Then the trip. And it’s as if the old world, the old ways never existed.

It is 4:45 a.m. as I write this. New Year’s Day. We have crossed over from one year to the next. When the sun went down last night, we cooked dinner, popped a bottle of champagne we’ve been carrying around for months, and then – under only the light of the half moon – we scoured the sky with our binoculars. Stars upon stars. Countless dots of light, light hurtling at us – like the light of the North Star – sent this direction hundreds of thousands of years ago. And then, like old people all over, no matter the home or location, we turned in early, long before the big ball dropped in NYC or anywhere else. At midnight we were asleep as one year clicked into the other.

I woke up very early, and I began to think about the journey and what it means. Towns, places, and the highways that connect them. Always lurking is, “What’s next?”

This trip is full of things that are named and unnamed. I’m writing a book, trying to figure out if I want to keep teaching. My wife is deciding what’s next for her, a business, back to her career, something else we don’t even know.

Loose ends. The money is disappearing. It’s not an endless supply, I can tell you. I have the small white bank receipts to prove to you that the time is dwindling. But we wouldn’t go back now. We’re something like halfway. Half the miles. Half the country. We wouldn’t turn back for anything. It’s a road that we chose and one we’re going to hurtle down until we finish the journey. When tmy work on the book is over in a few months, I suspect the sadness will be real and overwhelming. The real world will intrude like never before. But there’s time still. Time still to continue the dream.

Just now, the light is appearing in the east, over a hill whose name I do not know. My wife sleeps. I leave the mighty RV – Winnie Cooper – for a bit. The desert is always cold in the morning, but I stand out there for a while anyway. The only sound – I mean the only sound – is the rush of blood in my temples, the sound of my breath. The sound of a new world coming on.

[+]

This excerpt comes from Poets on Place.

The sky’s so vast here in the Midwest
Stretching like a giant rainbow reaching
Side to side across the earth.
Some days I wonder if I climb up high
Could I just see my home from here?
But there are no tall trees in the prairie,
The highest thing a dormitory.

On rainy days droplets hang like tiny mirrors,
And if they’re angled right, might
I find glimpses of forgotten faces,
Crowded lanes and streets? Which way is east?

I journeyed here across the rainbow’s edge,
Resting multiple times in multiple places
Between yesterday and the day before,
Leaving in those liminal spaces
Bits of me like scattered breadcrumb trails
To stumble back before day races
On and fatal birds of prey pluck away
From the earth my traces…

So here I am a hybrid mess of cultural droppings,
A patchwork dolled up clown of no renown,
Masquerading in a cap and gown,
Playing the fool and fooling none
With borrowed accents from a colonial boss
To cover up a sense of loss

At abandoning a diverse land
Of ancient gods and spicy food
For capitalism’s ugly hand,
How could it come to any good?

So who am I? I ask with pain,
Bewildered by the way I’m seen,
A muddy brown-skinned splat of stain
Across the snowy landscape clean.

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
“Indians! Indians!” Columbus cried,
His heart was filled with joyful pride.

In nineteen hundred and eighty-five
I came across the ocean wide,
A dotted Indian not a feathered one,
But no-one cared, the land was won!

While the Cartagena Hook Up with the Secret Service on the prowl for strippers and lap dances was an embarrassment to the Obama administration, it would really be a tall order to say that the incident was a shocker. The infamous “Tail Hook” scandal of 1991 made it painfully clear to anyone who had a pulse that the US military either fosters or tolerates a culture of sexual harassment and assault that routinely degrades women. For those who were born after the Cold War, I am referring to the four days in September of 1991 when a fraternity of US Navy and Marine Corps aviation officers took Vegas in a storm of debauchery and perversion and allegedly assaulted over 80 women, many of these incidents occurred with the full-knowledge of flag officers who did nothing to stop them. I have doubts real doubts about the so-called ability of our armed forces to protect our country if they can’t protect their womenfolk, even baboons are more capable of that. But more about primates later.

Radio also did its part to add to the obsessive-compulsive mix of sex and violence in US culture. As I drove into work this morning there was a lot of sex-talk show I tune into every day. Granted, it was the show that regularly featured comedians with jokes about bodily functions, NASCAR, unsanitary hotel rooms, insane relatives, binge drinking, and sex in awkward places. In short, it is my kind of morning show. Most of the time it’s just background noise for me as I polish off my morning coffee, but today there was actually something of substance. The woman commentator was reading off the national and international headlines of freak-show oddities and she came across the work of two inventors that were designing a robot to take the place of prostitutes, which would put the women from Cartagena out of work.

