on a tract of battered land. Unemployment is rampant. Drugs seem to exist only to waste away the few potential good things in this place. Between the homeless and the squeaking, crippled veterans from the scattered military bases, streetwalking becomes a case of uncomfortable existence. With each turn, a pregnant teenager or a coughing old woman makes one wonder if this is some kind of limbo, stuck between a true and bitter hell, spiraled with sulfur smoke, and a quiet, reserved, heavenly place. But, alas, it is not limbo. It is a desert.

The burros - a pompous and ethnically-charged name for wild asses - dig up the dust, thrusting their hooves into the dirt in a desperate attempt to bring forth water and wash the filth from this land. They nay and kick into the air, fighting off the thought of Barstow. Dark-skinned and bitten by flies, a small patch of white on their noses reminds the rest of society of the cornering of the Caucasians in this country. It is a reminder that the elite become the eaten, as the maggots writhe and stretch into the woods. But those maggots, once filthy and fattened like fingers, will become flies. Those blow flies, flies though they may be, are beautiful and shimmering colors. They flit from flower to flower, always a reminder that their progeny fed on the fat and bloated corpse of the old world. Even in their strange and new beauty, these shimmering blue-green flies speed off into the sunset, looking for a new land. A land out of this hellish place.

But then, what is to be made of this place? The heat overcomes everything. Hundreds of days blaze into the 90s, 100s. Nights pretend to cool off, but are outed by their triple digit identity. Even here, the snakes sweat. Their rattles drip with a memory of a kinder time, a kinder place. A Midwest where an American dream once slept under twisting shingles. Now their rattles fall onto the deaf ears of the last bastion of society. Fighting to keep out the sand, the lions, and the vagrants. The few families that linger on with a widened eye plead for a release. Be it death or a transfer, they long to move on. They request a better life on a whisper in the wind, like a butterfly battered by a sandstorm who falls into the rocks and is forgotten. That is the spirit of this place.

Here, the cactus and solitude are replaced by burnt shrubs and hot-rodded Japanese machines, faking their heritage as if dressed in muscle and speed, burning rice up and down the streets. Silent monuments to humanity rust on, the El Caminos and the Rancheros, promising American hard work in a package everyone can be proud to own. I fie on them. Their steel lies, dripping with rust from their metal cunts. Out the window of my duplex I spit on them. I am not fooled by ancient machines, pretending to present style and performance. Within a few inches, I spy the truth. Rounded and soulless machines, spoilers adorned, grinding down the streets, packed with persons pretending to be gang members. Scraping their Hondas and Kias on spinning rims across the random rainwater gutters that cut through the streets like a swash of hope. There is no rain here. More lies.

Yet I swallow the lies. On a map I know that a few inches away is Vegas. A city of lights that beacons the moths of the desert to come,  lie down, and curl up under a slot machine for the night. On the other side, Los Angeles. Precariously placed on the edge of everything. A promise of Hollywood and the wet pussy of starlets, craving recognition and father figures. I sit stretched here, torn on the direction to turn on baked, windy days. Looking to the lights and falsehoods makes more lies froth out of the Kelso dunes, escaping from their deepened graves. Then, a turn away, off to the ocean is revealed a city of angels, probably weeping from the violent eruptions of society's phallic wedge. Those streets are littered with as many soaked, backroom panties of the dreams of youth as Barstow is with empty Spanish-language food packages. Even in the hope that this city collectively breathes in, there are no truths.

Dali could not paint this land as twisted as it is. And yet, there is a light, a faint and flickering light. There are kind words at the grocery store and a twinkle in the eyes of the Gopherus agassizii. Holding on by a thread to existence, they trek on, knowing in their hearts, tucked deep inside scraped shells, that there will be a tomorrow. And with any tomorrow or yesterday and forever there may be a change. There may be lions here. Those lions could die, under a desert willow or a mesquite, but they may also roar. They may also create and try and build before they die.

Here, between the puffed out couches, shot stuffing overflowing 70s patterns, and the scorched earth, cockroaches hide. Scurrying into the darkness to wait for the night like werewolves or addicts. But they do not wish to harm, to maim, to break. They eke an existence in the sands and the sun. They are the lions out here, I would say. I am charmed by them.

It is in this charm that I realize my coming to this place is not a death sentence, a trap into limbo, or a twisting on a branch in the window. No. The cockroaches, the lions of Barstow, do the best living they can here. In the homes of the white, the black, the Hispanic, the Asian, and the dead, they live on. High society and strangely quiet, they creep on. As if an homage to film, they exist as the humans in Planet of the Apes. Silent. Dignified. They, they are lions.

I came here to be a scientist, to study the lizards and the creepers and crawlers in the sand and the burnt, brown plants. I have seen the orange sky break over the mountains and die, down in the rocky soil. And it is here, I found a muse…it may be nothing more than a spindly-legged cockroach, hiding in the dark and under the sink, but it may be a lion. And when I die, under a Joshua tree from exhaustion in the summer radiation, bury me as a lion. Mark my grave and tell them I lived. Because the flies, they can't even stay for dinner. Even they'll have left Barstow.