Waiting on the Acton van.

I'd never been to Skid Row but had read a lot of Bukowski and what he portrayed sounded similar to The Tenderloin in San Francisco, rundown hotels and seedy bars, sidewalks crowded by bums and hustlers and whores, but it wasn't at all. It looked clean, and quiet, as if everything that breathed had been vaporized, probably by a toxic cloud.
I saw a cloud mushroomed over downtown L.A. once, it was green. I knew that it was the after effect of the earthquake that had just occurred, otherwise I would have suspected some sort of biological chemical warfare result. They were always trying to solve the homeless population problem and what better way than just disappear them with some poisonous cloud of gas.
Red and blue pup-tents livened up the gray backdrop but it was otherwise bleak and completely void of people. The buildings looked empty and I wondered why they didn’t just stick the tent dwellers inside them.
The tents appeared to serve as portable tract housing for the homeless, and none was any larger or smaller than it’s neighbor. I wondered if they had a limit on number of occupants. Instead of cars in the driveway there were grocery carts parked alongside.

The cab dropped me off in front of a white one story cinder block building surrounded by a very tall chain link fence. I got out and realized the cleanness was an illusion created by the layer of smog dust that covered everything with a matte veneer. Sunlight did not reflect down here, it absorbed, and I wondered if the same grey glow shone day and night. A patriotic colored banner hung from the flat roof, American Outreach United. I found the name of the place not comforting but suspicious. I imagined myself wandering around some flat vista wearing a torn and singed faux military Scientology looking uniform, my eyes blank with Thorazine.
I checked in with a friendly black woman sitting behind a battered wooden desk with nothing on it but an old phone with a cord. She told me it would be awhile and to have a seat.
The waiting area was made up of a couple of couches and overstuffed chairs. Thrift shop rejects filled with decades of dust mite carcasses I suspected.
One of the chairs was occupied by an ancient lady wearing monochrome clothes, everything was peach. AN unrolled to the chin ribbed turtleneck was tucked into the high waisted flared slacks. Over this was an ankle length sleeveless vest. She had soft suede zipper sided platform boots, also peach.
I dropped my bags and sat across from her on an orange couch stained with grease where your head would go if you sat back.
The lady didn’t look like she wanted to exchange hellos so I didn’t. She was staring into a tiny address book and since she didn’t seem to take notice of me I watched her do this. I don’t like people staring at me, I doubt anyone does, but if she wasn’t aware of it she couldn’t mind.
She had tiny reading glasses perched at the end of a long nose. Her copper-colored hair was coiled up tightly into a cone that peaked at least eight inches above the top of her head. She looked like a Star Trek bartender and I wondered what kind of noises would come out of her mouth if she spoke.

Roadrunner, Indians, Sharkskin suit

Roadrunner
One night my ride left so on my way out of the lot I stole a Roadrunner. It wasn’t planned, I was going to hitchhike, but as I passed by I saw that the windows were open and the keys were in the ignition.
It was an old school muscle car and I knew that whoever owned it loved it. Hood scoop and spoiler, big fat tires, rear end in the air, green metal flake paint job with wide white racing. I don’t know why it didn’t have a stick, but it didn’t so I had a ride home.
But I didn’t want to go home, driving it was too much fun so I passed through Traverse City and headed North, up M22 into Leelanau County. The road was empty and I was going as fast as I could. When I got to Northport I turned South. I slammed the pedal to the floor and It went right through it.
Directly in my path was a house and no obstructions between me and it. There was no way I could make the curve going as fast as I was. I shifted into neutral and the car spun out into the ditch on the other side of the road. The motor was screaming and I was afraid it would blow up or something so I jumped out and ran into the woods. Just like the Torch Lake Indians.




Indians take to the woods
Gabrielle and I were hitching up to our friend Nancy’s cottage on Torch Lake when an overloaded station wagon picked us up. It was filled with four of five generations of an Indian family. Not all of them I’m sure, but some from each. Gabby knew some of them. She liked to hook up with native guys. Anyone third world looking really.
We barely got a mile when smoke started billowing out from under the hood. The car pulled over and without a sound everyone piled out and ran into the woods. I considered it some sort of primitive reaction to the dysfunction of the white mans mechanical monster. They disappeared and we were left standing there. Gabrielle grew up on a farm and had some know how that I didn’t. She popped the hood and started throwing handfuls of sandy dirt onto the engine. I quickly joined in and we got the fire to go out.
A pick-up truck pulled over and the driver got out to help us. By now the engine had quit smoking but the Indians were still nowhere in sight. It was like they had vaporized. I wondered if they were still running, the fiery car a heaving monster in their minds, roaring through the woods behind them.

