SERIAL: PART 2 Fear of the Unknown and Self-Loathing in Hollywood or Doctor Midnite and The Great White Whale Hunt of ’93

Part II of A Serial in Three Parts

Part 2

Melrose. Midnight. The streets are wet and blue and there’s an orange fog made such by the lights along the street. We’re outside a bar called the Snake Pit. There’s no one along the street. The front doors are wide open and we walk inside.

It’s dark. Dark tables. Tiny red hurricane lamps. A large bartender in the shadows who has either played a Hell’s Angel on television or been one at Altamont back in ’68. It’s a toss-up.

Nadia is wearing a red beret and standing over a kid who’s setting up a projector pointed at a large empty canvas. Like something a crazy Spaniard or Jackson Pollack would lay on the ground and splash paint all over and charge you a million bucks for so they could spend it on booze and hookers.

“Nadia?”

She turns. Her lips are full red. Her skin pale. The features, Eastern European. She raises a long, delicately curved eyebrow.

I lay some Russkie on her and she just stares back at me.

Then I say, “Josh said you could tell us about Mark-Paul Gosselaar.”

“You are like… bull,” she says softly.

“I am?”

“Yes. You are. One that is wrecking china shop.”

It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a china shop in years. Were china shops going out of business? When was the last time I’d actually had a meal on bone china? There was a time, lost days long gone now, when you’d eat on china as a family gathered around a table. Special occasions, Sunday dinners. Grateful for food and freedom and America. Not anymore. It was just another thing that was gone now.

Just like the America I’d once known.

“What did Josh tell you?” asked Nadia.

“Some actor sold his soul to the dark prince for fame, fortune, and a better parking place. The usual. The kind of thing that either happens all the time, or never. Or maybe just a little,” I added.

I was still kinda stoned.

“It only happens once. Once at a time. And then, even… maybe not at all.” Her accent became thicker. The orange fog gathered beyond the windows as the long shadows deepened in the cracks and alleyways. It was strangely quiet out. Then, maybe because I was already beginning to feel the first waves of the anxiety and paranoia that would consume me in the days to come, I reminded myself it was a Sunday night, as some kind of explanation for the absence of life on the street. Like decent people were somehow home and in bed and not out prowling the night. It was just after midnight. The cold beer the bartender had placed in front of me at the tiny table we were seated around tasted good.

“There are rumors,” began Nadia. “Very small ones… you know… how is the word… tiny.”

“I get it.”

“Small. No one talks about them. But I know people, and we are waiting for something to happen soon. Something very evil. So we watch… and we wait.”

“What’re you waiting for?” whispered Arturo, who was both poorly dressed and still suffering from the effects of our rollover car wreck.

The projectionist approached Nadia and whispered something in her ear. She murmured, “Da” while staring directly at me. Then the guy left to walk back to his equipment. There were only a few couples, seated within the dark of their deep banquettes. Their faces were shadowed, their voices murmuring. Then the film began to reel toward the empty spool, sending empty white frames across a canvas Picasso would never paint on. The clickety-clack seemed at once abrupt and constant, as though it had always been there. Even though it hadn’t been.

“We are waiting for the Black Hand,” she whispered. Her eyes were wide. She even looked around like she was worried someone would overhear us.

On screen, an old cartoon of Mickey Mouse—a very, very early version—began to run. But even from the get-go I could tell something wasn’t right with it. I’d always been a Popeye man, but I knew enough to see that this Mickey was skewed. Off.

Mickey was merely walking past a series of repeating buildings, but it all seemed odd. Not so cheery. Sublimely torturous and with an innate sense of ennui. As though Disney’s usually optimistic and plucky little mouse was grim, determined, or just deep in some unexpressed thought.

“A friend once told me,” Nadia continued above the film’s bland soundtrack, “that there is always one actor out of every generation who becomes devil’s friend of Hollywood. They get fame, but only for a time. It may even seem like they are some sort of has-been. But if you really watch them closely, you will find they are always there. Always on the fringes. Always at the right parties. They have all the benefits without ever really having to work again. Some say they become the real power in Tinseltown. Some say no deal gets made unless they say so. Even though you might think of them as, say, how do they say… a used-to-be?”

“But this kid’s the biggest star in TV right now,” I objected. “Aren’t little girls in malls all across this nation screaming to rip him to shreds or run off to a pony farm with him?”

