Low Life in the High Desert

by David Hirst

  The year 2000 came and went, and the piglets continued to do what they do best — eat. Knowing about these animals, I had inspected them in their sties, where they had been nurtured on the overflow from Harriet’s kitchen, and they all looked delicious. But one had struck me as particularly tasty, and I’d pointed the revolver that we had been playing with at the best-looking pig, and suggested that we — and everyone else — eat the thing.

  Sean had agreed. There is something about eating an animal you actually know compared with the ‘faceless’ animals that arrive on most people’s tables. We once knew a farmer in Australia called Sam who claimed he bred the best veal in the world. He was always talking with wide-eyed enthusiasm about putting one sort of bull over one of his various breeds of cows, and went to the end of the world to find the perfect combination — ultimately a Sindhi Brahman over, I think, a Hereford Black Angus. Sam was exceptionally strong, and ate steaks, sausages, bacon and eggs, and half a loaf of bread for breakfast. His refrigerator dripped with rich red blood. He butchered his own meat, and this perhaps led to his downfall. Sam couldn’t keep his hands off his vealers, and would drive around his property relishing coming meals.

  ‘I can’t wait to eat that beast,’ he would yell as his truck bounced over the fields. He would lick his chops and grin obscenely at the animals, and then at Boo and me. It was as if breeding the animal, delivering it, and then watching it grow to just the right moment for butchering, hanging, and then eating it made for a tastier banquet than a trip to the market for a cut of steak.

  Unfortunately for Sam, his appetite got in the way of his wallet. The prize beasts could be sold for far more than the average beeve, but Sam’s massive, promiscuous appetite had him eating the profits. A whole animal — worth perhaps $4,000 — would be consumed in a matter of weeks.

  Sam started losing money at the rate he gained muscles, and he took to supplementing his income through the production of a notorious cash crop.

  Sam ate his way into jail.

  I didn’t know Sean’s pig that well, and have to confess I have forgotten its name. But the experience of selecting, preparing, and eating taught me much about how Sam got into the condition — over a period of six years — he ended up in.

  Sean arrived a few days before the big day aboard his tractor, to which he had attached a backhoe, and proceeded to dig an exceedingly deep pit in the granite. It took him the best part of a day — the ground being solid rock — but when he exited the backhoe and accepted a bottle of tequila, he could proudly exhibit a hole deep and large enough for a prize pig and a couple of its friends.

  While Sean had been tearing up the granite I had visited Buzz, proposing that his band play at our collective bash. Considering the prospects of the speed fiends turning up and having to be turned away, I hired Mike Bristow to enforce whatever laws he thought should be enforced — and hoped for the best. Harriet warned me that the police would raid Boulder House and that druggies would take off with the silverware, and at one stage Sean suggested that maybe the party should be moved to The Palace.

  ‘Dude,’ he said (Sean has an irritating habit of calling all and sundry ‘dude’), ‘do you really want to go ahead with this?’

  ‘A man doth not put his hand to the plough and turn back,’ I replied.

  The neighbours were duly informed and invited, as the night promised to be long and loud. Though the nearest neighbour was half a mile away, we expected the sound to travel many miles in the thin mountain air.

  Buzz readily agreed and promised the attendance of the band, but did mention the matter of money. Four hundred dollars. It seemed a fair deal, given that they would have to drag their equipment all the way to Boulder House, set up and play from six till midnight, and Buzz had a strict policy of ‘no pay — no play’.

  A few days later, the butcher arrived with the pig. The porker I had admired in Sean’s pens was now both headless and hideless. It was also — I was relieved to see — gutted.

  It was dumped on a huge piece of cardboard on the floor of the poolroom some fifty yards from the pit. Having inspected the pig, we lit a fire six feet down at the pit’s base, and piled a cord or so of wood onto the flames. We went early to our respective beds the night before the party.

  At 3.00 a.m., almost twenty hours from party time, Sean woke me with a bottle of his prized tequila and announced it was time to prepare the animal.

