The Boy Bandit King

Let’s see if I can do it from memory: Snake Eagle Cove to Spillman Ranch Loop to FM 620 to 183 to 67 to 84 which becomes 20 for a while before turning off and heading back onto 84 and past Anton and Muleshoe, near Earth but not quite through it, zoom past Farwell and the border and slow down past all the stragglers in red sweatsuits and the huge retired fighter plane in Clovis and by this time it’s 60 or 84, your pick really, cause it says both for a long long time, until finally you see some signs for Fort Sumner. This is the exciting part because it’s getting dark and there have been thunderclouds on and off and it’s only the Michelin brand windshield wiper purchased way back in Sweetwater that is responsible for sporadically saving your ass – and, by the way, they sell you one blade at a time, dumbshit…next time try buying TWO – and since the sun is beginning to head over the edge of the earth, which makes all the night eyes of deer and armadillos and other potential car-wreckers, it’s time to either concede defeat and shlepp over to the very next motel you come across OR continue until…

Billy The Kid’s grave! There it is! Fort Sumner arrived just as I was trying to scheme and plot my journey through the evils of America’s vast and very-underestimated rural outback. The one-lane highways of the United States Roadway System are some of the most glorious roads to travel upon, but only during the day. Come nightfall, critters come out. Critters mean more of the Route 290 bullshit from Texas, and that shit just isn’t allowed anymore. I’ve now repeatedly learned that knuckles do, in fact, turn white in certain high-stress situations. Pupils dilate. I know what high-beams are for. At various moments tonight, though, they weren’t enough and I wanted heat-sensing infrared goggles so that I could at least see the size and shape of the buck I was about to hit before he was mangled and plastered to my windshield. I seriously hate night driving now.

Anyway, I’m not explaining this linearly and that’s probably annoying. Point is: I left Austin at about 11 a.m. and headed out with the goal of getting to Billy The Kid’s grave in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.



Mapquest said it was a ten-hour drive which, at this point in my motoring career, is like a warm-up lap. The roads were beautiful and clouds were all over the place so it stayed cool and the windows were down, this time blowing tepid air instead of hairdryer air. About Sweetwater, I realized that my five-year-old windshield wipers weren’t going to cut it if I was going to be heading anywhere near the billion-acre storm that was on the horizon, so I stopped off, filled up, and headed into the mecca of all small-town killers, WalMart. God, what a horrible place. Henry Rollins’ latest stand-up thing on IFC had a hefty portion devoted to this monstrosity of a corporation, and he was dead-on. The fluorescent lights are so bright that they reset your internal clock over and over again so you forget what time it is, how long you’ve been in the place, and start looking for provisions that will allow your body the proper nourishment to stay-on in the store. This particular WalMart even had a full-scale grocery store and pharmacy under its roof. It took me a good fifteen minutes to find the wipers and then I picked out some fuses just in case it gets hot again and then some gum and by the time I got back out the storm had moved off.

I spent a good portion of the next few hours listening to Patsy Cline and Neko Case in an attempt to rid my brains of the refrain of some adolescent kid in the WalMart, his hands full of candy bars, flat-tiring his younger brother with a gleeful call of, “You're such a faggot, faggot. You are a faggot! You are a faggot! Ha ha ha.” It’s now thirteen hours later and the words are still bouncing happily about my head. Hooray for the southwest backwoods!

Anyway, I did the drive and it was getting late at a certain point and I was on one of those one-lane highways (as I said, either 84 or 60, you take your pick) and I was nervous and then Billy The Kid sprouted up out of nowhere. There’s a little brown sign off to the side of the road and it points south and out into the fields you go.



It said two miles, but it was definitely more, and I got a little turned around because the signage dropped off and I figured maybe I had missed the grave on the side of the road or something, so I turned around next to some horses, and then got dirty looks from a kid about my age with a whispy attempt at a moustache and an Oldsmobile with the back window shot out and scenes from Deliverance shot through my head, even though I’ve never seen that movie and I can’t stand John Voigt, and I turned around a few more times, saw a large dirty lake with picnic tables, felt scared, and finally stumbled upon the grave. It’s located in the back of a museum/shop thing that was long-since closed by the time I got there (about 8 p.m.) in the center of a courtyard with a few other graves scattered about. But it’s easy to tell which grave belongs to The Boy Bandit King because it’s enclosed in a large metal cage.