Nadia watched the film. Studying it for a second.

“Now, yes,” she said distractedly. “But soon it will all begin to fade… If the rumors are to be believed, it will all seem to end very soon. And yet, he will not change. He will barely age, and he will still be here for many years to come. Which, if you know how Hollywood really works my friend Bull, is something. Do you want some coke? The movie is about to reveal if it is fake… or if it is real. The coke helps.”

“Sure.” I was always up for cocaine.

I raised my eyebrows. “Arturo?”

Lunatic test.

He declined in a clever effort to outwit me. Which of course meant I had to go ahead and snort four lines of cocaine off Nadia’s tiny little mirror.

“The coke is good?” asked Nadia.

“Da,” I replied. “The coke is good.”

“The same guy sells to personal assistants of Al Pacino and De Niro, along with all other personal assistants of really big stars. Or so he tells me. I don’t care. You want to watch movie. Is about Devil.”

Suddenly the room was plunged into darkness. The film had abruptly ended.

“We have to wait now.” I could hear Nadia’s thickly accented voice in the darkness. “There is a just… nothing… now in these frames for next few minutes of movie,” she explained. “At six-minute mark we may begin to see what hell looks like. That is, if the film is real thing.”

I could still hear the film threading its way through the projector in the darkness of the bar. In fact, the light in the projector was still pointing at the screen. But the canvas was completely dark.

My ears were buzzing from the coke, and I could sense Arturo’s tension next to me.

“I want to know why people think Mark-Paul Gosselaar sold his soul to the devil. For instance, are there any pictures of the actual event?” I asked Nadia.

“Do you know the legend of Suicide Mouse, Mr. Bull?”

I’d wondered if there would be pictures. But what else could there be? What exactly would be the proof that someone had sold their soul to the devil?

“No,” I replied. “No, I don’t know the legend of Suicide Mouse.”

“Suicide Mouse,” she said, indicating the darkness on the screen, “is urban legend. Some say it never was. Some say Walt Disney made it. Some say Walt Disney made deal with Devil too. It is normal cartoon until the darkness we are now watching. For many years, people thought it was just some early Disney test footage. Nothing special. When the film turned to black they thought there was nothing more to be seen. But a historian noticed the film was actually much longer. So he decided to watch the entire reel before archiving it. Do you know what he found, Mr. Bull?”

“The missing frames from the Zapruder film showing the three Chinese gunmen on the grassy knoll?”

“No. Not at all. That would not be interesting. Who would want to see that?”

I would.

“No,” continued Nadia. “After the darkness… the cartoon began again. Except… it was not same cartoon. Colors and technology that weren’t available at the time began to show up within the frames. And the little mouse seemed… tormented. Almost lunatic, and even insane. The images eventually became so disturbing that the historian asked his assistant to finish watching and record what he saw, while the historian stepped outside to take a break from the troubling things he was witnessing.”

She paused.

“A few minutes later, a guard down the hall heard screaming coming from within the projection room. When the guard arrived at the door, the assistant ran from the room muttering incoherently. He wrestled with the guard, grabbed the gun from the guard’s belt, and killed himself.”

The filmstrip was still dark. It had been at least three minutes now.

“Before the man killed himself, he told the guard that the cartoon contained a vision of hell.”

Arturo Chung cleared his throat.

“In just a few minutes, Mr. Bull, we will find out if this cartoon is the real… how do you say… the real McCoy. There have been many fakes.”

I waited. I polished off the draft beer.

Then, because I cannot let things lie, “So let me get this straight. If it’s real, this cartoon, then you’ll know because you’ll all kill yourselves. Right?”

Nadia smiled. “Probably not.”

“Then how will you know if it’s real?”

“I just will, Mr. Bull. I just will.”

“So there are no pictures of this deal with the devil and the kid from Late for School?”

“No,” replied Nadia calmly. “There are no pictures.”

“And the only evidence is circumstantial hearsay, as in: he’s unexplainably successful, good-looking, and rich… therefore, he has to have sold his soul to the devil? Hard work, talent, and genetics don’t really matter.”

“Yes. The evidence is mostly circumstantial. But there may be some ‘hard’ evidence. Other evidence that he made deal with Devil. Hard-to-find evidence.”

Suddenly, the cartoon began again. Now there was a weird Mickey. Not so jolly. Stoop-shouldered. And yes, even deranged. Demented. Tormented was the word Nadia had used.