To be continued…

Cross-posted at My Ongoing Struggle With Misanthropy: http://jimmygabacho.com/?p=793

Since the 1950s, the NTS has been used as a test facility for the most advanced aircraft the U.S. military has (starting with the famous U-2.) Since then, everything from the F-117 to the B-2 has done its first trials there.

Of course, if that’s all it were, perhaps the internet wouldn’t buzz like it does about Area 51, a multi-acre tract of buildings and runways around the dry Groom Lake. Here are the essential bits of info:

• The past three American presidents have signed legislation exempting the NTS
from having to release anything about its research, nuclear waste disposal,
personnel records, etc. The Freedom of Information act does not apply to
anything related to the NTS.

• Two past scientists – both now discredited badly through a variety of means –
claim that when they worked at Area 51 (in the 60s, 70s, and 80s) they – hold on –
worked on reverse-engineering alien spacecraft. At the time of their departures
from the NTS, they were both credible, well-respected scientists. They now
get painted with the “GREAT BIG NUT” brush.

• Workers sign confidentiality agreements that some lawyers believe are
illegal. Workers are sent to the site for 4 day shifts via Janet Airlines,
a private fleet of 737s that fly out of Vegas and go the NTS or the Tonopah
Test Site further west. Security around the boarding ramp to the nondescript
planes (white with orange stripe, no insignias) is very high – metal
detectors, wands, armed guards, and police dogs.

• The NTS is in the middle of nowhere, geographically hidden by a variety
of moutain ranges in the Pahranagat Valley. Any mountain vantage points
that would allow viewing the site from within 30 miles have been closed
off to visitors. The only photographic evidence we have of the area
come from satellite photos from space – the first were released by the Russians.

But the place can be found. If one has a handheld GPS unit, one can use it to drive along the nearly deserted Hwy. 375 and find an unmarked gravel road (about 4 lanes wide) that disappears 13 miles through desert scrub and cacti. It is to be noted that once one is actually on this road, magnetic sensors are transmitting the size and speed of one’s vehicle to the guard post dead ahead. (This has been confirmed by a local researcher who was arrested last month for digging some of the sensors up and taking photographs of them – all on public land.)

There aren’t a lot of places in the country where the use of deadly force is authorized, and I do my best to avoid nearly all of them.

But one could press on almost to the guard house, one last stop before deadly force goes into effect, and one might see one of several Ford F-150 pickup trucks come rolling down from its perch on a small nearby hill. The men in the truck are called “cammo dudes,” and they are employees of EE&G (a private security firm whose only employer is the Department of Energy). They carry sidearms, wear camoflauge jumpsuits, and have twin shotguns in quick release carriers in their pickups. One can take one’s word for it, or view shaky video footage for partial confirmation.

Of course one might also at this point do a crisp u-turn and head back down the unmarked gravel road, at a good rate of speed, if one were given to that sort of paranoia.

Still, it sounds like a neat place to visit. And it’s a good idea to take a rented car (in one’s wife’s name, for example) for greater security.

Oh yeah, one other thing. Fifty yards from where the unmarked road meets the highway, right in the middle of Hwy. 375, one might see this. On whom it was used one probably won’t know. But it will be there all the same.

Last Supper Redux from Gerald Cannon on Vimeo.

– 265 executed inmates and their last meal request and date of death.
– Vocal track of execution of Jerome Boudin
– Musical tracks formed from short samples and compositions using DEAD in the C Major Scale

A short break in the interviews I have scheduled for a book I’m working on allows us some time to wander, so we decide to take a couple of days in the remote and beautiful Death Valley National Park. We arrive at Stovepipe Wells at midday, the temperature a polite and friendly 65 degrees. Stovepipe Wells is a little outpost in the middle of the big valley. There are about 50 RV spaces in the National Park area – no electricity or water. And there are 14 spots with power and water right alongside the desolate and barely traveled Highway 190.

At night the place is dead silent. About every hour or so a car might headlight through, headed either to Los Angeles or Nevada. At night we sit out under the stars and a three-quarter moon and just soak in the quiet. The desert gives up its heat easily out here at night, and the lows are in the mid 30s.