  He had bought six pineapples and gallons of plain yoghurt after consulting all and sundry on the basics of cooking a pig in a pit, and concluding that this was the appropriate way to go. We stuffed the pineapples into the pig’s gutted cavity, and then smeared the yoghurt on the flesh. Then we wrapped it in sacking and chicken wire. Finally, we drove an eight-foot pick bar through the thing’s throat and the pineapples, and finally out via the back passage. We hoisted the bar, and carried the pig to the fire pit, lowered it onto the white-hot ashes, and, like thieves in the night, repaired to our beds.

  If anyone had observed our behaviour, an impossible task unless conducted from the air by Edwards Air Force Base F18s and F14s or by satellite, they might have thought they were witnessing a fiendish, satanic ritual. And we both admitted to feeling guilty — not over the fate of the pig, but our nocturnal activities, the burying and cooking of an animal we had come to know.

  Sometime before, Tony and I had been chatting up two LA girls in The Club. I was doing my best to make Tony agreeable to at least one of the young filmmakers, and for a while it looked like he was in with a chance. I suggested the girls come back to Boulder House. They were nervous, but Tony gave the place a grand description, and they were almost persuaded.

  I thought to put their minds at rest by saying they should not worry.

  ‘It’s not like we’re going to sodomise you and put you in the lime-pit with the other girls,’ I remarked jovially.

  I heard Tony’s face drop. Immediately, I realised that my lighthearted banter had miscued. The girl next to me turned another colour, and her acquaintance started fussing and talking about ‘getting back on the road’ — always a bad sign.

  Suddenly, they had both disappeared, and Tony was as close as he could get to a rage. I told him I regretted my comment, but thought it just a frivolous aside.

  Tony was boiling.

  ‘A frivolous aside,’ he almost screamed. ‘Out here in the desert, where even they would know that bodies are dumped every day!’

  Tony gaped, and stared at me in silence.

  ‘I think they overreacted,’ was the best I could manage.

  Clearly, I had said something that had cost Tony a decent chance to get to know a young lass from Hollywood better than he otherwise might, and I felt poorly about the outcome.

  But here we were, at dawn’s early light, lowering a beast into a burning pit. I had butchered, burnt, and eaten animals in the past, but these activities had not been conducted in the presence of a man who, having lowered steel doors over the pig, returned to his Bible and tequila.

  Upon the day that Sean reached his thirty-eighth year, and as the sun slipped behind the mountains, Buzz Gamble, his microphone covered by one of my socks to deny the wind, opened the party proper with ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. From then on, the rocks rocked. A hundred or so people gathered in the amphitheatre or danced on the cement dog runs. Elderly ladies from the church adjusted their bifocals and jitterbugged with gay young men in caftans. Bill Lavender perched on a boulder with his girlfriend, Phyllis, watched as the band played, and people danced on the cement that had once been the runs for his famous Rotts. Others sat up high on the rocks that surround Boulder House as the kids of the upper desert thrashed about in the pool under the floodlights. Horseshoes were thrown, and volleyballs were tossed across nets by bikini-clad girls. And so went the night.

  Finally, it was time to retrieve the pig. At nine o’clock, when it had cooked for the day, the great steel doors that Sean h
ad placed above the pit were lifted, and the pig was brought forth. Everyone, starving by now, gathered around, salivating. Unhappily, the pig was seared but not actually cooked, Sean having used pine for the fire rather than a hardwood. The starving masses took the disaster stoically — things always went wrong in the desert. But Sean was mortified. His pig was a failure. It reflected poorly on him at a time when he was trying desperately to prove he had made a successful return to the land of the living.

  ‘There’s only one thing to do,’ he muttered, pulling me aside. ‘Chinese takeout. I’ll leave now.’

  Sean was trying to remember where his car was, so he could embark on the thirty-kilometre trip to Yucca and back, when a Hawaiian gentlemen whom no one seemed to know materialised and called for more wood and coal. The man happened to be an authority on the cooking of pigs in pits, and, almost at midnight — after the good folks of the High Desert had demolished mountains of beer — the Hawaiian brought forth a perfectly cooked pig.

