It’s amazing what you can discover when you start to look in the right places.
From today’s classifieds in the Battle Mountain Bugle: “Several photos and negatives found in Turner Lane. They are miscellaneous shots of people fishing, and a school photo of an eighth-grader named Charlee. To pick them up, please…”
I think: Who on Earth would take the sort of time and effort to take out an ad for something so trivial? Not anybody where I come from. We’re not boring enough.
On this day, Battle Mountain is transformed. It is homecoming weekend, when the undefeated Battle Mountain Longhorns are taking on the hated Mustangs from Lovelock High, in Pershing County. Nearly every store window is soaped up with pro-Longhorn or anti-Mustang slogans.
And suddenly, I remember something. Back when Shar was squiring me around town, she brought me to see Tom Reichert, the head of Lander County building and planning and economic development. Tom was one of those people who didn’t really cotton to this whole armpit idea. He was polite, but prickly.
I dig through my notes.
“This is a very family-oriented place,” he’d told me. “The number-one adult entertainment in Battle Mountain is attending youth sports events. I guess it is embarrassing that we’re so lacking in things to do, we have to concentrate on our kids.”
Now, I’d talked to kids, asked them about growing up here, and mostly I got rolled eyes and vows to bomb out of there at the earliest possible moment. Still, I have to say, a whole lot of kids seem to have spent a whole lot of time soaping the heck out of this town for homecoming.
OVER AT THE Civic Center auditorium, high-schoolers are putting on a talent show. There are maybe thirty rows of seats, maybe twenty seats across. And in a town too small to support two fast-food restaurants, every seat is filled, moms and dads and little brothers and sisters, crammed in the aisles and spilling out into the vestibule, craning to see and straining to hear, over an insufficient PA system, a high school girl lip-syncing Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”
Afterward, everyone—kids, parents, teachers—repairs to the high school grounds, for the homecoming bonfire. There aren’t many trees in these parts, so Battle Mountain High makes do with a giant mound of wooden forklift pallets donated by local businesses.
When ignited with gasoline, these frames make a better than passable bonfire, the flames licking 50 feet into the night sky, against the cheesy backdrop of high-rise signs for the McDonald’s and Super 8 Motel, the pyre disbursing heat devils that dance on the grass like little tornadoes. Chipper, fresh-faced teenage girls in cheerleader costumes, girls no bigger than Labrador retrievers, are high-stepping and kicking and chanting in voices that squeak, “We are the mighty, mighty Longhorns,” and even littler girls on the side are imitating their varsity big sisters, and the high school band is playing a spiritedly terrible “Born to Be Wild,” and parents are whooping and cheering, passing cameras back and forth to remember this forever.
The bonfire throws a lot of heat. You really feel it. It stings your eyes, and reddens your face.
IT’S ALL ABOUT the football game, of course. The Longhorns have a shot at the state championship, but first they must destroy Lovelock. One cheerleader, Natalee Ormond, sixteen, in full costume, has an arm in a sling. What’s a broken arm? This is homecoming; you play hurt.
The game has started, but I am watching the grandstands, not quite believing my eyes, and doing some math, and not quite believing my numbers. I count 670 people here, plus the players, which amounts to approximately one-fifth the entire population of Battle Mountain. In the city of Washington, that would be like 115,000 people showing up for a high school game between the Ballou Knights and the Woodson Warriors.
The game is too close for comfort—Battle Mountain is leading 17–14 in the fourth quarter—when the Longhorns have to punt from their 40. A bad snap. Gasps from the crowd. Longhorn punter Nick Sandru is forced to tuck the ball and run. He cuts right, shakes a tackler, sheds another, and races 60 yards for the touchdown, and the game.
The crowd explodes. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a figure in jeans and a polo shirt racing down the sideline, jubilantly trailing the play, arms pumping the air. This is not a coach or a trainer. This is someone who got so beautifully caught up in the joy of this moment that all professional skepticism and cynicism have evaporated here in Battle Mountain, the place she doesn’t want to live.
