Flash

by Jim Miller

  During World War II, the Marines had set up Camp Dunlop here in the broiling heat between the sea and a gunnery range. After the war, the base was abandoned, leaving behind nothing but the large concrete slabs where their huts had been. In the years that followed, the site became a Mecca of sorts for homeless squatters, outlaws, social outcasts, religious nuts, burned-out hippies, alkies, addicts, anti-government types, elderly snowbirds on fixed incomes escaping the winter in their RVs, and an odd assortment of others yearning to live free of the watching eye of the man. Here, amidst the slabs, boondockers lived as they wanted to—with no fees or water or power or police. It was an anarchic junkyard of human and material cast-offs. In the winter, the place drew thousands, but in the scorching heat of the summer only about 150 slabbers remained to wait out the inferno. Thank God it was January.

  The first thing you encountered on your way in was Salvation Mountain—a huge multicolored mosaic hillside of Biblical verses crowned with a cross. It took slabber Leonard Knight years to construct this monument to the Lord out of tons of adobe and thousands of gallons of donated latex paint. Leonard’s creation rose out of the earth like an apparition as I approached: “God is Love.” I got out to take a look and walked up to the top for a view of the Salton Sea. Leonard was below, giving a tour to a pair of German tourists in soccer jerseys and bike shorts. I waved over to him as I got back into my car to head to Slab City, and got a wave in return. I drove by the “Welcome to Slab City” sign and cruised around trying to find the anarchists. Being the peak of the season, there were hundreds of motor homes, campers, and trailers of all sorts scattered in between abandoned buses, burned-out pick up trucks, and the occasional mound of old tires. I drove around somewhat aimlessly at first, passing a few classic silver Airstreams, a huge new motor home, and a group of campers parked in a circle. Lots of folks had set up elaborate awnings or improvised patios in front of their rigs. There were even a number of makeshift structures giving the place a semi-permanent feel: the Oasis Club; the Lizard Tree Library; a church; impromptu flea markets selling cactus, bird houses, and solar panels; the Ranch Night-club, complete with a stage and cozy seats ripped out of old buses. I made a few turns and saw an abandoned grapefruit orchard and a hot spring full of bathers. Finally, I gave up and took a look at the map that came with the letter Neville gave me. It was inconclusive as all it showed was a spot marked “Thrasher Collective” next to a dot labeled Slab City.

  I was snarling in disgust at Neville’s having wasted my time on a hoax when a scruffy dude in camouflage came over and asked if he could help out. When I told him I was looking for a bunch of anarchist punks who’d formed a collective, he shook his head and said, “You mean the poop troop?” Then he proceeded to give me his version of the lowdown. Apparently, Slab City was divided between the “Suburbs” on the south side and “Poverty Flats” on the north side. The anarchists or “poop troop” were on the north side, he told me. I got out of the car and shook his calloused hand and told him I was a reporter from San Diego. This prompted him to introduce me to a crew of gruff-looking oldsters sitting in lawn chairs outside a Winnebago. They handed me a Pabst Blue Ribbon and bid me to sit with them. From this group, I got the story that Slab City was being threatened by a bunch of dumbass litter bugs who were going to wreck the whole thing by dumping old cars, toxic waste, beer cans, and their own feces into the fragile desert ecology. These guys even had a website to support their cause.

  “This place is one of the last outposts of real freedom in the United States,” a leather-faced codger in a dirty cowboy hat offered up. “The government is always looking for ways to shut freedom down and these assholes are just giving them an excuse.” This got a rousing round of approval from the rest of the men who explained that the authorities had occasionally made noises about clearing out Slab City or tearing down Salvation Mountain, but the town of Niland would just as soon have the slabbers around, because they spent what coin they had in Niland, which would just about dry up and blow away without them.