In the mornings we sit outside again in our coats and watch the sun poke up over the Funeral Mountains and light the desert floor all over again. We don’t talk about it. We just let it bathe us, warm us. Sometimes my wife will get up and wander away, through part of the desert. A quarter mile away and I can still actually hear her shoes scuff the desert floor. I watch some kind of hardy spider work out from beneath a rock and then head out on his own path.

Out there, I think we both feel it. The cares and worries of our old life, the working life, the city life, have disappeared. This is not a vacation. It was a breaking of one life and the opening of a new one.

Really? Is this how we like to spend our evenings (and, for some, much of the day), relishing the humiliation of people on TV? This isn’t Alex Keaton torturing his sister Mallory on Family Ties, although the roots of our fascination with degradation are embedded there also, however couched they may be in apparently innocuous familial exchanges. So-called Reality TV has finally dragged us into the depths of our basest selves to giggle at the shenanigans of couples and families embroiled in a death dance around the kitchen table!

Did it start with Survivor as we watched participants form and renegotiate partnerships and alliances to ensure their survival at the expense of the “others,” until they became “the others?” Or the auditions of countless hapless performers laying bare their misguided souls to win a chance at American Idol to be further demeaned by the unctuous Simon Cowell, whose only talent lay in offering sarcastic soundbites that passed for artistic evaluations? All we really tuned in to see was his predatory feasting on luckless youngsters with stars in their eyes! Which in some ways was easier to stomach than the gush of non-sequiturs pouring out of the stoned eyes of Paula Abdul! This is what passes for entertainment these days! Then there are the Real Housewives who parade their ludicrous lives and Botox-treated features across our screens every week. Small wonder that so many of those marriages ended in divorce and it was only a matter of time before someone sought ultimate release from shame in suicide! That the participants accept their destruction in front of a national audience just for the opportunity of appearing before that audience is a sick commentary on our abject need for attention!

I suppose humor has always fed on humiliation of some sort or another. The French philosopher Henri Bergson suggested that something mechanical encrusted upon the living is the source of that which we find ridiculous and risible. In other words, unless something awkward or artificial interrupts the fluidity of human living it tends not to be funny. Someone always has to be “IT.” But it’s a far cry from sitcom one-liners centered on ludicrous “everyday” situations to having cameras follow effete housewives and an assortment of humanity’s odds and ends! Television has reversed the mirror and is finally parodying itself, making TV into “Real Life,” and finding, as always, an eager audience in our prurient tendencies!

Of course, this is hardly new. Talk Shows have been around for a long time; The Jerry Springer Show ripped off the thin veneer of make-believe, forcing us not so much to suspend our disbelief as to gasp in disbelief!! Then Survivor and M-TV’s Real Life, both spawned in 1992, elevated dysfunctional reality into entertainment, paving the way for “simplistic” concepts to replace good writing. But it does appear that we have turned a corner and now spend Prime Time delighting in the mortification of fellow human beings through the judging panels on Idol or Dancing with the Stars or innumerable cooking, fashion, and comedy shows!

Perhaps there’s another perspective here. What if all of this is just a coming to terms with who we really are? What if we are finally stripping off the masks of polite tolerance and political correctness to reveal our true character? That we cannot really stomach the good fortune of neighbors and, in this fame-obsessed culture, anyone who dares to or tries to become a celebrity must needs be ripped to shreds! Were it not at least a bit true, The National Enquirer would have closed after the first issue and paparazzi wouldn’t be a familiar term! Let’s face it, deep in our bones is a reservoir of jealousy that seeps occasionally to the surface—until now! Now it gushes up and spills over, for we don’t have to be civil anymore in this media-driven age of blogs and “investigative reporting” (just an excuse to dig up dirt), where opinions can be freely displayed with no sense of responsibility and everyone’s life is an open book from which we can tear pages!

