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The rough guts of a story yet-being-written 

poetic journalism by Rick McKinney
August, 1998


What you are about to read is a goddamn mess.  
It's a travesty of journalistic justice, a lump of jumbled verbiage, a gob of spit 
in the eyes of literature, to paraphrase Henry Miller.  And I don't give a 
damn.  I can't.  I don't have the time.  

I set out to keep a running journal of this trip, to write everyday and file 
stories to the website every few days.  Forget it.  It didn't happen.  For indeed, 
so much has happened and this road life has proved so intensely rich and 
distilled that I just haven't been able to keep pace with it.

So before we hit Portland next week for the Hawthorne Street Fair and 
Extremo's Art Car Parade, I must unload to you everything I've done so far, 
no matter how scrambled it be.

And it be scrambled.  

I'll try and set the stage for you, to toss off some facts before you wade through 
the chaotic rambling observations of my mind.

First of all, this is a tale of travel, a tale of artists on the road in art cars in the 
summer of 1998.  I begin with a few pre-trip ramblings, then hit the road, the 
computer as yet non-operational, writing notes in a steno while driving, 
attempting and failing to flesh them out during input into the computer 
weeks later, then suddenly finding myself so far behind on the story that I ask 
Tex to be my driver for the duration so that I can do nothing but write whilst 
we tack off the miles heading west.

At first there is just me.  In Minneapolis at the Lynn-Lake Street Fair and the 
Intermedia Arts Art Car Parade, I meet up with dozens of other car artists.  I 
give a speech at the symposium, the highlight of which is a poem I wrote that 
morning about my trip there.  When we leave Minneapolis, we are 9 vehicles 
inhabited by a total of eleven people.  However, Jan Elftmann in the Cork 
Truck is only with us as far as The World's Largest Ball of Twine in Darwin, 
MN.  So technically, we are a caravan of eight: 7 cars and one bus.  

The characters are as follows (and I have given everyone a pseudonym just to 
confuse things little more than they already are): 

The artist Seven from Bisbee, AZ, driving his car IFSM, or Interactive 
Functional Sculpture Mobile, accompanied by his canine helper & friend 
Baby.  Seven ought be a hero to all handicapped peoples, traveling for several 
months on the road with multiple health problems and without the use of 
his legs.  I first met Seven in Bisbee in the spring of 97, where I interviewed 
him for the Bisbee Daily Review.  Included in this jumbled mass of road 
notes is an interview with Seven on the philosophical and historical 
significance of ART, the American Road Trip in which we now are immersed 
like cherries in a whipped cream pie.

Chiquita from outside Ottawa, Ontario driving her car The Natmobile, every 
inch of the interior of which is covered with multi-colored feathers that 
quiver and move in the wind like undersea plant life of a corral reef swaying 
with the tides.  I first met Chiquita with the caravan's arrival in Minneapolis.  
She is working on her Ph.D. at Rice University in Houston.  Chiquita plays 
guitar and sings in the caravan's band.

Stockton from Houston driving his car With a Little Help From My Friends.  
I admit to knowing very little about Stockton.  I have heard it said that he was 
in a bad car wreck as a small child and would have died but that his father 
overrode the doctor's pronouncements and helicoptered him to a hospital 
where he could be saved.  Stockton is generous, has a good wit about him, 
and travels with his canine companion Bob.

Ned driving Max the Daredevil Finmobile with Ripper the Friendly Shark in 
tow.  Ned and his two spray foam masterpieces hail from Houston, where he 
worked diligently in the months preceding our journey to attract sponsorship 
to the caravan.  Ned is the lyricist and lead singer in the caravan's band The 
Fanatics.

Ramon, alternately driving Ned's Yellow Submarine bus and filming the 
caravan of art cars.  I know even less about Ramon, except that he claims to 
know something about everything.  Ramon is the caravan's video 
documentarian.

Trip, Ramon's assistant both shooting film and driving the bus.  Trip is also 
the bass player and co-songwriter and singer in the caravan's band.  

Chloe, as best as I can tell, a caravan stowaway but a good one.  Chloe keeps 
order on the bus and fills the role of caravan den mother.

Bird, he's the sax player in the band.  A quiet guy.  Keeps to himself and 
hardly says a word most of the time.

Tex, the band's drummer and now my driver.  Tex is a great help to both 
Seven and me, and he is faring well considering he left behind a new love in 
Texas and pines for her daily.

Big John, an apparent co-sponsor of Ramon's filmmaking efforts, driving a 
1957 International Truck that he bought in Minneapolis and is fated to repair 
and debug consistently during his tenure with the caravan.  Big John will 
separate from the caravan in Rapid City, taking Chloe with him back to Texas.

Then there's me, Duke, driving my car of the same name, Duke the Art Car, 
the 8 mpg Tower of Babble-on wheels.  I am the caravan's scribe, whether 
they like what I have to say or not.  

And briefly, there is Bobina, a 19-year-old girl from Mitchell, SD who takes a 
shine to us and follows us on the road across SD and for several days in Rapid 
City. 

And that's it.  Art.  Cars.  Movement across land.  American monuments.  
Fun-loving, good American people.  

Seven and I made it about two weeks with the caravan before leaving them, 
or being left behind by them.  It happened at Devil's Tower.  Stockton had 
already dropped out to stay in Sturgis, and Seven and I followed suit a few 
days later.  Now we're days behind the caravan.  They are, in fact, probably 
already in Portland.  We are in Bozeman, MT, as I now write, intent on 
visiting here a bit, then stopping at Jerry Johnson Hot Springs outside of 
Missoula on Sunday the 9th, Joseph Oregon on the 10th, then making a bee 
line for Portland where a new chapter will begin.


Pre-trip ramblings

I hate for this to begin here.  But I suppose it must.  Here.  In Corvallis, my 
own private Punxsutawney, PA.  

This is the story of the art car caravan that cruised America in 1998.  It is my 
version of that story, and as such it must begin here with me in Oregon and 
not with the boys down in Houston who started the whole thing, as perhaps 
it should.  Right now I imagine Ramon and Ned having cocktails in some 
downtown Houston high rise bar sweet-talking some corporate execs into 
sponsorship.  Hopefully those execs will be from Exxon or Chevron, hell, free 
gas from anyone would be fine with all of us I'm sure.  I imagine this, but I'm 
sure the truth lies closer to the kinda shit I'm scooping to get my ass on the 
road.  I can imagine just about anything.

But who would have thought I'd be scrubbing toilets and pushing a mop at 
the local U.S. Post Office just five days before embarking on the biggest road 
trip of my life?  Me?  Oh, yea, hello by the way.  My name is Duke.  I'll be your 
flight attendant for the next 1,680 hours of your life, so I guess I ought 
introduce myself.

I'm a 31-year-old bottle of Irish whiskey from some Boston suburb.  I've got 
the thirst and temper to prove it.  But I'm not the fighting type.  I'm a 
Scorpio, all quiet contemplation and desire.  And hunger.  It's the hunger 
that's leading me on this journey.  It's the lust for the richest experience that's 
got me scrubbing latrines this week so that next week I can afford a few more 
tanks of gas to carry me through.  So that next week, when someone else is 
scrubbing that urinal and that fuckhead office manager is telling him he can't 
wear a Walkman, I'll be long gone on the road.

On the road to fame and glory.  Would that it were true!  Maybe someday.  
But for now just to be out there, just to be doing something grand and 
eloquent, something fantastic, something all the cubicle dreamers and 
metaphorical toilet scrubbers of the world wish they were doing.  That's what 
will make this last painful week worth all the trouble.

Growing up I had a penchant for throwing back yard carnivals, puppet shows, 
and in late October, haunted houses.  That same huckster spirit invaded my 
writing from the start.  Studying journalism in college, I wasn't content to 
just write, I had to BE the writing, to leap right in and thrash around with it, 
then circumvent the establishment and publish it myself.  I got the degree, 
but it was just misguided parent-pleasing.  Just several years of fucking 
around on borrowed time and government loans to make the hucksterism 
look official.  Or maybe to try and make it go away.

But it didn't go away.  And the next thing I knew, I'd been out of college for 
several years, fucking around quite un-officially, and what did I have?  What 
was I doing?  What could people call me? 

Answer: who cares.

You are who you are.  And the way I figure it, the only time you are what you 
do is when you love what you do.  It's when you like your work so much you 
stop looking at your watch to find out when you can get the fuck outa there 
and go have a beer.  

For me, then, this meant I was a writer.  No matter how little money I made 
at it or how prestigious or obscure my press, I was a writer.  And then 
something else that neither me nor my high school career counselor ever 
could have guessed: I was a car artist.

Not a body man.  No Emilio Estevez repo man.  An artist whose canvas is his 
car.  A nut with a bunch of mis-mixed house paint, yard sale toys and a glue 
gun.  Oh, and a show-off.  Yea.  There's the huckster we were trying to lose.  

For who but a show-off would do to their car what I did to mine?  

I just got back a little while ago from trying to talk a 91-year-old farmer out of 
a truly awesome set of moose antlers for my car, a "rack" as it were.  It was a 
no go.  I saw the antlers nearly a year ago when my girlfriend and I were 
looking for someplace to live.  While checking out this little rental on the old 
man's property, I'd walked past his open barn and gone slack-jawed at the 
sight of them hanging on the wall.  I'd been wanting them ever since, and by 
the way things went today, I can see I should have started working on him a 
few months ago.  

Selfish considerations aside,  I truly believe I would be honoring both that 
moose and old Mr. Hound (that's his real name) by mounting the antlers on 
my car.  Honoring them and granting the antlers a place in preserved history, 
as it is my firm conviction that my car will someday come to rest in a 
museum.  Here my imagination whispers, "Smithsonian."

Back to the huckster thing, well, it would seem I'm not a very good huckster 
having come away today empty handed.  No matter.  My car is adequately 
monstrous and breath-takingly chaotic as it is.  It doesn't NEED a fifty pound 
set of moose antlers.  It just would have been nice.

Okay.  So I'm scrubbing toilets today to earn a little extra cash for the road.  
Today, tomorrow, until Friday.  Then Saturday, whoosh.  I'm gone.  
Hopefully.  

It's a little tough scrubbing toilets and reminding yourself that you're doing it 
for a good cause when in fact you know, as I do, that one month ago you were 
getting paid $300 a day to run around and gather quotes that would wind up 
on the front page of the fifth largest newspaper in the country.   That's the 
journalism thing I was talking about.  That's the part of me that did get 
official, I guess.  The part that's glad I got the degree.  That was reporting for 
the New York Daily News in the wake of the Springfield, Oregon high school 
shootings.  Big news.  Big money.  And I spent it all quickly in a big way.  
Gonzo.

Scrub, scrub, scrub.  

"The Road! There's no place like the road, there's no place like the road.  
Take me there Mr. Wizard."  Soon enough, my little pretty!  First you must 
pay penance for the fucking bowling pins and American Glider sled and 
ammo case and other stupid shit you blew your windfall on.  Car decor.  Gotta 
watch that.

It's a bad habit, having an art car.  It's an obsession, really.  Which is why I do 
it.  I like anything that absorbs me to the point of obsession.  I'm obsessed 
with writing, drinking wine on a train and writing, women with haunting 
bedroom eyes, and hunting down goodies for my car, in that order.  

Typically, one tries not to buy too much of what goes onto an art car.  It's 
almost anathema.  It goes against the grain of the recycled art thing.  
However, when the obsession hit hard like it has in the past few weeks of 
preparation for this road trip, and you've got a picture in your mind of what 
you want for your car, finding it in a dumpster is tough.  So you go nuts and 
blow $25 on a full set of bowling pins.  What are you gonna do?  Bowl.

There's something to those bowling pins that I should hit upon before I take 
you on the road with me, and that is this:  I secretly love bowling.  Bowling 
has this social stigma about it that somehow wormed its way into my 
consciousness during a decade and a half of life in California.  I mean, I was 
on the bowling team in junior high school back in Massachusetts, but once I 
hit Cal, bowling became uncool and somehow remained that way forever for 
me. 

But now, by bolting bowling pins on my fenders, I'm making restitution with 
the gods of bowling.  I'm coming out of the bowling closet, as it were.  I'm 
saying, "Hey!  I bowl and I'm artist to boot.  Go gnaw on that one, you social 
pidgeon-holers." 

I mention this because really this is the whole gig behind the gig.  This is the 
"theme" to the car for which there is no theme.  This is the essence of Duke.  
Yes, Duke.  His name is my name, too.  I named Duke after Hunter 
Thompson's alter ego Raoul Duke from the classic "Fear and Loathing in Las 
Vegas."  But beyond that, the Thompson thing disappears into history.  

From roughly 1993 to the present, my car took on a life and a soul all its own, 
but with very definite shades of me.  Duke is my id, my alterego.  He is my 
altar, my shrine unto the life I have created and the people I have known.  He 
is my statement about me.  Me the bowler who can't admit his perversion 
any other way.  Me the trunk nut, the pirate's treasure trunk dreamy soul that 
never quite shook off Tinkerbell's magic dust.  Me the complex and chaotic, 
creative soul wandering, wandering on endless seas of pavement, peering out 
the brass portholes at a world too big and complicated to take in with any 
greater field of vision the 8" diameter ship's window.  Me the kid who never 
got a tree fort quite cool enough and never, ever got the go-kart he lusted after 
for years.  

Me, who built the grown up go-kart to end all go-karts, complete with a plush 
tree fort (sans the tree) with 15 square feet of bubble sunroof sky and the 
whole thing masquerading as a stage coach stacking of classic old travel 
trunks.  That's me.  That's Duke.  Now back to the toilets.

God, the fucking toilets.  How do I get myself into these things?  I am 
reconciled in my suffering only by a recent admission of Ned's that he'd just 
spent the day moving furniture for $10/hour.  "Anything to get on the road," 
he'd said.  Thanks Ned.  I needed to know that I wasn't alone in my 
shameless pursuit of anything that pays.

Anything.  Even kissing up to that weasel city editor at the local paper begging 
for a story.  And when he says no, going over his head to the managing 
editor, whom I like well enough, but who was no help at all this time.  I had 
no story pitch for him, just a plea for anything, as he had been tossing me 
little stories here and there for some time.  But then he expresses interest in 
the road trip I'm going on, and says he'd like an "As I See It" column from 
somewhere along the road to enlighten his readers about the wild car they see 
around town and often mention to him as a possible story.  Great, I think.  
Another nibble, another $50 or $75 check I can count on for later in the trip.  
But after we talk some more I come to realize that he's asking me for a 
freebie, for something for the opinion page that he doesn't have to pay for.  
Shit. Welcome to the world of the freelance writer.

Well, ole Bill was good while he lasted.  He even offered me a full-time 
reporter job a few months back, which I turned down with little hesitation.  
Full time means full time, folks.  It means good-bye freelance writing career, 
hello daily shave, shirt & tie and a boatload of office politics that I don't need.  
Anyway, I'm still freelance.  And yee-ha for that, for the freedom to pick up 
and go, to boldly crest the wave of land bound eastward, and for no other 
reason than because I can.  And Bill, and the geek manager at the postal hub, 
and next week's toilet scrubber, they can too.  But they won't.  Because they 
ain't got the imagination for it.  And even if they could imagine it, they don't 
have the balls.  

I do.

There are a few other things you, the reader, should know about me before 
we begin this savage journey into the heart of the American Dream.  One, I'm 
slightly mad, as all good artists, writers, creatives should be.  And this isn't 
just a character trait I pulled out of some slick youth culture mag trend info 
hat on how to be a cool artist type.  No, no.  This is the real thing, children.  
This is Romper Room.  This is The Banana Splits on acid. This is the kind of 
slightly off-center madness the Mad Hatter got from wearing poisoned top 
hats, hats the brims of which were stretched with lead.  Lead poisoning.  
Except in my case it came from an overdose of thinking.  Head poisoning.  
Somewhere in my teens, I decided it was unhealthy to watch television.  I 
stuck to that conviction for many years.  But now I renege.  Watch more TV!  
It keeps you from thinking.  And thinking can really screw up your mind.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I learned how to write from 
Hunter Thompson.  Some may equate this with learning house-cleaning 
from Oscar the Grouch or reality-based thinking from Snufalufagus, Big 
Bird's imaginary friend.  I call it luck.  I couldn't be happier to have learned 
the art of "write it as you experience it" gonzo journalism from the outset.  To 
me, it is the only way to write, the essence of the art.  It is the wringing out of 
every tome ever written on the human condition into a douche bag, pouring 
in a cup of French Roast, rinsing out your bowels with it, then running a 
marathon.  Gonzo journalism is the coffee enema of the so-called literary 
establishment.  It is that and, according to Thompson, a lot of controlled 
substances.  Take out most of the drugs and throw in the inherently 
psychedelic world of the art car, and you've got your first peek into the lion's 
den, the tip of the tail of the beast into whose back I will dig my claws and 
hold on for the whole mad summer ride.

This thus far isn't gonzo journalism.  This is reflection, introduction.  This is 
freaking out with only four days left before departure and too much to do.  
And thus, this is all for now.

Later..
After opening Windows, I click to the file menu and there is but one file: 
ROAD706.  But that is wrong, for today is the 7th, nearly the 8th.   I'm giving 
this to you as I go.  And now, it is a little bit later, a few hours closer to the 
official departure time.

I'm hammered.  Tuesday night, a few short days from leaving, a million 
things to do and I opted to join Jill, her little brother and his friend on an 
evening of drinking.  Shit.  I'm outa my head.  This is me running home 
barefoot from the bar.  This is me communing with Duke in the yellow glow 
of some streetlight on this town's lone saloon stretch, another painted car 
parked beside him in the night in a sort of  artcar solidarity.  This is me 
ditching my keys in some shrub before I go near Duke to assure that no 
overzealous cop can catch me with intent to drive drunk.  This is me 
running, barefoot, Birkenstocks in hand, bleached white pirate shirt billowing 
in the wind of my racing embrace.  This is me taking in the moon, nodding 
appreciatively at some tree that seems to belong in the South, some swamp 
tree.  This is me thinking, well, you may not be that bad Corvallis, but I hate 
you anyway.

On the way to the bar in Duke, Jill's brother said, and I quote, "This town 
should be proud to have your car living here."  Would that it were true.  This 
town never knew Duke, never will.  I hate Corvallis, Oregon.  I make no 
bones about it.  It is probably the first place I have ever hated with such 
conviction.  I hate it because for seven months this winter I had only to look 
out the window to see Duke molding in the cold and constant rain.  I hate it 
because every time I ventured out to sit in Duke, to glue on a few trinkets, to 
commune with my only friend in Oregon besides Jill, no one would talk to 
me.  No one would return my kind hellos.  I hate Corvallis because it never 
gave me a friend.  Some have said that Corvallis, the "heart of the 
(Willamette) valley," was known even to the Kalapuya Indian settlers of long 
ago to have bad energy.  It was a place of sickness for the Kalapuya, if only at 
the junction of their tribe and fur trappers, the first white men to enter the 
area.  Whatever.  Their sickness was mine as well.  From the first night I 
drove Duke into Corvallis, I knew in my heart that it would be a bad place for 
me, that it would be a gauntlet of sorts.  I would survive it, but I would never 
be quite the same.

I spoke to Ramon tonight of the "caravan's" progress in terms of the 
sponsorship he has been so doggedly seeking.  The news was not good.  
Goodyear, the supposedly in-the-bag sponsors for a dozen sets of tires, was not 
a go.  The gas sponsors: an ever-greater long shot.  Even my buddy Seven in 
Bisbee (that's his whole name, like Madonna), the one responsible for talking 
me into this weird trip in the first place, was suspended in some hearsay 
cloud of possible incarceration for God-knows-what kind of weirdness and 
hasn't been heard from in days.  And suddenly, the 2-plus month tour of the 
western United States is, by default, being looked upon as an "at least we'll 
make it to Minnesota and back" thing.  

Bad.  Very bad.  But more bad for them than for me, I have to admit.  Or at 
least I have to think that way.  Because if they do turn tail and run home to 
Houston from Minn., I've still gotta return west, an obligation that carries 
with it the honor and the assurance that I will be at Portland, Burning Man 
and Westfest.  Oh, yes.

The First Leg
Day One
July 12, 1998.  I set out at 1:30 p.m. from Corvallis, Oregon leaving Jill in tears 
on the sidewalk outside that dumpy old apartment that I've called home for 
nearly a year now.  It is a heartbreaking moment for us both.  Jill is the picture 
of tragedy, her face a crush of sad tears, love and something else.  Pride?  She 
claims she is proud of me.  But what a price, this newfound strength of mine.  
It is too terrible to dwell on.  I drive away and try not to think.  There is no 
denial, no anger, only sadness.

It is on the highway east, that ugly corridor between Corvallis and Interstate 5, 
that I experienced my first moment of total elation, howling farewell to that 
place of sickness where more by guilt than anything I have remained far 
longer than I should have.  Guilt, but also love.

The last preparations to leave were a nightmarish slogging obstacle course, 
the worst combination of guilt and horror and stuffed excitement.  Though 
Jill wants only for my happiness, I found it almost impossible to leave her 
and Oregon for the sake of my own mental health.  Every excited look ahead 
at the road felt traitorous, so I said nothing, or as little as possible.  It was like 
waiting for an execution, and when at last I left it was as if I had killed her, 
right there on the street.  One can only wonder what sort of messages we are 
given as children to instill such guilt into the mere act of graceful surrender 
when circumstances make a relationship impossible.

I drove 475 miles that first day.  A good-sized haul for a 22-year old vehicle 
carrying one and a half times its factory weight, and that after an entire winter 
sitting idle.  I pulled off the highway in the mountains just east of Couer 
d'Alene, Idaho, and spent my first night staring up at a clear starlit night 
through the 15 square foot bubble skylight of the trunk sculpture. According 
to my road notes, I had received my first real warm reception at an Umatilla, 
WA, Arco station were in the space of a few minutes I sold half a dozen 
postcards.  I had driven the northern route from the Columbia River Gorge to 
Spokane and then into Idaho.  Already people were pulling over and waiting 
for me to drive by so they could snap a picture.  I was excited to learn that I 
was getting nearly 10 mpg, a full 2 or 3 mpg more than I'd anticipated.  
Though I left for the road with just barely enough cash to get to Minneapolis 
and no money to get back or for any frills, I rolled the dice and bought a deep 
cell RV battery for $60 to assure that I would be able to run my computer.  
Already I was moving confidently out into the world again, taking risks in 
the name of art that I hadn't had the courage to take in a long time.