  To me fell the task of carving the animal. Much of the outer layer was fat, but the people of Pioneertown, Pipes Canyon, and Rimrock could no longer be restrained. They tore, like beasts, at the huge slabs of pork that I slashed from the carcass. Knives, forks, and plates were forgotten by the multitude, as people grabbed cuts of hot dripping pork from my hands and stuffed themselves. The temperature was still high at midnight, and I had stripped down to an undershirt. The fat gushed from the pig, and soon my butchering had rendered me slick from the waist up, my arms and shoulders and even my head dripping with fat as I took part in a fantastic, bloodthirsty orgy of delicious, unforgettable food.

  In the early morning hours the guests began leaving, only to find police cars parked at the end of Coyote Road. The cops could have locked up half of the citizens of the High Desert, but instead determined who was drunk at the wheel and had them replaced by more sober passengers. They had been alerted by the noise and had come up from Yucca, but for once their concern was not to fill the jail but to see the residents safely home. People marvel at that to this day.

  31

  The most hazardous activity in the High Desert is undoubtedly driving. Last year, no fewer than sixteen people went to be with Jesus within fifteen kilometres of my front door. This, in an area with a total population of twenty-six thousand. If translated to, say, Los Angeles, that would result in an annual death toll of sixteen thousand. Nationally, it would mean a road toll of millions, a figure that would equal and maybe eclipse the murder rate inflicted by the tobacco industry. Locals, taking a cue from the nations to our south, have begun erecting crosses and shrines, and Pioneertown Road has developed an Andean look.

  The cause of this carnage in the area is the chronic alcoholism, the ageing population, a considerable adolescent population, the chronic consumption of speed, inadequate roads, and the endless stream of concrete trucks that roll down Old Woman Springs Road. Driving out to 29 Palms to pay a fine at the DMV, I witnessed an extremely old and frail woman have her licence renewed. She had shrunk, apparently, and was about the size of Lenin after eighty years in his tomb — and in equally poor shape. So blind was the old duck that she couldn’t locate the place to sign her form, so some helpful locals lifted her high enough to be able to reach the counter, and the DMV official guided her hand to the correct spot. Then she was held up so her photo could be taken and — presto! — the right to drive was confirmed. At times like this, the expression ‘defensive driving’ assumes a new perspective. Usually, such person’s lives are terminated when they wander before a cement truck while driving white Cadillacs.

  Another cause of the carnage was exemplified of late when a woman lost her Harley on Pioneertown Road when she got into trouble and decided to use the front brakes to slow down while negotiating a bend. Thousands of would-be outlaw bikers visit the area every year, and, though they have spent a fortune trying to get the look right, they have not learnt to ride big motorcycles. This lady, who was AirEvac’d to civilisation and lived — we know that because the coroner, for once, was not sent to the scene — did what poorly trained riders and drivers inevitably do when confronted: she hit the brakes. It’s the last thing most people who are killed in accidents do.

  A fundamental reason for this ‘massive road crisis’ is the assumption, one of many, that there are no other cars out there to worry about. Because the roads — and there are only three tarred ones — appear to be bereft of vehicles, a driver used to the intense concentration required for negotiating a freeway is blinded by the absence of fellow travellers and assumes none exist. But they do, and they appear when the unwary are unwary. And no one likes to be surprised by a cement truck.

  Though the dead are many, the escapees are also plenty-fold. Corners are actually named after amazing saves. The best known is Barrymore Bend on Pioneertown Road — named after the actor John Barrymore Jr, who spent, until lately, much of his retirement at Ernie and Carole’s motel, and had regularly crashed on a difficult bend halfway down the road.

  A few nights after Sean’s party, Crinkly Jim and Lil Debbie rolled their car on a particularly nasty stretch of Pioneertown Road. Neither was injured, but a tyre had blown, and the car, having landed in the long-suffering yucca forest, sank into the soft soil that follows the rains. Both were too drunk to negotiate the replacement of the tyre — their jack having sunk deeper into the soil. Figuring the same would happen to my dinky jack, I repaired to The Club to arrange for a few locals to get Jim and Lil Debbie from harm’s way before the authorities at Yucca got to hear there was money to be made up the hill. The hour was not late, but it was the Sabbath, and few were prepared to take the chance of driving to a wreck and having the cops inquire into their sobriety.

