by David Hirst
‘You can’t do that to a horse,’ Freddie opined. The horse seemed to agree, as it passed away down in the boiling desert.
29
Down in the lower desert, the temperature can hit 80, a figure that excludes human life. It takes a lot to fry the human brain, but fry it will.
I sat having a beer with Dave in the Wine and Roses bar overlooking Yucca Valley’s little airport. Dave is a safety officer on a large building site in the Low Desert, and has been dealing with the problem of heat a lot of late. In the past, construction would cease in the baking summer months, but now too much money is at stake as the gated communities spread like a disease across the desert. The builders know the vagaries of the economy. They have seen floods of money dry up before, and the half-million-dollar houses have to be built and sold with a weather eye not to the weather but the economy. The faster these tract houses for the rich can be sold, the surer they are of abundant profit.
Dave has to walk the line between meeting the demands of profit and not killing his work crews, who are usually from south of the border. He arrived on one site recently, driving through clouds that rose two hundred metres from a burning orange-packing factory, to find one of the workers unconscious. Within minutes, two other men had fallen to heat stroke, and Dave, equipped with saline drips and the like, closed the site and ministered to the fallen. They recovered, but in future they will have to be watched closely. According to Dave and anyone else in the know, the brain fries faster once it has first fried. Just as cold water boils slowly the first time but faster the second, the human brain, once mushed, mushes more easily after each mushing. Apart from brain damage there is the risk of death, and a death on a job site will lead to a lawsuit, and a lawsuit will gobble up the profits of half-a-dozen half-million-dollar houses. So Dave has a narrow row to hoe.
Later, as I sat writing, the heat caused me to open the front window. I leant from the laptop, slid the glass, and watched as a horned toad gracefully sailed into the living room. He sat on the carpet for some time, ignored by the dog. I captured him, with great ease, in a Trader Joe’s meringue bucket. The toad was grey, about the size of a woman’s fist, and, in common with other horned toads, had horns. They weren’t dangerous, and I stood reading the calorie count on the meringues as the thing expressed lethargic resistance. It hopped about a few times as I carried it outside, depositing it near the dog’s huge water bowl, and wandered back inside. I was about to deposit the meringue top in the trash when I noticed that the toad was still in it, clinging on — no doubt enjoying the remnants of sugar, flour, and vanilla. I returned him to the water trough and went off to mix a drink. A thought came to mind halfway through the process, and I returned to the laptop. Remembering my drink, I wandered back to the kitchen and was about to take a sip when I detected a scorpion struggling in the icy pina colada. The local scorps are not to be taken internally. I scooped the creature from my drink, crushed it, and returned to the battle station.
Dan Dan, who works in the Low Desert, deals with scorpions and other terrors of the desert as part of daily life. His work, installing music and security systems in the tract palaces, finds him often in attics where the heat can reach 70 or even 80 degrees. The attics are also the homes of the black widow and recluse spiders — huge nests of them, sometimes a score of nests to an attic. Into them he goes, clad in a sort of homemade space suit, his face masked, his gloves and boots taped at the ankles and the wrists so the spiders can’t get at him. With each step, a mini mushroom cloud of fine desert dust erupts from his feet and covers him in layer after layer. Just how hot it gets inside the suit is anyone’s guess, but when Dan climbs from the attic he actually makes a squishing noise as his sweat slurps about the suit.
Worse are the date-drying warehouses. Only a few miles from the grand tract houses, but deeper and lower in one of the world’s hottest deserts, fifty feet beneath the sea, are the huge squat buildings where thousands of crates of dates are left to dry. They attract all manner of the creepiest creatures that the planet has on offer — black widows, recluse, a finer variety of scorpions (over a hundred species in the Low Desert alone), and a close relative of the scorpion, the vinegaroon. The vinegaroon grows to four inches, is as fast as a mouse, and incredibly aggressive. The tail is like that of a scorpion except smooth, and although his bite is not as powerful as his cousin’s, he is, in Dan’s opinion, ‘a creature from hell and the ugliest thing you have ever seen’. They are named after the taste of vinegar they leave on the palate after inflicting a bite.