  “We ain’t against the party,” one clearly drunk man in a ratty, red “Are We Having Fun Yet?” hat broke in. “We’re against dumbshits. And these poop troopers you’re talking about are crapping in our front yard.” It turned out that most of the anarchists were tent campers and tent campers buried their waste in the ground, but the desert climate didn’t allow for their leavings to decompose quickly, so they were rapidly turning the Slabs into one big toilet, according to my new friends. The poop troop, the litterbugs, and the dumbass hillbillies who were dumping wrecks all over the place were going to kill the whole Slab City enterprise. By this time, I had finished my beer. I thanked my hosts and walked back over to my car and drove to poverty flats. On this side of Slab City, I saw fewer motor homes and more trailers, pick up trucks, and vans. While the suburbs had no doubt been full of interesting characters, the flats had a darker feel. I got a few inquiring stares and some guy in a truck with “Fuck Everyone” painted on the side, flipped me off, which only seemed appropriate. I drove by a trailer where a haggard young woman was screaming at her little boy. At another camp, a guy who looked like a biker was sitting on the back of his pickup truck, he waved so I pulled over and asked him about the anarchists, telling him about my conversation with the men in the suburbs.

  “Fuckheads,” he said. “If they don’t watch it, they’re going to wake up in a burning bed.” I was a bit taken aback but I played it straight and listened. “That’s the law out here, man. Fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you.” He went on at great length explaining how the last guy to call the cops out here had his trailer burned up. There was a long litany of guys who’d had their asses kicked, been shot, or had never been seen again. He didn’t know where the anarchists were. I thanked him and moved on, passing an old school bus with flowers painted on it and glancing over at a big group of people, several families, in dirty tie-dyes, thread bare jeans, and faded sundresses. Some of them were smoking pot while the kids played beside them, another group were dancing to no music.

  Finally, after driving by a pair of dune buggy corpses and the shell of an abandoned Range Rover, I spotted a VW van adorned with dozens of stickers and a pirate flag, surrounded by a circle of fraying dome tents. The driving sounds of hardcore were spilling out of the van. I parked the car and walked over to meet the anarchists. The first person I saw was a kid with an overgrown mohawk that had begun to flop over a bit. “Hey dude, welcome to the Thrasher Collective,” he said without a hint of irony. I looked at him—skinny and dirty, his face badly broken out. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. I surveyed the other Utopians, who appeared to be a pack of scrawny teenage runaways. They were all vegans, punk kids who had met online and decided to start a commune. They had even worked up a badly written manifesto about how they were rejecting the hypocrisy of the capitalist system and a world based on false needs. I read it and said, “cool,” with my best poker face. There were a few very young girls with shaved heads that were starting to show some peach fuzz from neglect. One of the girls, a pretty-faced thirteen-year-old, had several fading bruises on her face and arms.

  I sat with them and got their stories. They were indeed all run-ways, all abused in some way or other. One of them had mailed out their manifesto to a few alternative newspapers and Neville had gotten interested and sent me out to Slab City without telling me much else about it. While there wasn’t much of a political story here, there was a tale worth telling. I went back over to my car and grabbed my digital camera and took a picture of the group of twelve kids. They all raised their fists and said, “Power to the people” as I took the shot. I reached into my pocket and gave the kid with the mohawk a twenty. I couldn’t help but think of Hank as a teenager threatening to run away from Kurt’s house to ride the rails like Kerouac. The mohawk thanked me effusively. It was late afternoon by now and I wanted to check out a few more camps before I left.

  I looped around the back side of poverty flats and cruised by a trailer so
meone had covered with found objects—shoes, plates, springs, hub caps, pieces of scrap metal, and ocotillo branches. There was a pet cemetery and a dirt golf course. I noticed that a lot of the folks out here were older women. I made my way back around to the suburbs and parked by the Lizard Tree Library. The library consisted of a pair of small shacks patched together from plywood, garden fencing, and whatever else was around. It was quite picturesque, located beside a little tree with a swing hung on the biggest branch and a nice bench right next to that. Inside, the books were neatly housed in battered old bookcases or makeshift shelves. The collection had its share of mysteries, romances, and crime novels left behind by the snowbirds, but I also saw The Stranger by Camus, some poetry collections, and Do It by Jerry Rubin side by side with a book by Rush Limbaugh. Just then, a kind-faced older woman in jeans and a flannel shirt came over.