I remember the sun setting over Washington farm country, eating corn from 
a can, alternately singing to and beating the Panasonic lemon, the pricey 
boom box I'd bought in 1995 and now had to thrash on occasion to get it to 
play out of both speakers.  I wrote in my notebook, "Be thankful for what you 
got," a bit of wisdom I believe came from a song I was listening to at the time.

Day Two
Miner's Hat Reality.  Wallace, Idaho, the location set for last year's summer 
sizzle film "Dante's Peak."  Tears in my eyes at the sight of a white garage 
covered in huge, decorative butterflies.  Jill would love that.  Tired of my 
music selection, I begin listening to a set of self-esteem tapes my dad gave me.  
The speaker quotes Eleanor Roosevelt as saying, "Nobody can make you feel 
inferior without your consent."  Hmm.  How bout that.  I make a note to 
myself to do two things for Duke: get a log book going that people can sign, 
like a visitor's log, and also write a mission statement for Duke, so that for 
now on I have a quick, clear answer to the why question.  Mr. Self-Esteem 
says, "If life gives you a lemon.."  How very Duke.

Day Three
Spent the night at friend Maggie's house in Bozeman.  Eight hundred miles 
so far.  First library email stop.  Maggie's roommate Mark a nerdy but 
congenial guy.  I regale him with Duke stories and together we three watch 
the Nightline Burning Man coverage and several Duke spots.  I wonder why 
Maggie would choose to live with this guy and am relieved to find that 
there's nothing romantic between them.  I tell her that he's not her type.  
Later, however, she jumps to his defense saying, "He hunts with a pistol.  
He's the best shot in Montana."  Ok.  Whatever.  She's smitten with the guy.

Awoke this morning sure that I should get insurance before going further.  
Just a gut feeling.  Postcard sales have been going so well that I can afford 
(barely) the $91 for three month's coverage and still make it to Minneapolis 
in gas, though how I'll get back is yet anyone's guess.  I buy the insurance, 
feeling somewhat stupid as I walk out of the office with a yellow receipt as my 
"proof" and nearly $100 lighter in pocket.  What a scam.  But the way I choose 
to look at it is this: I just bought $91 worth of "assurance," not insurance.  
Despite whatever good it might do the system, I can now drive free of worry 
for the next three months.  I have a valid license, registration and now 
insurance.  So what if I'm licensed in Arizona, registered in New Mexico and 
now insured in Montana.  I'm a man of the road and I'm legal.

Downtown Bozeman greets me kindly with postcard sales and smiles.  A 
lovely girl named Robin is flirtatious, strolling out of her shop several time 
to chat.  A month from now when I pass back through Bozeman, there will be 
a man in the shop with her and she'll be a far less friendly person.  As I start 
up the car to roll out of town, Duke billows his usual greetings smoke.  Two 
attractive women about my age are sitting on a bench outside a shop watching 
me and giggling.  Apologetically, I say, "He's a little smoky."  They respond 
with, "We're looking at you!"  Which is nice.

Later that day Duke and I are running hotter than hell in the eastern 
Montana heat.  In a gas station in Billings, I languidly clip my nails while 
pumping the gas.  Two cop cars pull up and spit out curious cops.  I hardly 
look up, dead from the heat, worried about my car and busy clipping my nails 
to keep me from chewing them off.  I answer a few of their questions, give 
them postcards and move on.  It is the least unnerved by police I have ever 
been.

All the while I have been freaking out watching the temp gauge climb to 230 
degree and waiting for the hammer to fall, dead sure that water boils 
somewhere around 220 and wondering why I don't see steam.  While 
clipping my nails, I take a moment to read the Prestone coolant jug and am 
greatly relieved at the knowledge it imparts.  Coolant cools.  Duh.  Of course.  
So whereas I'm sure it ain't healthy for my engine to be running steadily hot, 
I now know that Duke's not going blow up until he hits about 280.

The overpass pillars out here say, "Trust Jesus."  Birds dive bomb my car.  I 
pull off occasionally in search of a place to jump in the river that I've been 
dreamily observing off to my left.  The heat and the late afternoon sun 
together lend this deserted stretch of country a psychedelic pallor.  In Forsyth, 
MT, I hit paydirt, a tiny, free campground that appears to exist for the sake of 
fisherpeople.  A sign says 7 day limit on camping.  Unbelievable.  I put on my 
river shoes, a pair of $2 sneakers from the Salvation Army, and wade in.  
Ecstasy.  Local kids cruise the campground in their cars with stereos blaring.  
Uh-huh.  Free campground.  Cruise spot.  Of course.  I imagine the word has 
already gotten out about the freaky car in town.  I soak in a calm, back-flow of 
the otherwise strong current.  The sun lingers on the horizon.  After I get out 
and towel off, some local guy comes to chat with me, his son and daughter in 
tow.  Seems they've driven some 60 miles of dirt road to visit the dentist here 
in town.  The man carefully crafts his questions and speaks in a quiet, 
unhurried voice.  Strangely the kids never open their mouths.  A 
nightcrawler dangles strangely from his fishing line, bouncing wildly with his 
every movement to shoo away a mosquito.  The teenage girl has picked a zit 
on her forehead and it bleeds down toward her eye.  The conversation centers 
on where I am from, a topic for which there is no easy answer.  Yet somehow 
the question is always there, the first meeting point of travelers, as though it 
even mattered anymore.

Back on the highway beneath the darkening cotton candy sky, I scream aloud 
to Aerosmith's "Dream on" at the top of my voice.  There is nothing and no 
one but the highway, Duke and I.  The traffic on the freeway has vanished, all 
the tourists cutting south at Billings toward Yellowstone.  My notebook reads: 
"I'm on now and I'm gonna keep on because as the good doctor said, `It still 
hasn't gotten weird enough for me'."  What did I mean by that?  I haven't a 
clue.


Day Four
Rest stop just west of Glendive, MT, 7:45 a.m.  Dallas Dahl and family from 
Elma, WA.  I ask Dallas if he's any relation to Roald Dahl, the mildly-
deranged author of "Charley and the Chocolate Factory."  Nope.  Bummer.  
We exchange greetings and I pose for a photo with Grandma.  She's 97 years 
old, traveling somewhere for some damn reason.  I ask her if she's ever seen 
anything like Duke in her long life.  She replies: "I've got one just like it in 
my basement."

Up the road, a billboard advertises Beach, ND with a painting of a clipper ship 
and the phrase "Land Ho!"  Duh?

I stop at exit 127 in New Salem, ND for a photo of Duke with the World's 
Largest Cow.  I think of the Texas Cow Goddess busting out of her Holstein 
bikini in the rainy aftermath of the Houston parade in 97.  Udderly incredible.  
She's supposed to be joining the caravan from Houston.  She's gotta see this 
damn cow, this and the Holstein House in southern Oregon.  

A note to myself from today tells me to buy a used alto sax.  I started to learn 
once.  Should have kept it up.

At day's end I reach Fargo.  I've driven my 400 miles for the day and Duke is 
running hot when a voice on the radio calls out to me.  It's the hot local FM 
rock station and they're doing a live remote, broadcasting from an Applebee's 
restaurant in town.  It sounds like fun and a sure-fire good place to sell a few 
postcards.   I walk into the restaurant and straight up to the group of DJ-
looking people at the first table.  I show them an 8 x 10 of Duke and say, "This 
car is out front,"  adding that I've just driven 1500 miles and heard them on 
the radio while passing by on the freeway.  At first, the guy says yeh great, 
whatever and brushes me off.  I stick the glossy in his face again and repeat 
the tale.  

When the station people finally get it, they go nuts.  The bar area empties out 
into the parking lot to see Duke.  The restaurant manager calls "the best local 
TV station" the Fargo NBC affiliate and sure enough, they show up.  The 
radio station hangs their banner on Duke, I do an interview, and dinner and 
drinks are on the house.  Helluva deal.  And already one of the radio guys has 
offered me parking across the street from his place when Steve pulls up on a 
Harley and hands me the keys to his house.  Says to go on over and make 
myself at home, that he'll be staying at his girlfriends if I need anything.

That night I'm back at Steve's drinking a cape codder, reading my email on 
his computer, watching myself on the 10 o'clock news and laughing at the 
miraculous results of a life lived with spontaneity and a desire to give.

Day Five
Minnesota

I think I was the first out of towner to hit Minneapolis and walk in the door 
of Intermedia Arts.  At a little reception desk, I announced myself to a guy 
who looked like he worked there and would therefore know what was up.  
"Can I help you?" he asked.  "Yeh, I just drove 1800 miles to get here, and 
here I am," was my reply.  "I see, and how can I help you?"  That stumped 
me.  Weren't they expecting me?  Had this greeter-person not been informed?  
WHAT THE FUCK?

As it turned out, the guy hadn't been informed.  In fact, throughout the 
weekend, whenever I walked in the door of Intermedia Arts and past his 
eyeballs, I got the sense that he still had no idea who the hell I was or why I 
was there. 

Beyond the door-guy experience, Minneapolis was groovy.  All the 
arrangements people like Jan and Rachel and Ruthann had painstakingly 
made went off like clockwork.  Well, almost.  

Several cars came together to be interviewed by the media that Thursday 
afternoon.  The only no-show was the media.  Naturally, the media-liaison 
woman was disappointed and probably a bit pissed, but I didn't care.  Not only 
had I been on TV the night before in Fargo, but I was toasted, my body some 
morpho-delusional cocktail of road exhaustion, arrival-euphoria and just 
plain come-what-may surrender to the universe.

That afternoon Ruthann escorted me to my accommodations, a brand new 
dormitory on the campus of Macalester College in St. Paul.  Man was that 
place plush.  The air conditioning alone was cause for throwing oneself down 
upon the carpet at Ruthann's feet and wailing in gratitude.  I had a room all 
to myself with two beds, a sink, closet, desks, clean linens, the works.  All of it 
was thanks to Ruthann Godollei, who, as a teacher at Macalester, had sold the 
school on the idea of putting us up.  Dazedly excited and at once dead-to-the-
world, I rain-checked Ruthann's offer of lunch and threw my body down for a 
nap.  

To say I awoke refreshed would be wrong.  I don't think I even slept.  The bed 
moved like desert asphalt in waves of hot summer heat and my mind was a 
strobe-lit dance of broken yellow lines.  There were flashes of fly-by cameras 
and huge trucks roaring into view around the blind corners of my skull.  
There were animals in the road, and people and cars and cars and more cars.  
Though the room kept a steady A/C cool, my head ran hot as an engine 
struggling to pull twice its weight up some impossible grade.  And I never 
achieved deep sleep.  

But somewhere in late afternoon I rose and phoned Ruthann.  She came and 
took me to dinner at some Greek place not a block away.  We talked of all 
things artsy and of escape from places that suck.  The whole time I felt weird 
and hollow, unsafe as though at any second Corvallis or my evil stepmother 
or worse might pierce the paper-thin skin of my back and fill me with some 
unspecified horror, namely that beast we call REALITY, such that Ruthann 
and my spanikopita and the blue and divine St. Paul sky were just a good 
dream from which I might at any moment awake.

Such is the space one sometimes inhabits when rising from an unsettling late 
afternoon nap.  I survived it.  But perhaps it was this very episode that 
convinced me that the time had come to chuck the anti-depressant drugs and 
reclaim my sanity as my own.  The notion had for some time haunted me 
that my new-found confidence owed itself entirely to THE DRUGS and that 
quitting them would be disastrous.  But quit I must.

Ruthann walked me back to my dorm and I bid her goodnight.  It wasn't even 
dark, but I knew I was done for.  Besides, I hoped that sleep would dispel the 
freakiness from my head.  I hadn't slept more than ten hours in 3 days.  It is 
no small wonder I was gonzo.

Friday morning I awoke and wrote my speech.  Having no paper for my 
printer, I printed it out on the back of a Macalester map from our info packet, 
got together with Ruthann at the lecture hall and practiced it on her there.  
She loved it.  Hooray.  It was the first speech I'd written since college, and 
probably the first speech I ever wrote about something I really gave a shit 
about.

That evening the cars began to roll in.  My best recollection of that feeling of 
"being back amongst family" was sharing a hug with Sheila.  Sheila gives 
great hugs.  Though her art car, Planet Karmann, had to stay home, she had 
flown in to speak at the symposium and join her boyfriend Ned in the 
parade.  

At this point, I left the fold to join a couple of cars for a media gig of some sort 
and quite quickly began to wish I hadn't.  It turned out the shoot was a live 
one, and that in order to be on TV we had to drive to the studio and await our 
scheduled slot in the programming.  The whole thing was a bust, with 
Intermedia Arts representative Rachel doing the whole schpeel herself, 
attempting and failing to correctly introduce each artist, car, and theme in a 60 
second live blip.  If it helped lend local awareness to Intermedia Arts, then it 
was worth it.  But for the sake of the artists, it was almost comical it was so 
bad.

But I wasn't laughing as we rushed back to Macalester, now late for the 
symposium and my speech.  Luckily, I arrived with just enough time to calm 
myself down, have a drink of water and get Seven in his wheelchair inside 
the building.  He alone of the Houston caravan bunch had arrived that 
afternoon.  And already, thanks to some negative aspects of his trip thus far, 
he seemed to need the boost of confidence that I hoped my speech would give 
everyone.  I wanted him to hear my speech, and was glad when he made it 
inside in time.

My speech for the 1998 Wheels As Art, Art Car Symposium, Macalester 
College, St. Paul
HELLO MINNESOTA!  Wow.  I'm so thankful for the opportunity to be here.  
Like all of us who travel far to do Houston or anyplace, just getting here was 
an incredible feat for me.  It was 1827 miles of  "I THINK I CAN, I THINK I 
CAN" with an engine pulling one and a half times its factory weight, and this 
twisted arm thing of driving and waving for 40 hours, but most importantly 
for me it was stepping out of a winter of severe depression in the Oregon rain.  
It was a gamble.  It was "can I handle it on the road alone  in a vehicle that 
puts me smack in the center of attention, this after 7 or 8 bad months of not 
being able to cope in the so-called "real or normal world?"

Well, I'm happy to announce that the answer was a resounding  YES!

I'm going to share with you a poem in a moment that affirms that success 
and that will hopefully inspire even one of you to conquer any fears or 
hesitation you might have about the side effects of car art such as cops and 
rednecks and people judging you or you yourself just feeling odd or freaky 
sometimes.


Perhaps one of the most absurd things I have heard said about having an art 
car came out of my father's mouth.  "You've got to get out there and make a 
career for yourself," he said, to which he added, "You've got to stop hiding 
behind an art car."

As all of you who drive art cars are aware, you cannot hide behind an art car.  
It's like being naked sometimes.  I think I felt more at ease being stark naked 
at Burning Man than I sometimes feel driving Duke.  Like, when I'm in a bad 
mood for instance.

As we were cruising San Francisco last year at Westfest, David Best told me he 
doesn't bother registering his cars anymore.  This astounded me, for though I 
hadn't experienced nearly the police harassment Harrod claims, I had chatted 
up plenty of cops on the societal benefits of car art.  I couldn't imagine going 
that far with it, to simply fly in the face of authority to that extent.

But something has happened to Duke and I since last we traveled far.  We 
seem to have crossed some invisible line, to have ventured so far into the 
Twilight Zone that cops no longer see us, or are simply so daunted they just 
leave us alone.  As I got closer to Minneapolis, I stopped frequently at rest 
stops to raise gas money in postcard sales so I could make it here with out 
dipping into my emergency fund and people were just amazed, especially 
young drivers, that I hadn't been stopped once on route.  I was never even 
tailed, an experience I'm sure you all familiar with.

All this came together this morning to inspire the poem your about to hear.

Before I read that, I'd like to make a couple of announcements.  

Firstly, I will be chronicling my/our summer's travels for a number of media.  
At least once a week I hope to be emailing chunks of the grand adventure to 
Penny Smith for posting on artcars.com.  And in addition to the web site, I 
have interested several magazines in the story including two out of Canada -- 
Outpost and Borderlines, a mag called Alternative Press here in the States and 
oddly enough, the UN Chronicle.  And who knows, God willing, Rolling 
Stone, whose editor spent a full ten minutes on the phone with me last week 
and didn't say no.  

It is my goal to combine my talents as reporter/writer and art car artist to shed 
some light on the art car world from the inside.  The Rolling Stone editor 
with whom I spoke said she thought the whole art car gig sounded more like 
a photo and cutline, rather than a full narrative story.  I intend to show her 
that there is definitely a narrative to art cars.

My second announcement is that I intend to start work this fall on my second 
art car: a Spanish Galleon on wheels.  I saw myself on the news in Fargo the 
other night in dark sunglasses and this puffy white shirt, Duke's Titanic 
luggage tower in the background and all of it glowing in the warm sunlight of 
late afternoon, and I thought, "My God, you're a pirate, McKinney."  You're 
the very image of the romanticized, Disney pirate's of the Caribbean rogue 
that you always wanted to be.  You're Long John Silver in a pirate ship with 
four wheels, taking just enough gold to keep you on the road.  So, though 
Duke has elements of buried treasure and ship's windows, next it'll be the 
real thing. 

My final announcement is more of a challenge really.  I think there should be 
an art car caravan next year that begins either in Houston or sets out from 
Westfest pointed in some direction on the globe with the intent of reaching 
that point by the turn of the century and joining in celebration with the 
people of whatever country we wind up in.  I'm thinking the tip of South 
America, where it would be summer in December..  Just a thought.

And now for the poem..


Build it and they will come.  Build it and they will look at you whether you 
like it or not.

Paint it and they will see your art for all its glory or madness or both, and they 
will react and often they will speak out whether or not they know a damn 
thing about art.  And that's good.  It's called dialogue.

Glue upon it and they will test the strength of your glue.  Oh, yes.  Especially 
the little ones.  Yank!  Yank!

Tweak it and they walk up to you and talk to you like children under a spell 
and they will honor you with their attention no matter what they think or 
say.

Weld it and craftsmen will give you the time of day and though they might 
say "There's a guy who's got too much time on his hands," what they'll really 
be saying is "I envy you all the time you have taken to craft something you 
love."

Carve it, melt it, pelt it with toys and little girls and little boys will screech 
with joy at the sight of one adult who won't tell them not to write with 
crayons on their boring white suburban walls.  And once in a while when you 
get a child who hates your car... pray for that child.  Pray for their already 
squashed creative soul.

Built it bigger and wilder and crazier than anything they've ever seen and 
they will introduce you to their 96-year-old grandmother in the RV across the 
parking lot and when you ask her if she's ever seen anything like it in her 
long life she'll reply with a wry smile that she has one just like it in her 
basement.

Create it with love and they will empty out their change purses for you.  

Build it and give the 7-11 clerk a postcard as a gift and when you go back in to 
pay for that $5 worth of gas you just put in the gas can in the trunk, she will 
say "don't worry about it, don't worry about it," and she won't take your 
money no matter what you say.

Decorate it and they will wave and smile at you as they pace you at fifty 
blocking traffic until they've had their eyeful.

Build it and they will come with TV cameras and zoom in on you and you'll 
giggle later as you watch it on the evening news, the newscasters fumbling for 
commentary about something so out of their realm.  And just laugh at them 
if perchance they use patronizing language to slyly dismiss you as silly 
because they're afraid to enjoy you lest their audience not.  For if only they 
could see you out there on the highway being lapped up by the masses, by 
thousands and thousands of little Neilson ratings points whom they think 
buy only scandal and death.

Build it and make of it a thing more impressive than the World's Largest Ball 
of Twine and they will chase you like Paparazzi and boggle you in a flash-bulb 
frenzy.  They will pull over in their cars, their trucks, their massive 
motorhomes with cars-in-tow, they will swing tour busses off the road to let 
you go by so fifty retired couples from Missoula can crank up their camcorders 
and catch you on the fly-by.

Built it, paint it, glue to it, tweak it, weld it, carve it, melt it, pelt it with trash 
and with treasures.

Rearrange its factory facade and take it on the road and they will buy you 
dinner in their restaurant.  They will give you respect and they will give you 
their trust because with your car you have given yourself completely.  They 
will write you directions to their house and tell you where they hide a key 
and say, "Go there, make yourself at home, get a shower and some rest.  
Here's the number of my girlfriend, where I'll be staying the night."

Built it beyond the line that some drone drew in the dirt of normalcy and 
they will hand you back your postcard with a pen and say "Will you 
autograph it for me?"  and you'll think "Nooo!  That's not what it's about," 
or "I'm not worthy!" but you are worthy and that is what it's about.  It's about 
sharing with and inspiring people who never had a clue that you could do 
such things, whose TV view and commercial-eyesed, Wal-Mart generic 
perspective on the world never let it enter their mind that THEY could MESS 
UP their car so beautifully, so magnificently. 

 It's about relating to people you would be hard pressed to relate to in any 
other way.  But here, on the street, where you the artist built it and had the 
courage to stick it out there for all the world to see, and he the drywall 
contractor came, here you can talk about life and how very much, at bottom, 
we all have in common.
Thank you.
[end of speech]


To my mind, that night's events were the height of the weekend.  The 
symposium and the warm reception of my poem, the drive around 
Minneapolis to see the shoe-covered house and Allen Christian's funky 
gallery of carved bowling balls, these were the richest moments.  The night 
culminated in a barbecue and beer drive-in movie show in the back lot of 
Intermedia Arts.  When "Chitti-Chitti Bang Bang" was savagely cut short 
smack in the middle, I went ballistic until being informed that it was 2 o'clock 
in the morning and that I had to be up for the parade in a few hours.  I was 
still pissed.  I mean, you couldn't ask for a more appropriate movie to show at 
an art car gathering, and the bastards just killed it right when Benny Hill was 
being sniffed out by the Child Catcher.  

The parade the next morning seemed thin.  Not the showing of cars, but the 
spectators.  Compared even to a small parade we would do weeks later in 
Bozeman, MT, the turnout to see us on Lyndale and Lake streets was thin.  
But it was fun just the same.  Ned and Ramon and Chiquita and the gang all 
arrived from their broken-down-bus-delayed journey just in time, and I 
mean minutes, to catch the tail of the parade.  Nutty.  

But if the crowds were lacking during the parade, they made up for it, 
showing up in hoards to view the art cars where they were displayed all day 
during the Lyn-Lake Street Fair.  There was a fashion show that had 
everything from Chiquita in wild head gear and feathers to some poor guy 
dragging his obviously reluctant wife and kid through a promenade of nuevo 
road kill wear.  And the awards ceremony gets my vote for the best one I've 
seen yet, if for no other reason than NO CASH PRIZES WERE AWARDED.  