  Only Dan Dan would come to the succour of Crinkly Jim and Lil Deb, and we set off to right the situation. Much of the beer in Crinkly Jim’s car had exploded under impact of the roll, and the trunk was dripping with a telltale smell. Worse, Jim had found a bottle of cheap vodka, a polyester cup, and some orange juice, and he and Lil Debbie were mixing a fresh drink as I crawled under the wheel to help place the industrial-size jack that Dan carried in his truck. I wasn’t nervous about the police because I had managed only two beers. Not for long. Jim set the vodka bottle up on the truck, and with the first movement of the jack it fell on its side, delivering a stream of vodka across the truck’s surface and down onto my head.

  I stank like Boris Yeltsin visiting Ireland. But we righted the car, and somehow Crinkly Jim and Lil Debbie were soon careening home while necking the remnants of the vodka.

  I pulled out as soon as I was sure they could move and get home safely. The next day, I ran into Dan Dan, who informed me that Debbie or Jim had rolled the car again about half a mile further down the road.

  I had noticed some alarming skid marks on the road at that point, but it had not occurred to me that these idiots could manage to roll a car, successfully, twice in the space of a thousand yards. How could they have even got up the speed?

  A few days later, I called to see if all was well. Dan Dan’s version of the story was, as all stories told locally, wrong. They had not rolled the car again. The skid marks were from when Jim had rolled the car the day before. A completely different incident, Jim informed me indignantly.

  Following the party, Sean’s life got better with each passing day, and soon he was lost to us in favour of Debbie, a high school friend whom he had re-met at their twenty-year high school reunion up at Big Bear. They married, and Sean got a steady job — leaving me with a few tools and little expertise to finish the renovation of Boulder House. This was a task akin to the work carried out by the Egyptians at the time when all but the higher reaches of the High Desert were still part of the Sea of Cortez.

  The next day, I heard that Buzz was sick. For a time, Buzz was increasingly, alarmingly, sick. His liver, according to the VA, had almost ceased to function, and his survival was a source of wonder to all. But the same was said of Crink
ly Jim’s liver, and he had, for the moment, kept the undertakers at bay.

  ‘The people at Loma Linda told me they don’t do new livers for alcoholics,’ Buzz said, with half a smile and half a grimace.

  Buzz served his nation, but it wasn’t a two-way deal. I told him, ‘You can’t die. You’re Buzz Gamble,’ and he seemed to think that might be true. But he was truly sick.

  I discussed the matter with Dan Dan, one of Pioneertown’s success stories, a man sought out far and wide for his skills with music and lighting systems. We agreed that if Buzz was to eat — and he hadn’t in a week— he’d have a better chance. His only nutrition in six days had come from the Sprite that he’d been adding to his bourbon. I wondered if the drinks they give people with AIDS and other diseases that attack the appetite — little cans that contain, in fact, meals — might help. Dan Dan said they were expensive, and threw twenty bucks on the bar.

  It’s not exactly health care, but Buzz is amongst the most uninsurable people in America. The only doctors he can afford to see are those at the Loma Linda Veterans hospital — a two-hour drive that has always ended in him being told to take counselling. Buzz needs more than counselling. He needs a new liver. But the position of the state is that alcoholics are to be denied livers until they give up drink, and can prove so. Buzz used booze to get off a twenty-three-year-old heroin habit, and he thought that was something of an achievement. But those who have sworn to give their life to healing the sick must think that alcoholism is not a sickness. Certainly not one that should be encouraged by handing out fresh livers.

  The fact that Buzz might just be the best white blues man in the US, that he gives joy to all who know him as a singer and as an all-round guy, that the blues are his blues due to the pain of being him, a pain that he treats with booze ’cause heroin just means jail — does not make him worthy of a fresh start with a fresh liver.