A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  Yet there was more to be learned inside Steve’s studio. There was a second room, and it too had many of his belongings, right where he had left them. In fact, this was the room where he worked as a cop, quite possibly the very spot where he had received the final call for help from the man in Llano who was concerned about a local squatter. The call could have come in on his radio, which was on top of an old cabinet; this was the unit he would receive dispatches on. Next to it there was a window with a view of the corrals and the acreage to the east and north. “He liked being out here near the animals,” Kristie said. “And the land.” Every dawn he would come here to watch the sun rise over the desert. It was indeed the kind of new-beginnings view that only the desert delivers, the one that’s visible only in the timeless time, and now, in the mid-afternoon, we both admired the vista, yet one more Mojave wonder in which the sun played across the rocks and the sand and the creosote in a way that would never leave you. “I don’t know why I haven’t used this studio,” Kristie says, and then she left to tend to the animals. I paused to try to understand the moment, and realized that I was now inside Steve’s tomb—without the physical presence of the man who belonged here—but with certain sacred objects of his life. I had seen the things that linked him to the act of building, an elemental activity that is so visible in the wide-open expanse of the desert, with its housing tracts emerging from the womb on the horizon and men in their driveways hammering and sawing. And now, here was more evidence of Steve’s desire to ruminate, kick back (to the degree that a man like him could do such a thing), and let something else take over his body.

  And then, as I stood and soaked up the feeling of the studio, there came the thing I was looking for. Actually it was the thing behind the thing, for I did not know that it existed. Against a wall in the carefully kept hideaway was an old hotplate with a coffee warmer on top. The warmer still had signs of use, desiccated coffee rings on the bottom, perhaps from coffee that Steve had made on the morning of his last call. I didn’t see a grinder like the one he had left with his old roommate in Hermosa Beach; I figured that he ground his coffee in the kitchen, from beans that were kept in the refrigerator, and then brought the fresh pot to this studio, where he placed it on the warmer. On a shelf above the hotplate there were six or seven mugs—a few were cracked and they too had coffee rings. There was a chair at a small worktable, and I sat down and took in the view through the window, as Steve did every morning according to friends, a stunning sight in which the giant rock formations to the east filled the sky. I imagined the vanished deputy drinking his brew—“cowboy coffee” it was now called by purveyors of the old West—as he surveyed his kingdom, his beat. The formations were the Three Sisters Buttes, a region in the Antelope Valley known primarily to geologists, local pilots and hikers, and other aficionados of the terrain, including the sisters at Mount Carmel and Donald Charles Kueck. I now realized, as I looked south, that he lived several hundred yards away, if that.

  Each morning, his friends and family members had told me long ago, he gazed at the buttes too. Over the years, as I followed this trail, I realized it was the same sight as the one beheld each dawn by Steve Sorensen. Don himself had three sisters, and in his last few years, they had come to his aid, and no doubt the name of those rocks had particular resonance for him, although we do not know if in fact that name had registered for him in such a way, and in any case few among us would not have been taken by the extreme beauty and the sacred thing that they manifested and conferred. On the day I visited Deputy Steve Sorensen’s house, I sat in his chair and gazed at the buttes, and imagined that quite possibly, on the very morning of the fatal encounter, both men might have contemplated those buttes and their splendor, for each loved every elemental aspect of the desert, especially as it became a new place with every infinitesimal turn of Earth’s axis and the ensuing shift in light, each perhaps raising a cup to his lips at the same time, savoring a favorite beverage, home-brewed or water from a spigot caught in cupped hands, and perhaps as the sun’s rays spilled across the holy vista before them, each was filled with gratitude and awe as they prepared to embark on their fateful day, even as they were entangled in notes of a minor key and beyond shaking them off.

  On the day that the house sale was completed, Kristie remembers standing at the front door as something unspoken passed between her and Christine. “The person who was responsible for the whole thing had been murdered,” she says. “Now I would be the caretaker. It was very emotional.” Christine handed her the keys and then got in her car and prepared to drive away from the house that Steve had renovated for his new family. Her son, Matt, was in the car’s baby seat. “Where’s Daddy?” he was saying, as Kristie had heard him say on other visits to the house. “Home?” Christine went to comfort her son and then drove away, not looking back or waving, torn up about leaving the animals behind, and heading out of Lake Los Angeles.

  GHOST ON A BIKE

  “So you never wanted a regular life?”

  “What the fuck’s that? Barbeques and ballgames?”