This is Lorrie Baumann, the hard-bitten newspaper editor.
THE SHIRT THAT Rose Carricaburu is wearing has a photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, and beneath it, it says, “If you want to burn the flag, why don’t you ask one of these guys for a match?” Rose owns this place, Rosa’s Cantina, out across the railroad tracks, near the whorehouse.
A month after September 11, you can see plenty of American flags in town, though the pall that hangs over Washington and New York is not evident here. Osama bin Laden is unlikely to be targeting Battle Mountain. The can behind the bar is taking donations, but not for disaster relief. “We Love You, Sherry,” it says. Sherry is the owner of a nearby bar, and she has a bum ticker, and they are raising money to maybe get her a new one.
Rose is collecting for a business rival?
“There are no rivals in Battle Mountain,” she says.
A weathered-looking guy sidles over. He is James Hopper, who owns H&H Exploration. “There’s a flag flying on my trackhoe,” he says. “The terrorists, what they’ve done? They’ve screwed up! They vaporized those poor people in New York, and they brought the whole nation together. The way I see it, little town USA is just like Big Town USA. We all have hearts, and we all bleed.”
He extends a hand.
“The way I see it,” Hopper says, “you’re my friend. Right?”
Oh, man.
BRIAN THE PHOTOGRAPHER and I are cruising the streets, one last tour through town, and I am explaining to him my dilemma. I don’t want to officially declare Battle Mountain the Armpit of America, and the townspeople don’t want me to, and I don’t have to, and, truth to tell, maybe it isn’t. Sure, it’s got some jerky people, but it has some fine people, too. Maybe it’s not the armpit. Maybe there simply is no such body part now.
On the other hand, Shar Peterson was right. Back there on the phone, before all this began, she was dead-on right. You don’t have to be an economist, or a sociologist, or an architect, or a land-use planner, to understand that this place is in trouble. It’s got almost nothing going for it.
In America in the twenty-first century, you need something. You need an identity. A personality. You need to be someplace someone’s heard of. You need to be able to pass a word-association test. (“L.A.” “Movies!” “Detroit.” “Cars!”)
There’s no answer for “Battle Mountain.” Yet.
That’s my dilemma. Do I hurt them in order to help them?
Lord, give me a sign.
Brian sees it first. He stops the car, and looks up at the sky, and points. My jaw drops.
God may indeed work in mysterious ways. But one thing, surely, is no mystery: He uses available material. When He visits destruction upon the tropics, He doesn’t send a blizzard, He summons the power of the warm seas and the tropical winds.
In Battle Mountain, He writes in flickering neon.
Above us looms the highest structure in town, the giant sign on stilts 40 feet above the gas station, an enormous red and yellow SHELL.
The S is burned out.
SO HERE IT is, for better or worse.
Having objectively examined the evidence, which is clear and convincing, and having reached its conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt, the Washington Post hereby confers upon the town of Battle Mountain, Nevada, the title of Armpit of America, with all the privileges and responsibilities therein.
I FIND MYSELF returning again and again to something Tom Reichert said to me. Tom is the economic development guy who didn’t like the armpit idea one little bit. He argued and argued, and finally said, with some defiance: “
Well, if you’re going to make us the armpit, fine. You do it. Maybe we can work up some sponsorships. Maybe Secret antiperspirant will buy new uniforms for the girls softball team.”
That, Tom, is exactly the idea.
And it would be just the beginning.
I can’t make this happen. I’ve just handed you a tool. The rest is up to the image-makers—people like you. And Shar, who better than anyone understands the possibilities. And Lorrie, who cares way more than she lets on. And Doug Mills, who might consider changing the wording on the Battle Mountain T-shirts he sells at his pharmacy, if you get my drift.
A renaissance for Battle Mountain? The way I see it, this is America, we’re all in it together, and anything is possible. All it will take is a little sweat.