I think pitting artists against each other with monetary prizes is extremely 
wrong-headed.  The awards Jan Elftmann & crew from Intermedia Arts 
dreamed up were fun, funny and appropriate, and any moneys distributed 
went for gasoline: the one indivisible factor in every car artist's struggle to 
participate.  I say the awards were "appropriate," yet I myself received the 
award for "Most Dangerous Car."  If nothing else, I appreciate the humorous 
sentiment.

The rest of that parade day was a blur of Duke Q&A and postcard sales, live 
music, food, crowds, and occasional light showers punctuating an otherwise 
hot and sunny day.  The Fanatics summoned up the last of their road-
deadened strength and played a six-song set on Ripper's trailer-cum-portable-
stage ending with Time Bomb World, a song, according to Ned, about how 
fucked up everything is.  They were well-received and even garnered a 
request for a CD. 

I let one person paint something on Duke that day, and I wasn't sorry I did.  
Sixteen-year-old Rachel the someday-architect wrote, "Start at the beginning, 
go through the middle, get to the end and then stop."  Simple and yet 
profound.  I aim to follow the advice out here on the road.

The next day Jan and Dave hosted a breakfast at their place.  The food was 
wonderful and I recall feeling really at home for the first time in a long time.  
The feeling stemmed from watching Chiquita prance around and stick baby 
carrots up her nose.  I thought of all the times I had tried over the past year to 
relate to Jill's peers at Oregon State University parties.  Tried and failed.  I 
took another look at Chiquita and knew why.  I wished I'd found just one 
person like her to relate to in Corvallis.  But that kind of wishing is 
irrelevant.  You are who you are.  You are where you are.  And now, I 
thought, thank God I am here amongst my kind.

While we were hanging out at Jan's, Stockton's dog Bob got nicked by a car 
zooming down the ally where he was tied up.  Ned took the blame upon 
himself for that and some earlier incident involving Bob the dog, and I saw 
Ned cry for the first time.  Stockton became very angry at Ned and took off, 
effectively abandoning the caravan for a few days.  Sheila and I and others 
comforted Ned.  And though it was certainly not an enjoyable moment for 
him, I, myself, felt a great rush of humanity upon seeing him cry.  It was as 
though I hadn't seen any man but me cry in a hundred years, and it helped 
me in a way.  I needed those tears.  They gave me faith and trust and a 
deepened sense of camaraderie with my art car friends.  Somehow, between 
the carrots in Chiquita's nose and the tears in tired Ned's eyes, I knew that 
everything was going to be all right from there on out.

That night Ramon led us on some wild goose chase for a campground that 
should have been just a few miles outside of Minneapolis.  It was my first 
inkling of Ramon's brand of lost and baseless, dictatorial leadership that 
would run a red streak through his so-called "documentation" of the caravan 
like the lines of blood-poisoning up a diseased limb.  Following blindly as it is 
so pleasurable to do in a long convoy of colorful brethren art cars, I just went 
with it at first.  But then I began to notice the passage of time and even sense 
that we were back on some stretch of highway we'd been on an hour before.  

I imagine Ramon, bald and somewhat more portly than he already is, 
squatting in the middle of some overgrown temple in some Minnesota 
jungle that he's guided us to saying, "Do you.. question.. my methods, Duke?" 
and my replying, "I don't.. see.. any method, sir."   It was crazy, and it ended 
first with our being turned away at the campground we'd long been searching 
for due to the late hour of our arrival and finally crossing over into 
Wisconsin in search of someplace that would take us.  

That night wandering out beyond the cluster of tents and motorhomes in 
some anonymous campground we'd picked, Chiquita, Ned and I found 
ourselves on some long and steadily narrowing woodland road way out past 
any campers.  I was entertaining some spooky notion of a haunted forest 
when we came upon a sign that read Sleepy Hollow.  No shit.

That night Ramon cooked up a fine feast and all the musicians joined in on a 
quiet jam by campfire light.  For the first week out, he kept us well fed.  If 
nothing else, Ramon cooked well.  So, I imagine, did Marlon Brando's 
Lieutenant. Kurtz.


A Twine Ball World
Darwin, MN--
The toys are coming in like Santa Claus with his pants on backwards.  Toys 
are Us.  Tunes are us.  The Art Cars have descended on Twine Town.  
Darwin, Minnesota, home of the largest ball of twine in the World.  And 
tonight, our home.  

It's good craziness on a Tuesday night in some farmland paradise west of 
Minneapolis.  It's Jim and Merrill, the brothers on guitar with our Big John 
joining in and Bird on sax.  It's "bye-bye Gertrude" and hello lakefront 
property for the night.  It's Cheryl and Sam and Buck.  It's Betty and her 
daughter Sue in a booth seat here in the back.  Sue says "This is the best thing 
to ever happen to Darwin."  

Back in the Ball of Twine gift shop there hang several photos of Weird Al 
Yankovich, who visited the ball some time ago and even honored it with a 
song.  Could it be that we are cooler than Weird Al?  And how cool for me, to 
be able to show the folks of Darwin that the Great Weird One has also 
touched my car.  I show the children the autograph on the hood.  Wow.  They 
are amazed.  

And so are we.  In the space of a few short hours the 1998 Art Car caravan 
across America has taken this town by storm.   And, as I say, the town has 
taken us.  In, that is.  And out comes the Ikagami, Ramon's filmmaking baby.  
Out come the instruments, the guitars, the sax, the maracas, the cameras, my 
laptop.  This is the way life happens.  This is the way it ought be, the way it is.  
This is spontaneous combustion, instant and unpredictable revelry, the 
union of like strangers who meet on the streets of some town progress forgot 
and jam together for no other reason than they can, they want to.   This is 
what the art cars are on the road for, to reach out, to thrust a friendly arm into 
the heart of America and pull out a diamond.  

Ned looks tired.  But I know he's in Heaven.  He misses his woman.  I miss 
mine.  But mine isn't mine anymore.  I gave up everything to come on this 
trip.  Not because I had to.  Because I wanted to.  I wanted my freedom black, 
no sugar, no cream.  I wanted it pure.  I wanted to seize the day and not have 
to wonder what toes I might be stepping on, what hearts I might be breaking 
in the pure act of flying free.  I wanted freedom not reckless but present.  I 
wanted now.  I wanted this.  More than anything, I wanted out of Oregon, and 
she wouldn't join me.

We rolled into town here somewhere around 4 p.m.  It had seemed like we 
would never get out of Minneapolis and on the road.  But here we were, in 
the tiny town where the twine ball lived, population 325.

Something had struck me the moment we'd hit this place.  I felt good, just 
really right on, and I felt like celebrating.  In an uncharacteristic move, I ran 
into the local liquor store and bought a 12-pack of Pig's Eye Lager, the beer 
named after one of St. Paul's first settlers.  I threw it in Duke and zoomed past 
the pack out of the gas station lot and down the main drag of Darwin in 
search of the ball.  I passed around beers and we drank and pondered Francis 
Johnson's inexplicable act of creative energy.  What the hell would make a 
man ball up twine on his fingers and suddenly decide to keep going until he's 
got something the size of a tank on his hands.  Good craziness.  The kind we 
understand without question.

I don't know how it all progressed from that to this.  It was an explosion, 
really.  A big bang.  A decision not to try and roll on down the highway and 
seek out some campground to pay for and sit around impersonally with other 
travelers.  We wanted to greet the people, to take the handshake and the 
dialogue beside the twine ball a step further.  I asked local Jim Allen where we 
might stay for the night, and when he suggested the farm of a friend, I took a 
contingent of us to go check it out.

What we found out there was no one home and a run down farmhouse that 
looked not just a little bit familiar from the film Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  
Or was it just our reluctance to relax into it, into the holistic and utterly non-
commercial idea of just showing up on someone's doorstep and sharing a 
little life together?  Whatever.  I know I was nervous, being the point man 
and all.  But up I walked just the same.  And found no one at home.  No 
human, that is.  But with Ned and Chiquita behind me, I suddenly found 
myself staring down one big ass turkey.  I mean, this bird had legs the size of 
my forearms, and he was coming at me.  Now, Ramon says that's what 
turkeys do, says they walk toward fear, whatever that means.  Call it what you 
want, that turkey chased the three of us off that property lickity split.  It was a 
sight to see.  Big wrestler Ned, Chiquita the bird woman from the Planet Ice 
Cream and me, running down the dirt driveway toward Duke.  And we were 
out of there, backing down the long dirt lane between fields of corn and out 
onto the main road back to Darwin.

Now Jim had also given us his address and said to come on by later and have 
a swim in the lake.  Back in town still without a place to stay, we opted out of 
responsibility, left behind Ramon and some others at the bar and headed for 
Jim's.  

The lake was glass.  Not a boat on it.  Out to the end of the long dock we 
walked, and, on my cue, out of our clothes and into the water.  Jumping in 
was funny.  Here I was naked in front of Chiquita and friends thinking I could 
leap into the water and thus some semblance of discretion.  I landed two feet 
below the surface and had to sit down to get my ass under the water.  Totally 
shallow.  

Later.. 
Just met, well.. was just interviewed by Stan Roser from the Litchfield 
Independent Review out front of the bar here.  Small world.  The boys are 
now singing a song they just made up, "It's a Twine Ball World."  Stan says 
his son Ed is involved in the rock music business out of Chicago.  Plays in a 
band called Urge Overkill.  Have I perchance heard of them?  Hah!  You just 
never know who you're gonna meet.  Get out there on the street, man.  

Scott from the bar was just eavesdropping off my computer screen.   Says he 
really likes my computer.  I liked watching his eyes light up when I told him I 
got it for only $70.  Slowing down a bit.  I think I need a cup of coffee.  Now 
the band, er.. the motley gang of singers, strummers and maraca shaking, 
beer-drinking crazies is singing "Living on Tulsa Time."

Seven pulls me aside out front of the bar and tells me a story.  It seems that 
the owner of the bar is a bitch on wheels, or so the rumor goes.  Daughter of a 
banker, all money matters and how the Hell Jim got hooked up with her is 
anybody's guess.  Well, it seems she owns this establishment and ordered it 
closed most days of the week.  Apparently, it was closed when we walked in 
here this afternoon, but we didn't know it.  We ordered food, drinks, we 
brought some cash flow in.  Jim came along with his brother and their guitars 
and after we'd had a swim and adequately pissed off his wife out on their 
land, well, this happened here.  She tried to close the place down, but, as 
Seven tells it, somehow our presence helped prevent it.  And the rest is 
history.  A night of fun and music for all.  

I'm sitting over here in the corner typing away, trying hard to look at the 
scene and not at my screen.  Ramon to my right seems to have found himself 
a lady friend.  Adrienne shakes a maraca and dances in her red mini-dress.  
The band has whittled down a bit.  I join them in song for awhile.  "Cauz I get 
a peaceful, easy feeling, and I know you wont' let me down, cauz I'm already 
standing on the ground."  Little Sam shakes a tambourine and follows the 
movement and the rhythm, though somewhat jittery and beer-addled, of the 
adults around her.

Every now and again I think about the fact that we gotta drive outa here.  
Corvallis, Oregon has left me mildly scarred in the revelry region.  Shit, I was 
damn scared of drinking in that town.  Mostly because I was so damn 
depressed.  And when you're depressed you just can't handle people telling 
you shit like "ooh, don't EVEN get caught with beer on your breath driving 
in this town.  The DA's daughter was killed by a drunk driver and they'll 
shackle you and run you up the river."  This guy I was working with at this 
real estate agency before I totally shut down took me out for a drink and told 
me all about his DUI, about having a device hooked up to his ignition 
whereby he'd have to blow into it to drive and how his wife hated him for 
awhile and all this fear shit.  He reminded me of the library janitor in one of 
Hunter Thompson's short pieces.  The guy has an electronic ankle bracelet 
on, his portable jail sentence for some innocuous crime.  All 1984 fear and 
loathing shit. 

So, when Seven says to me in this conspiratorial tone that he's been watching 
this one short-haired guy at the bar and is sure he's the sheriff, blah, blah, 
blah, it's hard to ignore the paranoia.

The cats are stomping now here at the Country Saloon.  The well-scuffed 
hardwood floor rumbles and thumps with footstomps beating time to Bird' 
sax.  "I've got my eyes on you.. stomp, stomp."  Hard to say what other lyrics 
there are.  The sax is prime.  And now it's over and the natives are really 
going wild.  A major stomp, howls and cheers.  Waitress Lou comes by to 
collect my empties and tells me how the Walkman-and-sunglasses-wearing 
bunny on the table beside me was part of  her larger donation to the art car 
cause.  Seems she gave Seven a bunch of toys.  And she says when we come 
through next year (?) she will have all the town's used toys collected and will 
donate them to us.  Wild.

I'm eavesdropping.  Ramon is terrifying the blond in the booth with him 
with tales of California falling into the sea.  Of course, we're not in California, 
so maybe terrifying ain't the right word.  She laughs.  Maybe she's thrilled.

So, I've just discovered that I've been drinking 3.2 beer here for hours.  The 
blond says I'll find out tomorrow.  Huh?  How could it be bad if, as I'm now 
realizing, I've hardly a buzz?  "We call it 3-too full," she says.  Uh.  Ok.

I'm hankering for a nice long night soak in that lake down the road.  Take me 
to your lake.  It's only 11 p.m., but suddenly I'm real wiped.  Too much smoke 
inhalation.  Wanna know the rest?  Buy the rights.

[Retrospective..]
That night Chiquita, Ned and I swam far out into Lake Washington under 
the starry canopy of night.  The party, now moved from the bar to Jim's 
lakefront property raged on, the musicians jamming acoustic by a bonfire.  
The next day Jim's brother Merrill cooked us all a breakfast fantastic breakfast 
of bratwurst and potatoes over an open fire.  Some local ladies showed up 
from the Twine Ball Inn with 8 or 10 free pots of coffee for the celebrity artists 
that had brought their town so much fun the night before.

Ramon and Trip and the Yellow Submarine gang had fled sometime during 
the night intent on intercepting a UPS package containing Ramon's new 
movie camera in some town 30 miles to the north. The rest of us passed the 
morning and early afternoon hours swimming, making music, playing 
horseshoes and getting better aquatinted with our hosts.  Every few minutes 
passerby on the road above Jim's stretch of beach would slow to a crawl and 
gaze in wide wonder at the weirdness they had found.  Haha.

Jim had inner tubes galore, such that even Seven got out of his wheelchair 
and into the water.  It was his first dip in a lake in years, and a well-deserved 
cool-off it was for our good will ambassador, the artist Seven who the time to 
whip out an oil painting of the caravan lakeside as a gift for our kind host 
Jim.  It was a great gesture, and the first of many such painting-gifts he would 
hand out along the way.

Other gifts were exchanged.  Chiquita makes wild, colorful necklaces out of 
plastic beads, fish hooks and rubber nightcrawler worms.  She gave one to 
young Sam, daughter of Jim's mistress Cheryl.  

Mistress.  Damn.  What a wild scene that was.  Jim, you pirate, you!  Both Jim 
and Merrill were good candidates for the pirate role.  Merrill was tres Jimmy 
Buffett, and Jim, damn, all he needed was an eye patch to go with his sandy-
bearded and weathered face and his 10-cigar voice.  Merrill gave us all 
autographed CD's of his music, and not only gave Jim a book of my poetry but 
forfeited my Barbie towel to little blonde Sam.  Hell, she looked a lot more 
like Barbie than I did.

Some other female reporter showed up from some other paper.  A woman in 
her mid-fifties, she admitted to being somewhat afraid of what she might face 
when she got out of her car and walked over to check us out.  I had to laugh.  
Hell, every new and different reaction we get from someone makes me laugh.  
This whole damn art car gig is a scream, one long and fascinating sociological 
crawl up the nostrils and into the brain of our absurd American culture.  And 
that was it for Darwin.  


Wednesday, July 23, Edgerton, MN--

We eat like gypsy kings.  We sail through seas of corn like pirate farmers.  

Free pots of coffee from the Twine Ball Inn this morning.  Horseshoes and 
hand grenades.  Inner tubes and stiff nipples.

Interviews, the estranged wife, the CD gift, the painting, the bratwurst and 
potatoes, the lifting of the sauna to level.

Thursday, July 24, Route 268 out of Edgerton--

I managed to write that much last night after dinner and before falling hard 
asleep in the quiet of a rare early-to-bed night for the gang.    Got me a driver 
this morning so that for the first time I can type and roll along down the 
highway at the same time.  The first time, ever, in fact.  

Wow.  After all these years of being a writer and then some 7 years with 
Duke, driving through rain and snow without a roof, look at me now.  I'm 
hooked up, rolling down the highway past fields of endless corn typing on a 
386 laptop in the passenger seat of the weirdest fucking car on the road 
surrounded by pictures and tokens of loved ones and the very real and safe-
feeling presence of a caravan of friends with similar cars and similar creative 
interests and personal histories.  It's a kind of magic I feel sorely inadequate to 
express, like there's no way you the reader could possibly comprehend this 
without seeing it.  And then of course we have our film crew and each of us 
our own camera.

We pass a farm and I notice that the farmer is busily engaged in something 
with his tractor, something away from the road such that as we pass he 
doesn't even see us.  That's funny.  As much impact as we have everywhere 
we go, there is one man through whose world we drove directly without him 
ever knowing.

Just stopped for gas in Luverne, MN, down by the SD border.  As is often the 
case, what could have been a ten minute gas stop turned into a 45 minute 
spectacle.  This time it was a semi-organized display of the cars for the 
Minnesota tourism office across the street and a photog from the something-
something Sentinel, the local paper.  The reporter was a dark-skinned beauty 
named Ingrid, who during our brief conversation disavowed her small-town 
paper several times.  Ramon had given her a copy of the New York Times 
article, and it was likely this that had her apologizing for her small town 
intrusion into our big city world.  This of course is pure bullshit.  We are 
misfits all, and Ramon, with his Hollywood power-broker schpeel and his 
foam mattress bed on a hippie freak bus, is most certainly the king of this rat 
pack.

I don't know where I'm going with all this except to says that to some we are 
pure magic, a presence that enlightens and wows.  And to others, we pass by 
unnoticed or are, to the detriment of the observer, a disgusting absurdity.

Like the guy in the Arizona who kicked me out of his junkyard on some 
twisted aesthetic technicality.

Enough about that.  We have more serious matters at hand.  Just entered 
South Dakota and the Zepher, the  International Harvester truck that Big 
John bought back in Minnesota seems to have taken one of its daily dumps.  
Oil, that is.  Black gold, Texas tea.  I wish I had a dime for every time 
someone's taken a photo of my car, and another dime for every time I've 
heard my car and I likened to the Beverly Hillbillies.  

Tex is driving.  He's the drummer in the newly formed art car band The 
Fanatics.  Aside from a few lines on his character-weathered, mustached & 
goateed face, you'd never guess he was 43.  He pines for his new love Julliette 
whom he left back in Austin.  It's great to have someone else driving Duke.  
I've been having a hard time getting much written what with driving and all 
this fun we're having.

Just snapped a shot of Seven's dog baby with her head out the window of 
IFSM.  Seven is a real trooper in my opinion.  Bound to a wheelchair, he's 
managing this trip almost entirely independent of our help.  I mean, picture 
it.  Every time we stop and I jump out to stretch or hit the bathroom or pump 
my gas or sell a few postcards, Seven is occupied with doing whatever he can 
do himself from the driver's seat of this car.  All short stops (and we make 
many) are sit-in-the-car stops for him.  

Smoke & Buffalo
Enter: Sioux Falls, SD.  Stopped for a tune-up for Seven, some gear oil for the 
Zepher, and to retrieve Ramon's new camera from UPS.  Naturally, the stop 
consumed about 3 hours of our day.  But as Ned just noted, had we not 
stopped there we may never has seen the Shag Car, a mid-70s Chevy Impala, 
chopped and lined in a kind of puke yellow shag carpet.  Billy the kid found 
us, and I don't know who was happier to see who.  

He arrived swerving and honking with all his sound effects firing, an 
impressive enough entry though what he did next will no doubt worm its 
way into art car lore and stick.  After some introductions, photo poses with car 
and various members of the gang, Ramon asked him to do his bounce thing 
for the video camera.  Now, the bounce thing was kinda like what you see 
those low-rider cars do with their hydraulics, but was however, a simple toe-
heel, high-throttle-brake maneuver whereby the car jerked forward and 
rocked like a standard shift being driven by a novice.  

Bill did as he was bade, but then, with the engine still roaring, he locked up 
the breaks and laid down more rubber and sent up a bigger cloud of smoke 
than I'd ever had the hysterical laughing lung-displeasure to inhale.  All of us 
standing there on the sidewalk were consumed in the noxious cloud for a 
moment and with several still cameras snapping and one movie camera 
rolling, we caught all of it caught on film.

When the squealing stopped and the smoke cleared, all that remained of a 
large chunk of the Kid's tread was a puddle-sized black stain on the 
pavement.  Out of the driver's seat and around the back of the car came Billy 
saying check this out.  He opens the trunk and out pours another cloud of 
smoke, all that was trapped inside the trunk.  Bird bent down and with his 
finger carved out our call letters in the black dust on the street: ART, The 
American Road Trip, 1998.

Heading out of Sioux Falls, it was put to me to somehow get us to where 
Ramon and Trip sat in Ned's Yellow Submarine awaiting another UPS truck 
or something.  I exited the main freeway early and took several of our cars on 
a dirt road detour that, though it looked bad for awhile, magically got us right 
where we were headed.  But somewhere along that dirt road, I seemed to 
have lost a tire balance weight or something.  For not far down the road, a 
wobbling tire began to shake the Duke like a tilt-o-whirl.

To change tires, we pulled off at some buffalo burger & Ghost Town stop west 
of Sioux Falls.  The place was a riot, a thousand square feet of fireworks, 
trinkets, and weird attractions like the caged and well-dressed gorilla who, 
with a 50 cent incentive, would play the piano and sing some silly song.  The 
ghost town was out back, presumably accessible though the store.  Everyone 
loaded up on fireworks and buffalo burgers while I changed out the bad tire, 
laboring over a badly-stressed bumper jack that surely was never designed to 
lift the kind of weight Duke was pushing these days.  

It was yet another five minute stop turned hour-and-a-half adventure, with 
all of us tromping out onto a pasture for a film shoot with the buffalo and 
nearly triggering a stampede.  The pasture was anything but wheelchair 
accessible, but Seven isn't easily discourage and merely threw his little Honda 
into imaginary 4-wheel drive jungle-thrasher mode and drove on out there.  
As soon as Baby got wind of the buffalo, she went ballistic, barking up a storm 
and threatening to leap from the car's passenger window.  By now, the store's 
owner had gotten wind of our activities, hopped in his truck, and raced on 
out with a mouth full of foul language and rabid spittle, threatening to call 
the cops if we didn't vacate at once.  The fastest I ever saw the caravan move 
was out of the buffalo burger, singing gorilla ghost town tourist turn-out just 
west of Sioux Falls, SD.