“What evidence, and where can I find it?” I asked.

“Chad Dakota.”

“What’s a Chad Dakota?”

“Chad Dakota not a what,” replied Nadia with a dry sneer. “Chad Dakota is who. Before Mark-Paul was king of Saturday morning TV and the big man on campus at Bayside High, he was in another show. Good Morning, Miss Bliss. On that show, Mark-Paul is very bad student. Always getting into trouble. Not very popular. Not much ladies' man. But show gets canceled. Then comes back the next year as Saved by the Bell. Is “big hit.” Show now set in California. Before, it was in Midwest somewhere. Show was about teacher. Now is all about Mark-Paul. Now Mark-Paul all the things we know him as now. Mark-Paul Goesselar is now very famous. But before, when it was other show, not so much.”

There was a low gurgling sound coming from the projector. An almost inhuman muttering. I felt the cold feet of a rat with the flu walking up the back of my neck.

“So what’s a Chad Dakota?” I was trying to ignore the creepy cartoon.

“More coke?” offered Nadia.

“I don’t wanna watch anymore,” chattered Arturo beyond my vision. “Can I wait in the car?”

An obvious ploy to avoid the free cocaine.

We did another bump.

I wiped my nose, inhaled the cold chill of the night, and felt my eyes peg a redlining tachometer somewhere in the back of my brain.

But I was clear.

Crystal clear.

Or so I thought.

On the cartoon’s soundtrack, someone was screaming as a drunken pianist banged out an unsettling melody over and over, again and again.

“What’s a Dakota Chad?”

I was leaning in now. I wanted to know, because somehow I sensed this was the dark tributary I would go upriver on. Past the neon lights and into the jungle, deep and dark.

I was an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill. For me, there was no other calling.

Nadia was touching up her lipstick and watching the film. Her pupils caught the hellish colors on the screen and shone in the dark. I had to admit, what I could see of the film out of the corner of my eye was disturbing, and the soundtrack wasn’t helping matters. I knew I had maybe thirty seconds left before I freaked out. Big time.

“What’s a—”

“Chad Dakota was child actor. He’s disappeared now. Gone. Same age as Zack… I mean Mark-Paul Gosselaar. Handsome. Cute. The boy every young girl would want to fall in love with. They say, late at night when no one is listening, that he would’ve taken over the show.”

“Saved by the Bell?”

“No. Our Miss Bliss. There never would have been Saved by the Bell. Chad was brought in for Episode 13. An episode no one ever saw. A make-or-break episode for the show. After he disappeared, they filmed a different Episode 13 that everyone saw.”

“Missing?”

“Disappeared. A dead man who was once my lover told me Mark and his agent sacrificed little boy to Devil in exchange for stardom.”

“And what happened to this missing episode?”

“No one knows. It is as gone as Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa and the Jamestown settlement. I know people who say they know people who worked on it. But you know how that is.”

“I do.”

I didn’t want to do this anymore. I wanted to ride in a car with a sunroof through the neon night and blast Zeppelin so loud people call the cops. I wanted a chopper and a machine gun and a mission. I wanted life. The talk of death was chilling. And rather boring. Yet, there was a shudder about it all that I couldn’t ignore. A shiver that would not leave.

I stood up from the tiny table. My lawyer was already at the door that would take us away from the Snake Pit forever.

Then I had a tingle. A tingle deep inside the jungle of me. And it was the tingle that scared me the most. It should’ve warned me that I was racing toward a place I couldn’t come back from. Maybe it wasn’t cartoon Mickey’s hell. Maybe it was worse. Maybe it was real. And before that… was the place of going Roman. And once I’d gone there… all bets would be off. The consequences could not be measured. Not then. Not yet. Everything was possible and nothing would be left off the table in the wager.

I could even take down the Clintons.

But I progress well ahead of the story.

“What’s the evidence, Nadia?”

The screaming coming from the filmstrip was hideous. The mouse’s eyes had melted in his skull. I turned toward the door and could barely hear Nadia’s reply as I walked away toward the exit, leaving it all behind.

“I told you, Mr. Bull… find Chad Dakota. Then you’ll know,” she shouted at me above the screaming.

Outside, I lit a cigarette and watched the door. Arturo had gone into the alley to bring the Cutlass Sierra around. I was alone on an empty street, far from home. It felt like Moscow ’83, sometime in the winter.