Postscript: They did it.
First came the billboards on Interstate 80, bragging about the town’s new axillary distinction. One read
BATTLE MOUNTAIN—VOTED THE ARMPIT OF AMERICA BY THE WASHINGTON POST. MAKE US YOUR PIT STOP!
Next came the Festival in the Pit, an annual town fair and carnival, sponsored by Old Spice, that drew visitors from all over the state.
Eventually, the financial anxiety caused by the recession of 2008 turned Battle Mountain’s gold mines into… gold mines. Property values soared, jobs flowered and the New York Times gave the Armpit a shave, declaring it, at least for the moment, America’s boomtown.
My Father’s Vision,
Part I
My father, Philip Weingarten, was born on the day, almost to the minute, that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, triggering the first World War. I used to joke with my father that he might be the reincarnation of the pompous, colorful, kangaroo-hunting aristocrat with the preposterous mustache and the ostrich-plumed pith helmet. As penance for his prior arrogance and ostentation, I told him, he’d been consigned to live this next life as a meek Jewish accountant in the Bronx.
December 29, 2002
MY FATHER WAS waiting for me downstairs, punctual as always, smiling as usual. But when he got into the car—we were headed to my house for dinner—he said, “I have a problem.”
I am not sure I’d ever heard him use that phrase before. At eighty-eight, my father is half deaf, three-quarters blind, and 100 percent “fine.” He has no problems whatsoever. He would not consider it a problem if, at dinner, his nose fell off into the soup. “I’ve still got face holes,” he would say. “I’m fine.”
So he had my attention, and he kept it.
“I’m seeing things that aren’t there.”
“What sorts of things?”
“People. People with big teeth.”
I pulled out into traffic.
“When do you see them?”
“All the time. I’m seeing them now.”
“How do you know they’re not real?”
“Well, if they were real, you wouldn’t be running them over.”
Ah.
And suddenly, I knew.
“Do they look like cartoons?” I asked, as matter-of-factly as I could.
“Yes.”
“Are they dressed any special way?”
For the love of God, don’t say in military outfits.
“Some are wearing uniforms. Khakis. They have chevrons on the sleeves.”
Several years ago, while doing research for a quasi-medical humor book I was writing, I happened upon the description of a real neurological condition so rare, and so preposterous, that even some neurologists haven’t heard of it. Peduncular hallucinosis occurs when perfectly sane people begin to see small, unthreatening cartoon characters, often in military attire. It is usually caused by a stroke or a tumor deep in the brain. Historically, the diagnosis has been confirmed at, ah, autopsy.
There might be 500 people in the United States who either have this condition or know enough about it to recognize its symptoms, and, near as I could tell, two of them were in my car.
“Do you see anything else? Animals?”
“Only donkeys.”
(I feel it necessary to assure you that this is all completely true.)
My father has always been a meek man—given to understatement, reluctant to assert himself, content to let others set agendas. And yet he is also the most practical and centered person I have ever known, blessed with a peace of mind I envy. Because worry is counterproductive, he simply banished it from his life. When I dropped out of college with three credits to go, and proceeded instead to infiltrate a teenage street gang with some vague notion of writing about it, it was my father who persuaded my mother to get her head out of the oven. He said I probably knew what I was doing, and, to my mother’s astonishment (and mine), he was right.
Throughout my adult life, my father has remained—even now, in his fragile winter—a bedrock of patience and reassurance upon which can be balanced the most fanciful of ambitions. On this unyielding ground, no plan I ever made ever seemed rickety or unsafe. I’ve never feared risk.
“How long have you been seeing these things?”
“Two days now.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
Silence.
“You thought you were losing your mind.”
“That might have bothered me a little, yes.”
We dined that night on false cheer. Afterward, as I was walking him to the car, my father froze in his tracks. He wouldn’t budge. I felt his arm trembling.