And the excitement wasn't over.  At the cloverleaf entrance ramp, the 
caravan slowly climbed onto the freeway, wrapping around itself in 
picturesque wagon circle fashion.  So picturesque was it the moment that 
someone in a little red Japanese car coming down the offramp beside us lost 
complete control of his/her car and spun a donut before coming to rest half in 
the grass beside the road.  The whew!'s and wow!'s communicated over the 
CB had hardly died down when suddenly Ned shouted that Seven was 
dragging something beneath his car.  It was a heart-stopping moment that 
quickly passed when the piece of cardboard came flying out behind him.

A while up the road, I convinced the caravan to stop in Spencer, a tiny town 
that was already dwindling, its children having long fled to the cities, when a 
killer tornado struck a few months ago killing over 30 residents and 
destroying fully two thirds of the town's houses and public buildings.  It was 
an iffy stop.  I had no idea how we would be received but felt hopeful that our 
gift of comic relief would be appreciated.

And it was.  Though there weren't many people left in Spencer to witness our 
arrival, the dozen or so who did see us assured us that our gesture would not 
soon be forgotten.  There were smiles and tears, photos taken and gifts 
exchanged.  We gave them postcards, an art car book signed by all, anything 
we could think of.  They gave us a relief case of Gatorade which we tried not 
to accept but finally did lest we not offend them.  One resident, a lovely older 
woman named Barbara, pushed a fifty dollar bill into Seven's hand.  He 
unhesitatingly handed it back and said, "Go buy yourself a toilet."  Barbara 
and her husband lived in the last house left standing on the front line of the 
destruction.  Theirs was a tale not so much of total destruction but of 
irreparable damage, likely emotional as well as physical.

Corn
Next it's the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.  Here I digress into notes 
written on the scene, notes that I will preface with this:  The Corn Palace, like 
many places we have gone and will go, accepted us with kindness at the 
outset and before long was "requesting" our departure with hints of police 
action.  No, I shouldn't say this happens everywhere.  It doesn't.  But there is 
without a doubt a sense that our window of welcome is always a small one.  It 
is a blade which cuts both ways.  Out here on the road, we seem to tire quickly 
of the same stretch of pavement, and it of us.  In Mitchell, we arrived in the 
late afternoon, just early enough to snap a few shots before darkness set in.  
We occupied one entire length of the building with our cars, sharing space 
with the duly impressive corn-surfaced castle for a few hours that evening 
and all morning the next day.  And though I don't know how long we were 
there, I know that it was long enough to wear me out, both on the place and 
the people.  And when it was time to go, they let us know.

In truth, it was one of the more memorable stops.  

Notes from Mitchell:

Troy, manager of the Corn Palace; trying to keep pace with this caravan, I'm 
finding to be a daunting task.  Peter the architect from London, formerly of 
New Jersey, went to Yale, hailed Duke, says he knows the curator of Museum 
of Modern Art.  In pursuit of the Mitchell Corn Palace Farm Home for the 
terminally insane, or so it feels, driving around Mitchell at 2 mph searching 
for? following? some guy offering lodging for the night.  Wow, whatta scene.  
It's a good thing I'm getting down some notes on every day now because 
every hour of every day is full to the brim with weirdness.  A wagon circle in 
the grocery parking lot.  Newspaper reporter girl and copious notes.  Now 
we're at John's place, wherever that is.  The word was that we'd been invited 
to someone's farm.  Well, this sure as hell is one small farm.  But heh, no 
complaining.  Sure, John calls us "the modern hippies," which is somewhat 
irksome, but he's cool, crammed all of us into his yard, sparked up a fire in a 
giant oil barrel-looking thing in his yard.  Big John is a nice boy and I tell him 
so, excellent manners and cadence.  Tex ought get a haircut and open his own 
gospel church.  Talking with Ned.. something about face recognition vs. car 
recognition; forging a band on the road vs. forging one and working a 
schedule into everyone's schedule.  Stars beautiful and clear tonight, seeing 
the big dipper as if for the first time; the Finmobile in the light of the fire, 
glorious!

Next day: 
rainstorm early morning and Duke a little damp; Seven hurting after a night 
of Mudslides; Enter Bobina, sandwich buyer and friend to the gang; met a 
man with a toy-topped VW van; lotta dough in the donation can; Corn Palace 
miniatures -- a gift from the Palace, photographed and filmed installation on 
Duke.  I say I feel like a movie star sticking his hands in cement outside the 
Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.  


The Badlands
They're not called that fer nuthin.
Didn't write a goddamn thing between Mitchell and Murdo, South Dakota.  
Didn't write anything in Murdo either, but I did manage a few words at a rest 
stop somewhere on I-90 between Okaton and Belvidere.  To whit: "Well, 
today was weird.  Woke up at dawn and crawled out of Duke and into a 
torrential rainstorm.  Ran the hundred yards between the car and the 
bathroom here at some South Dakota rest stop where we unofficially 
encamped the night.  Last night was insane.  A mad energy struck the caravan 
as we pulled into a truck stop somewhere between Murdo and Rapid City."  
And that's it.  We were, in fact, well outside the Badlands just yet, but for me 
the ugly energy was already strong.  I imagine myself standing at that rest stop 
and looking up my location on a GPS, one of those satellite-linked calculator-
looking things Christopher Columbus would have given his left nut for.  
Murdo has bad energy and I can just see the GPS reading "GET OUT!" or 
"NOWHERE" from any point within a 50 mile radius.

Anyway, it's journaliterary (my word) black holes like this that have 
constipated this tales progress from the outset.  Every day now I find myself 
plugging holes, slamming my head against Duke's trunks trying to recall 
what the hell happened that night, or that minute.  Who would have 
thought life could move this fast out on the plains of South Dakota?  Answer: 
the citizens of Spencer.  Whooosh.

 My notebook scribblings from this time read: Corn palace photographer with 
chew all in his teeth; rain this a.m.; a robust argument in Murdo; Seven says 
"I'm right on your bumper"; Karl the truck driver from Rhode Island gives 
me $5; next a.m. Kadoka truck stop biker-looking dude (probably truck driver) 
gives Stockton $20 "for the art;" wild energy afoot; sprinkler run & shampoo; 
fireworks shoot.

In essence, the robust argument began in Mitchell.  It had to do with Mr. 
Film-maker's refusal to talk to the artists about what the hell he was doing at 
any given time.  It had to do with out-wearing our welcome at the Corn 
Palace and being threatened with towing if we didn't leave immediately and 
make room for several bus loads of Japanese tourists.  It had to do with the 
heat and with my impatience at a consistent lack of communication between 
the Powers that Were and the documentary's subjects, the artists.

Everything fell apart at a rest stop high above the Missouri River.  We had 
parked too far apart from one another, something that shouldn't have been a 
problem, one would think, for a group of people with CB radios.  But it was a 
problem.  The day was hot and I had been asleep at the wheel since Mitchell.  
After peeing and standing around awhile avoiding my car and the constant 
barrage of questions and ogling, I began to get impatient.  Why weren't we 
leaving?  The Yellow Submarine sat in the far corner of the rest stop and 
seemed never to leave.  I went and tried to get some info out of Ramon to no 
avail.  The man is a wall.

I don't recollect whether I was trying to herd the group myself or just 
threatening to take off without everyone, but I got in Duke and headed for the 
exit at a crawl.  In no time, all the cars were lined up except the Yellow 
Submarine.  And so we sat.  Over the CB, I said again and again, "Let's go," 
and "What the hell's going on Ramon?"  Never once did he respond with 
any indication of his intention, which we later discovered was to shoot the 
caravan crossing the Missouri River.

I don't remember exactly how it went down, but move out we did. Ned had 
done his best to calm me, even getting Chiquita to sing me a song in French.  
But I'll be the first to admit that by the time we hit the on ramp, I was rip shit.  
And I am not easily angered.  Tooling down the highway and out over the 
bridge, we learned at last what Ramon was up to.  But it was too late.  The 
caravan formation was a shambles.  If the damn film ever comes out and that 
little blurb survives the editing process, you will likely be able to see the 
smoke rising out over Duke, and not from the exhaust.

A few miles up the road we pulled off to let the Sub catch up and Tex took 
over driving for me.  Frustrated and tired, I self-prescribed a nap and crawled 
upstairs to crash.  Whatever rest I might have gotten was soon to be needed 
in Murdo.

A year and a half ago, Jill and I crossed South Dakota in the dead of winter.  I 
wrote about that journey, too, and one of that tale's richest yet darkest nuggets 
was about Murdo.  I hated the place, and had I been at the wheel I would 
never have stopped there again.  As it happened this time, I woke up there.

Tex would become known to Seven and I as the well-meaning guy whose 
assistance usually left you wishing you had just done it yourself.  Pulling into 
Murdo, he apparently took one look at the gas station where everyone else in 
the caravan was going and decided it was too full.  So he pulled in across the 
street.  Fine.  Except that instead of pumping the gas and rejoining the group, 
he simply knocked on the trunks to wake me up and left me there.

Now, I don't know how everyone else in the world wakes up from hot 
summer afternoon naps, but for me it's a struggle.  Add to that struggle the 
sketchy nature of sleeping in a makeshift camper shell at 55 mph and waking 
up to a dozen leering, bad-toothed local yokels circling your car wondering if 
they should lynch the long-haired art fag or simply hack him up and eat him 
on sight?  (My mind is an ugly thing to wake up to.)  

That gas stop was unique among the three dozen or so gas stops I would make 
on that cross-country trek.  I stuck the hose in Duke, stared at the digital 
readout as it zoomed toward $20, and never made eye contact or voiced more 
than a one-syllable answer to anyone's questions of Duke.  I couldn't.  I would 
have lost my mind if anyone had violated my fragile, half-asleep space.  If any 
of them had tried to fuck with me, I might have doused them with gas and 
gone tearing out of the parking lot sending up sparks as my tailpipe scraped 
the sidewalk.  Lord only knows.

Naturally, that awakening had done little for my mood.  My anger had now 
jumped tracks and focused itself on Tex, the bungling fool who'd abandoned 
me to the rabid and drooling buck-toothed locals.  And with all that going on, 
Ned called a meeting out front of some car museum down the street.  The 
subject was more or less Ramon's discontent with our fucking up his shoot 
back at the Missouri River.  I went in with all guns firing.

All I recall with clarity is getting in Ramon's face when he announced his 
near-intention to "take the camera, get on a plane and fly to Portland" where 
he would do business and await our arrival there in two weeks.  "Don't make 
like your the one who's been put out here!" I shouted, referring to his pouty 
take-my-toys-and-go-home attitude.  It was ugly.  

But it was therapeutic, if for no one else but me.  I actually hugged Ramon in 
the end and told him I'd be glad to take direction from him if only he would 
communicate what the hell he wanted.  And it seemed to have worked for 
him, too.  For not an hour down the road we hit the rest stop that would be 
our home that night, legalities to the wind.  And while there, Ramon would 
direct a rather bizarre but fascinating little segment involving fireworks and 
art cars, two things I never would have connected until then.  It was a blast 
and a success in a very gonzo sort of way.  Pyrotechnics and illegal camping 
on the interstate.  You don't get much more felonious without pulling out a 
gun.

The weird energy that I mentioned earlier was every bit the result of that hot 
and argumentative afternoon and its shaky resolution.  When we hit the rest 
stop at dusk, whoops and hollers filled the air.  We were inexplicably ecstatic.  
Chiquita's day-glo wigs were out and adorning heads.  Firecrackers and bottle 
rockets snapped and popped in the wind.  Chiquita came running back from a 
run through the sprinklers all wet and wild-eyed.  Hot and sweaty as I was, I 
put up no resistance as she dragged me through them as well.  I even ran back 
to Duke to fetch my shampoo.  Chloe set up kitchen in a little rest stop alcove 
and cooked buffalo burgers and teriyaki chicken.  Beer came from every car 
and Stockton's roof-top speakers filled the windy plains with rock and roll.  
The night was alive and electric.

The next day we'd split from the Yellow Bus to drop down on the 240 
through the Badlands.  Outside a store, the main attraction of which was a 
prairie dog town, we parked and pissed a bitch about the cost of getting into 
the Badlands at $10/car.  We piled into three vehicles, leaving the Natmobile, 
Max and the trailered Ripper behind, and sailed through half the park, with 
Stockton kindly picking up the tab for everyone.  To my mind, the best part of 
our brief jaunt through the park was Duke's open observation tower from 
which Bobina, Chiquita, Tex, Ned and I all got to view the landscape.  Tex and 
Ned had removed the bubble skylight making for a primo wind-in-your-face 
ride.  Otherwise, I found the Badlands rather boring and spent most of the 
ride discussing voluntary extinction with Ned.

All the way across South Dakota, tourists, truckers and everyone else behind 
the wheel are insidiously and repeatedly reminded of the existence of Wall 
Drug.  No matter that you're not in the market for pharmaceuticals or that 
you have no idea what the hell Wall Drug is, founder Ted Hustead has 
masterminded a command of your attention.  Perhaps because there's simply 
nothing else to see way out here where the GPS reads "NOTHING," Wall 
Drug thousands of billboards bring in the customers.

Tex had voiced the rather sensible notion that we boycott Wall Drug 
altogether due to their ruthless commercial brainwashing and "blow by Wall 
at top speed."  I was hip to that idea when first he said it.  But after the 
Badlands had emptied both my brain and my stomach, I and everyone else 
was hungry and off the interstate we went in search of Wall Drug.

What we found was a zoo-like mass of tourists swarming the narrow avenue 
of an old west-like town.  I saw dollar signs.  A few others in the caravan, who 
don't have postcards to sell, saw high prices and pain-in-the-ass crowds.  And 
thanks to that, we almost bailed.  Until suddenly a situation evolved.

An old man in a new white Cadillac was bending Chiquita's ear and holding 
up traffic behind me, while a huge human being in coveralls and resembling 
Hoss from "Bonanza" was saying, "Mr. Hew-sted would like to give you all a 
free ice water book."  Huh?

To make a long story short, the old man was 96-year-old Ted Hustead, 
founder of Wall Drug, a drug store in the middle of nowhere made-famous 
by Hustead's initial genius act of giving out free ice water to travelers.  The big 
guy was his driver and personal assistant.  The Ice Water Book is Wall Drug's 
biography.  And the story is that old Ted liked our cars, and that I was able to 
turn that appreciation into $20 off lunch for the gang.  It wasn't much, but it 
was fun.  I kicked myself later for not getting a photo of me and Ted.  
Nowadays Wall Drug gives out free bumper stickers (each one a tiny billboard 
advertisement of itself).  We took them and stuck them on our cars.  Seven 
altered his to read, "Drug Dakota."  And on we rolled.


Rapid City
Well, this is a first.  I'm sitting upstairs in the trunk sculpture while some cop 
runs Tex's license and Duke's info.  Never been pulled over while writing 
before, and up in the trunk sculpture no less.  The cops are breathalyzing the 
whole gang.  Seems our wagon train formation in the parking lot of Dan's 
Market upset the management enough for them to call the cops on us.  
Apparently you have to be drunk to do anything resembling fun in this town.  
Rapid City.  Arrive with style and we will rapidly descend upon you with cops 
and a fresh breathalyzer straw for everyone.  Ah, hell.  Tomorrow they'll send 
out a news team to brighten their gloomy news day.  

The cop is apparently confused with the information given him.  It doesn't 
match up.  The cop wants to know who owns the car.  Tex says, "The car 
belongs to the man upstairs."  We're going to jail for sure now.

The cop figures out that Tex is telling the truth and calls me down from 
above.  Cops.  They would summon God from the Heavens if they could.  I 
come down.  I am flustered, unable to find my license and irritated to be 
disturbed from A: my nap, and B: my writing, all for no reason that I can 
ascertain.  I mean, why does the guy need my license?  And now he wants to 
breathalyze me!  The absurdity of the whole thing is so bulbous and 
magnificent that I play along, utterly stupefied.  What the hell.  It'll make for 
a good story.  I pass the breathalyzer with flying colors.  Duh.  It's the middle 
of the afternoon and I've been sleeping.  Ok, now the reason for this charade 
is finally made clear.  Cops.  Keep you in the dark as long as they can.  It seems 
Stockton's license is expired and they need me to drive for him.  Phew.  I 
thought I was going to have to go into a fit of insane laughter and dance 
around like a goofy chicken.  Wouldn't that be good, eh?  Stone sober, not 
even driving, man pulled over and dragged from his car for no good reason 
at all arrested for balking at police with mad chicken clucks.  Fuck.

The Rant of Seven: 
the artist speaks out on car art
[Based on interview notes scribbled in a frenzy in an industrial back lot, Rapid 
City, SD.  Seven would like it noted that all sentiments expressed about 
Ramon were said before Ramon's mysterious disappearance.]

If it didn't look cool, they would arrest us.  Even though they are lay people 
they have enough sense to know that this is art.  The layman gets it, "Good 
job," he says, "That must have taken a lot of time."   The idea came to me 
when I won first prize in Bisbee.  IFSM.. Artcarism.  All the movements now 
are neo.  But not this.  A car is really amazing.  It's a 3-dimensional canvas.  
Picasso tried to get 3-D with cubism and couldn't do it.  On a car you have 
four sides, a roof, fenders.  And then there's your medium.  Plastic, wood, 
whatever, it's your paint and how you arrange it.  I paint with plastic.  You 
write with trunks, TVs, cow skulls.  It's all put together for art.  You can put 
anything on a car and it's not shit, it makes sense.  This needs to be done.  
People say wow!  A mother says, "Mary, John, don't touch the car."  I say 
"TOUCH THE CAR!"  It's interactive art.  Anything you sign your name to 
when you're an artist is art.  But a baker can't do that.  Being a part of all this 
is what I believe in.  I've only been in on it for a year, but I believe in this 
thing.  Somebody's gonna come up with a name for it, but its not gonna be us.  
It's gonna be some schlep with media savvy.  But I'll tell you one thing, we're 
NOT folk artists.  We're abstractionists.  We are a part of this fucking thing.  
Some people will say that we are fucking insane, but were not.  My friend Rob 
Moore, a teacher at Mass college of art, he painted squares, all the time 
squares.  Solid color.  It's continuity.  Paint, toys and glue.  Continuity.  We 
don't worry about weight.  Does the glue look good?  Who cares, it doesn't 
matter.  Ned works in roofing material, foam, makes a big bump, what 
happens next?  Every thing is fucking silver, continuity, better and better and 
better, you don't sit there and draw a fucking tulip.  That would be folk art.  
Ramon, documentation, celluloid, cataloguing the movement for lay people 
to understand.  Spontaneity, working it to death.  You learn the materials, 
you get the feel of the materials.  Monet got kicked out of the salon because he 
was doing impressionism.  This needs to be brought out to joe public who is 
ignorant to art.  It's VISUAL CANDY!  It wakes you up.  Why do you like it?  I 
don't know, I just do.  The gallery is too pristine.  What is this, totally anti-
authoritarian?  Is he more confused?  Probably, but he's looking at my 
postcard.  We're pioneers, we're going to little towns, bringing the gallery to 
the circus for free!  Like that guy at the truck stop.. Are you an artist?  "No, 
I'm a trucker.. here's ten dollars for the art."  We've got editors parking at 
every on-ramp waiting to do a story on us.  

THEY'RE STARVED FOR A NEW ISM!"  When you're in a state of 
confusion, you're in a state of if-ism.  The more we do what we do, the more 
we make the decision.  I am totally supportive of Ramon.  He's cataloguing 
all this.  I'm in it neck deep.  My life is a crank, I'm cranky!  Some people take 
over the CB radio and I get irritated and flip it off, but then I flip it back on 
because I might be missing something.  I would be missing out on that 
moment of spontaneity!  IFiSM!  Artcarism!  I see Ned's fins over the line of 
cars and everything is Finism!  Why don't we string some yarn from car to 
car?  Because that's what it looks like going down the road.  I really believe 
that this is a revolution, that this way of being with our art on the road is the 
new thing.  We're making it Americanized in the grandstand!

[End of rant]


Sunday morning in Rapid City, SD.  Or so they tell me.  When we rolled in 
here last night just before dusk, I was half asleep in the trunk sculpture 
staring out at a swirling sky as Duke did the wagon circle thing with his 
fellow art cars in some supermarket parking lot.  It was beautiful, really.  
Plugged into my Walkman and Enigma, flat on my back I watched a single 
oval cloud spin in place as though Duke and I were the very spindle on 
which the great green Earth spun like a top.

Anyway, I have no physical evidence of my whereabouts.  And as for the date, 
shit.  I haven't known what day it was for awhile.  

Booted up this morning in the yet-humid confines of my little rain-
dampened abode.  Tuned in on a Frank Sinatra song, you're marvelous, 
you're wonderful, etc.  From where I sit I can see down through the hatch and 
out the open passenger door at the gravel and weeds of the industrial 
complex "lawn" where we parked the night outside of some tattoo parlor on 
the proprietor's invite.

It's weird, this tendency to wind up camped out in places or with people I 
wouldn't otherwise hang out in or with.  But this is the third or fourth time 
our low-budget, no budget schedule that Chloe's saloon-savvy has landed us 
free "accommodations" for the night.  I throw quotes around the word 
accommodations because, well, sleeping in parking lots, back lots, the back 
yards of hick town locals who call us "modern day fucking hippies," well, it 
ain't The Plaza in New York City, now is it?  

Free lodging for a motley crew like us means roughing it in an urban 
homeless person sense.  It means highway noise, trucks blowing by so close 
sometimes they shake your sleep space.  It means weeds and chunks of 
broken concrete.  It means slummin' it.

The Black Hills
I don't know what day it is.  I don't what time it is.  I don't hardly know 
where I am.  I don't care.

Duke purrs and rumbles beneath me, a dragon heaving and twitching in 
dream sleep.  A short while ago all was quiet `cept the rain on the tin roof and 
bubble skylight overhead.  But then the deep-cell RV battery died after many 
days of uncharged use.  The computer began blinking at me, holding out as 
long as it could to give me time to save.  I did.  It died.  And I spent the next 
half hour rigging up a charge wire from the main battery to the new, auxiliary 
one behind the driver's seat.  Then I fired up the Duke, put a test lamp on my 
connections to make sure we were getting a charge, then crawled back up into 
the cave to type.

How long does it take a battery to charge with the engine running?  I haven't 
a clue.  The dragon heaves and grumbles.