Kind of tacky, but necessary: the tombstone has been stolen twice in the past hundred years and, truthfully, without it, the city of Fort Sumner will quickly disappear off the face of the planet like so many other cities I hurried past earlier in the day. The southwest has a way of eating off its vestigial cities rather quickly, and the wonderful crew at the aforementioned WalMart corporation have become superb catalysts. So, the cage is understandable and easy to deal with and porous enough to allow for ample spookiness and authentic I-just-saw-Billy-The-Kid’s-grave vibes. It was awesome.



No one else was around cause it was so late, so I did some touristy photo-op stuff without feeling the pinch of embarrassment. Proof:



And then I was on my way, racing the fading sun, trying to find I-40 so that I could have some lights and company out there in the dark, but I somehow missed the point where 84 and 60 split and became their own entities, and I stayed on 60. This was cool because I saw the Pecos River up close, but not cool because it meant 70 miles to Vaughn and then asking the nice woman at the gas station how to get to I-40 and being told 45 more miles to Clines and then follow the signs. Nighttime, deer, no other cars, chitter-chatter teeth. But no accidents. And a sense of great accomplishment when I-40 finally popped up, and an even greater sense of accomplishment when Albuquerque was only 70 more miles away. 845 miles after getting started, I opted for the EconoLodge because there was high-speed internet and it was $40 and in I went, Carl’s Jr. and all, and now get ready to face the Painted Desert of Arizona upon the morrow.



Al

ANGER, redux

I am watching endless amounts of Fox Soccer Channel and catching up on all of the Wayne Rooney temper tantrums of the past year.

I am driving the Ford Ranger through sultry nights in Downtown Austin, watching The Black Heart Procession at The Parish by my lonesome with lots of large-breasted women-folk and hip-looking men-folk milling about, sucking on small straws full of whiskey sours, etc, and trying not to hit deer. Don't hit deer, I tell myself. Hitting deer means a broken Ford Ranger, I tell myself. A broken Ford Ranger means an angry father roused from the comfortable confines of 2 a.m. high thread count sheets. Don't hit the deer.

I am hoping that we (DANGERS) can manage to sell 300 records or compact discs at $10 a pop. Can it be done? We shall see. That being said, updated with some MP3's and whatnot: http://www.wearedangers.com


Back to Old Tratford,

Al

ANGER

The new record is coming out. It is called "ANGER". In total, I am spending about $3500 to put it out. 1000 CD's and 500 LP's. A week-long tour in August to try and get the things sold. It shall be accomplished. Some songs should be up soon. It took a month to record, mostly because my voice kept going out. My mother always wonders why the screaming, especially now since I listen to Neko Case and Cat Power more than I do any "screamy" music. I guess it's just that I am actually pissed about most things that go on in life, that I haven't gone through my tank of upset just yet. Until then, it feels most natural to let it out with a scream. Anyway, the cover, with artwork by an old Grand View Gator named Danny Heidner:



Rhinos are strange animals. They look like dinosaurs. Not even just a little bit. I mean, if someone back at the natural history museum decided to draw a Triceratops to look like a rhino, you wouldn't think twice. You'd go, "Oh, what a strange looking dinosaur!" But since the Triceratops is what it is and the rhino lives on earth with us amidst Frank Gehry architecture and Scion automobiles, we can see one on the television or in a coloring book and go, "Hrmph, just another boring rhino." But, NO! Rhinos are crazy animals. They look like a strange amalgam of pig and hippo and dino and aggro-pissed-offedness. Also, they charge very violently when they feel threatened. Thus their inclusion on our cover. Angry, angry rhino.

Also, we wanted something simple and graphic. Also, we did all the art in about seven hours. We should plan things out more. We won't ever plan things out more.

I'll let you know where you can get the record when I myself know.

Al

White Sands National Monument

With the Ford Ranger rejuvenated, it was time for the Southwest.

I left the South Bay at around 11 a.m. and chose to go the Vista Del Mar route because it felt more appropriate. Maybe more romantic. More John Fante. Something about moving from the Pacific to the middle of the country in one day and having seen all of that with my own eyes. Something like that. I figure one day I’ll try to see the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf all in one day. If I surfed, I’d say I’d surf all of them. The sharks in Corpus Cristi would probably eat me.