“There’s a hole in front of me,” he said. “A deep pit.”
I assured him it was level ground, but he would not move. My wife came out and gently took his other elbow. Trust us, she said. So my father closed his eyes, took a breath, and stepped out into the abyss.
The next day we went for a brain scan. No tumor, no stroke.
My father doesn’t have peduncular hallucinosis; his is a similar condition—equally bizarre, but not as rare and not as dire—that sometimes afflicts people who lose their eyesight late in life. The hallucinations are identical.
“You can’t see, and your brain is getting bored,” the doctor told my father, “so it’s filling in the blanks.”
That brain of his—still as sharp as yours or mine—is doing a splendid job, churning out images his ruined eyes can no longer provide. Colors are brighter, movements are more distinct, and the details he sees—wedding rings, epaulets, facial expressions—are precisely the things that long ago disappeared for him into a blur.
And the people! I suspect it reflects well upon the human species that when our brains are freed to create a world of their own design, they deliver happy mischief. His cartoon characters resemble the work of R. Crumb, my father said, and the Katzenjammer Kids, and Tom Toles’s chubby little bureaucrats, and Goofy the dog. Buckteeth everywhere. (They don’t say anything, but if they did, it would probably be some variation of “gawrsh.”)
“Could be worse,” said my father.
How?
“They could be frightening.”
True enough. In the world of cartoons, pain is funny, and no one ever dies.
He was studying something on the floor. I asked what it was.
“A person.”
What’s he doing?
“Floating down to the ground, using an umbrella.”
Sometimes the hallucinations go away, the doctor had told me, and sometimes they don’t. Mostly, people simply learn to navigate this strange new world.
“You know, Pop, these people might be with you for a while.”
“I know,” he said.
We were walking to the car.
“So I’ll move around them. Or wait for them to move a little. I’ll be fine.”
There is a small pivot point, I think, where meekness and courage are indistinguishable.
“What are you seeing right now?”
“RFK Stadium.”
“Where?”
“There.”
It was a man, walking a dog.
My father shrugged, smiled. He sees what he sees.
We drove in silence fo
r a bit.
“Now I’m seeing cardboard signs on the side of the road. With Hebrew letters.”
“What do they say?”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “You know I can’t read Hebrew.”
Of course, of course. What was I thinking? My father is eighty-eight, and he can’t read Hebrew, and he is not losing his mind, and he is not dying, and RFK Stadium is on a small street corner in Bethesda, Maryland, where it will likely remain for some time.
Everything was fine, just fine.
We rode off together, unafraid.
Snowbound
When I was an editor, I once issued a challenge to five writers: Hammer a nail into a phone book, then go write a great profile about whomever the nail stopped at. The idea was to test the old maxim that in the hands of a skilled journalist, absolutely anything can be a story. My five writers did splendidly; they proved it correct.
That was the basic principle behind “Snowbound.” I’d been on a plane, leafing through the maps in the in-flight magazine, when I saw the silly-sounding name “Savoonga.” It was a flyspeck island off the coast of Alaska, in the Bering Sea, not far from Siberia. It was nowhere. It would be populated by nobodies. When my plane landed I called my editor and proposed that he send me there the following week, still in the dead of winter, with no preparation at all. Not even a minute of research.
“Why?” he asked.
“Just let me do it. It’ll be funny,” I said.
He did. It wasn’t.
May 1, 2005
LET’S SAY YOU were looking for a vacation destination in winter. And also, that you were out of your mind. You might pull out a map of Alaska, locate Anchorage, and then let your eyes roam north and west, across mountain ranges, through millions of acres of wilderness, until you ran out of dirt. You would be in Nome. Nome: the last outpost, Babylon on the Bering, famously dissolute, said to be home to the desperate, the disillusioned, the hollow-eyed, the surrendered, the exiles, the castaways, the cutthroats, the half dead and the fully juiced. Nome, the end of the Earth.
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 10