Duke is no longer a car.  He is a ship, a mad galleon adrift in mid-western 
America.  Today we sail blindly in thunderstorm seas.  When I heard the 
thunder coming, lumbering across the lake on feet of falling trees, I moved in 
action, unlashing and spreading out the giant army tent canvas to fully cover 
the trunk sculpture.  As the rain began to come in earnest, I used one of the 
two tikki torches that jut from the front of the trunks to hold some of the 
canvas out and over the passenger door so that I could boil water for coffee 
whilst seated on the running board.  The rain came then harder and the 
thunder crashed and Duke rocked in the wind.  I just managed to boil water 
when I had to retreat inside the ship to escape the spray of the sea.  I closed the 
door and sat awhile in the backseat peering out the porthole at the frothing 
Black Hills South Dakota squall.  Then up into the cave I climbed, lit a candle, 
fired up the 386 and began to write.

There is so very much to write.  I have been at sea now for at least a hundred 
years, or so it seems.  So much has happened.  Where can I begin?

Most everything I have written to date has been in the form of rough notes or 
heartfelt starts on chapters hardly developed let alone completed.  This whole 
mad journey will make a book, of that I am sure.  But for now it is my duty to 
keep abreast of the action, to keep time with the rhythm of every passing day.

Ned, Johnny and Chiquita were just here.  How many times was Christ 
tempted in the desert?  Well, these guys were my last temptation today.  Or so 
I hope.  They came from Rapid City, where the bulk of the art car caravan sits 
encamped in the rather modest surrounds of Rapid's light industrial 
outskirts.  Chiquita escaped with Seven and I the night before last and 
together we overnighted on some forest road just past the sign saying 
"Rushmore 2 Miles."  

Yesterday we were all due to meet up at the front entrance to Rushmore at 9 
a.m., a targeted rendezvous time that I pretty much knew would never draw 
fire.  We got there around 11 a.m., figuring the film crew and band bunch 
would be running at least a couple hours late.  Come to find out they'd 
decided to not even do Rushmore that day.  That, and by the tone of Ned's 
voice on the cell phone, they were more than a bit unhappy at our miniature 
mutiny.  I was unfazed.  If I'd learned anything in the past year of following 
Jill around the country from one place I hated to the next, it was that you 
can't hang where you ain't happy.  You can't sit in a pile of shit and paint the 
Mona Lisa.  God, that sounds like some bad country music lyric.

But that's what you get for getting the story as the story unfolds.  Pure gonzo, 
barely edited visceral lip service.  What?  I don't know why I said that.  Just 
sounded good, I guess.  In truth, this is anything if lip service.  This is lip-
smacking butterscotch Sunday licorice toffee stout beer through a straw.  This 
is a the Titanic steamer trunk that never sunk.  This is your life raft to the 
Afterworld.  Grab your ankles and kiss your butt naked foot masseuse on her 
honeydew melon.

I just love that phrase: butt naked.  Sometimes it's buck naked, other times 
it's butt.  Before Chiquita and the boys departed without me to go see the 
Crazy Horse monument, it was she and I butt naked for a long, quiet swim 
out into the lake.  In the calm aftermath of the storm, the water's surface sat 
still as a mirror in an empty room.  When we stood up in the shallow water 
by the shore, the two pre-pubescent Kansas City boys in the next campsite 
howled in disbelief, "THEY'RE BUTT NAKED!"  Chiquita, perhaps in part 
because she's French, simply laughed and made no attempt to hide herself.

Anyway, after one quite peaceful night spent just off a dirt road a mile or two 
into the woods, we opted for a fee area campground here on Lake Sheridan.  
We had intended to just continue camping at our newfound free spot out in 
the woods.  But some local kids had turned us on to the lake suggesting it as a 
good place to take a swim, a lake accessible to Seven and relatively cheap at $2 
per car.  But when we got here and discovered that we and our three vehicles 
could all camp for $13 per night, well.. there was little hesitation.  And once 
in site #64, we learned that Seven's Golden Age National Parks pass cut the 
cost in half.  Thus, $6.50 per night for three people and three cars.  

Chiquita, however, had other plans.  As a member of the gang's on-board 
rock band and truly the caravan's shining & eternally-smiling, multi-colored 
wig-wearing happy-go-lucky lucky charm, she was due back in the industrial 
zone for band practice.  Chiquita the silly, the silicone-toting optimistic 
adhesive of an otherwise wretched band of battling male egos.  This caravan, 
and especially its so-called celluloid leader, owes Chiquita its very existence, I 
think.  The possibility that I may break away at any moment is very real 
indeed.  And Seven has sworn to join me saying, "Anytime you wanna go, 
I'm on your bumper."  And almost nightly one can observe the sparks of 
dissension amongst Ramon and his carry-on investors.  Already Stockton has 
fled and returned, and Big John, who appears to hold the greatest swing over 
the project, has threatened to pull out yet remains in what appears a guardian 
stance.

The whole thing is bizarre and outlandish.  One night it's Ramon at an 
interstate rest stop directing a highly dangerous and most certainly illegal 
pyrotechnics display for the camera, and not two days later the very same 
man is shouting "Who the fuck did that?" when I off-handedly ignite one 
pack of firecrackers in a moment of extreme ennui.  "What do you wanna get 
us kicked out of here?" he shouts and the whole gang gets quiet as though the 
school principal himself had slapped a ruler on his desk and demanded to 
know who had snickered at him.

Ramon is a tyrant and a fool.  He's got all the markings of a shallow, 
unreliable yet full of promises Hollywood snake in the grass.  Yet he's way 
out of his element out here on the road with us.  We're artists, true blue 
crazies well-accustomed to going without and torn through with an 
independent streak as long and as sharp as a battle sword.  

But on the other hand, Ramon is an innocent of sorts.  He shouts and stomps 
and never looks you in the eye because in truth he's scared shitless of you.  
Underneath that exterior of bullshit is a very insecure but probably well-
meaning guy.  And as a filmmaker, perhaps he too deserves the title of artist.  
I wouldn't know, having never seen his art yet having experienced plenty of 
his personality.

Chiquita and Ned have returned.  Good for them.  This means we're 
succeeding in moving the city to the mountain.  Not that we really set out to 
do so.  But the choices are hardly balanced.  At $6 or even $13, a night spent in 
the forest by a lake is light years away from a dirt lot by the highway on the 
outskirts of Rapid City.

But there return in not so good for me, or for this story rather.  It means 
distraction.  I am tempted once again.  So if at any moment the words cease in 
mid-sentence, well, you'll know why.

It grows dark.  I remember the sweetest of naps this afternoon.  It was 
sometime between little fits of rain, between my mid-afternoon swim with 
Chiquita and Seven's return from the Veteran's Administration Hospital in 
Sturgis.  The skylight was covered in canvas, as it has been all day, allowing in 
only the tiniest points of the dim gray light of day such that from inside my 
cave it appeared that I was looking up at a starlit sky.  The campground was 
empty and all was silence and rest.  I folded up the computer, set it aside, and 
lay down.  And I slept.  And when I awoke it was due to no disturbance, only 
my inner clock signaling that I was sufficiently rested.  It was perhaps the 
most beautiful and pure sleep I have had in weeks, perhaps years.

Now I drink instant coffee and watch the yellow candle whittle away on the 
shelf to my right.  All day the hatch has been open to afford me ample air to 
breath, and now looking down it I see only darkness.  Night has come.  

The road is divine at such moments as this.  This is eternal camping.  This is 
the possibility of travel without end.  And it feels good.  It doesn't matter that 
some filmmaker struggles with an impossibly small budget and an excess of 
hot air and that he is supposedly in charge of all this.  It doesn't matter that I 
myself have less money on hand than it will take to get me back to the west 
coast in gas.  It doesn't matter that the only magazine that has for sure 
committed to taking this story doesn't even pay.  It doesn't matter.  

All that matters is that I'm doing it, is that I'm here.  That we're here.  All 
that matters is that Duke and IFSM and The Natmobile and Ripper the 
Friendly Shark and Max the Daredevil Finmobile, that our cars are here in 
South Dakota on the move and in the public eye and that we're fine.  All of 
us, we're doing just fine.  And the story will be published, in more places and 
more ways and with more payoff than I can imagine.  And Ramon will get 
his film made, no matter if it's a film of half a dozen art cars leaving him in 
the dust.  We're here, on the road and an inspiration to all who see and meet 
us.

Sake by the Lake
Gonzo in the late night dregs of afterthought.  Sake with Bird and Chloe on 
the verandah.  Email at long last today after over a week on the road.  Several 
messages from Jill make me hungry for all the things she gave me.. 
companionship, constant love.   A box of wine a questionable investment 
with funds now down into the below $100 range.  But it made me feel good to 
sit in Duke in the rain and play music and glue laminated photos of friends 
and loves past onto Duke's ceiling, to construct a verandah beneath which 
the gang could sit, the two tikki torches holding the tarp out from the car just 
far enough.  Feeding Chloe a Darvo through the ship's port hole window, 
making a game of it whereby I told her she had to stick her tongue through 
the "pharmaceutical delivery porthole" to receive her painkiller.  

I had fun tonight, I really did.  Sitting here in my condominium on wheels, 
deciding to at long last tear out the front passenger seat back to give me some 
much-needed room to clamber about, to get from the driver's seat to the back 
and most importantly, from the passenger door straight up through the hatch 
without the hassle of moving the seat forward.  I had fun reveling in my 
accomplishment once done, sliding forward with ease to turn the key in the 
ignition and grab the p.a. microphone, freaking out the curious camper kids 
from next door with a sudden burst of grumbling sound beneath Duke's 
hood.  I had fun.  Really I did.  Despite the rain, I had fun sipping wine with 
my friends, making rice, eating salad prepared by Chiquita in the rain, eating 
salmon cooked by Ramon.  I had fun.

I miss Jill.  Reading her email messages and her sense that perhaps I didn't 
want to communicate with her anymore because it had been so long since my 
last reply.. mmm.  It was tough.  I go to bed alone with Jill ever-richly on my 
mind.  I go to bed now thankful for the dryness my big ole army tent affords 
me in this Black Hills drizzle, yet somewhat damp and dissatisfied.  What 
have I done?  What did I give up to come on this mad journey?  Sleep now, 
for in a few short hours Seven will be up and talking to his dog at the top of 
his voice.


Dispatch to Rolling Stone Magazine
Today, we make history.
Today, we touch lives in a way unique to history, by means so beautiful and 
genuine and specific to each member of our clan, that surely no one will ever 
replicate this day.

Today, we inspire America to smile for no other reason than we can, we do.  
We are the smile-makers.  We are the equalizers, such that people of all walks 
of life come to us with the tale and their lives, with their two-cents and 
innocence, with their take on the meaning of life.

Today, we reach out and touch the Holy Grail, the ever-elusive dream of 
perfect happiness.  We are the fountain of youth.  We are the dream-makers.  
We are the dream, the realization of many dreams and the seed of a thousand 
thousand more.  

Today, we make history.  

Today we live, taking art on the road and sharing it unselfishly.  And in-so-
doing, we become immortal.  We sign postcards yet we are not rock stars.  We 
garner donations of $20 bills from rogue and hoary bikers, yet we are not 
bikers.  We drive cars that get unimaginably bad gas mileage and we are 
always low on cash, yet we keep rolling, magically, incredibly.

Today, we see America, and America sees us.


I made the mistake some weeks ago, while talking on the phone with an 
editor from Rolling Stone, of saying that there were a couple of hundred 
people involved in this venture.  She had asked me how many people were 
involved, a perfectly understandable question from a magazine that makes it 
profits in newsstand sales and advertiser patronage.  And I blew it.  I thought 
only of the car artists, adding up the attendees at the three or four big events 
we were going to hit along the way.  But now I know better.  Now I know the 
real answer, or can at least approximate it.

To figure how many people our journey involves, let's do a little math.  

First, let's take a look at me and my car Duke, on the road alone for five days 
from Portland to Minneapolis.  Now, according to what I told Danielle 
Mattoone at Rolling Stone, the number of people involved in that leg of the 
journey would total one: me.  This, I now see, is absurd and wrong.

On that short leg of the trip alone, I touched the lives of thousands of people.  
No joke.  To borrow an old cliche, "if I had a dime for every time" someone 
took my picture during that rather rushed 1800 miles, I would be a 
millionaire.  Well, maybe not quite.  But imagine yourself driving down a 
busy summer highway in the slowest car on the road.  Now, imagine all the 
people that would pass you.  Can you even count that high?  I can't.  
Thousands and thousands.  Bikers, truckers, old couples in RVs, families, 
commuters, college students on vacation, and the list goes on.  Now give 
every third person that passes you a disposable camera.  Now are you getting 
the picture?  

Every time I stopped for gas or a pee at a rest stop, I was swamped by travelers 
wanting to know all about my car, to touch it, to photograph it, to take it in 
with eager TV-wearied eyes.  And in Fargo, ND where I stopped for dinner at 
an Applebee's on the cue of some local rock station doing a live broadcast 
there, the local NBC affiliate sent out a cameraman and put me on the ten 
o'clock news.  Do the math, baby.

I was photographed more in those five days than some people are 
photographed in their entire lives.  And that was just the beginning.

Now, I arrive in Minneapolis, my destination.  I meet up with dozens of 
other car artists and we do a parade.  We do a parade, a symposium at which I 
speak to some 200 people about car art, a spontaneous cruise around the city 
and more.  In one day, the day of the Lyn-Lake Street Fair, so many people 
surround my car that by the end of the day I can barely think straight for all 
the names I've ingested and all the times I've answered the same ten or 
twelve questions about the whys, whats and wherefores of my car.  That, and 
I've got a $125 in my donation can.  Taking into account that axiom which 
states that "for every ten attempts at something you get one positive 
response," I would place my audience that day at, and this is a modest 
estimate, 1,250 people.  

Now we form a caravan.  We leave Minneapolis with a dozen artists in some 
8 or 9 cars and we head west, stopping first at the World's Largest Ball of 
Twine in Darwin, Minnesota.  We take the town by storm.  Or, I should say, 
they take us.  Within hours, word spreads through the entire area of our 
presence.  At the local tavern that night, we rock the town.  Let's call it 100 
people we touch directly.  But then two local newspapers interview us, with a 
combines circulation of several thousand.  Bang!  

From Darwin we head to Pipestone, Minnesota, where a grocery store parking 
lot quickly fills up with onlookers and someone announces that the local 
paper is on its way.  But we hear about a festival in nearby Edgerton, and race 
against the dying sunlight to get there before the fireworks display.  We make 
it in, but the gang is tired.  Several cars retreat to a campground, but Ned and 
Seven and I hit the fair with our cars and meet several hundred people in a 
brief half hour visit.  The next morning we file into downtown Edgerton and 
give the whole town a look.  Are you still counting?  We've only just begun.

Next it's Sioux Falls, where we don't even stay the night.  Yet in a brief 
afternoon auto maintenance visit, we are interviewed by the one of the South 
Dakota's largest newspapers and a local CBS affiliate television station.  The 
next day in Mitchell I see myself portrayed in full color in the paper's 
lifestyles section, but there's so much happening in Mitchell I barely have 
time to look at it.  For there, at the World's only Corn Palace, we are being 
interviewed by print and television journalists.  Already, people are coming 
up to me and saying they saw me on TV in Fargo, or Minneapolis, or Sioux 
Falls.  The word is spreading.

And it must be also be mentioned that between Sioux Falls and Mitchell the 
caravan of art cars touched the lives of a handful of very special people.  Okay, 
so the surviving residents of Spencer, SD were few, but Barbara and Lloyd and 
Nancy, all survivors of a killer tornado that practically erased that town from 
the map were very happy to see us.  The world media that had sucked them 
dry of their tragedy just weeks before had all gone home, but the survivors 
were there and they saw us and we, most graciously and with empathy, saw 
them.

An ABC affiliate captured us in Rapid City, rounding out the alphabet soup of 
TVs old guard.  Today we lent smiles to hundreds of visitor's to Wyoming's 
Devil's Tower, and often did I hear someone say that they had seen us on TV 
just last night.

So there you have it.  I was wrong, Danielle Mattoone.  Take that estimated 
audience of 200 and square it and square it again.  Now you have your 
answer.  America is watching, and ART, The American Road Trip of 1998 is 
touching the lives of one helluva large chunk of Our Country Tis of Thee.

The Tower
The heavy bass boom beats of the mother ship echo through the campground.  
It's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" night every night here at Ellen's 
Driscoll's KOA at the base of Devil's Tower USA.  And it's Ashley the dog 
musher, the muscle-bound blonde beauty punching me in the arm and 
saying, "Well, you're a cute sucker, aren't you?"  It's Richard Dreyfuss going 
mad shoveling dirt into his kitchen window and building the tower that a 
turn of my head reveals in this Wyoming night.  It's Ned and Chiquita sitting 
rapt in the rain to see the aliens descend upon the Tower.  It's.. 

damn!  It's late now.  Get caught up in the action and you never finish the 
story.

Tex and me just had free ribs and barbecue beef sandwiches compliments of 
Gilly, the best bone in the basin.  Gilly, who while we ate elucidated on the 
finer points of sheep fuckin'.  "Nuttin else to do in Wyoming," he said.  Gilly 
and Dale with their portable smokehouse on wheels parked in Ellen's front 
yard here at the KOA Devil's Tower.

Ellen invited us for a comped lunch, then lodging 

[transmission interrupted by the arrival of alien spacecraft]


Garbage..
Rain.  It is everywhere I am these days.  Or so it seems.  Rain like dogs 
through garbage.  Rain like flies on fruit.  Rain like sea water over the 
bulkhead.  Drowning rain.  Death ray rain.  Rain that comes and stays, makes 
everything a damp, dreary pain in the ass and hooks you on SRIs to keep you 
from holding your breath too long.

In Oregon I forgot how to breath.  It was as though I held my breath to keep 
the rain out, to suspend animation until the sun came out and shined and 
spat out light and energy like an arc weld, so bright you can't look straight at it 
without it blinding you.  

Now where am I?  Wyoming.  The base of Devil's Tower and the rain's here 
too.  The rain and the garbage trucks.  Eight in the morning in a National 
Park campground and what arrives to crush the doe-in-the-grass silence but a 
fucking garbage truck.  Garbage trucks and a battalion of other publicly-funded 
industrial noise-makers ruled my early morning hours in Corvallis, beating 
my head bloody at the start of every depressing day there.  It is no small 
wonder to me that I didn't check out of that hotel a lot earlier, perhaps even 
by some permanent means.

Drizzly rain and garbage.  Welcome to my head this 4th day of August, 1998, 
semi-sorta lost in The Yellowstone State, severed from the caravan, 
contemplating car troubles with Duke and struggling to kick the mood drugs, 
the Wellbutrin and the Klonipin that I've been on for months.  So much for 
the elation of just two nights ago, eh?  Ah, hell, I'll get over it.  It's a good sign 
at least that yesterday while feeling down and expressing that to Tex and 
Seven, I called it the blues rather than "being depressed."  The blues sound 
more like something you can get over, something classical, something we all 
go through, unlike its more clinical cohort depression.  Sure, depression is 
something society needs to recognize as a bonifide illness and not just 
someone's self-indulgent escape from the responsibilities of the world.  But 
perhaps it would still be better called the blues.

 A few days ago while talking on a phone near Mt. Rushmore with my dear 
mother in Fallbrook, California, I told her about trying to kick the drugs I've 
been on since I no longer feel that I need them.  The way I figured it, I had 
already succeeded in kicking the Wellbutrin at least, having ceased taking it 
over a week ago.  But mom reminded me that these things can stay in your 
system for weeks, and that I should be yet watchful of a crash.  Oh, joy.  

So now, 3 or 4 days later, everything's coming up rain and garbage.  Ha.  Not 
really.  But it sure felt that way yesterday after a night of boxed wine, Darvocet 
and little sleep at the Buffalo Chip campground outside Sturgis, SD, at this 
very moment home to one of the largest motorcycle rallies on the planet, 
second only to Daytona, or so I've heard.  It was largely an ugly scene, graced 
only by the passionate performance of one Carolyn Wonderland of Texas and 
her band The Imperial Monkeys.  Despite the yuppification of Harley 
Davidson, the biker vibe is still an ugly one.  Having been to Burning Man in 
years past and seen how such gatherings can go, should go, well, it made it 
hard to smile at the crudity of Sunday night's Sturgis satellite scene.  
Tomorrow I will get another dose of that scene, this time in Hulett, 
Wyoming.  I'm banking on a better time there.  Banking.  Hoping.

And planning on not drinking or doping.  With every night out on the road 
feeling so much like a party, it's hard when you're a drinker to remember to 
cool it a bit, to remember that the road for all its euphoric air is also a place of 
challenges, and, in my case, work.  Drinking leaves me useless to write the 
next day, which when you drink nightly is every day.

But God the road is great when it's great!  So great that it's all I can do to pull 
time away from the greatness to write.  

Seven reads my Amtrak manuscript, or at least that portion that I've thus far 
managed to transcribe from my notes.  He likes it.  He says something about 
his trying to be less negative.  I ask him is the manuscript too negative.  No.  
It's intense, he says.  "Only you could write about a train trip like this," he 
says.  It pleases me to hear.  It is my third crack at a novel, and I want very 
much to get it all typed out.  


Go West Young Man..
Once upon a time in a land far, far away, there lived a strange, strange man 
with a strange, strange car.
Another perfect day here at Devil's Tower.  Ranger Michael Gallant zooms up 
to our campsite in his Ford Ranger to contest our fee arrangement.  Gallantly 
he parries forth against the formidable Seven, who with his Golden Access 
Pass has gotten as many as six of us art cars into a camp spot together, an 
apparently permissible though certainly disagreeable maneuver to young 
Gallant, Devils Tower's most duty-conscious watch dog.  He's a little prick is 
what he is.  Came to me the other day at the KOA outside the National ark 
Grounds and gave me this long schpeel about hot paying the proper amount 
at the campground and how important it is for everyone to pitch in to 
support the National Parks and how little each taxpayer contributed to the 
parks last year, this whole big long civic duty bullshit rap to which all I could 
say was, "So much for public lands."

Ah, shit.  I'm back into the notebook after some 3 & 1/2 weeks on the road 
trying valiantly to get the story down in little installments on my laptop.  
Alas, yesterday in the thick of the Hulett madness the deep cell RV battery ran 
outa juice and left me to wander and wonder stupidly, somewhat anxiously at 
first and then finally lazedly after popping a Klonipin in mood-drug-kicking 
surrender.  Holly Golightly's mean reds were on me and 60,000 Harley 
Davidsons  thundering all around me was just too much to cope with.

