Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  * Please, God, don’t let us have killed John Wayne, a nuclear defense scientist told People magazine. This prayer contains the obvious and pragmatic desire to avoid extremely bad press, but it’s also, when you ponder it deeply, a desperate plea about the whole narrative of our nation, a plea that’s caught up not just in our Bomb’s possibly having killed one of our most defining (for better or worse) icons, but that the possible poisoning happened as a result of the singularly mind-boggling film The Conqueror. And maybe nobody understood this prayer better than the film’s financier and producer, the man who wanted The Conqueror to be the great epic of his film career, Mr. Howard Hughes. When The Conqueror was panned by critics as one of the worst films of all time, Hughes reportedly spent millions buying up every print in existence. Different sources record his obsession over eliminating the film from public view as either a matter of shame over its awfulness or devotion to its greatness or some of the obsessive-compulsive disorder that dominated his later years. But most agree that he spent a four-month period in 1957 locked in a screening room in Hollywood watching films by himself, naked and eating chicken, watching a few films over and over, and one of the lucky few films for this audience of one was The Conqueror. Hughes watched it over and over by himself, even blindfolding the projectionist to maintain the total solitude of the screening. He continued the ritual even after that four-month psychotic break, watching The Conqueror over and over when nobody else would or could, through the sale of his airline, which made him the richest man in America, through his gobbling up and development of the largest single stake on the Las Vegas Strip, through his exile in the Bahamas with the Mormon mafia, always watching The Conqueror and probably always still with that poor blindfolded projectionist.

  Or maybe the blindfolding of the projectionist was not a crass act to maintain the solitude of the screening but an act of grace to save the poor projectionist’s life, because maybe in the story of The Conqueror is some powerful truth, some wicked axiom about the existence of America, some unutterable prophecy about humankind, the witnessing of which will drive you insane just like Hughes went insane and watched The Conqueror over and over and died with six hypodermic needles broken off in his skin, needles for injecting codeine right into his muscles, steel needles to maybe dull the pain of knowing the unutterable prophecy of The Conqueror. Or maybe Hughes is a necessary part of the story, of the unutterable prophecy that comes out of the experience of the whole backstory of The Conqueror, and the only one with any real understanding of the unutterable prophecy in its full context is the only one who was in the room with Hughes as he watched the film: the blindfolded projectionist.

  So here we are: a blindfolded projectionist with the blindfold just barely cinched up on our face through some vigorous smiling motions or cheek stretches and projecting The Conqueror for the zillionth time for Mr. Howard Hughes. If we tilt our head back, we can see a sliver of the world beneath our blindfold, and in that sliver is the light of the projector, all the dust particles reflecting the light, the beam expanding as it shoots past the back of Hughes’s head, a head that these days just sticks up out of a naked and emaciated body like the top of a raggedy mop, his playboy looks wasted away and his white hair in scraggles and its thinness really clear—transparent—in the light of the projector, The Conqueror beamed through the billionaire’s scraggles: John Wayne in the Western Costume Co.’s absurd interpretation of a thirteenth-century Mongol tunic, John Wayne in yellow face complete with rubber bands to slant his eyes, John Wayne as Genghis Khan, warring and marauding with his hundreds of warriors, extras cast from reservations of Paiute and Navajo in the southwest of Utah where the film was shot—Snow Canyon, Utah, where the sand was full of fallout from hundreds of nuclear weapons tests just across the border at Yucca Flat, Nevada.

  And we can almost see through the billionaire’s thin skin too, see with the light of the projector through his thin skin and watch The Conqueror play on his blood, on the 150 milligrams of Valium circulating through his system every day. And on the 45 grains of codeine circulating too, in the reflection of the needles broken off in his skin as he stares at the screen, watching John Wayne, whose own blood circulates with 150 milligrams of Dexedrine, speed to shape him up, to help him pass as the sleek but powerful Genghis Khan. What makes America so red-blooded, full-blooded, poison-blooded? And Hughes stares even deeper, beyond the Dexedrine in Wayne, looking for the radiation, the tumors that will develop in Wayne’s gut and the woman whom Wayne-as-Khan keeps raping, played by Susan Hayward, the smoky-voiced Hollywood vixen who always called Hughes Mr. Magic when she fucked him, who bragged openly that she would marry Hughes until suddenly he was married to some other vixen and so Susan Hayward moved on from Hughes until twenty tumors in her brain kept her from moving at all, little clouds so slowly mushrooming in her brain. Did he do that to her? Did his film put the cancer in her like it put the cancer in Wayne? Is Hughes the signal of a paradigm shift from Wayne as the symbol of the American spirit, frontiersman to capitalist, or is Hughes just the logical evolution of the same terrible myth of the conqueror that has slouched through history since Khan and before?

  I stole you. I will keep you. Before the sun sets, you will come willingly to my arms, says Wayne-as-Khan to his bride.

  Khan’s empire came at the cost of around 40 million lives. The American spirit (and policy) of Manifest Destiny that John Wayne embodied cost anywhere from thirty thousand to seventy thousand Native lives during the Indian Wars, not to mention millions of others lost to smallpox and famine since the coming of Europeans and then also all the Native lives lost to all manner of subsequent American fuckery. The two atom bombs dropped in our Second World War killed around 225,000 in Japan. And what has the capitalist spirit of Hughes wrought?

