Low Life in the High Desert

by David Hirst

  According to the medical dictionaries, which are all we are able to consult in the absence of a health system, stopping drinking, followed by rest, is essential for the liver to have a chance.

  But Buzz needs to work, and his job is as day barman at the Joshua Tree Saloon, a bar at the foot of the Joshua Tree National Park. It’s not the place to give up drinking. It’s a desert bar, a bar where people come to drink, and drink a lot. It’s an old-fashioned bar — a drinker’s and a smoker’s bar. Probably the worst place on earth to give up drinking. But it’s his job, and, apart from singing, is pretty much the only thing he can do.

  Dan Dan and I discussed this situation at some length. Buzz should have been on sick leave, but as with many jobs in the desert, Buzz and everyone else are paid under the table. He gets $3.50 an hour — more than a dollar under the legal hourly wage. Buzz lives off the tips. Being a showman and something of a local hero, he does better than most men. But he can work twelve hours, and leave with only $50. The question of sick leave was not even raised by his employers.

  But it was by Dan Dan, whose business had been flourishing, improbably enough because of the resurgence in religious activity. The local churches, flush with money, were lining up to put in the sort of sound systems that The Rolling Stones would be proud of.

  Dan asked me to watch his beer. As it was a Bud Light, I said I’d rather not, but he headed out to his truck, returning with a cheque for $200.

  ‘Take that around with the health drinks, and tell him there is more when that runs out,’ Dan proclaimed.

  I drove the few hundred metres to the home of Buzz and Laura, his girlfriend. Buzz waved me in, too sick to get up. He was in his cell, the tiny TV room about the exact size of a jail cell, and the room he feels most comfortable in.

  He was naked except for a blanket, and was running hot and cold, shivering all over. After an hour or so, Laura came home and I headed out. The sun was a few inches above the San Bernardino range, and the light was at its best.

  Old Jack, the honorary mayor of Pioneertown and long-time resident of the motel, had just made it through to his going-away party. He was as yellow as a submarine, but the party was a happy affair. Jack’s days were numbered in hours — about fifty of them, as it transpired. Most of the town was in attendance, and the young girls flocked to old Jack, who smiled and gleamed like a fifteen-year-old. He was presented with a grey top hat — the last having been stolen — and a fine grey cane. Jack’s face never lost its toothy grin. Two days later, he was dead.

  Bob Dix wanders the world with a concoction that he calls coffee but which is, in fact, homemade Black Russian. It saves him money at the bar. His constant companion, Adam, will drink nothing but Budweiser unless he’s run out of it, which doesn’t seem to happen often. In the absence of Bud, Adam will drink pretty much everything except the excellent water from his well. Lil Debbie used to drink only Kessler — a sign of her loyalty to Buzz, as Buzz would drink nothing else. But as Buzz had shown no intention of leaving Laura, Lil Debbie recently kicked the stuff completely and now just as religiously drinks vodka with orange.

  Crinkly Jim did not cheat The Reaper. Having exquisitely renovated the house by the pool, he repaired to Lil Debbie’s, weakened by the daily assault on his liver and a bout with Hepatitis C. Boo visited, and, alarmed by his colour, took him to the emergency section of High Desert Memorial Hospital in Palm Springs. The doctors rushed him in, one remarking, ‘Sir, you are glowing!’

  Jim was in high spirits, and expected to be discharged quickly. But when Lil Debbie went to see him a few days later, she found a virtual corpse. His skin had gone dark, he was snoring loudly, and was dead to the world. She tried to wake him, but he snored on. Finally, a nurse coldly informed her that her man would never wake up again. He was effectively dead.

  32

  Jim passed away in Palm Springs — not his favourite town, but one he must get used to, as the local hospital refuses to release his mortal remains to the likes of us, and now, six months later, he is still on the slab awaiting pick-up by a relative. As Jim had no known living relatives, and the hospital was reluctant to pass him into the possession of his fiancée, Lil Debbie, he may remain there for some time to come.

  The dead of Palm Springs are indeed many. Gene Autry is credited, along with Roy Rogers, with creating Pioneertown in 1946, but found himself drawn to the bottle and to Palm Springs when the cowboy period had passed.