Perhaps the whole gig was soured for me the night before when Jimmy D's 
kinda-sorta hospitality reared its ugly head.  We had been invited to Hulett by 
Jimmy in the first place and had unwittingly stepped on Jimmy's toes when 
we accepted rally promoter Spider's offer to pay us to park our cars downtown 
during the gig.  After parking the cars, I had ventured on up to Jimmy's to say 
hello and feel things out.  By now I knew that Jimmy was disappointed, but I 
had no idea how thoroughly the tide had turned against us.  Jimmy was 
downright rude and bitter about the whole thing, essentially lumping us in 
with all the wrong that had come to the festival he'd started years before.  
After a good half hour of eating crow at a table with Jimmy and his friends, I 
left with my tail between my legs, thoroughly convinced that I'd done a bad 
thing and that we should pull out of town immediately.  

But thank God for the good sense and commitment to personal boundaries 
I'd been developing since a winter of depression.  With every step away from 
Jimmy's I thought up damn good reasons for my actions.  For one, had I 
thought of it on the spot, I would have told Jimmy that after six or eight years 
of taking shit for driving a weird car that when someone offered to pay me to 
have that same car show up somewhere, I considered it an honor and god 
damn right I jumped on it.  And if indeed I had screwed up one commitment 
by upsetting Jimmy, I wasn't gonna bail on my commitment to Spider, no 
matter how bad Jimmy said he was.  As it happened, Spider had paid us cash 
by the time I got back from Jimmy's, coming through with flying colors on his 
promise to us.  All I could think of was "What had Jimmy given me?"  The 
answer was a big guilt trip and a ration of shit that didn't belong to me.  Fuck 
him.  We stayed.  We had a good time.  And Seven pulled in a ton of dough, 
shaking down every biker that snapped a shot of his car.

Now we look west at some 1200 miles of highway and mean mountain passes 
and I wonder about old Duke, who for all his strength seems to be crying out 
at last for some sort of mechanical help.  He lags at speed and every bit of firm 
pressure on the accelerator elicits a hair-raising squeal that I can only hope is 
just a loose belt.

Packed up and headed out for breakfast.  Some roadside restaurant 2 miles 
from the Tower entrance.  Had enough of the KOA scene.  I didn't want to do 
breakfast there after the whole scene with Jimmy, an employee of the place.

More Massachusetts bikes.  The accent gives it away every time.  Milling 
around Sturgis has been like old home week for me and Seven, both natives 
of Mass.  We keep running into bikers and concessionaires from all over NH 
and MA.  The food is on Seven.  He pulled in $142 in donations yesterday at 
the Hulett biker rally, squeezing every biker with a camera for a dollar for 
snapping his car.  For all the flack Ned and Ramon and Tex and even I have 
give him for his strong arm tactics, well.. he's buying us lunch.  Hard to argue 
that logic.  Even with Tex assisting, Duke and I didn't pull in dick yesterday.  
The soft sell didn't cut it with the Hell's Angels crowd or their tourist-biker 
peers.

But ole Seven, Mr. Little Bighorn sitting in his wheel chair shaming them got 
a buck outa every camera-wielding passerby. 

Now its the highway west again after what feels like a millennium in South 
Dakota and just over the border at Devil's Tower.

I'm trying to piece together the events of yesterday.  Actually, I recall it with 
full clarity, it's just gonna be hard to describe it adequately.  Let's start with 
sound.  It was loud in Hulett yesterday.  Very loud.  There were more hogs 
and muffler thunder and beer-clutching, leather-clad humanoids whooping 
and hollering than I've ever seen or heard in one place.  The smell was one 
of leather and sweat, exhaust and roast pig.  And speaking of pig, there were 
lotsa cops and they didn't let the day go by without stopping by Duke for a 
look-see.  The smell they claimed to have gotten reports of was, well.. you 
guess.  Three guesses and the first two don't count, as they say.  I couldn't 
believe it, and I told them so.  I looked each cop straight in the eye and said, "I 
DO NOT smoke marijuana."  It's easy to do that when in fact you don't.  

I even told them they could run their dog through the car for all I cared 
because I DO NOT smoke marijuana.  Well, my conviction must have 
impressed them, that and the dizzying litany of anecdotes about Duke that I 
spouted off to derail their thinking, for they didn't search.  The cop actually 
said to me, "Well, we're not gonna send the dog in there because we can see 
you have a lot of delicate things in there and he might break something 
jumping around and wagging his tail."  What a life I lead.

Seven comes on the radio just now and says lets stop in Billings at a 
supermarket "so Duke can get that fish stuff."  Typical Seven linguistic 
eloquence.  At our last stop in Somewhere, WY, I said I might like to pick up 
some salmon steaks to grill for supper.  Fish stuff.  Well, they didn't have any 
salmon at the store we stopped at, so Seven bought beef. 

The other thing he said just now on the CB is that he wants chocolate milk.  I 
say to Tex, "Him and his chocolate milk."  Tex says he figures a man in a 
wheelchair on a long trip has gotta have his little pleasures to keep him 
happy.  And then he says, "speaking of which," and reaches into the cooler for 
a beer.  I don't know what the laws are here about having an open container, 
but from everything I'd ever heard from Jill about MT I ain't gonna worry 
about it.  The speed limit here is "Reasonable and Prudent" during the day, 
and according to Jill whenever her bad-boy little brother got a ticket it was for 
$5 or $10 at the most.  Cool state.  South Dakota was the only place that 
worried me, especially around Sturgis and with Seven getting pulled over 
and all.  In Wyoming we were encouraged to open a beer and hit the road.

Anyway, back to Hulett.  There were bared breasts by the bozen, er.. dozen.  
Women were actually given discounts at the various vendors for showing 
their breasts.  It was the first time I'd ever had women pose for bare-breasted 
shots atop Duke's trunk tower, and not just once but repeatedly and we even 
made a little money off it.  And speaking of firsts, it was the first time Duke 
has ever been paid to appear at a biker rally.  

There was one bare-breasted girl in particular worth ample mention.  Miss 
Ashley the stripper from Casper, the blonde dog-musher beauty in the silver 
Barbarella bikini and not much else.  Bronze tanned belly, a flesh white 
nickel-sized Playboy bunny in reverse-tan on her left breast, a freckle for an 
eye.  Miss Ashley was the shits, one hell-fire buxom blonde with a solid 
punch, muscles like a wrestler and a quite sharp wit.  Here was Holly 
Golightly in a killer blonde quarterback's body and she was smitten with me.  
Of all the things.  

Miss Ashley told her plain Jane poe-dunk friends that I was the man of her 
dreams, the kind of man she'd marry in a heartbeat if she were the marrying 
type.  A dance with Ashley a the local saloon quickly developed into a 
striptease, out of the shirt, into the heavy hip gyration and out of the 
corduroy pants.  I caught the pants in midair.  That, too, was a first for me.  
Down to the bikini.  I just stood back and grinned, not like a guy whose 
girlfriend was stripping in front of a whole bar, but like a guy being stripped 
himself, stripped and sucked off by the prom queen for the whole student 
body to see.  It was fucking heaven.  Watching that girl do her thing and 
knowing she had the hots for me.  No matter that I knew damn well nothing 
would ever go down between us.  A kiss.  Maybe a little bit more.  But the real 
sex was happening right there on the dance floor.  Call me a voyeur.  I guess I 
am.

Me, dancing with a  pro stripper with a pro stripper, a girl who can pull down 
$1000 in a good night and this night is buying me drinks, and her breaking off 
into a strip with the whole bar howling.  To think, we almost left Hulett 
before the show had even begun.


Stop for a cool-off at some rest stop south of Billings.  Duke's been running at 
260 degrees F.  Scary.  Turns out he was dead out of coolant.  Tex gives me a 
shake of the head and that "can't let that happen" thing and I'm like, "Hey!  I 
just checked it this morning!"  Hate that.  

But heh.  That's just Duke doing his thing.  He just wants attention like the 
rest of us.  Ha.

Then we're not five miles up the road and there's white smoke billowing out 
from under the car like Mount St. Helens and we all freak and I jump out and 
I can hear a fatale tone in my voice as I assess the situation.  I've been here 
before, I think.  Mexico, summer of 1991.  On my way to the tip of Baja to see 
the solar eclipse and the Zauber Bus is blowing coolant through the piston 
chambers and out the tailpipe and it's bye-bye Zauber Bus.  I'm thinking the 
same thing about Duke, like how your life flashes before you when you think 
you're gonna croak.  But in this case it's not about leaving Duke, but about 
spending some quality time in Billings, MT while I raise the cash to have the 
engine traded out.  Yuck.

But it's nothing like that of course.  You see, back at the rest stop when we 
were adding fluids and Tex says the tranny needs fluid and sets about to 
fashioning a funnel, I of course do it the sloppy gonzo way and just aim and 
pour but of course the hole I'm pouring into is about half as wide as the oil 
can hole it's coming out of and I'm missing like crazy and of course the shit's 
dripping all over the exhaust manifold.  Voila.  White smoke.  

Ghost Town
Now it's Billings, some dirt and weed filled riverside "park" called Calhoun 
Park or something like that.  Right in the crook of whatever river that is off to 
my right and Rt. 90 through Billings.  We exited, got beer and chocolate milk 
at the Texaco/Subway and the local kids told us how to get here.  You can see 
it from the highway.  The river, framed by some beautiful cliffs, lit up orange 
at night by the lights of some refinery and Montana Power down the road.  A 
dirt road in.  A trashy, forgotten place.  The sign coming in says Day Use Only, 
closed after 10 p.m.  But as I'm finding out, after a certain amount of time on 
the road you just don't give a shit.  The road is your home and any place 
semi-discreet or off the beaten path that looks good to sleep, why, you just do 
it.  No longer do I live in fear of retribution from the law for parking and 
sleeping where signs prohibit.  This is my country, my dirt lot by some 
undoubtedly polluted river beneath a lovely white August Moon.  

Seven cooks steak and onions.  We share a meal and a six pack of Bud tall 
boys.  Seven's dog Baby is quiet as a mouse, only reacts to other people and 
dogs, of which there are none here.

It's just Seven and Tex and me now, and Baby.  And our two cars.  That's it.  
That's the caravan.  That's the fruit of Ramon's poor leadership and asinine 
direction.  And Ned's ambivalence.  And my determination to do whatever 
the fuck I wanna do with my money and my time and my 5 billion ton car 
that I'm lugging around the country in.  

The night is hot.  The river tempts.  But Montana Power is just up the road, a 
huge machine scooping up piles of coal for burning 24 hours a day.  There's 
gotta be some waste from all that, and my guess is it goes in the river.  A 
breeze whispers through the trees.   Yes, there are trees here.  Don't ask me 
what kind.  Deciduous anyway, there leaves rustling lightly beneath the 
whoosh and roar of the freeway to my left and the river to my right.

It's Bozeman tomorrow to see Maggie again.  I'm half hoping to hook her up 
with Tex or Seven.  She's such a nice girl and so very lovely.  But as we've 
been friends since childhood and long ago done our one experimental romp 
in the sack, I know she doesn't want me.  Hell, I'm a man, and she's 
beautiful, so of course I would take her if she asked.  But she's a woman, and 
she knows better.  She's holding out for Mr. Right, or at least the next 
handsome dude candidate or one-night stand that she ain't had before.

There are flies on my screen, buggin me as bugs are wont to do.  I can reach 
out and touch the flies.  They are somehow stunned or dulled by the backlit 
LCD screen.
I should sleep now.  Bon soir.

Crashed last night in some dirt and weed lot so-called park wedged between 
an unknown river and the freeway.  Awoke this morning to a blurred 
Daguerreotype vision of an old west town and the noise of increased traffic 
flow on the freeway.  Pity the commuters as I squat in the trees for a vagrant 
toilet.

Looking up I spy a plaque on a stone in the weeds.  I approach it 
incredulously, thinking, "what significance could there possibly be to this 
place?"  It reads: 

Townsite of Coulson
Custer County
Montana Territory
1877-82

"Born by the river, killed by the railroad, giving to Billings her best citizens, to 
Boot Hill her residue, and to the Yellowstone her memories."  I turn from the 
lonely monument to look at the beige waters flowing by.  But of course, the 
Yellowstone River.  Suddenly this place has a name, an identity, a history it 
didn't have a minute ago.  I look at the dirt and detritus with new eyes.  I look 
at Duke and IFSM.  They are parked on Main St. in Coulson.  A commercial 
jetliner crashes over the cliffs across the river, booms overhead and is gone.  
Coulson.  What would they think if they could have seen their future?  
Smack in the flight line, discarded by the side of the highway, rusted out 
barrels and crap by the riverside.  Urban beauty and a river runs through it.  

Seven rises and we drink coffee amidst the garbage and the flies.  He takes a 
stroll in his chair with Baby and returns with two bedraggled baby dolls, one 
white, one black.  This place is like the town dump.  Any concern that we 
might have gotten busted by the cops for illegal camping last night now seems 
an absurdity.  Who in their right mind would choose to sleep here?  It was 
dark and we were tired.  Poor Coulson.

Tex crawls up from the edge of the Yellowstone, his bedroll over his head.  
We're 140 miles out of Bozeman, today's destination we're we hope to 
intersect that town's Sweet Pea Festival and visit my good friend Maggie for 
the weekend.  Then Sunday it'll be on to Missoula and straight up to Lolo hot 
springs on the 12.  Monday we'll hit Wallace, Idaho, the setting for the film 
Dante's Peak, then move on west, perhaps as far as Joseph, OR, the tiny 
supposedly-Bisbee-esque town in the far northeastern corner of the state.  
We'll see.  

According to the Ice Cream Man From Hell, we're already there.


Boozeman

Nobody knows I exist anymore.  I am hidden from the world.  I hide out in 
the last place one would ever think someone could hide, here in the womb of 
art, in the belly of the monument.

Parade today in Bozeman, Montana.  How many parades is that now?  Dozens 
anyway.  We were hot, the undisputed tits and ass of an otherwise tame 
procession of local yokel stuff.  Two judges came up to me after the gig and 
wanted to shake my hand, said Duke was amazing and that they'd given us a 
rating of ten.  So when Tex returned from the local Sweet Pea festival tonight 
with the news that we hadn't won anything, I knew the shit was rigged.  
Locals only.  Well, fuck em.

When we arrived in town yesterday Duke charged the gates of the festival 
during set-up time.  My idea was to go right to the main vein, to approach 
whoever was in charge and say, "Here's Duke and IFSM, rolling art at your 
service and smack in the middle of a western states tour."  Well, I found the 
main vein in the person of one Miss Pat.  Handed her the goods, a couple of 
definite cherries to top off her art festival cake and she didn't get it.  "Even the 
President has to buy a pin," she said of the $7 entry fee.  She displayed no 
interest in having us there on display, no spontaneity.  When I said what a 
shame it was, she merely nodded and smiled the pathetic smile of an heiress 
denying a bum a quarter.  I retreated without a fight.  I realized that I'd 
somehow dropped the ball, that I'd failed to convey the magnitude of our 
mission and indeed the very real value of that which we were offering her, 
and not the other way around.  To me the Sweet Pea Festival was, is and shall 
now forever remain a big little nothing in the small town where author 
Robert Persig lost his marbles.  Car art, however, is hugely significant and can 
only get bigger.  And as Seven said, we its forefathers will be remembered.  

So this town was pretty much a bust.  My Bozeman friend was bummed out 
and sincerely in need of a good lay.  I offered up my services to no avail, and 
soon found myself feeling like I'd felt offering up our art cars to 
Commandant Pat, like I was the one asking for something, not offering it.  I 
have to work on that.  We all have so much to offer yet so easily get tricked 
into feeling like we have nothing or not the right thing anyway.  It's like 
walking into a pawn shop to sell a diamond and having the clerk tell you he 
doesn't need diamonds and him adding, "And what's wrong with you that 
you gotta be selling something?  Are you destitute or what?  Why don't you 
go get a job?"

Some would say that's life.  I say it's bullshit, and I intend to learn how to 
keep the deal straight.

Now Tex arrives back from some 3 a.m. adventure climbing sculptures in the 
dark and running from the cops because his new-found cohort Tim is 
holding.  It's late.  We had margaritas early this afternoon and I was out by 
8:30.  Slept five hours, all the while Tex partied on.  The guy has endurance 
like no one I know.  Endurance for drinking that is.  I'm glad to have him 
along as my driver, but I'm beginning to wonder if his presence is sucking 
more of my time and energy than its worth.  I must fashion a support plate 
over the gear shift on which to sit the computer.  Attached with Velcro, I will 
be able to move it around yet have it stay put poised for drive-by typing.

I've kicked Tex out of the car.  He smokes and that, more than anything, is 
cause for immediate dismissal.  I'm sick to death of smokers.  I've been 
putting up with it for years because it seems such a natural companion to 
drinking.  But two years with Jill quitting and starting back up, quitting and 
starting, wanting me to make her quit for me because she didn't care enough 
to do so on her own.  Fuck it.  Smoking is nasty.

So Tex has gone into Maggie's house, a potentially dangerous move and 
certainly bad etiquette on my part.  I better go get him. 

Okay.  He's just sitting on the front steps.  No harm in that.

I'm a little lost right now.  A little pressured.  A little disappointed.  The latter 
emotion comes from seeing the latest issue of some mag called Juxtapose.  
There's a really comprehensive photo story in there about art cars, and do you 
think Duke's in it?  No way.  I'm pleased for all my friends who did make the 
story.  But I've been in this game awhile now and though I've gotten a lot of 
press lately, it's been solo stuff.  I long for recognition alongside my art car 
peers, in and of the family of car artists as it were.  

The pressure comes of having very few days left until Portland and wanting 
more than anything to get this story wrapped.  And being lost, well.. any 
number of things.  Detachment from my loved one, fighting a drug addiction, 
being in a leadership role amongst Tex and Seven and myself, and of course 
not writing to my satisfaction.  And being up at 4 a.m. can't be helping.  So 
enough already.  Goodnight.

K-Mart parking lot, Bozeman, MT--
Trying to get out of here sometime today.  More than one night in a place 
starts to feel like too long real  quick.   

Only been here in the parking lot for a few minutes and already the photo 
junkies are swarming.  Aha!  But what's that I hear?  The soft paper sound of 
a dollar being stuffed into the money can.  Good.  

So, Bozeman.  There was the arrival, the failed attempt at turning on the 
Sweet Pea people, the library and an email message for Seven from Chiyedza, 
his lovely Zimbabwe bride back in St. Paul.  There was the meeting up with 
Maggie, a heavenly bath for Seven, an expensive supply run to Safeway, the 
barbecue at Clain's and the disappointing salmon dinner.  The sky then was a 
lovely eclipse yellow as thunderclouds moved in and lightening began to 
dance about the hills around us.   I was sitting in Duke chatting with Pat from 
New Orleans.  He'd grown up there and we talked about Mardi Gras and Jazz 
Fest as the rain began to fall in earnest.  I remember looking out through the 
sudden darkness and seeing Seven being pushed at high speed out of the rain 
and under an overhang of one of the houses.

Saturday we awoke to parade preparations.  Tex removed the bubble skylight 
and we piled in Maggie's friends Laura and Toni, both of them tall girls, such 
that they had no problem seeing out over the trunk sculpture interior.  The 
parade was triumphant, a better turnout really than that parade for which I'd 
raced across America just weeks ago, the Lynn-Lake Street Fair.  The weather 
beautiful, the crowds very accepting and generous, applauding and cheering 
right along.  Halfway through the route, my face hurt from smiling so much.  

Shit.  It's 1:20 p.m. already.  Not like we're in a super hurry, but damn it takes 
forever to get going sometimes.  We've got 250 miles to cover today and so far 
we've gone about 2.

I type to the rhythm of friend Dany Willis' dance mix tape from Wales.  It's 
some crazy shit.

Hooray.  Finally on the road.  We're blowing a lot of oil these days, so Tex has 
asked me to take note: two quarts of oil at 77923 on the odometer.

After the parade there were margaritas for the pirates, Jen the fine wench who 
gave me the pin, and so on, as described in last nights late-night entry.


Duck

About thirty miles west of Bozeman, I looked up from my computer to see 
two kids perched high atop a train trestle over the Gallatin River and I knew 
that I'd be jumping next.  I love leaping off perilous heights into water, 
especially rivers.  My record to-date is some 70 feet high into 6 feet of water 
jumping buck naked.

We pulled over and watched the kids jump, then down the next freeway 
offramp we went, Tex saying, "No, we gotta make tracks" and me overriding, 
saying nope, I'm jumping.  Seven hopped in his chair, and I hung my camera 
around his neck and showed him where to press.  Tex moaned a faux cry of 
dissent, then changed into his shorts and scaled up a trestle support ahead of 
me.  I dove from a lower height first to test the depth, then up I went and off 
we jumped together.

Now poor Tex is moaning for real, claiming to have landed on his ass.  I 
don't doubt it.  From that kind of height, it's very easy to lose your straight up 
and down posture and land funny.  Or not so funny.  The doctor prescribed a 
Darvo, and now old Tex is doing fine.

Now we're on our way down Montana Street in Butte for a rendezvous with 
the mirror car guy.  From far off we can see this giant concrete structure on 
hillside on the right.  It's awesome, and it's apparently the home of Robert 
Corbett.  Wow.  Or as Tex is now saying, Fuck.

Tex spirited this spontaneous visit.  Referencing that recent Juxtapose Mag 
article that I was bitching about not being in, Tex looked up Robert in the 
Butte phone book and on over we went.

Bob, as I now know him, is one cool art cat.  Living large in an old zinc mill 
high atop Butte, Bob is much more than the guy who built the Shiniest 
Oldsmobile on Earth, he's an architect, a custom car builder, a designer of 
affordable housing, and founder of the OXO Foundation.  What does Bob call 
his house?  Why the OXO Foundation, of course.  Literally the foundation of 
the Foundation, his one-time zinc mill dwelling is constructed of so much 
concrete that professional estimates for the structures life span run between 
two and five thousand years.  It will be at least 1,500 years before the building 
shows any signs of problems in structural integrity, so the experts say.

Wow.  Another great footnote in the annals of ART, The American Road 
Trip, or our slice of it anyway.  Seven and Tex and me.  Oh, and Baby, too.  
We're surprised to find that Ned and Ramon and the rest haven't stopped 
here to see Bob.  We'd heard rumors that they seen in Montana, so we figured 
they must have come this route.

Bob was the subject of a few seconds of film in Harrod Blank's first art car 
documentary, "Wild Wheels."  Bob says he had just built the car a few weeks 
before, doing the whole thing with artist friend Rene Sherrer in just 3 days, 
when Harrod phoned him up to come out and film him.