I got out on the 10 and near those huge windmills out in Palm Springs there was a huge fire up in the hills and soon thereafter I came to realize that my air conditioner was not in functioning order. My skin was crinkling. Sweat from every pore. I tried to put my mind somewhere else but the hot air just kept sweeping in through the window and I had to turn off. I pulled into a Flying J with all the trucks so that I could be alone-ish and not have to look like my car broke down. There’s something embarrassing about standing near a car with the hood up. So I flipped in a bunch of different fuses into slot 18 of my fuse box and each time I switched the AC on I could hear them pop. So I figured, “Fuck it,” and kept moving on into the desert. But it was hot. Really hot. So I pulled off a few miles down at another gas station and went in and bought some fuses. There were people inside the gas station that looked like they lived there. Signs for “extended stay amenities” and an old cowboy sleeping in the hard plastic seats of the Wendy’s portion of the shop. Alas. I put the fuse in and it didn’t blow, but neither did the cold air. A stalemate. I drove on.

I passed Blythe and thought of Paulson Metzger. It could have happened.

I stopped in Phoenix near 6 p.m. because I was hot still and the water I had brought was already the temperature of steaming tea. I drove through and followed signs to the Arts District. It was either that or the Downtown District. That seemed like tall buildings and closed stores. Hippies are better than that. Thus Arts District. Subway seemed like the cleanest thing I could put in my body, so, after giving a dollar in change to a man on meth, I got a BMT and two large tubs of Coke and brought in my Arizona/New Mexico Tour Book produced by the AAA company. There wasn’t a good map, and most of the “sites” seemed a bit too far off the beaten path for me to enjoy. But White Sands National Monument was only seventy miles off the 10 and it sounded like a scene from that Doors movie so that was it. I left and headed for Las Cruces. It was 117 degrees out.

The night drive was a pleasant 80 degrees and the moon rose red and huge and it was so different out in the pitch black that I thought it might be the infamous The Thing that I kept seeing signs for. I think I had the Hot Snakes blaring.

A night at the Las Cruces, New Mexico Motel 6. A pod shower. A smoking room with a used ashtray. Bad television. My head throbbing from all the caffeine buzzing about my veins. That sense that things never change much in Las Cruces. A depressing, stable, wonderful feeling.




So the next day was the dunes and they rose out of the desert between hills and mesas and mountains on the 70, just northeast of Las Cruces. White Sands National Monument is seventeen square miles of white quartz dunes, situated in land that is also used for missile testing by the United States government. Sometimes there are park closures while missiles fly overhead. Debris and fuel and scraps litter the ground here and there. So I paid my $3 to the nice woman at the gates and headed in on the road that winds through the middle of the sands. They rise slowly, pure white, at first crammed full of desert plants and cactus shrubs, but then just white sand, rising taller and taller, until you feel like you are in Big Bear and there might be a cabin popping up sometime soon. Imagine snow. But not cold. Not wet. That’s the white sand dunes of New Mexico.



I took the road to the end and parked my car.



I got out and headed for the Alkali Flat trail. I didn’t read the signs. There was an old couple lurking near the information booth and I didn’t want to get engulfed in a long conversation. Or a small conversation. Straight to the dunes in my checkered Vans. Pictures were taken. I climbed up and down these dunes and everything was white. Like some crazy dreamland where everything was made of powdered sugar.







The sun was overhead. I had no water. About a mile into the trail I realized that it was much longer than I imagined. The map I got at the gate made it look like small hike. It was not. The sun was straight overhead and there were no shadows and my eyes were starting to fail and I reached a point where I thought I might pass out and not be found for a day or so.



I gave up near this mountain and headed back.



The information at the booth said the hike was 4.7 miles long and intended for serious hikers only. I need to get serious. The rest of that hike will be seen.

Another time, I guess.

Al

In Medias Res

Another foray into the electronic age. Which begs the question: am I, too, one of the sad, misguided folks that chooses to pretend that some other person will get pleasure from reading my little musings? Why not just be content with the private, sporadic journaling? Why offer this up to the anybodies? Hmm.

Truth: I really like the layout. It looks pretty shnazzy. I was allured. I have given in.

Also: you can attach pictures here very easily, which is pretty cool. Like this one:



That was my mortal foe for nearly three weeks. Rollie's evil microphone.

Anyway, this will make for a quick way to file back through my goings-on.

Like:

• the new record ("ANGER") is done
• the Ford Ranger is almost out of the shop
• Texas is around the corner
  
• Amir and I ate potato tacos in San Pedro
• Valley Drive is no longer a one-way street
• Italy won the 2006 World Cup
• No, father, there is still no Monday Night Soccer

Presto! This way I can scroll back through my life from anywhere. The marvels of the modern age.

Also, my mother will enjoy reading this.

And, lastly: Doogie Howser was an early inspiration. I just need that squeeky Neil Patrick Harris voice to drop in over my shoulder and the fantasy will be complete.

Alas,
Al