American Vignettes (Travels in my Wigwam)

1. Discovery #1
Las Vegas is big; has to be, the people who live here have no choice.
Be big or be mad in the desert; watch, listen to the Vegas sunrise
and before the smog and gridlock settles, you will see the world from the hotel window.
See the expanse, where no one lives and only the hardy, survive.
Everything was brought to this city; the water,
the concrete, the steal and the people. They saw the isolation,
the desolate horizon and had to swallow it
whole; for in any direction there is death
and the city hides this, as all cities do.
Be big, be mad, stop the tourists from leaving the city alone.

2. Discovery #4
Las Vegas has been drinking the same water for fifty years.

3. Discovery #10
Conversations heard in LV, NV: “She said,
next time I spoke to you to mention suicide…she said,
you knew something about it…look, I’ve got to get back to the table”.
“Don’t make a decision, don’t do that. I’m your friend, you’ll hurt me
if you do that”.

4. There’s Fat and then there’s American Fat
In Las Vegas, blue collared workers and white middle management line up
for shrimp buffets in this land locked city; they goad
the Hispanic serving staff, reminding them that they were here first,
I point out that the English were here before them and fat man barges
past stepping on my foot. A croupier at New York, New York gossips
as he turns the cards,
black jack, 21,
but the waistcoat barely fits and his podgy fingers tug
at the overflowing collar – this time the casino loses.
Yard long drinks, slot machines and nacho chips,
5c, 25c, 50c, $1, $5 – minimum bid $10 at the tables,
spin the wheel, stack the decks, black or red?
Tip the cocktail waitresses, try their drinks.
This is a big city in an empty place.

5. A buck for a suck
Flying into McClarren, in the dark,
storms fire off over Denver way,
Edison flash bulbs popping in the night
and I see a solitary light in the desert.
Where one man, one woman, one child eat to fill the darkness.
In Vegas they eat to fill this space,
to stop them from going beyond the strip,
the gambling, the shows, the bums and the hookers but the city is empty.
No one stays for long, no one can stand the heat.
They’re all heading west or east,
looking to get laid or rich along the way.
In the week we where there a guy from New Jersey walked into a casino, put a dollar in and came out with one point two million – he’d never gambled before.
On the same day, a millionaire went bust at the tables, begged on the bridges over the strip, clutching a change cup advertising a show where the dead are stripped of skin, plasticised and stretched. On the third day his suit was stolen – so there’s a half-naked ex-millionaire by The Casino Royale – he can’t even afford a buck dollar for a marguerita. A buck for a suck?

6. Arizona
The place where planes fly by.
In the west, butterfly clouds haze the moon,
and songs are sung about men who drunk at forty bars and drank at forty more.
Hank Williams and Johnny Cash by a campfire
beneath shooting stars and here, here in Arizona,
a man can stretch his arms for two hundred miles in either direction.
Beneath the big dipper and the night sky, in the shadow of Spirit Mountain,
I met them all, the ghosts of the west, Butch and Sundance, Tombstone men
with ground teeth and skin of copper stained stone and a diabetic cowboy (who moved from Vegas after witnessing a murder) who declined the pudding and sugar in his coffee.
And a cowboy singer, son of Sally, drawer of horses and commemorated in a hall.

7. Marginal places on the map
Primm, we watched gore on the television; overweight gamblers taught us poker,
sat at the slots and the few tables. There were no cheers as in Vegas. Empty
native Americans staggered around in trucks
and WASPS fled down the interstate, their faces grim. Primm. Grim. Prim.
It has to be said. Even a Polish desk attendant – Sope – and a Latino lifeguard in baywatch swimsuit hang their jaw just so, just too low, just too gone to stop the drool.
We had pizza in our room; noted that the door had three locks,
and the ghost of two others long broken off,
a catch, a dead lock and chain
(+ peep hole the wrong way round, so people could look in).
I met a Mexican at the soda machine,
I was half naked, glowing and pasty,
he smiled,
Laughed,
said something and his entire family swooped into the open doorway, took photos
of me in my pyjama bottoms. If Vegas is for high rollers, than Primm
should be rolled back out into the desert and left in the mid-day sun.
But Techapi Pass was full of windmills, turbines generating power, ugly steal
that from distance shimmered the foothills, the glorious red mountains and
whirred like maybugs and kept their voices as we drove slowly through, smiling.

8. Sulphur Town
The hotel pool in Paso Robles was full of newts,
the day before it was full of old people bathing in the springs.
It makes me cautious,
Maybe the old people stayed too long and became newts.

