As the weeks went by, Jello’s friends continued to visit, enchanted by the strange kingdom Don had conjured and learning more about the man himself. If you were in or near Don’s pad, there was static and chatter and codes coming from the police scanner, which was always on. Sometimes he used it to communicate with friends. Every now and then a biker would come by, and Don would meet him at his mailbox. Mike would think, “Whoa, look at this rocker.” He figured Don was picking up a speed delivery, but it was never discussed. Sometimes he was exceptionally dressed and carrying a bottle of wine. “I’m going to see this lady,” he’d say. “She does exceptional metal work.” It was a classic desert ID, not meant to be cryptic, offered to tell the truth by way of what was important without invading anyone’s privacy. But no one ever saw Don with “this lady,” or any other woman, or if Jello did, he never mentioned it to his friends. They figured there must have been a girlfriend somewhere, at some point, because Don—progenitor of Jello—was himself charming and attractive and, unlike his son, clean and neat. He bathed regularly and made a point of always keeping his Fu Manchu rolled up and tucked under his chin. His camper shell wasn’t exactly a chick magnet, but it was orderly and without dirt or grunge, reflecting a resident who cared about how things look. For a man who shunned company, Don was in fact kind of vain. At some point, it turned out that he did have friends—male ones at least. A couple of times Don took the boys to meet them. For instance, there was a guy out in the desert somewhere who had two double-wides parked side by side. Between them was a chair suspended by wires from a ceiling. Don would climb up into it, cover his eyes, and trip, hanging there for hours. There were also some musicians—gnarly old hippies—who lived in a compound nearby. One day Don and the boys went to hang out, and they jammed all afternoon. Don was proud of his son, the musician, and happy to introduce him to friends. Yet having round-the-clock company, and a land-mate no less, soon made him feel cramped and trapped, aggravating his general condition and amping up weird behavior.
For all of Don’s meditation and communion with nature and dedication to being a free spirit, he was often hyper and intense, and it seemed to some of Jello’s friends that something else was always on his mind. To Mike, it was as if he felt hunted, or haunted maybe, or both. Occasionally he talked about a cop and some past history, and he complained about a squatter who was hassling him. At his place on Avenue T, he had constructed various subterranean hideouts—one of which cops had found on the first day of the manhunt. All around the edge of his land was a labyrinth, largely consisting of burrows, about five feet deep and four to six feet wide, with entrances of about three feet in diameter. Some of them were linked, and had adjacent rooms with their own entrances and exits, and one of them led to the airstrip on Black Butte Road. Inside some of the tunnels were blankets, and you could stand up inside them. One of them had an air duct vent, and another had a periscope made out of rocket parts. With its attached mirror, it provided a 360-degree view of the desert. The burrows reminded Mike of the holes in the river washes of Riverside where the wild boar lived, emerging every now and then to freak out derelicts who lived there too, sometimes ending up as their dinner.
However unconventional the scene, together Don and Jello were becoming little boys again, running around in the open space, having deep talks, watching the stars, exploring the land, building things, and blowing them up. True to Don’s invitation at Bob’s Big Boy, they made and launched rockets together, and pictures of the two of them together at that time portray a happy father and son, admiring their latest creation—a three-foot rocket ready to blast off right in their own backyard. For Don, being in the desert and making rockets was a lifelong dream, having come of age with the country’s space program, imprinted with dazzling moments of exploration and adventure. For him, the moon walk wasn’t a Michael Jackson dance but a monumental thing that happened in 1969, when an American spaceship landed on the moon and astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped out and uttered the line that marked an era: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Friends say that Kueck was well-versed in the history of space travel, having followed it since he was seven years old, when the Russians became the first of nations to enter space, or “outer space” as it was then called, in a rocket dubbed Sputnik. The gravity-defying vehicle broadcast its signal around the world, and in classrooms across America, children sat and listened to the eerie static and high-pitched wheeees and other assorted odd sounds that were coming through from another dimension.