  “I hear you’re writing an article,” she said with no introduction. When I replied that I was, she continued, “Well, don’t believe the whole suburbs versus the flats thing some folks will tell you. It’s never been that clear-cut. There’s a bunch of well-intentioned do-gooders that want to save us from ourselves; there’s a bunch of stupid rednecks who just want to drink and raise hell and trash the place; there’s some lonely old folks escaping the winters; there’s a patch of hippies who keep to themselves and get stoned all day; there’s the ‘leave me the fuck alone crowd’; there are some bible thumpers; there are some real piece of shit criminals hiding out from the law ; there are folks that live on the road; there are migrants. You get my drift?”

  “Yes,” I said smiling at her, “it’s complicated.”

  “And it’s a real community, believe it or not,” she said earnestly. “People live and die here. They feed each other, keep each other company, take care of one another. Folks have been coming back here every fall for years. There’s something special here that you can’t get anywhere else. It’s freedom but it’s folks taking care of each other too. Don’t have much of that out there in the world now do you?” I nodded my head. Her name was Erma. She invited me back to her camp where a big group of ladies, as they called themselves, and a few of their gentlemen friends had assembled around a huge fire as the sun got low and the evening chill began to settle in. They had musical instruments, two guitars and a banjo, and they began to play song after song, with the whole group joining in if they all knew the words. I sat down on a spare milk crate and listened to them sing with voices full or frail, happy or sad, depending on the singer. As the night came on, the sky to the west went from blood red to black and I heard Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Jimmy Buffet, and a few songs I didn’t know. Between tunes I overheard two ladies talking about going to visit the widower of a woman who’d died a few weeks back. They’d been together for thirty years. He wasn’t doing that well and a cake might cheer him up a bit, the women hoped. I thought about the utter loneliness of an old man, facing unrelenting grief and then death in this cruel desert. The faces about me in the campfire light were old and battered, I noticed, but they were singing. Just then, Erma took a turn at the guitar and began to sing, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,” and I looked up into the new night sky at the tough old stars.

  The next morning, I woke up in a cheap motel in Brawley still thinking about Slab City. I’d gotten into Brawley late, had trouble getting to sleep, and had one of those strange fitful nights where your dreams are full of the faces and images from the day before. So I was singing Woody Guthrie and fleeing burning trailers in God’s Country all night long. In the morning, I went for coffee and breakfast at the same little diner after noticing that it was just down the street from where a farmworkers’ union hall had been in the thirties. I had eggs and bacon and listened to a redneck guy bitch to the waitress about “the big nig” in the White House who was bringing Muslim Communism and baby murder to Brawley any time now. The waitress called him “honey” and told him she didn’t care about politics. I finished my breakfast quickly and left. It was early and I wanted to check the court records out in El Centro for anything on Bobby Flash before heading back. I got into town and found the records office without any problems. The clerk, who looked like an ex-linebacker with a flat top, was a bit of a history buff and was pretty excited to help me track down an outlaw from days gone by. After an intensive search that took over an hour, we found the same Wanted poster that I’d discovered in San Diego. No arrest or trial records though.

  “Looks like he got away with it,” the clerk said with a grin. I thanked him and headed back out to the Mustang, driving past a gigantic motorhome sales lot before I hit 8. On a whim I continued east, passed scores of farmworkers toiling in the fields, big tractors kicking up dust, and motorhomes full of snowbirds making their way to Winterhaven, Arizona. I saw the sign for Holtville, got off the Interstate, and drove through a patch of farmland until I hit what there was of Holtville. The town was centered around Holt Park by City Hall, a cream-colored, vaguely Mission-style, two-story building with arched doorways and windows. I parked the car and walked through the park and sat down on a bench by the gazebo. There was a family having a picnic at a table under a tree. I tried to imagine Bobby Flash somewhere in town; perhaps his Wanted poster had hung up on a wall in City Hall. The family started to sing “Happy Birthday” in Spanish to a beaming little girl in a white dress. A pickup loaded with hay drove down the main street, followed by flatbed full of migrant workers. I walked over to a sign in the square that explained that Holtville was founded in 1903 by W.F. Holt, who had fled Missouri for health reasons. Much of the main street and the town’s theater had burned down in separate fires that had obliterated most of the Holtville of old, aside from the City Hall. There was nothing to be found here, no trace of the ghosts of the Wobblies who planned revolution or the outlaw who fled town on somebody else’s horse.