  Bob Dix, the son of Richard Dix, a man in his time more famous than Autry or Rogers, has retired to Pioneertown. He knew Autry, and testified to the massive drinking habits of ‘the singing cowboy’.

  ‘He was a mean drunk,’ recalls Bob. Autry himself conceded, ‘No one can live in a bottle and build, or maintain, a multi-million-dollar enterprise.’

  But he did all right, and died worth $600 million. It was not a lot by local standards, leaving him a pauper compared with neighbours such as Walter Annenberg, Marvin Davis, and the rest of the big-big-money crowd, but enough for a few more bottles.

  When Boo first dragged me down to Palm Springs — she was dying for some traffic lights, and green grass and flowers, and movies that showed stuff other than the first-run Hollywood crap they played in Yucca Valley — I hated it. While she went happily gallivanting off through museums and thrift shops, the only type of store she can stand, I propped myself up in a corner of a bar on the main drag with The New York Times. Every so often I would glance up to watch the world go by, and found myself staring at a life-sized sculpture of Lucy Ricardo sitting on a park bench opposite. Lucy’s ties with Palm Springs go way back. She and Ricky started one of the first gay hotels back when the word ‘gay’ still meant ‘happy’.

  Palms Springs was then — and, some say, remains — the closest centre of civilisation to our version of the Wild West.

  Civilisation or hedonism. And money — waves of money that have washed down from the San Jacinto Mountains and found root in the ‘downstairs desert’ since Hollywood started hiding out there in the late 1920s to sin. Where women could have other women and men take boys, and everybody knew and nobody cared. As long as nobody talked. Until recently, no one did — for this is a place where some hotels, like the old Silver Sands, which adjoined Errol Flynn’s Casa del Sol, provided ‘blue movies’, lubricants, and much more for guests who, like Errol, enjoyed it both ways.

  Every president since Ike Eisenhower has partied there. For decades, the Reagans thought it unthinkable not to spend New Year’s Eve at Walter and Leonore Annenberg’s palace, Sunnylands. The Reagans took time out from Ronnie’s 1976 presidential campaign to attend the wedding party of Frank Sinatra and Barbara Marx at Frank’s sprawling desert pad, which then housed an art collection worth a cool hundred million. When JFK came to stay in Palm Springs, he incensed Sinatra by keeping clear of him and staying with Bing Crosby, driving Frank into the Republican camp. He had been bragging for months that the president was coming, and had spent millions on securing and improving the compound for his guest. But Bobby Kennedy, horrified by the prospect of his brother being tarred with the mob brush, banned the visit, and Frank took a sledgehammer to the newly installed presidential heliport.

  Nixon hid out from the media at Sunnylands when he was on the run from the media hounds during the last days of Watergate. George Bush senior, never an insider amongst the Hollywood crowd, incurred the wrath of the Annenbergs when he allowed the release to Agence France-Presse of a photo of himself and Japanese prime minister, Toshiki Kaifu, relaxing by their pool. No one invaded the privacy of Walter’s 32,000-square-foot home and its 6,400-square-foot living room.

  Pioneertown fears and hopes that the super-rich will discover their idyllic world, which is a little more than an hour away. The people from the gated communities do venture up, and what they see and smell scares them. They stagger in, weighted down by age and jewellery, and are horrified to see our wild bunch and to smell not only tobacco but m
arijuana in the air. When the police arrive, the long-suffering Harriet calls in the DILLIGAF high command, who put the word out that the smoking must stop. And for a time it does. No one wants Harriet to lose her licence, and all try their best not to inhale. But it’s hard to have to walk twenty yards or so from one’s drinks to have a furtive smoke. So the habit remains.

  The irony is that the old rich enjoyed hedonism and criminality on a scale that would make the Edwards family blush collectively. But in a town that tolerated the drunkenness, promiscuity, and homosexuality of Jim Bakker while he called on the world to repent its ways, the irony seems lost.

  The one thing we have in common with the filthy rich is a fondness for drink. Of debauchery we have very little, and few can match the drinking excess of the now-departed Sinatra and Dino Martin, the leaders of a whole town running on booze for fifty years.