In a way, the dream of flight started with dry lakebeds of the desert, those great prehistoric wastes that seem to issue a challenge: “Hey you!” they call. “Come have a party! Fly me!” For America, from the beginning of the twentieth century through the present, many private citizens and a parade of military institutions have come to see the wide-open space of the west, and in particular the Antelope Valley, as a place where you can test limits. In fact the Antelope Valley has long been known as Aerospace Valley. In 1902, an early Antelope Valley pioneer set the first of many land-speed records on Rosamond Dry Lake by whizzing across the sands on a sailboat with wheels. From 1926 to 1933 new records were established there by trailblazers piloting rocket-like capsules on four wheels. Later, through a series of land acquisitions, Muroc Dry Lake—backwards spelling for Corum, the family that first home-steaded there—became Edwards Air Force Base, the second biggest such base in the world. From there, in October 1947, Captain Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier when he flew the Bell X-1 rocket research airplane at a speed of Mach 1.06, after it was dropped from a B-29 mother ship over the Mojave. Yeager and the other flyboys of the desert came to be known as having “the right stuff,” and it was a thing that was fueled by wide-open space. Over the years there would come many more aerospace feats and breakthroughs above the sands where they were dreamed up, and many of the men and women who worked to make those dreams a reality came to live in the Antelope Valley city of Lancaster—later, the command center for Deputy Sheriff Steve Sorensen and his remote desert outpost, and the place where his loss would be mourned by thousands.
Other than the fact that Kueck didn’t have a college degree, couldn’t hold down a regular job, and wasn’t interested in working for anyone, he fit right into this region of engineering geniuses. Quite simply, he loved rockets, and one of the things he did in the desert was build them, set them off, and track them. It was a thing he prided himself on, a trait he cultivated, a way that he tapped—perhaps unconsciously—into his Teutonic heritage, and connected with his family; after all, his grandfather had served with Kaiser Wilhelm’s army, and it was Werner Von Braun who had invented the rocket, the V-2 for the German army in the 1930s, before surrendering to the Allies and employing his signature skills in the development of America’s space program. Out in the Mojave, Don had deployed his own method of space exploration, making sophisticated projectiles out of desert treasure, with Jello and his friends serving as apprentices. For instance, he would find hollow metal fenceposts at various locations across the desert, some at the many piles of flotsam and jetsam that were wedged on the sides of washes, deposited there by flash floods, along with all manner of other junk—old refrigerators, old sofas, scrapbooks, pots and pans, the remnants of who knows how many lives that had been swept away long before the weather took what was left. Sometimes the fenceposts came from old homesteads built during the Depression, their perimeters still bearing that rare item of value that attracted desert scavengers, something made of metal that could be sold or traded, or hammered out and flattened into a patch for a leaky roof, pressed into service as a pipe or funnel, or just something that was shiny and dressed up a pack rat’s trailer. “I collect fence posts. Why I don’t know” would not be an unusual comment for a local to make, and his or her brothers and sisters might keep it in mind, knowing where to go if they ever needed a post for whatever reason. Don had acquired a number of these posts on junk runs by himself or with Jello, and whenever he wanted to launch a rocket, he’d add
wings and tips and make other adjustments, and then he and his son and sometimes Jello’s friends would pile into the Lincoln and head to a launch site.
Once there, they’d load the rocket with fuel, arming it with a homemade mix of propellant or attaching M-80 firecrackers. The fuel might be a concoction of sugar, sulfur, potassium nitrate, and water, or sometimes Don would use sulfuric acid or nitroglycerin, which he probably got in trades with friends and associates; the desert is one big Kmart—whatever you need is there, either out in the open or through the right person—and whatever Don required to construct his own space-bound capsules, he found. And ever the innovator, sometimes he tried unconventional recipes, such as mixing a fuel of peanut shells and some mystery fluid, lighting the liquid with a blowtorch, and then standing back to watch the rocket take off from El Mirage dry lakebed and soar toward the next county. These launches were sophisticated, mind you; he kept elaborate maps of where his rockets were launched, noted wind-speed measurements (critical for any launch but especially in the Antelope Valley, where the winds often gusted up to sixty or seventy miles per hour, shifting direction and speed at higher elevations), wrote down where each rocket landed (they had self-deploying parachutes so they’d return safely), and studied all of the charts later, making adjustments in his rockets and type of launch accordingly. Like any dedicated scientist, he saved the records, and they had a special place in a certain compartment in his trailer, stashed away where they would be difficult to find, lest a fellow scavenger enter his pad when he was gone and make off with all of his secrets. Interestingly, gripped by the same fear, von Braun made sure that the blueprints for the top-secret V-2 were not destroyed by the SS at the end of the war, hiding them in an abandoned mine shaft in the Harz Mountains of northern Germany.