  6

  I spent the whole next day at home, writing up the Slab City story, “Utopia on the Slabs.” Before I headed down to the office, I called to see if Neville would be there and got word from one of the music writers that he was out, but that he’d be back later. I took this as a “yes” and walked down the hill to get some exercise, cutting over to E Street to check my PO box before I hit the New Sun. Nothing from Hank, but there was a letter from my old pal Shane, who I played football with at Our Lady of the Sorrows. We’d kept in touch and visited each other for over twenty years now. I put the letter in my back pocket and headed to the office to hand in my piece to Neville. When I got there, he still wasn’t in, and neither was the music writer. I flopped a copy of the piece on Neville’s desk and sat down to read the letter from Shane.

  Shane had mailed the letter from Arcata, California, a college town up by the redwoods far north of San Francisco, where he had spent the last few years with an environmental group, “Redwoods Forever,” working on conservation. Before that he’d had a job with the local Greens. That was what had brought him up to Arcata in the first place after he left his job in San Francisco. Now, I was surprised to learn, Shane was leaving his gig with the conservation group to move to what he called “a collective” near Petrolia off the Lost Coast Highway just south of Arcata. “There are some fantastic people down there,” the letter read. “It may sound crazy, but I want to give this a chance. Why not try to live my ideas rather than just talk about them?” I thought of the teenagers out in Slab City and wondered what the hell had gotten into him. This didn’t seem like something Shane would do… Or did it?

  Back in high school, our days were filled with football practice and petty criminal pleasures. Sometimes we’d steal a six-pack and go drink by the railroad tracks or in an orange grove behind the mall or up in the hills above Chatsworth Park. We’d rap about philosophy or girls or both. On occasion, we’d run into some loser in his twenties or thirties, the kind of guy who likes to hang out and drink with teenagers, and get him to buy us more beer. Shane was always good at that, bullshitting us into some interesti
ng situations. We met bikers, homeless criminals on the lamb, drug dealers, and lots of other folks who would have horrified our parents. It was kind of our secret society. Once we ran into some gangbangers by the railroad tracks and we avoided getting our asses kicked by sharing our twelve pack with them. It turned out we were all Raiders fans, so we debated the merits of Jim Plunkett and agreed that Marcus Allen was the shit. Not bad kids once it was all said and done, which probably couldn’t be said of Big Mike, Shane’s neighbor.

  Big Mike was a grotesquely obese version of one of the fabulous furry freak brother cartoon characters with a huge mop of unkempt curly black hair and a shaggy beard. He worked for a porn video company in sales and distribution, so he had a vast catalogue of product that he’d let us watch. He was always begging us to bring over girls, maybe some cheerleaders from school, a favor we never did for him. Big Mike also had several huge aquariums full of exotic but deadly creatures, including a boa constrictor, a tarantula, and a lionfish. Big Mike was really into watching them eat their prey. When he was off on a business trip, Shane would feed his menacing little zoo in exchange for a baggie of his best pot, which we would smoke in Big Mike’s skull bong while watching Debbie Does Dallas or some other thrilling fare. Once we lost our initial boners, we both came to the conclusion that porn was, ultimately, boring. After a few bong loads, we’d find ourselves in a fit of laughter over some inane dialogue or a ridiculous scene. Apparently, we concluded, America’s sexual unconscious was a perpetual high school dirty joke. Big Mike was making a living catering to the adolescent desires of the middle-aged accountants who ran the world. Pathetic, we thought. It came as no surprise when the police showed up to take Mike away on some undisclosed crime.