  —Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley, Heat

  ON THE EVENING OF THE THIRD DAY OF THE MANHUNT, THE SKY was clear, and the waxing three-quarter moon, eight days away from being full, cast a bright light across the Antelope Valley, illuminating the Joshua trees and the greasewood and the cholla in a way that defined them well. If you were sitting on top of the Three Sisters Buttes and had a good eye, you would have spotted a man on a bike. From the way it wobbled, the bike appeared to be rickety and old, or maybe it was just because the man had difficulty pedaling. He was heading east, across a dirt road, toward the buttes, then turned north and headed toward a group of dilapidated sheds. Next to the sheds was another house, a well-kept, single-story, wood-frame house, with a driveway that was swept clean, a basketball net over the garage door, and some kids’ toys in the yard. Between the complex of sheds and the main house was a tree, a mesquite tree, noteworthy because few trees grow in this area, and this one was large and flourishing. There were lights on in the house, and inside it was a family, a Hispanic couple and six of their nine kids. The mother was a cleaning lady, employed at the thrift shop of the Twin Lakes Community Church, the one where Steve’s friend John Wodetzki was the pastor. She knew Steve well; he frequented the thrift shop and purchased household items such as toasters and fans, redistributing them to needy residents of Lake Los Angeles. She was aware of the fact that Steve had been killed earlier that week, although she did not watch television regularly and had not seen all of the ensuing coverage. At 10 that evening, the man on the bike pedaled up toward the sheds and hopped off, laying the bike down or propping it against a wall. She recognized the man as an associate of C. T. Smith, who lived in one of the sheds on the property. He was carrying an assault rifle. Afraid, she stepped away from the blinds. For the second time that week, Donald Kueck walked into his buddy’s place and asked for a favor. “Man, I’m hungry,” he said. Then he gave Smith $10 worth of food stamps. “Get me some food, would you?” he asked, and then told his friend to put it in an old bus in the sands nearby. Smith agreed, and then Kueck asked for water. A little while later he picked up the rifle and left, riding into the night, pedaling hard, we can imagine, riding faster, alive with H2O, faster now, taking off, imagining that he was levitating, out of sight, and even out of mind he might have thought—his own mind, his own joke, Fuck off world, I’ll see your manhunt, and I’ll raise you with this, now entering the jet stream and flying through the night, vanishing like a raven.

  DAY

  FOUR

  ROCKET BOYS AND THE ANARCHY VAN

  We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s. . . . Can we carry through in an age where we will witness . . . a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the far side of space, and the inside of men’s minds? That is the question of the New Frontier.

  —John F. Kennedy, nomination acceptance address, Democratic National Convention, Memorial Coliseum
, Los Angeles, July 15, 1960

  There is nothing wrong with your television set . . . We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical . . . You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to . . . The Outer Limits.

  —The Outer Limits, opening narration, 1963–1965

  SOMETIME AFTER THEIR REUNION, DON BEGAN VISITING JELLO AT the Smallwoods’ house in Riverside, driving in occasionally and staying overnight, joining the castaways at Virginia’s table and partaking of the loaves and fishes that Mrs. Smallwood always managed to provide. One day she convinced Don that it was time for him to be a grown up; Jello needed his dad and after all, although Jello called her mom like everyone else did, she wasn’t his parent and it was time for them to live together as father and son. So Don took Jello back to the desert, and a week or two later Jello returned. He missed his friends, he said, and really, the whole scene. But the connection took in some way, for a few months later, he decided he wanted to spend more time with Don, and he headed back to Llano. He got a ride from his friend Mike Cazares; at seventeen Mike had recently started driving and, to commemorate his new mobile status, had fixed up his truck. The two had met in high school, although given the tribal nature of things, they were not a likely pair. Mike was different from the others who populated Jello’s circle. He was not a punk or a metalhead or even a surfer. He was a rude-boy reggae guy, he recalls, the only reggae guy in town. He rode a Vespa. He called himself Rough the Mike, and he had a band called 96 Degrees, after the hit song recorded by the well-known reggae outfit Third World. With his ability to play bass, melodica, and percussion, Mike soon became a close friend of the three amigos. He jammed with them at gigs around town or in the Smallwoods’ garage, where they put on shows and charged a small fee, and Chris Smallwood’s younger sister, Amanda, served as a personal roadie, helping them with publicity, sound checks, and beer runs. Jello had told Mike strange and grand tales about his father. There were fables about his time in San Francisco during the hippie years, and one of them involved ingesting the crystal ball used to make the acid that Ken Kesey wrote about in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. From then on he had seen only patterns, and that was why he had to live in the desert. There was another story about Don being a rocket scientist from NASA. Everybody was accustomed to Jello’s overblown stories, but they were also part of his charisma. In this case, since they all had to do with his father, and few of Jello’s friends had one, they were excited about the prospect of one of their own forging such an alliance, especially with a father who sounded like a larger-than-life version of themselves.