This connection with serious science was a thing Don was so proud of that he made a point of telling friends and relatives that he was out there hobnobbing with local engineers, comparing notes on rocketry and attendant matters. To some of these friends who had seen him in action with his inventions and those selfsame engineers, he seemed at his happiest in those moments, never more so than when he was designing and launching his own vehicles, from his own personal test sites in the nether regions of the Mojave, sometimes right at the perimeter of Edwards Air Force Base. Perhaps the launches near the base were a joke, a way to tell the man to “Fuck off, I got my own rockets bro, and I know my rights, motherfuckers. Where does it say in the Constitution that I can’t set these off?” But also perhaps the launches near the base were a way to get close to the kind of life he could never have—one of respectability and acknowledgment by his equals—or possibly even a way to commune with his father, an Air Force pilot who had died some time after Don had left home. For many years, Don had told friends he missed him.
But it was through rockets that he tried reaching not just for the past, but for the future, his own son. The movie October Sky tells a true and similar story about a father and son who connect this way, although it is the boy who initiates the journey. In the case of Don and Jello, the trajectory was the reverse, with the father introducing the son to rockets, hoping to show him a way out. The act of guidance was witnessed one day when a sister of Don’s paid him a visit, elated to see her brother and her nephew toiling away on a new projectile, putting the final touches on quite an impressive-looking missile, loading it into a launcher that Don had fashioned from his cache of desert junk. “Okay, hold that pose,” she said, raising her camera, and then father and son did so, holding the pose as if they belonged that way, next to each other and leaning against the rocket and grinning away. At this moment they were boys forever, igniting fires, watching things fly, attaching the past to a thing of their own making, and sending it into the endless sky of the Antelope Valley. But in a few years, their relationship would crash and burn, and then some time later, so would Jello. Soon after that Edwards would join the hunt for Donald Charles Kueck.
Some of Jello’s friends blame his demise on “a chick named Samantha.” A young woman who worked at a record company in Los Angeles, she had connections with hot new bands such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana and was passing out demo tapes in clubs around So Cal, including Spanky’s, which is where she met Jello. The pair struck up a friendship, and the three amigos remember that it was heroin-based. She was beautiful, bisexual, and a junkie—and she got Jello back into shooting it. In fact, Jello spent the night with Samantha before he moved out to the desert, getting high on smack—and he was floating on the high when he embraced his father after stepping out of his friend’s truck. From then on, he was never able to shake the habit. But of course the problem was much more complicated. There wasn’t a drug he hadn’t tried or wouldn’t. When he wasn’t down in the well getting blasted, he was above ground getting into trouble. For instance, there was the time he either ate or smoked some jimson weed—his friends don’t remember the manner of ingestion, but it happened, and there were serious consequences. Jimson weed—or datura—is a deadly plant with beautiful white flowers native to the desert. When Don would guide Jello through the terrain, he had pointed out the various plants and their functions—you could make a healing poultice out of creosote or sage, just as the Indians did—and he made a point of showing Jello jimson weed, telling him not to eat it and even giving him a pamphlet about its dangers. But every son rebels, even the son of a rebel, and so he consumed the plant and went blind—a strange echo of Don’s own story about having gone blind in San Francisco after an acid trip. Afraid to go outside, he stayed in the van for two days, in his leather jacket, Total Chaos T-shirt, and combat boots, playing his tapes and listening to the radio while Don brought him food and water. When his sight returned, he emerged from the van.