Talked to an old man in Chelsea bookshop who hated Wallmart, and
A long list of other fingers, including Teflon and Ronald Reagan, Bush too.
He had two VWs, one that did 28 miles to a gallon and the other 55,
the latter diesel, an old shed on wheels.

He had glasses, a white moustache and silver topped cane,
the design on it was cylindrical turning to look like shells.
He talked with me for awhile, confused why Thatcher invaded the Falklands,
Called it a farce,

Thought the UK police were better than the American force. Thought grass
was greener in Britain because no grass grew in this town without sprinklers.
Polite and courteous
even when telling us about deaths on 46 – he thought money should be put into it.

He told us about a guy joining the freeway at 35mph
in front of an 18 wheeler – there was nothing left.
The trick is to use the length of the ramp to get up to 70.
He thought the English were all polite, upper class and unimposing.

While he was here he talked to a woman on a bus,
she had a dog; there were bobbies everywhere,
he didn’t understand why people still flew to France
when we had the tunnel.

The woman on the farmers market wanted half a punnet,
the Hispanic guy told her he would charge the same price as a full punnet,
she didn’t listen.
He served her and she complained, labelling all his kind with four letter words.

9. Big Sur Words
Castro Creek runs below our cabin, Faraway. A shack beneath red woods
and the sound of the Pacific. A hummingbird at Nepenthe.
Saw a whale break the water at San Simeon bay and birds we had no name for.
Took the 5 mile bus trip to Hearst Castle, where Wayne
the tour guide waxed and barked
about gum and handrails. Told tales of movie stars
who liked the shallow water of the Neptune pool because they couldn’t swim.
Clark and Gable came here,
Clark and Gable fucked here, as did the ghosts of Kane.
The indoor pool was 10’ deep and its sides were an illusion,
they are really straight, as was Grant and Hudson.
They are deep, they are empty, like little man Hearst.
The pool was hardly used by guests for anything
but
Fucking.
It was a place not to be caught.
Here there are tales of Hearst annoyed at his gossiping female guests,
Too long in the dark outside that he opened the doors of his castle, threw out bathrobes and toothbrushes, shouting to the Californian night, you’ll need them.
A childish tantrum; a mausoleum to mother.
Hearst the tycoon, Hearst the modern media, Hearst the mummy’s boy.
A bearded hippie was drinking shiraz at the bar,
talking about small town life - Phyllis had gotten a cold, some British poet was hogging the free internet at the Henry Miller place and he’d had enough of rain and was heading south to fix the roof on his desert property.
We read the journals from past guests, over ten years of,
how magical,
how many lovers had screwed in the bed,
what a rip off and how the septic tank stank.
Our entry read,
WE SCREWED ON THE SEPTIC TANK AND HAVE TRAINED THE RACOONS AS MILITIA.

10. Clam Chowder, Saint and Plague
In Monterey, there’s an Italian Festival, a parade,
the weekend after Labour Day, with a Saint on a carretto,
Saint Rosalia (Patron Saint of Palermo, Sicily), taken down to the boats
as a band in the plaza plays the Godfather tune and the parade band
crank out a solemn tune past shop after shop of taffy and chowder.
They bless the boats – Italian virgins at the front in tiaras – they have mass.
Santa Rosalia (1130-1166) killers of plagues and bats in caves.

11. Buster Keaton lives
Watched ‘Sherlock Jr’ with Buster Keaton, the one where Buster breaks
His neck on the water tower gag but doesn’t find out for thirty years.

12. The Journeyman
A musician that played the theatres, kept his music
In order by using tabs on the sheet music labelled
Prelude, Romantic, Tension and Pathetic.
He would turn the sheets so fast that they would tear,
fly out across the watching audience, like a scared flock of birds,
spin and soar away from the piano or organ. One musician in New Jersey
kept a mouse in the drawer of her organ (a magical mouse organ)
to play with during respite.
She played from ten in the morning to ten at night,
seven days a week, seven days a night.
And lived over the theatre with cats and single fag light.

13. Seagull and Otter play
In Monterey Bay, the seagull waiting to see
if the otter would drop any fish as the otter swam on its back
Tearing the fish to pieces, leaving nothing but guts on the ocean tide.