  On the day Mike drove Jello out of town, they piled into his truck along with Mike’s girlfriend, intrigued by the idea that they were about to meet a mythical figure. They traveled west on the 60 leaving Riverside and then hooked up with the 15, the route that takes you through the desert and toward Barstow and its vast discount shopping dungeons, and beyond, into Baker—home of “the world’s largest thermometer”—and then Las Vegas. At some point Mike noticed a foul odor. “What’s that onion smell?” he asked, and then looked over and saw Jello holding his arm out the window. Mike realized it was Jello’s armpit. The boy hardly ever bathed. “Dude, that’s nasty,” Mike said, and Jello laughed and shrugged it off. Jello’s friends were used to his poor hygiene, and they knew that the slovenliness was part of his general shtick. Sloppy rocker, the boy your parents hate, punk. And it worked; the kid was a serious ladies’ man, often hooking up with strippers, models, older women, all manner of babes. They got high with him and gave him money and drugs. They took care of him and got to hang out with a bad boy. Regardless of his stench, or maybe because of it, Jello had that thing that women wanted, and to this day, his friends are amazed. “I thought he would have cleaned up for his father,” Mike says now. “I don’t know why I thought that. He didn’t clean up for anyone.” And there he was, heading for the high Mojave, in his Mohawk, leathers, and Sid Vicious padlocked chain.

  The friends turned off at the Cajon Pass, a heavily trafficked mountain throughway that was once an old Indian trail. Then they drove west on the 138, past a stunning formation called Mormon Rocks, so named for the pilgrims who had followed a prophet’s call and trekked into the San Bernardino Mountains, looking for the Promised Land. Following directions that Don had given to Jello at the reunion, when they got to Palmdale, they turned at Avenue T and followed it until it became dirt and then continued into territory that was marked by a certain rusted-out truck from the 1950s and then a particular mailbox where you were supposed to make a right. They drove around in circles for awhile and then finally found a camper shell on blocks and some old vans. It was Don’s home.

  It was late in the afternoon, and Mike, Jello, and Mike’s girlfriend got out of the truck and began walking toward the camper. Mike immediately noted a strange thing: Don was sitting “Indian style” in front of it, meditating. There were squirrels on his body. “Dude, there’s a squirrel on your shoulder,” Mike thought, and then Don got up, realized that his son was among the trio, and started to weep. “I haven’t seen you,” he said, embracing his son. After the awkwardness of the moment had passed, Don showed his guests around, happy to welcome Jello and his friends into his desert kingdom. As they walked the land, Don pointed to the things he had built. There was a well a few yards from his trailer. And there were many others, scattered across the desert. “See,” Don said, pulling back a plastic sheet on one of them. It was about fourteen feet deep and you could climb down on a ladder. At the bottom pot plants were growing. As they continued walking the desert that day, and over time, on other visits, Don talked of distance in clicks—military terminology. “He’d look at the mountains,” Mike recalls, “and tell you how many clicks away the wells were.”

  During that first visit, Jello told his father he wanted to stay with him. It was a decision he had been considering for awhile now, but when Jello caught the lay of the land, it was a done deal. Out there he could do all the drugs he wanted. He could live for free and make music. Maybe even get to know his dad. Don, a man used to living alone and valuing his privacy, was torn. Could he handle having a full-time resident on his property? Beyond that, could he handle his son, who was clearly having problems? But behind the trepidation, he was elated. Out in Llano, the two of them could get to know each other. He could make up for lost time, maybe even be a good father. There were things he wanted to teach his son, and now here he was, ready to learn. Or so it seemed at the time.

  So father and son agreed and the kid made the move. By then Don was living on the new property his sisters had purchased for him. There was an old primered van and Jello moved in. It was parked over a well, about a hundred feet from his father’s. Father and son fixed it up, hanging curtains on the windows and rigging a shower area outside. The shower had a curtain and a bag of water that was warmed by the sun. On one side of the camp, they installed an outhouse. Jello began calling his new pad “the anarchy van,” painting the word on the outside and hanging a black flag. The word was very much in vogue then; in fact it came right out of his scene—all of the artists and musicians and renegades who were shaking things up in places like Riverside, Portland, and Seattle, taking on modern empires and raging against the machine. The philosophy dovetailed nicely with the way Don lived and thought, a dressed-up (or down) punk version of “No trespassing.”

  Among Jello’s friends, the anarchy van became infamous. They would come and hang out in it, pulling the curtains in the hot sun, tilting the radio downward into the well and then climbing a ladder to the bottom. With the music blasting, they would align themselves with the curvature of the well and lie there for hours, drinking wine and consuming other substances, taking the high up or down. “It was, ‘Fuck you, this is my hole,’” Mike Cazares remembers. On several occasions, Don would join them, although since he was over six feet, there wasn’t all that much room. Once down there, he would get high too, generally on the pain pills he ingested regularly. Many ti
mes Jello was down in the well by himself, steering clear of the extreme heat, playing the guitar all day long.