Sharkskin suit
I stayed in the woods too, for fear of being caught. The car was still screaming and there was the house right there. It was dawn now and I was wearing this shiny sharkskin suit. I was also wearing Beatle boots, this was my look at the time. With both of us being foreign objects in the area I’d immediately be connected to the car.
I started walking in the general direction of Lake Michigan. I thought this was what the Indians had been doing too, an instinctual pull towards water. If the world caught on fire, water would be safe harbor. At least you could see your enemies coming.
It was not a lush forest with a soft bed of needles underfoot. These woods had a lot of underbrush and the suit was getting snagged on branches. I was stumbling along for quite awhile when I glimpsed pavement between the trees.
I didn’t know what road it was or where I was but at this point I didn’t care. If a cop came along I’d just feign ignorance. I don’t know what you’re talking about, I could say.
I was so tired and dehydrated I would have drank from a puddle and slept in a ditch but I didn’t have to. I saw the trail to Vicki’s Place, and knew that if I made it there I’d have a bed to sleep in.

The Shed

Every warm day we spent on the beach. My brother and I set up this huge canvas tent on the sand and we’d sleep there at night. My sister was too small. Between our house and the river was a giant Willow tree that had three or four trunks. During the day we’d play under it. I’d create highways in the dirt where my toy cars would have horrific accidents.
At night we kept our distance from the tree cause bums would hang out under it drinking, we’d find empty bottles of cheap wine and Sterno cans in the morning. One night there was a loud ruckus and my mother came down to the tent with a flashlight in one hand and a big kitchen knife in the other. She told us we had to go up to the house. Shortly after, the cops showed up and I guess took the bums away cause it was quiet after that.
A friend of my mother’s helped us build a Tom Sawyer type raft; logs tied together with twine and rope. It weighed a ton but we had a lot of fun on it until a storm busted it up. We soon found replacements in a shed a few houses down. There were five houses along this stretch of beach. One of the houses had a long low shed behind it. It was about the width and length of a double-wide trailer, only it wasn’t. It looked really old with peeling paint and windows so filthy we couldn’t see through them. We were really curious what was in there and since we never saw any activity around the place we decided to check it out.
The end facing the water was comprised of double-sided doors connected by a rusted padlock. One night, me and my brother along with a neighbor kid went over there and smashed the lock off with a hammer. When our eyes adjusted to the dark we saw that the place was filled with coffins. They lined the walls and looked to be the cheap kind you imagine poor people are buried in. I saw a pile of lids and got an idea, “We can use those for paddle-boards.” We each grabbed one and dragged them down to the beach where we hid them under some bushes.
The lids were heavy but floated, although they were always an inch or two under the water. We spent the rest of the summer paddling around the bay on them. I liked to go way out and just lay on mine, soaking up sun.
We pretty much ran wild all summer but sometimes we had baby-sitters. One of them was this kid Bobby, he was fifteen and the son of some friends of my mothers. Most of the time he just played with us like another kid but one day he told me to come with him, he had something to show me.
We went into the shed behind the last house on the row, on the other side of it was a park. The shed was small and filled with old furniture including a couch which I sat on.
“Check it out” Bobby pulled out his dick and I stared at it. I’d never seen an adult one and was sort of grossed out by the hair.
“Not that” he said, “over there.”
He pointed at the wall behind him where the sunlight through a little window was casting a long shadow of his limp penis. He started wagging it around and we watched the shadow move. I didn’t know what to make of this, it wasn’t very interesting.
“Cool” I said.


A couple weeks later a friend and I were standing in the doorway of that same shed flicking lit matches at an old overstuffed chair. Whatever it was stuffed with turned out to be super flammable cause when a match finally made direct contact it ignited immediately.
The shed was gone before the fire truck could even get there. Everyone knew we did it and the cops questioned us about it, but we lied and nothing ever came of it.
My parents were separated during this period but shortly after we moved to Illinois where my father had been living in a large walk in safe. His apartment, the safe, was located in a creepy old mansion on the Fox River. It had a tower and an observatory. His room had no windows of course. I don’t know how he did it, lived there.
He told me later he suffered from lifelong claustrophobia due to closet imprisonment at the hands of his mother. Maybe he was always drunk in the safe, or had company. I wonder if you’re still claustrophobic if you’re with other people. Probably but the distraction must help.
Some of my childhood pastimes seem pre-serial killer in retrospect, but the arson didn’t continue and I never tortured animals.
Bobby the babysitter did end up a killer. He murdered a prostitute when he was still a teenager and did a couple of decades in prison.