  Of the great debauched families of Palm Springs, the Daryl F. Zanucks stand out. Zanuck, at the height of his power at Twentieth Century Fox, had a seventy-foot swimming pool, known as the ‘Palm Springs Yacht Club’, and his pick of the stars at the studio. A wonderful life indeed, and one that was to soon dissipate the fortunes of the studio. But the family did not prosper, and son Richard was tossed out of Fox after attempting a palace coup in 1970. Daughters Susan and Darrylin fared worse. Susan was beaten to the grave by her father by only six months — she died of ‘massive alcohol consumption’ in 1980 at the age of forty-six. Her son followed suit, choking on his vomit after a goodly dose of heroin and cocaine a year later. He was buried with his needles, headphones, and favourite cassette tapes. He believed, apparently, in life after death.

  Salvation, of a kind, came to the lower valley when Betty Ford opened the world’s most famous drug- and booze-treatment centre in Rancho Mirage. A more appropriate place, on the outskirts of Palm Springs, could not be envisioned, but its cost for a three-week stay is out of the price range of just about every member of Pioneertown.

  Palm Springs is known as the ‘gay nineties’, a reflection on the town’s sexual bent as well as the folks’ age.

  This is a little unfair. Although the small resort town has always enjoyed a gay bent, the age of the sexually active population is being lowered somewhat by the influx of the retiring gay population from cities such as San Francisco, LA, and San Diego. Every Easter, twenty thousand gay men descend on the little enclave for the famous White Party, one of the West Coast’s largest gay festivals.

  They are not the only ones dancing. Since the late nineties, local realtors have watched the desert’s new chic reputation send property prices soaring right up there with the mighty San Jacinto mountain that looms above the good life below. Sparked by the revival of the late-modernist architecture known as ‘Palm Springs Modern’, homes have been snapped up at prices of up to $5 million — for cash. These are fabulous, sleek houses of glass, rock, corrugated metal, and cement, with walls that vanish to usher in desert views and breezes. Designed by visionary, futuristic architects such as Richard Neutra, Albert Frey, and John Lautner, they are perfectly suited to the desert environment, which has been described as ‘nature’s version of modern art’. Lautner’s extraordinary hilltop home for Bob Hope resembles a giant mushroom, and presumably that is what Hope was on when he okayed the design.

  Although one consciously knows that summer is ending when September comes around, the month itself seems unaware that it’s time to move from the stage and let fall fall. In fact, as if possessed by a desperate need to establish its dominance, summer unleashes a final fury.

  Those with something approaching a brain try for cooler pastures. With the heat, September brings upon us a monsoonal mugginess that defies the swamp cooler’s best endeavours. Boo finds it necessary to visit LA more often, and some of the local men consider the necessity of fishing.

  The nearest decent trout stream is many hours away, up in the upper reaches of the Owens River, way along the 395. It’s a place where Desmond has contacts. That part of the Sierra Nevada is some thousand metres higher than the High Desert, and is commensurately cooler. Snow on the peaks is in evidence well into summer.

  So it was that Sean, Rodney, Ed Gibson, Buzz, Desmond, and I took it upon ourselves to provide the womenfolk with sufficient trout to last much of the winter to come — by taking ourselves many miles into the mountains.

  It was deemed that a week was needed to supply sufficient trout to feed the multitude, and one day in September we headed to the supermarket to buy supplies. Vast quantities of foodstuffs were purchased, and the trolleys groaned as we steered them towards that part of the store given to the provision of liquor.

  Ed Gibson headed for the selections that involved bourbon, and packed a few bottles of Gentleman Jack — a form of Jack Daniels considered to be, after Knob Creek, the best drop that money could buy. Rodney had already ordered a goodly supply of that substance, so it was left for Buzz to hook up a half-dozen bottles of Kessler, Sean to snap up the Mexican agave crop in the form of tequila purchases, and me to buy beer.

  Desmond mulled over his requirements, and settled for a few bottles of Jack and quite a few boxes of beer.