I'm glad Bob liked Duke.  For one, I felt an immediate affinity and respect for 
this man with the concrete monolith house on the hill.  And two, because 
Duke has taken me so long to craft, slowly of course, and to hear that others 
have built their cars in a few weeks or months or damn! days, well.. it kinda 
knocks the wind outa me.

Duke is beastly, road dirty and beaten.  Every day with every slamming of the 
trunk or the hood or a door, a few toys fall off.  We often have to take dirt 
roads here or there and the dirt seems to stay no matter what I do.  The 
engine presently leaks oil so badly that it's squirting out and onto the artwork 
on the fenders on either side of the hood.  When I arrive in Portland for the 
parade, Duke will have traveled some 4500 miles in one month, appeared on 
television 6 or 7 times and been photographed an average of 50 times a day.  
All this, all the miles and the dirt and the mud and the rain and clutching 
fingers of little children.  Duke will be due for a major sprucing, but will I 
even have time?  

All this is the undercurrent of a certain distaste I have for the prize structure 
of these art car gigs.  I applaud Minnesota for not awarding cash prizes, even if 
there only reason for not doing so is financial.  All the moneys given out at 
these events should go into mileage compensation both to get more new 
artists to the events and to keep the old guard coming.  The road is killer.  
Anyone driving their car a long distance to get to an event deserves extra 
compensation in the form of gas money.  Besides, cash awards wrongly pit 
artists against one another.

What does all this have to do with Bob and his mirror-coated car?  Nothing.  
Only I guess that if Bob were to drive that baby 4500 miles to an event and 
back, he would deserve, and need, a lot of compensation both in gas money 
and in-transit damage to the art.  It is no wonder then that I've never seen 
Bob at any art car gig.  Despite the fact that he's a busy man.

Fifty or sixty miles east of Missoula, we pull over at a rest stop and 
immediately I recognize it as a special place.  Nearly two years ago when Jill 
and I were in the sex-crazed early days of our relationship, we stopped at this 
rest stop on a cloudy, cold November day, crawled off into the trees and 
fucked right on the cold ground like the mad, hungry animals that we were.  I 
should note that the passion hardly even quavered let alone ever waned in 
the ensuing 20 months or so before are separation one month ago.  Then why 
did I ever leave her?  Simple: geographical incompatibility with a lot of valor 
thrown in.  Not the kind of die-for-a-cause valor, rather the live-for-a-cause 
kind.  

Well, no sooner did I write all this than we passed another rest stop, this one 
being THE ONE, not the one we stopped at just now.  Oh, well.  Memory, like 
love, is imperfect.  So is valor, for that matter, but I had to go just the same.  
To go and not feel like I should run back at any minute to validate our 
relationship or to suffer celibacy or give up intimacy with other humans for 
the sake of holding or being held by another.  I simply don't believe in it 
anymore.  And so I stand a moment at the rest stop (albeit the wrong one) and 
share a private moment with that memory, with that magic, with Jill who is 
always with me now, and then I move on and rejoin the magic of now.

And back at the cars there is a woman with a beautiful white parrot cursing 
the lack of film in her camera for wont of a photo of Duke.  I tell her that car 
is mine and that in trade for a photo with her parrot, I will give her a 
postcard.  Her name is Marlene, aka Eartha the Ecological Clown and she is 
traveling with her friend, also a clown who goes by three different titles: 
Matilda the Clown, Mother Goose, and Mrs. Claus.  It turns out they were in 
the same damn parade as we were yesterday, only so far up front that we 
never saw each other.  The hail from Portland, taking their act on the road to 
children all over.

I pose for several shots in my billowy white pirate shirt with Major the parrot 
both in and beside Duke.  Another miracle in a day of miracles!  Except now it 
is getting late, very nearly sunset.  It was my plan to reach Jerry Johnson hot 
springs well before dark and tromp in for a soak.  Now there is no way.  So 
the possibility of hanging a night in Missoula arises.  I tell Tex about all the 
great bars, but dammit I'm tired of drinking every night.  I feel a sincere need 
of a little nature.

And oh, shit.  Suddenly a thwacking sound on the roof and curious, I look up 
to see a form falling past the open driver's window.  At first I think it is my 
Snap-on Tools hat which Tex has just taken off his head.  But no, Tex is 
yelling, "Oh, shit we just hit a duck."  I turn and look out the TV-rear 
window and watch the poor thing tumble and slide into the median strip, 
most certainly dead on impact with the trunk sculpture.  

It is a sad moment.  I think of the duck Jill's brother hunted and brought 
home for dinner on that visit to Missoula long ago.  I took one bite of the 
cooked beast and spat it out, my head filled with a vision of the duck safe in 
its nest in the reeds of some pond just the night before.  It was so vivid I 
simply could not continue eating.

I was a mess back then, a walking emotional sponge.  This sudden killing of 
the duck with Duke, as sad as it is, is for me another reminder, another 
affirmation that I am getting better, stronger all the time.  It hardly touches 
me.  I sometimes wonder if a chronically depressed person is just more in-
tune with traumatic reality.  And are they depressed because of it, or the other 
way around?

Rest in peace, poor little of-course duck.  Amelia Duckheart, you flew over 
the cuckoos nest and smack into my wall of baggage.  Au revoir.  My 
apologies for the society of mankind.
I'm mad, am I not?  Go ahead, say it.


Wheelchair Accessible?

Rolled in around sunset, semi-desirous of a night on the town in the city that 
Jill so loved during her tenure here.  Just being here makes me think of her, 
makes me miss her.  When I was here with her, she was my safe zone, my 
womb of security.  I was freaking out a lot during that time.  But I enjoyed 
Missoula, more I suppose because of her love for the place than anything.    

Well, took care of that problem.  No more ambivalence.  We're in Idaho now.  
Jerry Johnson campground and au natural hot springs.

I'm leading two men in their 40's around the country.  How?  Why?  What is 
it about me that makes them follow?

Seven is our new chef.  Salisbury Steak, noodles and spinach dinner.  
Vendange zinfandel and Olympia beer.  Salutes over dinner, in thanks for 
our progress, for Duke's fortitude, for friendship.  Then after dinner Tex 
bums a cig off Seven and Seven goes ballistic.  Tex doesn't want to struggle up 
into the trunk sculpture because he hurt his tailbone today.  But Seven 
couldn't if he wanted to.  They fight.  I get up and walk to the river.  It is 
spectacular in the light of the full moon.  I remember that we're in bear 
country now.  When I return to camp the Salisbury Steak has been left out.  
Beer bait.  Great, especially with Tex sleeping on the ground right near the 
table.  

I pack it into the cooler, the cooler into Duke's trunk and go to bed.

The next morning I rise, actually I "drop" through the hatch down into the 
car and pop a tape in the pa system, ringing in the dawn with Bowie's Major 
Tom. Immediately I become fascinated with a rib bone given me by a young 
author named Morgan Teele who says he's been to Woody Creek Tavern in 
Colorado several times trying to meet the Great Gonzo One.  Morgan has 
autographed the bone alongside the name of his book, "Road Dogs of the 
Dead."  I glue it to Duke's ceiling.  Easy.  Then I take on one of those fucking 
three-pronged Granada name plates and it's a big, gluey mess and won't stay 
where I want it.  Now I'm all sore from weird contortions trying to glue 
upside down.  Sore and reminded that my belly is empty.  Eats.

Several handfuls of dry Cheerios, a mug of instant coffee, three bites of a red 
delicious apple (my least favorite apple), and a couple of bites off last night's 
ice-chest-cold Salisbury steak.  Mmm.  Breakfast of champions.  Talk of Bob 
this morning.  Oxo Bob and his big-ass house.  We all agree that if we had 
more time we'd wanna go back and hang awhile with Bob.

A perfect day.  Blue sky, vaulting ponderosa pine, temperature just right.  No 
complaints on the weather for the past few days.  Hell, for the whole trip 
really.  Aside from the somewhat drawn out rains in the Black Hills, the 
weather has been perfect.  And even those rains were do-able.  Hell, Tex and 
all the rest came from Houston where record highs and no rain have been 
toasting the old and the weak.  And everywhere it's been reported hot.  But 
along our route up here in the north by northwest, it's been mild.

One thing occurred to me this morning about how this "vacation" feels 
versus how camping vacations typically feel.  To most vacations there is an 
inevitable and usually quite near terminus.  On a one or two week vacation, 
the end is so close you can't not think about from time to time.  But on this 
artistic journey, this road trip with art and travel as a way of life, with every 
new day creating the means to another and yet another day of art, well, death 
where is thy sting?  Wherefore art thou scheisse Endung?  Just try and catch 
me.  Catch me if you can!


Jerry Johnson..
Uh.. duh.  
Lochsa River, Idaho.  Somewhere off Route 12.  I'm smoked, toast, French-
fired, dusted by several hours of intense wrangling with Mother Nature.

The question "what were we thinking?" occurs to me now as I look back at 
the day's events.  It is an irrelevant question. What we were thinking we did.  
Mission accomplished.  Without much forethought or doubt, Tex, Seven, 
Baby and I tackled the feat of getting Seven and his wheelchair over 2 miles of 
rugged forest trail to Jerry Johnson Hot Springs.  

So what if Seven's chair is now due for the scrap heap.  So what if we severely 
abused the good Samaritan ethic of a couple of Missoula Christian boys?  We 
got him in.  We got him out.  We soaked, we swam, we stomped on the terra 
as Lord Buckley would say.

I once quoted Hunter Thompson as saying that, or HST quoting Lord Buckley.  
But now I feel justified in going right to the source, having attended the Lord 
Buckley reunion party in Portland earlier this year and been knighted Duke of 
Duke by one of Lord Buckley's last known disciples.

Anyway, back to story.  We're moving west again along Route 12 across the 
neck of Idaho, leaving behind a magnificent day full of heave-ho's, hot pools 
and cold river dips, boulder tossing, the Alabama girl in the bionic woman 
swim suit..

Whoa!  Fell asleep there.  Wind in my face, cool forest afternoon, post-swim 
and all that pushing and pulling, lugging Seven's chair over the rocks and 
tree roots, and those two beautiful cold Olympia beers at trail's end.  Enough 
to put anyone to sleep.  

Waking up from these naps, however, is a bitch.  Like I just told Seven over 
the CB, "Every time I wake up from a nap, we're getting pulled over by the 
cops!"  


Impeding Traffic

Indeed, Idaho Officer G.S. Swearingen was right there like Tex said he was 
when, after a few deep breaths and a moment to collect my head, I stepped 
from Duke to survey the scene.  There was Seven, arguing policy with one big 
potato-bred cop who was trying to tell him that art or no art, you couldn't 
paint extra letters on your license plate.  Call me a traitor, but I can see the 
cop's point on that one.  It had to do with one little red "i" that Seven had 
painted on his plate to make the IFSM somewhat more readable at IFiSM.  
There was that and Seven's "tail," his foil-covered rear windshield wiper 
that, when bent out, wags and apparently obscures the license plate.

Well, we took care of both things.  Understandably, Seven wasn't happy about 
it.  But the way I see it, we who are pushing the envelope and riding the edge 
can afford to bend a little here and there to keep art rolling.  Because if you 
fight with the law, especially when they're being as reasonable (or petty, 
depending on your definition) as was Officer G.S., you can plan on getting 
nowhere fast.  You can't out-bully a bully with a badge.  The trick is to 
outsmart him.  Change a detail, allow him to maintain his illusion of power 
and Voila!  You're safe and free and still in motion, the latter an important 
ingredient in any outlaw life.

Hell, once I'd finished taking paint thinner and a rag to Seven's license plate, 
Officer G.S. was up and out of his car returning Seven's ID to him and 
strolling over to admire The Duke.  He was familiar with car art from TV, a 
blessing for which there is no one more worthy of thanks than Harrod Blank.  
God Bless you Harrod, you Foster Farms clucking nutball photographer and 
art car pioneer you.  Without the trail you have wisely blazed through the 
living rooms and kitchens of TV America, we car artists all would be F you 
see K'd.  But now we are known.  I gave Mr. Cop a postcard, and he even 
offered up that he would give a donation if only he had a buck.  Observant.

Now Tex is getting all aggro on me for bitching about his banter over the CB 
with Seven.  I can't concentrate for shit with him exclaiming over every 
inner tube rapid rider on the river and eagles perched in trees and truckers 
tailing us and on and on.  He's over it quickly, more quickly than me I guess 
since it takes me a few minutes to get it down on the computer, but not before 
threatening to smoke a cigarette if I'm not nice to him.  He wants to know 
that I appreciate him driving, that I appreciate him not smoking, etc.  I say as 
much, but add that if I can't write then the whole point of him driving is lost.

Tex is a helluva guy, really.  He's a real workhorse for Seven, from whom he 
still takes a lot of shit.  Now he's gigging on a pulley rig river-crossing system 
installed between us and some house across the Lochsa River.  I know he's 
just burning to talk about it with Seven over the CB, but he's cool.  I need this 
space to write in, and he's granting it to me.

Seven played in the river today like a little kid, and for good reason.  Turns 
out he hasn't swam in a river in the wilderness like that for over 15 years due 
to his disability.  Well, hooray Seven.

So it was worth the exertion.  And maybe, just maybe it was worth one boo-
boo I could have done without: dropping my brand new camera.  Tex said my 
face just lost all it's fun when that happened.  I had it in its case, the case 
around my neck, but somehow the case came unzipped and out came the 
camera, landing on the lens as I ran behind Seven pushing.  Upon inspection, 
it was immediately apparent that it would no longer auto-focus.  Maybe I'll 
only need to buy a new lens, I thought, still expensive but heh.  But then I 
tried to manually focus and found the lens totally locked up.  It was after 
some fumbling that I heard a snap and suddenly, damned if I understand 
how, the lens started moving again and even, yes, autofocusing.  A miracle.  
We'll just see how the pictures turn out from now on.

Seven o'clock already and we have many miles to go.  Seventy miles or so to 
the Idaho-Washington border, then another 100 to the tiny town of Joseph 
that I'm hooked on visiting for no other reason than someone I can't even 
remember told me that I'd like it.  I think I had been describing Bisbee to 
them, and from that they had pulled Joseph from their hat.  That was back in 
Corvallis.  I'm suspicious of anything Corvallis at this point, yet passing as 
close by to Joseph as we will it seems silly not to check it out.

Like what am I gonna do?  Move there!?

Oh, joy.  Another cop on our tail.  Passed him and his buddy chatting back 
there in Kamiah, there cruisers driver's door to driver's door in that curious 
parking arrangement only cops can get away with.  I had just put Cat Stevens 
in the tape player, the song Peace Train chiming in just as Seven came on the 
CB to let us know.  

"Maybe we should just skip Joseph," I said to Tex, "Just bolt straight for the 
nearest superhighway."  There's not so much more safety there, just 
anonymity.  Wow.  That damn cop is still back there.  As Alice said, 
"Curiouser and curiouser."

Well, I'm bored with the cop thing.  Think I'll go travel back in time and try 
and patch some of the holes in the greater story thus far.

No sooner said than the cop made his move.  Pulled Seven over and of 
course we pulled over, too.  Impeding traffic, he says.  How about that?  Guy 
follows us for some 15 miles making poor harassed Seven nervous as hell, 
Seven slows down to keep cool and the cop gets him for going too slow.  
Whatta world.  You know, sometimes I think we would all be better off just 
defending ourselves when instead we've got "public servants" who live to 
offend us at every turn.  Ah, hell.  Maybe not.  If it weren't for the cops, we 
sniveley artists would surely have been stomped by some of those 60,000 
bikers back there in Hulett, huh?  Yeh, as if.  

Okay, so now he's finished with Seven and working on us.  Or Tex, more 
specifically.  Tex and Duke.  I'm sitting here typing away, trying to look 
professional and more than ready to wag the press credentials to help 
"validate" us.  Jesus, what a crock of shit.  You have a great day basking in 
nature and ZANG!  Welcome back the real world, fellas!  License and 
registration, please.  And the cop says this is a very dangerous road!  Pulls a 
lot of trucks over for the same violation, he says.  "For future reference, in the 
state of Idaho, any more than three vehicles behind you and you must pull 
over.  And by the way, is this safe?"  Tex rifles back a quick "YES!"  Okay, says 
the cop.

Well, he's not gettin' any postcard.  That's fer damn shur!  End of story.


Nice Cops

a smoky duke as we climb some pass just over the border into Washington

just over the bridge from Idaho a sheriff pulls into the gas station where 
we're fueling up, asks Seven what the cars are all about, Seven says art, and 
the cop says cool and drives off.  he'll never know what wonderful timing he 
had after all we'd just been through in Idaho

Alpowa summit, 2785

Wow!  An amazing about-face in the face of a well-policed day.  Rolled into 
the tiny town of Pomeroy, WA, and just about out of town before sighting an 
open service station.  Duke had been blowing smoke bad back at the last 
climb, and I thought it best to buy another quart of oil.  Bought the oil, paid an 
extended visit to the rest room, and surfaced to find Duke and IFSM once 
again ensconced by cops.  Now comes the wow part.

Out steps sheriff Richard Dreyfuss-lookalike with a huge smile on his face 
and saying "Fantastic!" and in the space of five minutes we're backtracking a 
few blocks to the town park where we've been invited to sleep for the night.  
Amazing.

Corey, Tawny and Storm

What was an hour ago disgust
and a desire to run home in defeat
is now a love again
a trust again
in the power of an idea
in the beauty and kindness
however deeply buried
in some men's hearts
in others overt and all 
embracing


"Lewis and Clark met Chief Big Horn of the Nez Perce Torbe at or near this 
point on May 3, 1806."  --placard at park

What a fine morning!  What a dandy way to wake up.  Welcome and not 
feeling robbed of a few coins for the favor of parking for the night.  In 
Pomeroy, we awoke to little disturbance, to very few spectators and no 
slamming, grinding garbage trucks sounds or street sweepers and such.  

Now we're at Donna's Drive Inn just off the Main drag in Pomeroy.  I was 
sitting with the boys but have removed myself to the non-smoking section 
and now sit by myself.  I'm finding that I am more and more sensitive to 
cigarette smoke.  Actually, it has nothing to do with sensitivity.  I just hate it.  
Especially in the morning before I've had coffee or more importantly, 
breakfast.  So it would be more accurate to say then that as I continue this 
climb out of years of depression and back into a firm conception of self, I 
become more adamant about holding my boundaries.  And a big one is: no 
more fucking cig smoke in my face.

Seven has finished his cigarette and has now invited me back to the table.  I 
have declined thanking him while pointing to the guy behind him with a 
smoke.  

The waitress greets old Roy by name and leans in close to interpret his moans 
(post-stroke?) and take his order.  It is a tender moment, the kind of thing that 
always touches me and always has.  It is the reason I have done several stints 
of work with the disabled.  The summer of west coast travel with 
developmentally disabled adults; the job at the Cerebral Palsy house; being 
Glenn Smith's seeing-eye human.  

Once fed, I now think and move like a slug.  There's a crowd of senior citizen 
women circling around our cars outside.  I cannot face them just yet.  I am 
heavy with German sausage and eggs.  My head leans to the left like the top 
half of overfilled sack of potatoes.  NO!  No potatoes.  Nothing Idaho for 
awhile, please.  Seven glued a toy cop car to IFSM this morning.  It has three 
different sounds depending upon the button you push.  Like the three or four 
different attitudes we got from the police yesterday.  What a day.

We'll be in Portland in seven hours.  Tex will stay with the gang and Seven 
and I will make a beeline for Jill in Corvallis.  I can hardly wait to see her, and 
to touch home base as it were, to stand for a moment on the spot of my 
departure four weeks and 4500 miles ago.  Unbelievable.

As we prepare to pull away from Donna's Diner, Donna and her daughter 
Melody make us a gift of two matching battery-operated ashtrays shaped like 
toilets.  You push the flush lever and your butts disappear accompanied by an 
electronic flushing sound.  Brilliant.  Adios kind Pomeroy.

Crawling through the town of Waitsburg, WA, we get our hackles up when a 
local cop passes us, then whips around and, so says Tex, puts on his lights.  
But there are several cars between him and us, so it's hard to know whether 
he's after us or what.  Tex says, "This job of driving for you is getting a little 
intense."  In a pre-emptive strike maneuver, we pull into a gas station and 
look back.  The cop has disappeared.  Duke breathes a sigh of relief.  Then it's 
anyone's guess how to get out of Waitsburg, town of terrible signage.  We 
wander the streets a bit before reconnecting with highway 12.

Duke is really starting to express his displeasure with this long and constant 
abuse.  Climbing a hill awhile back he started throwing a bunch of oil that 
then burned on the exhaust manifold and sent plumes of smoke rising up 
behind us.  So bad was it that for the first time ever I saw smoke coming out 
of the glove box.  And just now Duke hiccuped for the first time since Jill and 
I were returning from the Jazz Festival parade we did in New Orleans last 
year.  Jesus, Lord help us to make it to Portland safely.  


The Crawl

Down  and out in Umatilla.  The final home stretch and Duke ain't gonna 
make it easy on us.  After many thousands of miles we've come at last to a 
tiny town on the Oregon border.  Full circle.   Well almost.  Sometimes you 
have to be careful what you ask for.   When I left Corvallis four weeks ago, I 
probably asked God or Duke to get me from Oregon to Minnesota and back.  
And well he did.  A few miles shy of the Oregon border and Duke announced 
his triumph and extreme fatigue with a hiccup and a sigh.  And another 
hiccup.  And another.  And so on.  With every  jolt of  the engine, we lost 
power speed and conviction.  
    
For several hours and for several stops, doing 30 mph tops, Tex and I wrestled 
with what might be the cause.  Tex said electrical; I said carburation.  At the 
NAPA  in Umatilla we put our skills to the test: I ran to the telephone and 
Tex ran to the trunk for tools, and ultimately to lock the keys inside.  As 
someone said, here the plot sickens.  After screaming at the heavens awhile 
and searching in vain for a spare key, I gave in and let Tex tear out the back 
seat.  It was a massacre, a gory sight.  Never before in all my alterations of 
Duke had the back seat been torn out and its hidden contents revealed.  
Ripley would have stared in disbelief.  Five pounds of Idyllwild, CA tree bark, 
two rusted and unidentifiable canned food items, one black comb, several 
chewed up trinkets, and one live mouse.  No kidding.

Tex retrieved the keys, but as they say, things happen in three's.  Car breaks 
down, keys locked in the trunk.. what's missing here, God?  Oh, of course!  
How about let's have a wiring fire.  So we did that.  With Tex shuffling things 
around in the cockpit, a couple of wires, one positive, one negative, decided 
to get together and spark up some more fun for us.  Smoke, realization, 
epileptic dance, burned fingers, melted black licorice, yikes.
   