Although the same species can be found in the High Desert, those around and possibly in Boulder House are scorned by Dan Dan for being not nearly as big or aggressive. Likewise, the scorpions are bigger than ours — the largest growing to seven inches. ‘They make you real sick,’ says Dan Dan. ‘But I’d rather be bitten by a scorpion than a black widow,’ he adds, before going on to recount working under a sixty-year-old store, feeling in the dark, and placing his hand in a nest of rattlers.
The scene in the date warehouses would send James Cameron off to church. The date crates are stacked five feet from the warehouse walls, which for hundreds of feet are completely lined by the webs of the black widows. In each warehouse there are thousands of these horrifying nests, and again they compete with the even more treacherous and deadly recluse spider’s quarters. In the ceilings live the date beetles — monstrous, vile things the size of a large hand, and given to dropping onto Dan’s neck as he climbs a ladder to the roof to attach an electronic device.
‘They land with a thud on my neck,’ says Dan with a gruesome grin. ‘It’s all you can do to stay on the ladder.’
Dan involuntarily slaps at his neck, remembering the horrible moments when he swayed on a ladder, tearing at the beetle and hoping he didn’t fall into the nest of black widows below him.
Boo gave a terrible shriek recently when she found, in the rock room, a scorpion that had strayed into a black widow’s nest. For a while we watched the spider slowly and determinedly consuming the scorpion, in a scene made for National Geographic. And that was two metres from where she stood.
What a cocktail man and nature have created down below. To the blistering sand, man has added water for crops and golf courses (over one hundred of the latter, with more being built continuously), and to this has been added decades of pesticides and herbicides. From LA rolls a river of smog. In the morning, a green haze lifts from the desert floor as the morning watering of gardens and golf courses evaporates. No wonder that, in this mix of man, mammon, and merciless heat, with a new rich menu for creatures that have spent millions of years adjusting to survival in a wasteland, the creepiest of creatures now flourish. But the desert cities cannot grow further to the south, for there lies the Salton Sea. Cut off from the Sea of Cortez some five hundred years ago, it is now a repository of the chemical run-off from hundreds of square miles of dense agriculture. It stinks so high that Ed Gibson grew sick just driving by. And Ed’s about as tough as they get.
Here at Boulder House, perched above it all, we see clear blue skies through the day, and bright stars through the night. It’s a half-hour drive away, but a light year from man’s waste bins of the desert.
Exploring the dusty back roads off Highway 66 in Southern California, we were used to happening upon some fairly unexpected sights. However, the area around Helendale — a nothing kind of town — had little to recommend it. After some hours of scrubby, depressing desert that even the cactus looked miserable in, we were considering turning around when we saw the sign: ‘EXOTIC WORLD BURLESQUE MUSEUM’.
It was mounted on a chain-link fence that surrounded forty acres of desert scrub. Inside was a typical nondescript California ranch house. Beside it sat a navy-blue Rolls Royce. The gate was ajar, and we drove in.
The door of the house opened, and Marilyn Monroe appeared. She was dressed in black stretch pants, kitten heels, and a fluffy pink sweater with a tight, plunging neckline. It was a
bout 10.00 a.m.
The extraordinary apparition gave a little wave and sashayed towards us. Up close, Dixie Evans — then in her sixties — bore more than a passing resemblance to the woman she had spent her career impersonating. Beneath the full make-up and perfectly coiffed platinum hair, she was a tantalising hint of what Ms Monroe might now look like had she lived — and had a full life.
Dixie was delighted that she had Australian visitors — she was delighted she had any visitors — but Aussies were an added bonus, because she had spent her early childhood in Roma, Queensland. Her father, she explained, as she led us towards the museum housed in another building, had worked for an oil-drilling company up there in the tropical north, and her childhood had been very happy. In fact, it had been the happiest time of her life.