Back in the car, we turned up the heat and pointed toward Sunset Boulevard and our motel. When we passed an all-night body shop, I suddenly reached over and pushed hard on the steering wheel in Arturo’s hands and we did a wide U-turn across the empty night-laden street. He screamed like a girl.

The boy was in the early stages of shell shock. He’d need confrontation therapy. I was sure of it. I upgraded firearms training to “imminent.”

“Pull in there, please,” I said, indicating the body shop. Two pale-lit bays were hidden in a sea of shadowy wrecks.

I gave the guys working in the shop a twenty for fifteen minutes with their power saw. Ten minutes later, I’d made all the necessary cuts and we lifted the top off the Cutlass Sierra “convertible.”

We drove into the night, and I rolled a joint so big it could’ve been dropped on Mao Tse-tung by a B-52 Stratofortress. We smoked it, and I ordered Arturo into the Hollywood hills, where we drove quiet, tiny lanes past sleeping block glass mansions in the fog, listening to Zeppelin on the eleven setting. I thought of the Clintons, Mays, the DNC, and a little boy with big dreams of being a star.

We made it back to the motel just before dawn. Arturo climbed between the sheets fully clothed, while I watched the farm reports and nursed a double bourbon to wind down.

But really, I was thinking about little Dakota Chad.

* * *

The day beat down on the convertible like a thousand angry Green Party punks somewhere in what was once West Germany. We’d blasted out of the city after finding nothing about little Chad Dakota. Nothing except some ancient headshot from a few years back. A cherubic-faced kid with a mullet and a designer acid-wash jean jacket. It was black and white. It was Hollywood’s version of an average preteen kid. In a font best reserved for B-movie fantasies about re-fighting ’Nam and winning was the name Chad Dakota. The headshot listed only one credit. Tiny Tim in the Yucca Flats Community Players’ production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Yucca Flats was a small high desert town that lay near the edge of the Mojave and the deep well of Death Valley beyond. In the days of twenty-mule-team Borax, it had been a sort of gold mine. A Borax boom town. Now it was a few buildings going ghost, kept alive only by a new drug called meth. Cocaine was too expensive and much too eighties. Meth was the rebranding of the great Wall Street marching powder of captains and whores. And cheaper, too. Back in my day, we called it biker speed. It was dangerous then, and I was sure things hadn’t gotten any better since.

Three hours beyond downtown LA, we arrived at the cracked front steps of an old steeple church tattooed in boarded-up windows. A sign had fallen down in the hard packed dirt and cacti of the front “lawn.” When we picked it up and tipped it over on its back, we found that the Yucca Flats Community Players had once had a home here.

We drove the lonely town, which seemed dry and empty. A three-legged stray dog wandered in front of us. The heat of the day passed furnace level and then dropped off when an absolutely moisture-sapping afternoon wind began to buffet the old houses, blowing away the last of the peeling paint and racing in between the clapboards. A few flat cinderblock buildings resisted the wind here and there. Outside of one, a few pickup trucks were parked in a dirt lot. Inside we found cold beer, pool tables, cigarettes, darkness, and Merle Haggard on a jukebox.

It was the kind of place you could get killed in.

But I was thirsty.

Haylene, yes, that was her name, pulled two tall cold drafts and smiled from underneath her platinum mane. She muttered a quiet, “Y’all be careful now,” and lit a cigarette as she sauntered back to the darker side of the bar where some local background casting types worked on their roles as shiftless ne’er-do-wells.

If I’d known then what I know now about the meth trade, I would’ve nailed them as mid-level distributors. In hindsight, they were probably some of the first entrepreneurs to get in on the ground floor of the coming meth boom that would lead to the deaths of so many. So, in other words, they were enterprising scum.

I knew there’d be trouble. I briefly tried to remember if I’d loaded the .44 Magnum in the trunk, but I could only picture putting a few bottles of Clevinger’sin the empty spare wheel well that morning.

“You Mexican?” said a voice in Arturo’s ear. A thin, ropy, dirty or tanned, lowlife redneck I’d later come to know as Gene had sidled up behind us from the pool tables.

I led with a “Nah,” which seemed apropos. I didn’t want to alienate them with a multi-syllabic vocabulary. “He’s Chinese.”

