Day Trip to Slab City
Some of the best days come after three hours of sleep. Spitting toothpaste into the toilet. Not flushing. Skipping the morning shit to crawl into a shuttering car, cold engine wheezing finding an equally groggy friend, aiming the car at some depraved or lonesome town. You’re sure to find adventure there. Watch the sun rise and don’t worry about romance. Follow the map app until the satellites can’t find you. Let fear wriggle her little claws up your sphincter. And then, keep going. You’ll find something.
Or you’ll find nothing. But it still beats the piss out of the mundane. Stumbling around in socks with elastic that’s given up. Finding old videos or tv shows to sacrifice the afternoon to. These things pale in comparison.
On a Saturday, before most people had a chance to hit the snooze button, we’d already stumbled onto a dirt-road dead end. A coke point, perfect for ambush and sodomy at gunpoint. Too far away from the main road to be heard. Shotgun shells littered purposely in the shape of a heart to send message of “Fuck-you” and “Thanks for stopping by,” all at once. You can have coffee, splash water on your face, or you can stab the nervous system with a penknife. All are effective.
Then there was a town of three-hundred, which had apparently died off to about twenty-eight. Trailers with flat tires, beaten sideways by a ambivalent desert sun. Once a beautiful lake-side community, now a haven forhomemade drugs built from old batteries and over the counter sinus medication. Windows that sneer jagged smiles. Stray dogs traveling with the posture of impunity. A calming scent of fish-sticks gone bad. Cats. Cats like furry locust. Cats like a street gang. Cats like hopelessness, shitting, scratching, hobbling with three legs, or five legs, or eight. Tails like wrecking balls dragging in the dust behind them, erasing their tracks.
Bombay Beach, where you’d need a bomb shelter before a surfboard. The tide is low. Sand replaced with the remains of every carnival-prize fish ever flushed down the toilet. Only they’re not gold fish sized, they managed to navigate the twists of the sewage pipes, grew the size of Nurf footballs, died, and washed ashore where they’ve been bleached ivory white, the eyes all long since pecked away by the murderous birds who cackle just offshore.
Before 8am, there was Salvation Mountain, where we are encouraged to offer our lives to god. Blasphemous and giggly from lack of sleep, we oblige. There’s no response. Maybe this god was still asleep back in one of the decapitated trailers at Bombay Beach. If god had been around, I don’t think he would have been offended. He would have appreciated our visit. He would have allowed us access to the rest of his glorious desert wasteland.
Welcome to Slab City, a grunge-hippy squatter’s camp.. The self-proclaimed, “last free place on earth.” Eyes full of sand, faces like a camping trip gone on way too long - but happy. Friendly waves and peace signs. Trees growing leathery fruit shaped like sneakers. Hand painted signs, chewed by stray dogs. Chewed by drug addled dreamers. They’ve got welcome mats shaped like rusted out engine-less Volkswagens. Spray paint addresses that all read the same sloppily scrawled “occupied.” This is the forgotten desert version of a “reserved” table placard at a pizza parlor. We watch them like zoo animals. They watch us like zoo animals.
The twenty-four hour library is tucked away, almost neatly. A woman with spiders for dreadlocks welcomes us with sleepy eyes. She’s neither happy to have us, or concerned with our being their. Her dog, Rick, or Roger, or some other name that I’ve forgotten, prances by. He’s underfed, dumb and happy. Too big for his breed, wandering with a rummaged chew toy in his jaws. Like the live in librarian, he couldn’t give a fuck about us. The books are mostly encyclopedias and romance novels with broken spines.
Two minutes away, driving slow to keep the dust down, we find an art exhibit of sorts. It’s made of non recyclables, things that would otherwise end up in landfills or gathering like kelp in the middled of the Pacific. A pathway lined with dehydrated beer bottles. A fifteen foot high elephant made of used tires. A plastic grocery bag crocodile with a bite that would require sutures and a tetanus shot. Shapes too big and gnarly to describe. Everything fucked ugly by time and the elements.
Breakfast beers from a red Igloo ice-chest. Beef jerk to balance out the food pyramid. We offer our contribution to the Slab, a couple dollar bills and a few sparkling relics. Our empty Stella bottles driven nose down, the only ones not yet abused by the irrevocable desert sun. Both sids of Slab City, “East Jesus” and “West Satan” are coming alive with untuned guitars. Communal breakfast conversation, laughter, stirring. The beers are already flowing, hash pipes red, warming cold, vagrant hands. We say our silent goodbyes, promise to return, to say hello, to add more dollars to the oxidized donation box, to see the fate of our two upended beer bottles, to remember the last free place on earth - Slab City.