The museum itself was fascinating, but not nearly as fascinating as its custodian and guide. In a perfect Marilyn-like whispery voice, and using Fred Astaire’s silver cane as a pointer, Dixie showed us lovingly displayed gowns and G-strings of the goddesses of striptease — Lili St. Cyr, Gypsy Rose Lee, Tempest Storm, and all the others. Jayne Mansfield’s bathtub was there. Feathers, bling, and pasties of every colour each had a story to tell from an earlier, more innocent, age of erotica.
Whether it was the fact that I was a journalist, or that she was simply starved for company, Dixie began recounting story after story of her life during the golden age of American striptease when she had reigned as the ‘Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque’.
She insisted we stay for lunch, and ushered us inside the main house she shared with the widower of another legend of the stage. Jennie Lee, the famous ‘Bazoom Girl’, had died some years earlier after buying the old ex-goat farm out here near Barstow. Her plan was to provide a retirement home for the former girls of burlesque — and to open a museum honouring them.
Her old friend Dixie was now bringing that dream to life.
Jennie’s ashes rested in a lovely urn on the mantelpiece. Her husband came in and welcomed us, and then left his wife’s friend to tell her stories. No doubt he had heard them before, but we hadn’t. In that strange, dark house, Dixie hauled out box after box of photos and rare memorabilia she was still sorting for the museum. With each photo came a story about the girl smiling or pouting for the camera — the girls who thrilled men for a generation before this art form gradually lost its appeal.
Dixie was lamenting the end of America’s interest in the great tradition of burlesque when an extraordinary figure flashed past the window. She peered at us through a blanket draped over her head as she scuttled by. It was hard to tell how old the woman was, but her missing teeth and sun-toughened skin suggested a sad U-turn in her life. Dixie told us she was an ex-dancer, down on her luck, whom they had taken in. Because she couldn’t stand being indoors, she was currently living under a hedge.
As if things couldn’t get any more bizarre, the door opened and a dog entered. It was lacking a snout. The silly boy, Dixie, informed us, had got it bitten off while sticking his nose down a gopher hole. What with the toothless cloaked woman and the no-nose dog — and with Jennie Lee’s ashes presiding on the mantelpiece — I started to feel as if I was hallucinating.
Dixie herself almost seemed unreal — a phantom out there in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the glitz of another time. She told us she used to strip at one of Jack Ruby’s clubs in Dallas, and had her own theory about JFK’s assassin. Ruby was evidently obsessed with Jackie — so obsessed that he was prepared to shoot the man who killed her husband. That’s love for you! Dixie had absolutely no doubt about this.
The desert gets dark early in winter. Suddenly it was night. Our hostess insisted we stay over. She wouldn’t hear of us leaving. We were visitors from her favourite country, and simply had to stay in the ‘Honeymoon Suite’. As alluring as the red heart-shaped bed was, we had to hit the road.
Before the light went, Dixie offered to pose — à la Marilyn — draped across the Rolls Royce. The photo later appeared in an Australian newspaper with my article. We sent her a copy, and she was delighted. Other journalists followed the story up. A friend from British TV came and made a program about the museum and Dixie for a travel show. Maybe, she told us, the world was finally waking up to a chapter of its heritage that it had stuffed away in a drawer for too long.
Maybe Marilyn was finally going to come back from the dead.
30
Sean, who had got lost in a drugged wilderness from which he was emerging, wanted to make a mark on the citizenry for his thirty-eighth birthday. A few weeks before, we had gone together to take some cactus from a former friend of Sean’s, an amphetamine dealer who lived in a dilapidated trailer at the base of Goat Hill. It was thirty kilometres from Boulder House and an entirely different moonscape. Only goats and cactus and speed dealers could possibly live in such a place. Goat Hill is a jumble of broken volcanic brown rock surrounded by barren washes. The dealer had a generator — we were far from electricity — and the thing chugged away as we approached the caravan to inform Sean’s acquaintance of our intentions. The dealer wasn’t unfriendly, as Sean had once been a major customer.