But from then on, Don’s early concern about sharing his kingdom was confirmed, even though his roommate was his son. Yes, they had hooked up over a couple of things—being boys together, running around in the desert, setting off rockets—but the arrangement just wasn’t working. Jello was one pissed-off kid; although he was sometimes too high to act out, the very act of getting fucked up and hanging out in a well for hours on end was not a good sign, and when he was not high, he was raging, lost in rants about cops, society, the world. Later, one of the amigos suggested that the two had been feeding off of each other’s anger. During his time in the desert, Jello had told Don about what happened to him in jail—how the cops had thrown him into a tank filled with skinheads, doing so, in his view, so he would get a beating. It was around the same time, oddly, that Kueck and Sorensen had their encounter on the road. Together father and son were a team united against rules and regulations, pissed off at the man, never talking about their own choices in life—or if they did, not telling anyone about it—and for sure, they did not make the big moves necessary to correct them. There in the sands of Llano, they festered and mulled things over, convinced that the deck was stacked against them. Their paranoia was nurtured by the relentless sun and an endless cocktail of drugs, sprouting new shoots all the time. Together they had reached a wall.
For refuge and advice, Don turned to fellow parent Virginia Smallwood. He would get in his old Lincoln or one of his Dodges and head into Riverside, stopping en route at his daughter’s, spending a day or two with her and her children before heading to the Smallwoods’. There, in modern civilization, he’d have a home-cooked meal, again joining the others who had come in for a moment of grace, and he’d speak of his son’s problems as well as philosophical matters and religious practices and he iterated the names of ancient warriors. The kids who gathered round Mrs. Smallwood’s table regarded him as an old soul who wandered in from some mysterious place, an elder whose mind was operating on some other level. When the night wound down, he’d watch television sometimes, amazed at the number of channels that were available as he flipped through them, accustomed to receiving only the Home Shopping Network out in the desert. On many occasions he slept over, on the couch or on the floor, which he preferred, because of th
e pain from his old back injury. By all accounts, he liked having the contact with what was becoming a kind of extended family, even though the situation with his own son was a mess. On several occasions, Don had resorted to locking Jello in the van, to get him to sober up. “I don’t know what to do,” he’d say. “He’s out of control.” Chris and his sister, Amanda, commiserated and agreed, and so did their mother. She was okay with the fact that Jello had decided not to hang around her house or kids any more, hoping this new relationship with his father would work out. But Jello’s friends had watched his descent into harder and harder drugs over the years, and once he had gone down the heroin road, they figured the game was over. Mrs. Smallwood was never one to give up on the lost kids of the Inland Empire, but even she had reached the end of her rope. “You need to man up,” she would tell Don. “It’s time for some tough love.”
There came the day that he gave it—not in the way she meant, like organizing an intervention or getting him into rehab—but give it, he did. After all, when you got down to it, he just liked being alone. He was not cut out to be a hands-on parent, whatever that meant. He wanted to dream and think and putter whenever he felt like it. Yes, it was one thing to hang out with your son and watch the stars or launch rockets, but having to deal with all of the fucking problems was just not part of the program. “You can’t live here,” he said to his son one day. Where and in what manner he said it we do not know. Maybe he had joined his son in the well, waiting for a break in the music, smoking a joint with him, and then as the high kicked in and calmed them, he told his son that things weren’t working out. At that point, maybe Jello passed out in a drug haze, or maybe Don climbed back out of the well and cranked up the music as a fuck you. Or maybe they were having an argument, and that’s when Don said it. At some point toward the end of their time in the desert, Don had once again locked Jello in the anarchy van, trying to keep him from running around the desert and scoring drugs. Jello was stranded there, detoxing presumably, with only the well as a refuge. After a few days, Don let him out. There was a fight, and the reunion was over. Jello had been out there for a year. He left the desert and headed for Seattle, where he could have all the heroin he wanted. And Don retreated back into his own private world, with one less fetter keeping him there.
A Desert Reckoning Page 18