My answer literally stopped Gene in his tracks. As in, Gene had never considered that the outcome of his attempted afternoon drunken bullying in preparation for his role in a hoped-for forthcoming Billy Jack revival film as redneck-who-gets-the-tar-kicked-out-of-him in the bar parking lot would be the answer he hadn’t considered. He probably expected a fight. A denial. An, “Our mistake, we’ll be moving on, sir.” But before I said, “Chinese,” he might never have even heard the word, much less expected it to be used as an answer to a question that he, Gene, would ever ask.

He recovered a long moment later. Then, “You funny?”

Which I took to mean, was I mocking him?

“No.” I spun around on the bar seat. I smiled. I was thinking, “I like violence.” And, “A lot.”

Gene got the message.

Crazy eyes do that for you.

“You know that playhouse a few streets over?” I asked. I might as well have asked him to name any element from the periodic table.

Again, Gene seemed to go all “out of order.”

“Was an old church…” I waited.

“Yeah, I guess…” Gene’s level of bewilderment was Oscar-worthy. If only he were acting.

I heard Haylene wiping the bar behind us.

“They haven’t had a show there in years. Not since Gay Kurt died of AIDS.”

It was Haylene in my ear. Maybe she was trying to defuse the impending über-violence I was allowing myself to consider. My plan was to nerve-pinch Gene’s dirty arm so he couldn’t use it to defend himself while I rained down a series of karate chops on key pressure points. Once he was immobile, due to temporary paralysis and pain, I would kick him in the ribs. I doubted there would be any lasting damage. Then, of course, we’d need to leave.

“Saw Our Town there once…” grunted Gene in a stunning turn of events worthy of the most desperately-in-need-of-ratings soap operas.

“Hmmmm…” I said. “If you saw a production of A Christmas Carol, I’ll buy everyone in the bar drinks for the rest of the afternoon.”

Gene seemed to perk up. I imagined that liquor to him was like some sort of bonus for quarterly sales. Or at least breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner.

“But… I never saw that one…” His face instantly dropped. As though all the booze he could ever drink had been snatched from his dirty fingers. To him, it was probably like he’d almost won the Super Bowl. He would’ve talked about this day for the rest of his life in the prison I was sure he would die in.

“Anyone see a production of A Christmas Carol at the old church?” Gene whined into the darkness of the bar. He was like a three-day-binge meth-head Captain Kirk. He would stop at nothing to outthink his sobriety.

No one in the cinderblock bar in the middle of nowhere had seen a production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Imagine that.

No one, besides Gene, had seen any show at the not-much-heralded Yucca Flats Players’ now-defunct theater.

“Gay Kurt’s mom’s still alive, I think…” someone grunt-shouted a little too enthusiastically from the darkness over in the corner of the bar.

“Sylvia?!” exclaimed Haylene.

“Yeah!” came the grunt from the darkness. “Think so.”

“Well, lemme call Momma. She’ll know for sure.” Haylene picked up a phone near the cash register and dialed.

Haylene’s momma confirmed that Gay Kurt’s momma was still alive and that she would receive “callers” after five for a cocktail party in the garden.

I bought the bar a round, and the pioneers of the meth trade turned out to be fairly nice. My guess, now, years later in hindsight, is that they hadn’t started taking their own drug yet. They were just venture capitalists looking to move on from the flagging marijuana trade. I even got a free sample. I tried some in the bathroom. It made my eyes burn and my nose water.

Later, when I began my long-form epic poem about the giant snake out in the desert, shirtless and screaming into the hot night, I suspected the meth may have been a little “chemical-y” in its composition.

One of the meth dealers got a little rough with Arturo after my lawyer displayed a brilliant, yet hesitatingly frightened, prowess with a pool cue and the billiards table. What he lacked in style and smooth aplomb, he made up for in running the table on the break. The hillbilly, possibly an enforcer for the meth-preneurs, got mad and didn’t want to pay the quarter we’d set the table stakes at. He was a moment away from running Arturo through with the cue he’d just broken against the bar in a Hulk-rage, when I informed him Arturo was a Chinese Mig pilot who’d just defected to America in a state-of-the-art SU-27 Russian-made Flanker with stealth capabilities. I told everybody it was my job to keep him safe so he could tell us, the U.S. government, exactly how the Chinese had been planning for years to invade the west coast of the United States.

“You can kill him…” I noted above the silence that followed the shattering pool cue. “But he knows how to stop the invasion that’ll take place next year.”

“How he know that?” managed Gene.