I looked into the tiny ramshackle dive and saw a girl. She had once been very pretty, but speed had taken care of that. The spots on her face were identical to those I had seen on the coke whores of Venice. Her body was in good shape and most of it was in evidence, but she showed no modesty before my brief glance. The guy had the dope, and she was his chattel. He didn’t care who looked at her, and neither did she.
Sean explained our intentions, and the guy said it was cool — which it definitely wasn’t. Sweat was running from the leather band of my Stetson. We picked our way through the rubbish, old tyres, and equipment that lay baking in the sun as we returned to Sean’s truck. By the path stood a wooden box some three metres long and a metre high and wide. The remnants of a mattress spewed from a hole in the box, and Sean stopped and appraised this forlorn sight.
‘I lived here for six months,’ he remarked at the box. ‘In the summer,’ he added. ‘I was sick most of the time.’
Nothing else needed to be said. Sean was once a top gun in the coast guard. He had a letter signed personally by president Reagan, complimenting him on his role in the detection of a boatload of marijuana some years before. He lost the letter — and everything else — in the course of his speed addiction. He had come a long way from such distinguished service, but was fighting his way back.
The birthday party was partly his way of showing just how far back — and it had to be done right. Sean had been respected by the community for his strength and his mechanical skills, and before sinking into the slops had been well liked in Pioneertown. The party was his chance to let the town know he had returned to the land of the living. But this I was just learning.
We knew we were living in methamphetamine country. All around us were bits of blown-up houses that used to house meth labs, and we had wondered about them. Sean explained the dynamics of the drug.
‘You start taking speed, and you are up all night. You might fuck for three hours. And you are drinking and smoking all the time. You can drink a lot of whiskey and smoke a lot of cigarettes on speed. And of course you have to have dope [marijuana].
‘And you have to pay for all this, so you work for the speed. You need more speed to work. So you are working for speed. But the work you do is no good. You think you are working hard, but you are just making more work. And you never get the adrenaline naturally, because you are snorting or shooting adrenaline.
‘I’d clean a room, but really would have just taken a mess and put it somewhere else. So you lose your job, and you sell your tools for more speed. I once sold my welding equipment for three days of speed. One hundred dollars. It was worth five hundred. Then you start stealing stuff. I never did — I got too sick.’
Sean developed pneumonia in the course of a binge. Things got ugly, and his woman took his guns. Thin
gs got even uglier, and Sean ended up in the box in the desert, where he lay in delirium while a local Christian brought him food. The payoff for the food was Sean’s promise to attend church, so he found himself hiding out on Sundays until things got so bad he decided on religion before speed. His face was full of sores from the impurities in the speed, and his body was about lost.
‘I would have died, had I kept going,’ says Sean, who is now as fit as a trout and as strong as a brace of oxen.
Boo and I went along with the idea of a massive celebration, partly on the grounds that we felt one was due as well. We had successfully moved from the city to the desert, and had made peace with the locals.
Sean went to great lengths to ensure that none of the speed fraternity heard about the party. He wanted to be painted with a new brush in the collective consciousness. I feared that if the speed freaks discovered Boulder House, they would return and steal all but the boulders.
Sean, who was given to waxing biblical far too often (the Bible had played a major role in his rehabilitation), decided that the party had to include the killing and eating of a fattened calf. I argued that we needed Buzz Gamble and the Daily Blues.
We reached a compromise and agreed on the music, but in the place of the calf settled for a fattened pig.
A few years before, when Sean was amidst his battle with speed, those given to alarm had convinced themselves of the coming of the end of the world due to the Y2K bug. Sean had taken responsibility for a number of piglets to be raised so they could be eaten when ‘the system’ collapsed.