  We can hear them now, can literally feel the atomic bombs.

  We, the blindfolded projectionist, are at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas where Hughes spends some of his last years pouring money into developing our national City of Entertainment—our Sin City—at the Desert Inn just seventy-five miles from the very same Nevada test site that irradiated Snow Canyon, Utah, where The Conqueror was filmed. Hughes watches The Conqueror yet again as nuclear blasts shake the walls of his penthouse every three days and shake the projection of the film off the screen. Hughes yells, Straighten the picture and God damn the Bomb. And it is our job—we, the blindfolded projectionist—to anticipate the shock waves of the Bomb and stabilize the projection despite our blindfold. But we know the trick of seeing a sliver of the world out the bottom of our blindfold and have been peeking like this for years and we could easily straighten the picture but we must not let on that we are peeking or we will raise the ire of the billionaire so we let the blasts in the distance shake the film from the screen, we let it play like that, Wayne-as-Kahn cockeyed across the wall of the casino penthouse, warring with his thousands of Navajos-as-Mongols, the whole scene wobbling in the shock waves and we just pull the blindfold down and pray the lunatic dies before too long and aren’t we always the blindfolded projectionist just letting the uncanny unfold like that, like we couldn’t ever change things anyway, didn’t have our fingers on the power switch the whole goddamn time.

  * This invincible bat hanging in the wake of the first atomic blast was undoubtedly a Mexican free-tailed bat, a species that almost kept us from creating the Bomb at all. These bats fly out of Carlsbad Caverns in SNM by the millions during the summer, an emergence that darkens the evening redness 150 miles southeast of Trinity. Early in 1942, reeling from the surprise attack of Pearl Harbor, a Harvard researcher visited the caverns and snagged about three hundred emerging bats. He wanted to know if their bony wings had the power to carry time-delayed explosives—seventeen grams of napalm. The superweapon on his mind was a fleet of American bombers retrofitted to carry tens of thousands of bats, bats that could be released over Japan, bats that would roost in the wooden houses of the Japanese, bats that would explode after a day or two and ignite the houses and create fire
storms that would level cities. President Franklin Roosevelt had approved the project, writing, “This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.” The Army and the Navy pursued bat bombs, achieving suitably destructive results, including the accidental incineration of an airfield in Carlsbad, New Mexico. But the army of bats was abandoned when the project developed too slowly and the directive came down to allocate all available military resources to the Manhattan Project. Go watch the bats emerge at dusk in Carlsbad. Millions in a wondrous roar from the underbelly. Every bat a civilian family burned to death. And still we could imagine something more monstrous.

  * I’m being too flippant here. The pretty clear cultural divide between Northern and Southern New Mexico is only partly about the Bomb, which has wrought its havoc throughout the state with devastating fairness. Masco writes plenty about the toll that the nuclear industry has taken on the people of Northern New Mexico. As does V. B. Price in The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project. The gist: lots of exposed people, lots of sick Native American uranium miners, and lots of radioactive runoff into communities and rivers around the national labs near Los Alamos and Albuquerque. For instance, Acid Canyon, an area named as a result of large amounts of nuclear waste that flowed through it after being unceremoniously drained “down the mountain” from Los Alamos. Acid Canyon has been “cleaned up,” they say, and now boasts a pretty sweet skate park for the kids. And don’t forget about the Church Rock uranium spill way up north near Gallup, New Mexico, still the largest single incident of radioactive contamination on American soil. The Church Rock accident happened at 0530 hours on July 16, 1979, exactly thirty-four years, to the minute, after the Trinity test. The uranium mine’s disposal pond burst and poured into the Puerco River. The exact consequences of this spill are much contested. The people of the most exposed community, Navajos, say they are sick. The government says they are not. But none can debate the fear, the nuclear uncanny, the little bit of hesitation before putting any local water or food in the mouth. Maybe the most uncanny of facts about this spill is not that it happened at exactly the same minute and on the same day of the year as the Gadget’s blast, but that it happened even as Superman was still rocketing toward a $300 million box office.

  Superman?

  Yes.

  A year before the spill, Christopher Reeve had pranced around in his red tights and cape, shooting the climactic scene of the film only three miles from the United Nuclear Corporation’s Church Rock mine, at a place that would forever after be known as Superman Canyon. The climax of the film’s story happens after Lex Luthor has launched a nuke into the San Andreas Fault and Superman is trying to mitigate the damage by flying to the center of the earth and forcing up its molten core to plug the gap. But the earthquakes have already started and Lois Lane is caught in the quakes out in the desert along the fault line. She dies. So then, in one of the most iconic film scenes of all time, Superman contorts his face into a devastating strokelike cry and flies around the world, against the direction of its revolutions, in a rage until he gets the world spinning backward and manages (despite the laws of basic physics) to reverse time just enough to get back to the moment before Lois Lane dies.