The Nova

Monument
For whatever reason the Nova was still fucked up after I bailed it out, it would never run right. It sat for a month while I paid off the garage that worked on it. I may have as well been a girl to the mechanics for as little as I knew, but they couldn’t rip me off, I had no money. After awhile they just wanted it gone.
I didn’t really have to buy it in the first place, after all I was only test driving it. I just thought I should. It would have been crappy if I didn’t, although the guy was knowingly selling me junk. Aside from the mechanical failings I liked the car, the look of it. I liked it even more after the accident. It looked like it’d been bit by a shark.
I erased its mustard color with flat black spray paint. This was dumb because it drew heat causing more and new engine problems, but it looked good. I flipped the tires to hide the unsightly white walls and if no one knew how small the motor was it looked menacing.
Down the road from PC was this thing that I wanted to drive to the top of. It looked like a giant upside down planter or Devo hat. From a distance it appeared to be carved from rock but up close it was just hard dirt. It was difficult to figure how or why, or even when it had been constructed. I didn’t care, I wanted to sit on top of it. My sister was coming out to visit so I thought I’d take her there.
I was living at Beas boarding house at the time and got my sister a room there too. I had to even if it was only going to be for a couple days. Bea insisted on separate lodging. I don’t think she thought Dianne was really my sister, and she didn’t encourage cohabitation. She didn’t even rent to girls.
Beas was a big old house in the canyon at the top of Main Street. It defined ramshackle and like all the other old structures was Victorian era. I liked living there and had moved in after the mess with Tony lost me the condo. I could climb out of my window onto a roof pitched just right for tanning. I still hadn’t started using sunblock anywhere but on my face, and had atrocious spots of damage on my shoulders and upper arms. I looked bad, as in awful, but I liked it. I fit the car.
I didn’t really leave the immediate vicinity of Park City much, unless it was to go down into SLC for shows at the Indian Center or shopping at the mall. There was no reason plus I tended to get harassed by the police.
A friend and I had driven East to Wyoming once to register his van and stock up on cheaper beer. You didn’t need proof of insurance over there and they had real beer, not 3.2, for real world prices. The Mormons had it all jacked up, liquor wise. They didn’t believe in consuming alcohol but they did believe in fleecing the people that did.
We turned off the highway. The thing could be seen in the near distance. I’ll call it The Monument, it had to be one of some kind, like Ayer’s Rock. I wondered if anyone died at it. I wondered if we would and started laughing at the drama that would ensue if we did. Dianne looked at me but I couldn’t share the thought, it was too stupid.
There was nothing of any significant elevation near it, although far off was the ever present mountain vista, topped by snow. We climbed out of the car and into a cloud of dust we’d stirred up. We both coughed, and waved our hands around in front of our faces like old women.
The ramp to the top was little more than car width. Medium sized American. In order to stay on track I never unturned the wheel. I think we maybe made three revolutions before reaching the top. I stopped, pulled the emergency brake on and we got out. No one else was up there but I already knew that. You would have been able to see them from ground level.
We sat on the roof of the car. The sun hung low in the sky casting long shadows behind the cactus and rocks. Its rays reflected dimly off the water of a manmade lake a few miles to our south. This lake wasn’t made for recreation, and it was in no way scenic, it was simply the byproduct of some never finished industrial excavation. A slick surface surrounded by rock outcroppings. It was long, you couldn’t see the far end.
Locals did windsurf on it, and I’d been over there a couple of times. When the wind was up it was perfect for that but no matter how hot the air was no one ever went in without a full wetsuit. The water was murky green with foam piling up along the shore. It never got shallow enough to see the bottom. Fish had been planted decades before but you never saw anyone fishing and from what I saw of the dead ones I can’t imagine the kind of freak that would eat one. Or maybe I could, The Hills Have Eyes had been filmed nearby. The mutants would eat these fish. I’m sure animals wouldn’t though, they can tell when stuff’s not right, like Indians…