14. Plastic
Cannery Row isn’t the place of Steinbeck’s fiction,
it’s corporate logos and businesses with patrons
– it’s families that stop to stare at trash cans
And marvel at how Monterey recycles juice cans; as their six year olds wail
and scream in the aquarium because the windows to the otters
are ten foot deep with people cooing and banging the glass with their digital cameras.
Children repeat the mantra, “I wanna”, “I wanna”, “I wanna see the penguins,”
“I wanna see the jellyfish”, I want to see the blue sky and civilisation.
I want to see the back of them and tell them that this place isn’t real.
The otters are orphans, the sharks starve themselves behind Plexiglas,
and those who watch are broken, dysfunctional,
filling the days of youth by groping starfish, sea slugs in touch pools,
wandering away, hands still dripping,
wanting to see and touch something cuter, tamer,
keeping their distance from others.
The penguin enclosure is so deep, that the crowd have become a mass of flash bulbs, children’s shoes and men’s garish shorts, there is only one colour, sweat.
And the parents, the poor parents should be on show,
endangered, drained and spiritless on Cannery Row.
You stopped me from giving money to a homeless couple as they have
A brand new cooler, when do the homeless own coolers? You ask.

15. Red Wood Words
At Felton, near Santa Cruz, we stay with a German woman,
we are woken each day by her waving goodbye to her neighbours,
you ask, do the neighbours fear this? Is she training her cats and dogs from five each
morning to storm the driveways of Felton, no prisons, only glory.
By nine the campaign is over and Italians are shingling the roof of next door
and our host is gone, no note, no maps, just a hole in the ground
where her dog was.

On Highway Nine there is a Sasquatch museum,
a hut on the side of the road – a curiosity shack – full of maps
and an old man fed up of stupid
Questions.
In Santa Cruz everything is closed for the Fall, you can’t even buy stamps.
We stop off at the museum on the way back they have a Sasquatch cupboard,
neither one of us wants to open it.

From our bedroom we can hear the steam train whistle
of the Roaring Camp line. We go, we are drawn to the past.
What the camera didn’t capture are the names,
Brezny, Vitiello, Tom, Hannah and Dick, Casey, the Feasby’s from Grand Canyon way – Which part? you ask. The top part, they reply, as if no one lives at the bottom of the heap.
We went back to 1880 – a fake frontier – as the place isn’t that old.
I started to walk like John Wayne, called myself Shirley for the day.
Stalked the cowboys at The Red Caboose, food and drink place, the General Store and Bret Harte Hall, opera house and meeting hall. The ticket office has PCs.
The gold panning tables cost $6 a pan, $4 to make a candle
and a solitary Latino with maintenance gloves in the back pocket of his jeans sweeps
the boardwalk in the morning sun,
at high noon I draw a pen and he hits me with a mop. I tip him a couple of bucks and hide on the first train out of town, wet and humiliated.
Our driver for the escape is Tom Waits, guiding the Dixiana up Bear Mountain,
brakes make the sound of a Confederacy song, Hurrah, Hurrah.
A man in the next carriage, talks loud to cut through the Tom’s song, Tom stops
for a smoke and a wise crack about wood and a woman he knew from Biloxi.
The man in the next carriage carries on at the same level,
“How does one get laid in this country? I’m 50, that’s a 180 in dog years. I’m invisible here”.
Not anymore.

Outside an organic supermarket, a guy asks us for money,
we give him a Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia cone,
He takes it back to his girlfriend, who waits in their car, she is ‘totally stoked’.
I ask, when do homeless people afford to run such an expensive car? Maybe, you reply,
In California the down and outs get a choice between a pickup and a cooler, Shirley.

16. Discovery #236
Discovered the month I was born that they opened Space Mountain in Disneyland.

17. Wear Flowers in Your Hair
On a cable car in San Francisco we mention we’re on honeymoon
And the entire car erupts into applause,
falling into each other as we go downhill.
A German woman asks if you are pregnant,
you reply, I only caught a cable car.

18. Discovery #45
Falling leaves, the singer that gets drowned out by the bar
often thinks of killing the audience.

19. Beat Bar
Vesuvio, we listen to the real Tom Waits and drank soft drinks on the rocks by
Jack Kerouac Alley, opposite City Lights Bookshop where we argued over
Taking a photo and composition. The walls are adorned with Beats, mainly
An overkill of Kerouac and cable cars, across the road the buildings are
Weary and tearful, busted board and hustler hoarding and cheap sex shops.