Somewhere in all that, I rebuilt the carburetor and Tex removed and tested 
the modulator.  The former was dirty as shit, and the latter failed Napa's test 
and we replaced it.  A bunch of young Mexican boys rode up on their bikes 
and hung out awhile whilst we packed up the car again.  I asked them, "Are 
you boys Catholic?" a question that clearly stumped every one of them, as 
though the answer involved algebra or something.  Not waiting for answer I 
said, "Please pray for us."

We pulled out onto Umatilla's main drag and another cop appeared and did a 
U-turn to come back our way.  Thoroughly sick of being tailed by cops, 
benignly curious or out to get us, it didn't matter anymore, I pulled 
immediately into a gas station to call their bluff, so to speak.  Kinda like, 
"Let's have it out right here and now, mutha fucka!  Enough of this hanging 
on my ass til you can invent a crime for me bullshit."

I pumped gas and Tex went and did the PR thing with the law.  Turned out 
they were cool enough, just curious.  Gassed up, we headed down the road 
stopping briefly at the Circle K at the end of town so Tex could get beer and 
ice.  Now it was judgment time.  I hit the gas and prayed.  We reached thirty-
five and Duke hiccuped again.  FUCK!

Well, so much for that, I thought.  Looks like it'll be a few daze in Western 
Oregon while we figure this shit out, maybe get Ned to come out with his 
trailer and tow us back.  The cold beer that had tasted so good a second ago 
suddenly seemed flat.  Duke hiccuped again and again.  And just when we hit 
that fatalistic plateau of "Oh, well, we're fucked and there ain't nuthin we can 
do about it," Duke went quiet on us.

My foot on the accelerator remained firm and our speed slowly began to 
climb.  Forty-five now and not a hiccup in a minute or two.  Now fifty and no 
hiccups for five minutes.  It was miraculous, but over the course of the next 
quiet ten minutes of driving and climbing in speed, it became apparent that 
Duke had changed his mind.  Maybe, just maybe, he was going to make it 
after all.  We drank and the beer tasted cold and wonderful.

It wasn't long before we were confident enough to seek a diversion.  Tex 
pulled out the computer and I began to dictate to him.  He typed about five 
words per minute, hunting and pecking hunched over like a blind man 
searching for spilled cocaine in a shag rug.  It was funny and it was a welcome 
distraction.  I thought-wrote, crafting my sentences more carefully than ever, 
having all the time in the world whilst Tex carved them out of stone.  I 
laughed and smiled, driving confidently now, bereft of hope but chock full of 
arrogant determination to make it to Portland that night.  Tex typed and the 
sun set in the west.

The next  and truly the last thing I remember before hitting Portland was a 
psycho gas stop  off the interstate at The Dalles.  Seven was hungry, so I pulled 
us in at a combo gas station-Taco Bell.  I turned off the car and immediately 
wished I hadn't.  Out of the dead heat and weirdly lit darkness there came at 
me a swarm of freaky people who seemed to jeer and cackle at Duke.  They 
were utterly hopeless to discuss art with.  There was a midget and leering 
giant, a weeping girl with a parrot on her shoulder and a face so plain that 
tears made her utterly despicable.  And suddenly, when I wanted to back out 
and repark in the gas aisle, there appeared a red pickup truck behind me, 
boxing me in.  I informed the gaggle of freaks that I was backing out and 
someone shouted, "You ain't goin anywhere!" and some redneck howled 
that I'd best not back into his truck or he'd something-something my head 
off.  

I thought sure I was in for trouble, but when I looked back again the redneck 
and his truck were gone.  By now I was sweating bad.  I wolfed down a burrito 
Tex had picked up for me and got out of The Dalles as fast as I could.

And that was it.  Somewhere in the blur of the last hour's drive into 
Portland, a couple of truckers came over our channel talking about their own 
break down troubles.  They had both put in a lot of "break down time" as they 
called it.  One of them said, "I've just been picking my nose trying to figure it 
out."

Duke made it to Portland, and I rewarded him with a period of rest.  Leaving 
Duke with Tex out front of Reverend Chuck's Temple of Eternal 
Combustion, I squished myself into IFSM beside Seven and Baby and we 
headed off to Corvallis.  I envisioned a lightening quick zip down I-5 to 
deliver me to Jill and peace.  Naturally, that was not to be.  Before we even 
reached the freeway, Seven had lost a lens from his glasses and punched Baby 
for the first time ever in a moment of extreme tension.  Our minds were 
liked the frayed and smoking wire of that afternoon's electrical fire.  We were 
stretched thin and hot after 14 hours behind the wheel.  The last thing we 
needed was what we found next, construction gridlock on the I-5.  That and a 
sea of truckers educated on art at the Rush Limbaugh School of Hopeless 
Intolerance and Slimy Opinions.  In a somewhat treasonous move against 
Seven's freedom of speech, I switched off his CB just in time to save us from 
God-knows-what kind of angry trucker roadside beating.  They were jeering at 
IFSM, and Seven is not one to sit quiet and take it.  At 1 a.m. as tired and 
strung out as I was, I would have snapped if the truckers had heard him and 
decided to box us in with their big rigs or worse.  We were at a dead standstill 
in the middle of farm country.  Anything could have happened.  When 
Seven discovered that I had shut him off and tried to tune back in, I 
threatened to get out of the car and walk.  I wanted no part of the machismo 
confrontation that would surely ensue when his bitter art rebellion met their 
hard-livin'-for-low-wage road rage.  

And who knows what rage of my own might have reared its ugly head in the 
claustrophobic specter of never getting home to Jill.  I hated Corvallis.  Yet 
suddenly Corvallis and Jill's little bedroll on the floor in some student rental 
were my salvation, the all and everything I craved in a mad and hungry 
night.

The freeway never got better.  We pulled off at Salem and opted for a parallel 
route through small towns to the west.  Naturally, we encountered the police.  
Some unidentified tailing officer glued his headlights to our ass for an 
excruciating 15 miles before leaving us alone.  We made it to Corvallis and to 
Jill some time around 3 a.m.  


Sleep

.. and a dead standstill.  It's amazing how addictive the road is, like a drug you 
need so bad you don't mind running for it, always running.  but then 
stopping is drug as well, a different kind of drug like Valium next to the 
cocaine of the highway.  the stopping drug comes on slow, crawling across 
your tongue in the slack-jawed innocence of sleep like the stuff of the witch's 
poppy field just shy of the gates of Oz.  Sleeeeep!

All I want to do here is sleep.  And in this heat, it is unquestionably the right 
thing to do.  Sleep.  To hell with the story.  Rolling Stone will never publish it 
anyway.  Sleeeep, says the wicked witch.  Sleeeeep!  You have no money to go 
on.  Duke is tired and seizing up like a tin man in the rain.  You can't take it, 
you weak-kneed pussy cat.  Sleep!  Surrender yourself to THE TRUTH that 
you are not able to go on!  The road is long and there's not a yellow brick on 
it.  Just the runny shit of cowards loose-boweled with fear of the unknown.  
Doom!  Sleep, my little angel, my doped and dead-eyed would-be hero, the 
sands of time are not yours but mine.

The donkey-eared children are smoking butts and giggling.  
I'm done like an overboiled egg,
done with the demons,
done with the shoulders I cried on.  
I cross my testicles and tell you I am mighty.  
I fight for nothing 
and curse the means to my own euphoric end.  
I am yellow.  
I'm a golden snow cone as she lifts up 
her ski pants and stands.  
Her ass is like Everest and I'll climb til I die.  
I'm a moth-eaten bat-winged bellboy.  
I'm a girl toy, a cute little sucker.  
She grinds and I lust for a urinal.  
Who am I and why do I cry?

This may mean nothing
but I wrote it for you.


Corvallis.  God, what a waste of real estate.


Last night Jill had a nightmare.  I heard her crying and assured her that it was 
only a dream.  But she could not shake it, and upon waking wanted to tell me 
about it.  I told her I wanted nothing to do with it.  I am on a strict diet of 
positive thought these days.  I have enough of my own black thoughts.  I 
don't need anyone else's.  This afternoon we make love like cheetahs.  The 
sun is hot.  August smolders to a rapid finish, ignites in September's burning 
man.

A letter from Bernie.  The chickens have taken over his mind.  He sees cock 
fights and gizzards everywhere he turns.  He spent too much time in the 
coop.  He says Ramon reminds him of one of his chickens trying to get a 
lizard, fighting the other chickens then smashing the lizard's bones so it'll go 
down easy.

The key to the road is never to stop.  Corvallis feels like a cul-de-sac and I the 
tractor trailer truck that cannot negotiate a turn.  At least Bernie writes.  And 
Phillip.  And Che.  And Penny.  The story must go on.  The ticket has been 
bought.  I must make it to the show..

I've started in on the Sangria wine coolers and my brain is a post-coital mush.  


I'll say.  Found myself asleep just now, staring at the computer screen.  I sleep 
a lot on the road.  I'm narcoleptic.  That's why I need a driver.

Seven lives a weird life out here on the road.  The rest of us get occasional 
automotive reprieves at the houses of friends or people we meet along the 
way.  But Seven can't get into those places as easily as we can.  Case in point: 
here at Jill's there are two steps into the house, so Seven spends most of his 
time in the garage gluing toys.  It's a good thing he found himself a good toy 
connection.  My buddy Jim likes him and has been loading him up from his 
trash & treasure store downtown.  

Seven's whole world is vastly different than mine, the kind of differences 
that are damn hard to overlook.  Sometimes you can forget that other people, 
no matter how close they are to you, have vastly different perspectives on 
things.  But it's not hard to imagine that Seven looks out at a world far 
different than yours.  For one, he's always sitting down.

Some chick in Portland told him that his friends treated him like fertilizer.  
Well, I don't know quite what she meant by that, but for sure he is treated 
different.  I would have expected people in the caravan to treat him extra nice 
because of his disability.  This wasn't the case.  By the time I'd come aboard, it 
appeared that a heavy impatience had already kicked in.  People were tired of 
being asked to do this and that for him.  And the itinerary setters were 
fuming with him constant questions about what lay ahead and will it be like 
this and where is that.  I was abhorred by everyone's short fuses toward him.  
But then I caught up.

He is needy.  He does require a lot of assistance and awareness of his lack of 
mobility.  And worst of all, he asks questions all the time that would require 
an omniscient intelligence to answer them, like "how much do you think 
it'll cost to camp" at a place we have no prior knowledge of.  But I don't care.  
The way I see it, Seven is facing one helluva challenge taking his paraplegic 
ass on the road for two and a half months, and if I can't rise to the occasion to 
help him out a little bit, I shouldn't be traveling with him.  And frankly, I 
like traveling with him.  

His strong-arm style of soliciting donations is not my style.  His angry, 
combative style with the police is not my style.  His tendency toward negative 
expression is not mine.  But so what?  We get along.  We make it.  He knows 
stuff about art that I'll never know.  He's been in combat in Viet Nam, an 
experience I've never had nor do I ever want to have.  But he was there.  And 
if there is even one commonality between his teenage combat experience and 
my young life it is this: the reasons for his joining up.  Seven fucking 
volunteered for service during Viet Nam for the same screwed up reason so 
many men do shit they shouldn't be doing: for daddy.  He did it to be like his 
father.  He knew better.  He was whipping out infantile Monets in crayons on 
his bedroom walls as a kid and getting punished for it.  He knew he was an 
artist but he ran off to Nam to be a good soldier to please the old man.  Fuck 
the old men!

Yeh, I can relate to that.  I'm just lucky my dad was never a soldier, or a 
banker, or worse.  Who wants to be a salesman?  Not me.  And somehow, I 
managed to avoid it all these years.  But to be sure I've wasted plenty of hours 
and days bellyaching over what a loser I was because I was a writer.

Whoa.  Let's get off of me.  This was about Seven.  Seven the soldier cat, the 
army brat.  Seven the cranky curmudgeon with art up his ass.  Seven the die 
hard warrior for art.  Seven the two-wheeled, toy encrusted glue junky.  Jill 
says he calls himself Seven because he lost one life to a bullet in Nam and 
another to a car wreck in Boston.  Nine minus two equals Seven.

Seven.  He's a master and a menace.  The other day at Ned's mother's house 
in Portland, he called for help getting out of the bath tub and got no reply.  So 
he managed it himself.  A short while later he was out on the front porch 
staring down the five or six steps to the ground and again calling out for help.  
It's a big place, and all of us were around the other side of the house screwing 
with our cars and packing.  No one heard him.  So what does he do?  He grabs 
hold of a dog chain tied to the house and essentially repels down the stairs 
backwards in his wheelchair.  Thus the menace.  He could have killed 
himself, and I for one would have felt guilty as hell.  And I would have been 
stuck with the care of his dog Baby, which would have been one mouth too 
many on my budget.  

Seven has painted half a dozen paintings as gifts for our hosts along our 
journey.  He just does it.  He is a master.  With his beard and weathered face, 
he looks like Hemmingway or a pirate.  I don't know.  I'm just glad to be 
traveling with him.  It is because of him that I'm on this journey.  And truly 
without him I may not have lasted this long.

Ned's Family Home, Portland

He's only..
he's only 
he's only
I wanna be..
I want just a little..
no, not like that..
oh, if only I had a chance to..
I could..
all night I hear the refrain
one pill and there's only
Jill.

I'm working on two cookies at once.
Capitalist pig dog cookie wolfer.
They say our civil liberties
will have to give way to heightened 
national security
because you see the terrorists
are everywhere.

Ramon 
speaking of capitalist pigs
has left us "out to dry" as Ned says
but we got all his glue
480 tubes of the shit
which is 
a lot.

Extremo came by the morning and spent a good chunk of a Saturday 
afternoon impromptu picnic get-together airbrush painting an incredible 
man aflame on Max's passenger side fin.  Wow.

Seven glued some rich kids set of mega-Legos on his car whilst Baby 
terrorized a blue rubber racquetball on the lawn.  I wander aimless, starting 
one project and drifting into another with predictable absurdity.  My big claim 
for the day is having gotten my nephew Jacob's first set of bottle nipples glued 
onto Duke's ceiling after months of coveting and carrying them around in 
anticipation of the perfect arrangement of them.  I like how they went on.

I'm suddenly lethargic as hell.  YEAH!  POP ANOTHER QUAALUDE YOU 
MORON!  Ok.  Forgive me father for I gave up toilet-cleaner-derivative drugs 
like crystal meth for doctor prescribed valium.  Good night nurse.  

Sunday, August 23

Another day that sits like an uneaten banquet salad.  I wilt here.  I wilt and I 
injure myself stupidly.  I bought a Number 5 golf club to smack shag balls 
across the playa.  I'll need something to do out there in the Black Rock desert.  
Some young people came up to me today and asked if we were taking the cars 
out to Black Rock City.  The question struck me funny, like BM had entered 
the realm of the trendy see-you-at kinda place.  I asked the guy if he had been 
before, quite confident of his answer beforehand.  Once, he said.  Last year.  Of 
course.  

I have been to BM only twice myself, but the first time, in 1995, was far back 
enough both in time and in terms of the events morphology, that I feel like 
one of the old guard.  I'm not.  I know.  But it feels that way.  I mean, I'm in 
the book and Duke made the newsletter this year.  So, I'm not way off base.  
I'm just a crank.  And hearing that "See you at Black Rock City" shit just irked 
me.  

Today Ned and his mother went to some family gig across town, leaving the 
house and yard to Seven and I.  I tried to write about the Portland gig, the 
Hawthorne Street Parade and the Art Car Ball and all the work Extremo and 
his wife Audrey went to.  I got nothing written.  It's the last piece of a very 
large puzzle to date, and I'm just burned out.

I tried to decorate Duke, got little done.  I took a walk and ducked in at an 
adult bookstore just down the street.  It seemed funny, such a place being in 
such close proximity to Ned's mom's house and the swanky wedding 
reception at the B&B just down the street.  I invested a few bucks in the porn 
industry and vacated after some giant of a young gay man followed me 
around the store for 15 minutes waving boy-on-boy titles for me to see.  I had 
really wanted to force a confession out of him, just say, "Ok, what do you 
want from me?  A few minutes alone in one of the stalls?"  And once he'd 
said yes just tell him straight out that he wasn't my type, to say nothing of 
gender.  

I walked back to Ned's looking over my shoulder to make sure the guy wasn't 
following me.  He was creepy.  I still can't write.  Or glue.  Or get under Duke's 
hood and actually work on the automotive stuff that so often gets neglected 
these days in favor of art.

Goodwill clearance center today and toys by the pound for Seven.  A golf club 
for me, which I now lean on to favor my sprained right ankle.  My feet stink.  
Tried my young friend Jamie's number in Idyllwild today and found it 
disconnected for the first time.  I'm not surprised.  I was thinking of inviting 
her to take a bus up and join me on the road for awhile, be my driver.  I need 
a driver.  It's just as well though.  She's too young and probably drives for 
shit.  I've had bad luck with drivers and copilots.  Tex was the best, even if he 
was drunk half the time.

Guess I'm feeling a bit lonely today.  It was a gray and drizzly day here in 
Portland.  I look forward to bidding Oregon farewell forever in a few days.

Well, at least until the Hawthorne gig next year.


[END OF CURRENT DISPATCH, AUG 24, 1998]

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  ű  ű  űc  űu  űř  ü  ü\ššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššš     !ż  c  ü\  ü´  ü—  ÝI  Ýô  ÝË  °$  °%  °h  °i  °„  °¸  ˘J  ˘ń  ˘°  ˘˘  ˘Ł  ˘•  Ł=  Łă  Łü  ŁÝ  ŁŇ  §B  §č  §˘  §Ł  §Ű  €B  €ę  €’  ¶+  ¶,  ¶v  ¶¬  ß  ß_  ß¨  ßŮ  ®@  ®v  ®w  ®  ®ź  ©  ©  ©W  ©§  ©Ň  @  ę  ÷  ´#  ´8  ´9  ´ĺ  ´˙  ¨$  ¨t  ¨¶  ¨ß  ¨ž  ‚C  ‚é  ‚đ  Ć*  Ćv  Ćź  Ř  Ř[  Řh  Ři  Ř˝    R  ů  Á  ±(  ±)  ±@  ±A  ±B  ±ę  ±Ý  ±°  ±ž  ľ?  ľy  ľz  ľĂ  ľÎ  ľĎ  „:  „Ö  „ä  „ă  „÷  Ą%  Ąr  Ąyššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššš     !ż  c  Ąy  Ąz  Ą‘  µ  µe  µµ  µŐ  µ‘  Ź  Źi  ŹŹ  …  …  …  …Z  …[  …‚  …ś  ˝I  ˝g  ˝h  ˝„  ˝”  ˝Â  Ľ0  ĽÄ  ĽŔ  †  †e  †Ř  †  Ş  Ş  Şe  Şµ  Şś  şL  şú  şĽ  ş†  ‡  ‡(  ‡)  ‡u  ‡‰  ć  ć_  ć®  ćÓ  ćÔ  ř:  ř~  řĂ  ż  żh  ż¨  ż  ˇ)  ˇ*  ˇx  ˇ»  ¬  ¬a  ¬x  ¬É  ¬ě  ¬î  ¬ď  ¬¤    a  Ć  Ż  źA  źě  ź·  ‰2  ‰É  ‰‚  ‰Ć  ‰™  C  é  Ž  «"  «[  «\  «§  «Ň  »6  »Ä  »Ă  Š  Š^  Š_  Š‚  ŠŇ   9   ä   ˙ššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššššš     !ż  c   ˙  Ŕ%  Ŕ0  Ŕ1  Ŕ~  Ŕ   Ă  Ă]  Ă€  ĂĎ  Ăť  Ő   ŐO  Őű  ŐÂ  ‘!  ‘"  ‘n  ‘ˇ  ¦
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        Ţ     c  c      É  B    %’  /—  :•  Fë  Q˛  \Ô  h  t«  Ä  ä  ď   üË  ©÷  „%  ş‰  «Ä  łŻ  Đ”  Ë|  Ű\  ť, 	‚ R ď )4 4Ź @^ KI V; aĐ mE xć Ö é• öČ ¶{ ±ç şă 7 ‹u ¤ş Ę  Ň9 ›" I Ü … (Q 2¨ = HÇ QŰ ]" h r" |¤ ÜŐ íZ ú Ł ĆX Ľ{ źű ­  ˙. ·‹ Ěů Ű| ś c ťť    4  ťť    I ťť    P  ťť    N ťť      ťť    J ťť    I  ťť    N ťť   	 K  ťť   
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 G  ťť    P ťť    <  ťť    M ťť    M  ťť    M ťť    L  ťť    8 ťť    J  ťť    P ťť    Q  ťť    J ťť    M  ťť    K ťť    Q  ťť    7 ťť    S  ťť     ťť    L  ťť     M ťť   ! L  ťť   "  ťť   # R  ťť   $ N ťť   % I  ťť   &  ťť   ' L  ťť   ( K ťť   ) O  ťť   * K ťť   + P  ťť   , 3 ťť   - O  ťť   .  ťť   /   ťť   0 K ťť   1 R  ťť   2 N ťť   3 Q  ťť   4 M ťť   5 K  ťť   6 N ťť   7 O  ťť   8  ťť   9   ťť   :  ťť   ;   ťť   <  ťť   = M  ťť   >  ťť   ? J  ťť   @  ťť   A L  ťť   B N ťť   C   ťť   D  ťť   E T  ťť   F N ťť   G   ťť   H  ťť   I      fÇ     D  )R  @<  Y  q°  ŕó  ü\  Ąy   ˙  ·é  f Q %Ů >ć Uá nE á* űW Ź9 Ăs ’ ™Ŕ x (Ą ?ö U
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         ! " á ŕ â ä ă ĺ Ă ‹   <UrÁIëŘĂÍ`mIT‹ł˛Śą÷×˙Ž¤đŢ”ÁČĚÚŻťŔ	R	u	˛
ü lżˇ«»°†ĚÓÔ*+Eopq STUVŕâäăľ#;<"Ď"Ě"Ô&p&r(í(–) )Ę*ĺ*ë,Č,Ň,Ú,Ű,Ů-(-™-š-›-ť/ă3/33¨678Ŕ8ý8·8’8“:0:1:2:S:T:U:V:W:X:ő:Ú;¦<R—    H H    Ž(ť·ť’FG(¸    H H    ˙(    d       '              ` ę                                =ý/­ÝÝ  ­R    @      H -:LaserWriter 8 
        PalatinoÄ   –  –2 Ä Ä  –     E e¸ E P¸                                                                                                                                                                                                                 