“He’s the son of a top COMINTERN official. In fact, that’s what we’re doing here. A Chinese first strike will consist of three full divisions of Chinese rompin’ stompin’ airborne paratroopers landing in the desert right around this location. He’s showing us exactly where and how to bury the minefields the Chinese will land in when they invade next year. If you kill him, we’ll never know, and the Chinese will kill you and rape your women. And maybe not even in that order. Know what I mean…”

“They’s gonna invade us?” stuttered Gene.

“They is,” I assured him.

Now everyone’s sudden rage was turned against the Chinese, and a profusion of curses, blood oaths and war cries resounded around the bar as someone found the lone Lynyrd Skynyrd selection on the jukebox. Everyone assured everyone else in the most redneck of terms that no “Chinese” was gonna invade the U.S. of A without him having “somethin’ to say ’bout that!”

Five o’clock rolled around and we left the fledgling resistance movement to head up to Gay Kurt’s mother’s house for cocktails in the garden. I yelled “Wolverines!” as we left, and Gene drove us up through twisting volcanic rocks to a small hilltop where an old Victorian gabled house loomed above the dying high desert town. In the afternoon sun it reminded me of a vulture.

An old woman answered the door and said little. We were escorted through a house filled with gilt-framed watercolors of a mother and little boy in short pants. There were also silver-framed pictures of some opera singer. All of them were in black and white. All of them were from a long time ago.

I’ll save you the details. We drank Old Fashioneds from highballs with Gay Kurt’s mother, an ancient grand dame of opera. She and Gay Kurt had started the playhouse after her “exile,” as she repeatedly called it, from the stages in the great cities of “the continent.” It was all sad and I didn’t need to be told the story to know all the details. Single mother. Artist. Adoring son. Gay. Theater the only place he’d ever make it. Each of them holding on to some dream that never was. Some lotto ticket numbers that would never come up in the right order.

AIDS.

People used to die of AIDS all the time. Or at least it seemed that way in the eighties.

Now, you hardly ever hear of it.

It’s always pneumonia or cancer or some other thing. Never AIDS. Not anymore.

Eventually, after another blast of the speed sample in a sparkling, tiled bathroom with old-fashioned fixtures and doilies and a tiny window where I could look out at the moon and the desert, I asked Sylvia the once-famous opera singer if she knew of little Chad Dakota.

She did.

Little Chad Dakota had been her son Kurt’s most promising actor in the theater camp he ran for children each summer. So promising, he’d suggested to the child’s parents that they see an agent Kurt had been a “companion” to once. Her words, not mine.

Little Chad Dakota’s mother and her boyfriend, a man everyone knew as “Squid,” went west to Hollywood and were never seen again.

“Nope,” mumbled Gene, who’d been digging in his nose and gulping Old Fashioneds in the cactus garden we found ourselves in as twilight came on. Tiny soft lights were strung in the bare trees above us. It was warm and quiet, and the sound of Sylvia’s stentorian recounting of all her great love affairs and performances had put me somewhere else. But the “nope” of Gene the Unwashed drew me back.

Gene may have been the very nexus of randomness.

“How so?” I asked Gene.

“Well,” he began, and rattled his glass for a refill. The silent and ever-present maid hurried off, and for a moment in the garden quiet, Gene was able to hold forth as he probably never had outside of a bar or parole hearing. “Squid come back through ’bout five years ago. Then he up and left again. Come into the bar one night. I ’member he told us he was gonna live like a movie star, ’fore he up and left the first time, but when he come back he cried a lot that night. We all told him to “Cheer up now, Squid!” but he don’ want to. So Monster asks him what happened, and then Squid told us he lost everything and that Hollywood was a evil place. A few days later he was gone and we never seen him again.”

Later, we finished our highballs and had pot roast around a large dinner table in an actual dining room. The dinner was served on bone china. I excused myself for more speed. I came back and drank claret and barely ate. We went back to the bar and had farewell whiskies with Gene and the few barflies that remained. “We’ll see you all real soon!” I lied as Arturo and I backed out into the hot desert night. My heart was racing. I was sweating. Later, between Yucca Flats and somewhere else, we pulled over in the middle of nowhere on the long road that fled away from the dying town. I climbed a rocky outcrop and started my epic of the giant snake. I screamed myself hoarse and promised never to do speed again when we eventually climbed into our beds back at the motel on Sunset after dawn.