20. The ghost of Ginsberg (for you can sleep in a wigwam)
What fool believe this shit, these wires and screens that scrambled minds
And fed off common sense and compassion?
America! Lost ideals! Democratic! Lies! Latinos and blacks! Slaves behind
The counter for cents and dollars! Boys in the army! Dumb men giving council!
America! America! Nightmare of America! America the lost! America the lewd!
Insatiable lover of men and oil!
America the land of the free!
America the prison and congress of corporations!
America whose people are puppets!
America whose strings have been cut!
America the deceiver of government!
America who builds on bones! America whose arms have sprouted from their mouths!
America whose fingers pull triggers 20 million times!
America whose heart is an atom bomb!
America whose compassion is a smouldering crater!
America whose truth and dignity was seen a thousand falling windows!
America whose religion was stored and forgotten! America whose
Factories belch forgiveness!
America who fog and frenzy flattens cities!

21. Travels in my Wigwam
I have motorise my buffalo skin; fitted an outboard motor in Bakersfield
and taken myself upon the road.
My tipi has no wheels, the stumps of fallen trees,
shorn and axed square for my buffalo,
have left deep furrows in new fields behind me.
I have seen the skeleton of America,
you can see the bleached bones in Arizona
Where cowboys still roam around campfires, singing Hank Williams
and the Irish flee to the bar for last orders; return with buckets
full of booze and feign ignorance
of folklore
and text beneath the moon
and run from jack rabbits.
Here, there is a Cowboy who eats no desserts in the desert, for fear of diabetes
but still carries a gun with the safety off.
A cowboy called Sam has been married 6 times and is still looking
For lucky number 7, east of Las Vegas.

22. Alcatraz
Wandered the corridors like zombies, listening to the audio tour,
Amongst the tourist inmates.
Saw Frank Morris’s escape route
and Capone’s lasting standing space,
Stroud’s isolation
and the dining hall where they rioted over pasta
and a guard shot out three windows with a Thompson to stop it.
Saw how a library became a blood bath,
how C-D became seedy, Michigan led to Broadway and the small recreation yard.
At the docks we were attacked by flies and were delayed by a medical emergency
(an old woman had fallen and the entire ferry was commandeered).

23. Discovery #71
On the way up the F line an old woman moaned about the sign
that asked that certain seats be given over to the disabled – she frowned at me
for being disabled without a wheelchair.

24. Discovery #72
In Haight Ashbury we ate at All You Knead, I bought a leather jacket of $22
And found Duchamp and American Art in the street, dumped on the sidewalk
for the trash.

25. Discovery #299
Everywhere we stayed they put us at the end of corridors, furthest
From street and elevator.

26. Shopping With Black Nail Varnish
Elvis is sewing in Haight Ashbury – selling memories of long skirts,
maxi and beaded tops, torn jeans and faded leathers. Dusty, bobbled reminders
of the 60s, sold by kids born in the 80s. Welcome to the meat locker!
$4 scarves or 3 for $10. From seamless to diamond net legs
to the bums dressed like Goths on the sidewalk, with begging signs that read
BLAH BLAH BLAH MONEY BLAH BLAH BOOZE BLAH.
Where a few dollars can buy you a slice a pizza and dr pepper
And you can buy 4 bums for the price of 1.

27. Discovery #80
Union Square used to be a sand dune. There are crowds there still, waiting
with dinghies, inflatable animals, bermuda shorts, two piece bikinis, watching
for the surf that will never come to meet their feet and boards.

28. Coming Down
5:30am SF. All that’s out at this time is airport shuttles, tired travellers, aliens
cleaning, security staff going home and all coming down the F line.
Even our driver doesn’t speak on the way to the airport,
neither do the passengers.

Homeland security: Threat level is orange.
Homeland security: Threat level is banana.
Homeland security: Threat level is a tin of tropical fruit, run for the love of God, run, the foreigners are here.
5:45am some food and a drink.
Homeland security: Threat level is orange.

Unknown PM. A customer service desk at Chicago Airport, an attendant
who wouldn’t answer
Questions,
Hid behind her coat by making a tipi out of it on the desk
And telling random people she couldn’t speak for half an hour
to anyone
and then ignored a growing queue.
I had to applaud her when she moved into her tipi,
blocking her view of the angry crowd – she lives there still with her husband and kids. She speaks no words until half an hour passes
and then she tells people she can’t speak for half an hour,
she is worshipped, she is wisdom they say, people come
from all over the airport to pray at the tipi of the ostrich woman.

Flying east, chasing the moon, we saw nightfall over Canada and Iceland.