Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 52) Vegas, LA, and back to Indiana

Vegas is the most rigid dollar-printer in the world, and puts to shame all other religions since mankind began. It is the Crystal Palace, the nirvana … it is the pinnacle of light that lost souls seek … it’s the one place where the meek may truly inherit the earth.

People go to Vegas when they don’t fit elsewhere … and yes, we all have dreams, but reality is, LV is a dirty truck-stop with two slot machines drilled in the wall next to the pisser, but we all end up somewhere, and I thought Vegas was the answer.

Creative minds may claim reign over LV but it is fraught, more than ever, with the clamor of people wanting something over the top of your back. The place is a line-dance of black-masked riot police lock-armed and stepping forward, step by step … enforcing the code of take-take-take. Suede-brown’s greedy eyes would moisten to tear.

I arrived in LV smack in the middle of the oil embargo. Remember the embargo … the artificial panic thrown on the public to justify raising gas prices beyond a dollar a gallon?

The gas shortage hadn’t oozed up to Utah since the state lives in a time warp, so I arrived in Vegas unaware and found dry holes at every gas station along the interstate.

The decision was clear; turn back to Utah or go forward and make my friend’s apartment in Los Angeles.
 
There was no going back, so I left Vegas driving toward LA with less than a quarter tank of gas. Fortunately just as the gauge teetered on empty, a desert station popped up with ample supply.

The embargo produced long gas lines in LA … and it was a mystical time to be there.

I stayed with my friend Tim, who is a perfect replica of Simon Pegg in the movie Shaun of the Dead, and carries the same deadpan hilarity inside a hurricane of human carnage. Tim is a gem of agreed-conformity yet nothing in the human delirium escapes him … he’s a demolition driver looking for a derby while laughing at the whole comedic scheme.

We knew each other from Indiana where five or six years earlier we pulled what turned out to be my final criminal act … a building burglary that netted two state-of-the-art electric typewriters. At the time, electric typewriters were the pinnacle of office efficiency and Tim had a plan to sell them in Indianapolis … and I went along to share the human space.

We removed the bars held in with 6 screws, pried open the window, and stole two of the 50 typewriters, and then hoofed them across campus over to the Tri-Delta sorority ... the whole time walking the opposite direction from where we lived … in case we had to ‘drop and run,’ it would throw off the investigation.

Tim wasn’t the least bit street wise. He wouldn’t know when to hold or run, so it was foolish going with him. He had bright red hair and they’d follow him like a burning flag.

We got away with it, but the entire caper was stupid. That criminal act was simply the end for me and I did nothing like that ever again.

I can’t say that stealing those typewriters made me sick, but it made me feel small.

Tim was a wanna-be criminal, and had a good façade for the con. He disappeared for a couple days from his apartment and I knew he was in jail in upstate Lafayette. He and another colleague invited me to go, but I knew to stay away from that caper.

Tim got arrested for possession of two stolen bikes that were hanging out of the car’s trunk … but during the preliminary hearing, neither officer could agree on ‘probable cause’ for stopping the car, so he walked free, except his Mom paid for the bail and the lawyer. That humiliation cost him more than anything. He was angry that she didn’t understand, but the real problem was deeper. It was about his father.
 
He told me the story about losing his father to heart disease when he was in grade school. Tim said it was a heredity heart condition that would kill him too.

Tim told me about growing up and how the other kids at school had fathers. I saw this small boy totally crushed by losing the enormous person in his life, and that terrible loss must have stolen all his hugs. It was sad. You must stay alive for your children.

It was against the law to sell gas in LA after dark and Tim knew some gas-station owners so we sat inside the glass-walled station, peering out for an hour with two guys uneasily holding guns. We were evidently waiting for the living-dead to crawl up out of Watts and stagger down Santa Monica Boulevard, but it didn’t happen. Tim tried to buy some gas, but those guys refused and we left.

The embargo lasted a week before gasoline was restored with prices above a dollar. Ca-ching, ca-wizzle … the market economy worked … but that wasn’t the market economy … it was no different than Noriega turning off electricity in Panama City to stop middle class protest.

I got a gopher job at a tile store in La Puente and moved into the worst roach-filled apartment imaginable. The apartment was unfurnished so I slept on the floor in the middle of that disgusting mess. No roach bomb was big enough to kill off that pestilence.

At night I ran my bike down to the Santa Monica pier but always rode on the sidewalks. In LA, nobody walks on two legs except at the beach, so the sidewalks were empty and the run was a fine dairy creamer at no-charge.

But LA felt like a bigger jumble of people than Chicago … despite the bad-mouthing Hollywood takes, I think LA is the truest melting pot of America.

It seems that a lot of people I had known over the years were in California. An old girlfriend lived in San Francisco so I drove there for the weekend and discovered we still had nothing in common. Another old girlfriend lived about two miles from Tim and we hung around a couple times but she had a budding love going with some guy … besides whatever we had years ago had disappeared. People change.
 
Dan the informer lived 50 miles away in Ojai, having moved from ‘the dark regions,’ as he called the sun-less Indiana winters. He gave up his painting business back home to pursue a spiritual life with the Krista Murti or whoever ran the guru thing there.

I visited Dan and we still enjoyed a good laugh at ourselves, and, although it remained in the back of my mind that he was an informer, it wasn’t relevant. We were still friends and he was developing big ideas and a desire to write, but actually I think he was descending into schizophrenia.

My wild-west trip ended five months after it started and my real girlfriend flew to LA and we saw the La Brea Tar Pits, and then drove on a camp-out trip through the Grand Canyon, Utah, Yellowstone, the Dakotas and back home to Indiana.

She was finished speaking to me by the time we got back. It was Love.
Chapter 53) The essential points of law
Index of chapters