  In all, I figured, we set out on the fishing trip with some twenty bottles of hard liquor and maybe five hundred cans of beer. It was not much for a week’s fishing, but a start.

  We settled into our hut by the Owens River, and the fishing soon got confused with the drinking. Not that we didn’t fish. Buzz attacked the river with an alacrity that shamed Sean and me into doing likewise. Desmond, the truly wild specimen of these wild men, disappeared into the stream’s higher reaches to find wilder trout. Rodney wandered far across the valley, and by the evening of the first day we had caught more fish than we had destroyed bottles of hard liquor.

  The men of the High Desert keep unusual hours, and all bar I would be up and working on breakfast — the most serious meal of the day — before the sun had made its appearance, and while I steadfastly slept.

  Rodney took charge of most of the cooking. He is a superb bush chef, hearty in every sense of the word. Rodney advocates removing the horns from a steak before cooking it, and his concept of bacon and eggs required whole pigs and more eggs than one could point a stick at. When not sleeping, drinking, fishing, or playing cards, his robust person could be found in the kitchen with great iron frying pans sizzling, bowls of chilli boiling, trout in various stages of preparation, whole loaves of bread being put to work, and biscuits being baked.

  Desmond had found a suitable log for practising his axe-throwing on, which he did successfully, though he was rather taken aback to discover I could throw an axe equally well. Desmond is long, lean, wiry, and wild. His hair and beard untrimmed, his skin etched deep by the sun and wind, and a wide grin almost always present, he is forever delighting in life.

  On the morning of the third day, I was woken at about 6.00 a.m. by the men, whose conversation had taken a troubled tone. In that fitful condition between sleep and consciousness, I heard Rodney mutter something to the effect that our supplies of booze were running short.

  I had sat up reading the previous evening while the men snored. We were all crammed into a few small bedrooms, Buzz and Sean sleeping (we imagined) in the same small bed. The only place to read without the light keeping the early risers awake was the bathroom, where I had spent some hours struggling with Finnegan’s Wake, having cast aside the only other book available, The Coming War with China, as being far more fictitious than anything Joyce could contrive. Before tiptoeing to my cot beside Rodney, I noticed that a hole had appeared in our liquor stocks.

  A few hours later, in the grey of morn, I was awakened by conversation, and from the tone of that conversation the situation regarding the alcohol was becoming grave.

  ‘I think we might have to drive into Mammoth,’ I heard Rodney remark.

  ‘Either that, or reduce our drinking,’ Sean reflected.

  By the time I stumbled
from the cot, my companions had headed into the town some thirty kilometres away, and I had time to reconnoitre the remaining supplies. We had been reduced to one and a half bottles of Kessler, one bottle of Knob’s Creek, a quart of Jack, and fewer than three hundred cans of beer. A desperate situation indeed.

  I took out the rod and squelched through the grassy, watery valley to the stream. After not seeing grass, flowing water, and mud, and after not being cool for months, the sensation was sensuous, especially around my toes. As I pulled in my second trout (twenty-four inches) — Buzz won fifty dollars for coaxing a twenty-eight-inch brown trout onto the bank — the men returned with supplies.

  The liquor store at Mammoth had been closed, so they had driven on to Lee Vining, that apple of a town that invites one to enter Yosemite. Here they had found sufficient supplies of bourbon and beer to make the next few days liveable, and we all sat in the cool shade and engaged in a few days of serious poker.

  We returned to Pioneertown with six hundred pounds of trout and many a feast. It was time well spent.

  We also returned to discover that Buzz’s mother had come home, a matter that had occupied Buzz’s mind for a good part of the fishing, drinking, and gambling (not necessarily in that order) expedition. Buzz’s attitude to Alice, who had moved east six months ago, was not that of the average loving son. He figured she’d be back, and had informed us over a bottle that he’d pay good money to have her ‘popped’.

  ‘Two hundred dollars, and the contents of her purse’, was there to be taken by any soul willing to take the old lady out of the game.

  ‘Popping’ Alice, Buzz assured us, would not be difficult, as her only form of transport was a golf buggy that took her the three hundred or so yards from Ernie and Carole’s motel to The Palace at a slow pace.