  Here’s the uncanny part: all of the San Andreas Fault stuff was filmed not in California at the actual fault but at the canyon in New Mexico near Church Rock. So in July of 1979, even as that canyon was filling up with over a thousand tons of radioactive waste, tens of millions of people were in theaters watching that exact landscape get hit with a nuclear missile. Our stories of the Bomb, the superheroes we invented to deal with the fear of the Bomb, were already distracting us, were quite literally, in this case, putting us in a dark room and showing us a miraculously saved version of the landscape that was at that very moment flooded with the worst of our creations, the myth mapped over the actual and totally overshadowing it, because in the end Superman saved the girl and everyone left the theater feeling triumphant. Never mind that Superman chooses to only rewind the world enough to save his girlfriend, never mind that he doesn’t bother to rewind even just a few more minutes to stop the nuke-triggered earthquakes that are killing thousands, never mind that he doesn’t bother to rewind enough to stop the nukes from launching, never mind that he doesn’t bother to move back all the way in time to the days before the Gadget when there was not so much fear. Maybe the moral is that even Superman, with his ability to control the spin and tilt of the earth, with his ability to manipulate time, could never stop the human bend toward obliteration.

  * Let me add a disclaimer as a personal note here: The Cains have long been friends of my ranching family. They were always in the same clubs: political, religious, business. The New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association named the Cains Ranchers of the Year in the 1994 issue of Stockman—a magazine that has featured many Olivers, including my great-granddaddy and his daddy before him. But the real bond between the families was that both ultimately lost ranches because of the creation of the White Sands Missile Range beginning in the 1940s—the federal government condemned their land and has been blowing up stuff on it ever since. But the post–Second World War swindling of ranchers in Southern New Mexico is a whole other story. This note is just to say that my family’s bond with the Cains doesn’t sway my thinking about the spaceport. Even if the New Mexico Spaceport Authority did pressure the Cains to cooperate, they were not totally swindled this time around. The land still belongs to their family, is still covered in their cattle, and they did not have to leave their homes. Word on the street in Truth or Consequences is that, this time around, the Cains are raking in six or seven figures for letting the frontiers of commercial aerospace percolate on their ranches.

  * In a move reminiscent of those conquistador actors at the spaceport groundbreaking, the former Imagineers at IDEAS hired a Native American consultant for their design of the Visitor Experience. This guy, Larry Littlebird, has made his living as a Native American storyteller, both in the movies and freelance at high school assemblies and New Age spiritual retreats. Securing an interview with Littlebird for this story required months of permissions wrangling from the Spaceport Authority and IDEAS, including a condition that we not talk specifically about the Visitor Experience, which was particularly ridiculous because when Littlebird finally got the okay to talk to me, he said he’d never even been consulted about anything for the spaceport and that, so far as he knew, he was just a name on a website. Littlebird and I talked for hours and the whole conversation was a real mind trip, but none of it can be quoted here because I screwed up the recording of it and the fact-checkers don’t believe that he said some of the things that he actually said, things concerning the long outwaiting of horses and rocket ships and a Pueblo prophecy about the second coming of an aging sun lizard. The interview recording is not lost but is interrupted every five minutes by a robot reading the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Apparently this is a ploy to get you to pay $3.99 to upgrade to the Pro version of Android Call Recorder, the app I used to record our long talk. The demo version of the app also records only one side of the conversation. The First Amendment is read by the robot fifty-one times during the recording. Because so much of the interview is censored by the robot reading the First Amendment and all the questions are lost, I cannot quote from it, but I can reconstruct it based on my notes and the uncensored bits. So this is a reconstruction I call:

  Storylistening with Littlebird

  Concerning the Long Outwaiting of Horses and Rocket Ships

  Question:

  Littlebird: The most profound thing in Florida is Disney World. What was going on with that human being that this Disney World came out of his brain? Walt Disney is my
hero.

  Q:

  L: He made the mouse move. He gave it a voice. It began to tell these stories. Where did that come from? How was that expressed?

  Q:

  L: I’m going to tell you a story about a horse.

  Q:

  L: Everything is related, Joshua. All of these floating islands, these continents, they come from one great ancient floating island. Joshua, think about the horse.

  Q:

  L: Our understanding of our place in this world comes from the return of the horse to this continent. My people, my ancient people, on the one great floating island … we knew that animal. We knew the horse when it was still tiny. You know, three or four feet tall. Then it disappeared. Gone overnight. That coincided with the separation of the great floating islands, the breaking apart of the continents …

  Q:

  L: It makes for wonderful entertainment for the head.

  Q:

  L: When the horse returned to this floating island, we were waiting for it, and when it returned, we recognized that animal by its spirit. Where is the spirit? Can you cut open my brain and find the spirit?

  Q:

  L: For me, as a tribal person, I see we are going further and further away from that which is of the spirit. Now a lot of tribal people across the Americas have stories of this connection, the recognition that occurs when the Spanish bring back the horse. Oh my gosh! These moments are like you’re on a particular journey and then there is a signpost. The return of the horse is a signpost. And a big one. And what it means is that people that were separated in another time are coming together now. See? You are on the right journey. A signpost.