As we cower in our disenchanted corners, filled with the angst of the 21st century, disenfranchised by the systems and policies that purported to help us, we are no longer going to pretend to be happy at the successes of the Joneses! Not only that, but we will exult in their failures! This is the age of Schadenfreude, that German word that so aptly describes the tenor of the times—delighting in the misery of others! As Schopenhauer put it: “To feel envy is human, to savor Schadenfreude is devilish.” Widening gaps between rich and poor, disillusionment in a fading American dream, tense relations between nations and races, religious and communal discord, poverty amid unbelievable wealth, athletes on steroids, terrorism around every corner, suicide bombings, ethnic cleansing, global warming, and economic crises have all contributed to the cynicism of the times—and now we have outlets through which to air the thoughts that used to be private musings in our heads. Now we can respond with vitriol and unmitigated anger to a hundred blogs with no fear of repercussion. There are no monitors, no filters, and no policemen unless we make a “bomb” joke in an airport! Everyone from the miserable off-key singer auditioning on Idol to the President or Pope is fair game! We have stripped away veneers of civility built over decades and are transmogrifying social playgrounds into jungles! We are receding into our origins, trapped in an entropic spiral towards impotence. Hyperbole? Perhaps. But we deny the patterns at our peril!

Let’s not kid ourselves! This is the truth of Us. Reality Shows feed an insatiable hunger. Television is filled with people shouting at one another. Where is the art of conversation, except on commercial-free PBS (hmm…)? When Donald Trump, a real estate conman, can have a successful TV show that’s basically about firing people, when he announces a run for the Presidency and not everybody bursts into derisive laughter, when CNN seeks his opinion on global financial markets, it’s time to roll up the floor and head for the desert to sit at the feet of a tireless sphinx!

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

–Yeats.

I found a plastic bottle of gin in one of the cabinets, tucked behind the coffee. Drink me in case of emergency. That’s what I’d deciphered from its location. I uncapped it, took a long, burning swig, recapped it, and stuck it back in the cabinet. I made coffee.

While the coffee percolated, I flipped through some old records in the living room. Every tenth one or so, I’d take one out of the jacket and inspect it. All of them were dusty and scratched. The inner sleeves were yellow, some crumbly.

One, two, three, four – your left, your right, your left.

I drank coffee in the kitchen. Sandra came in wearing an extra-extra large t-shirt, which came down to her knees. I saluted her with my mug. The tee-shirt said Union PROUD! She had on a big pair of puffy pink slippers. Good morning, she said groggily. I thought I heard someone down here.

I made coffee, I said. Which was obvious. Perhaps I was angling for a round of applause.

So you did, Sandra said. She went and poured herself a cup and sat down.

We sat silently for a few minutes. Some part of the house was creaking. Another was making a tick-tick-tick noise.

The Bun tells me you’re from Nebraska, Sandra said.

I had stopped mentioning that I was originally from Nebraska to people for a reason. People always wanted to talk specifics, and I could barely remember the place.
It was incredibly hot there in the summer and arctic in the winter. Was there a week, each, of spring and fall? That was all I could remember.

No, wait. There was kindergarten at William Jennings Bryant Elementary School. The kiddies churned butter in the classroom. We visited a real farm. My brother acted up.

Overheard:
Is that the normal one or the weird one?
They’re both strange.
Is that the quiet one or the loud one?
The quiet one.

I glued together stock cars out of model kits. Chess used a wood etching gun to burn bullet holes in them. I taught myself to read.

One day in class, I had my head on my desk, a book in my lap, reading. The teacher came over. I saw her legs.

What are you doing? she demanded.

Showing off, Chess said.

Lift your head, she demanded.

I lifted my head.

Show me what’s in your lap, she ordered.

I handed her the book.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, she said.

I told you, Chess said. Show off.

Read it, the teacher said, shoving it at me.

I took the book, set it in my lap and started to put my head back down on the desk.

Aloud, she said.

I flipped through the book, found my spot, and read aloud: After the hymn had been sung, the Rev. Mr. Sprague turned himself into a bulletin-board, and read off ‘notices’ of meetings and societies and things till it seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of doom—a queer custom which is still kept up in America, even in cities, away here in this age of abundant newspapers. Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

Do you even understand what you just read? she asked.

I wanted her to go away so I could finish.

Sure, I said. Our parish priest does the same thing.

Showoff, Chess said.

Quiet, the teacher said. Then she said something deadly to Chess: You ought to be more like your brother.

That’s when Chess shouted a word that no six-year-old should even know, but thanks to our father’s military background, he did. In the 1980’s, the world had become fairly jaded, but some things still shocked. Especially in the grain belt. The air went right out of that classroom.

Chess’ hand went up to his face. The word had ejected out of his mouth and shat itself all over the ears of the impressionable. He clapped his hands over his mouth anyway, as if he could shove the word back in.

The teacher crossed herself.

The word was a Grand Canyon. I stood on the edge looking into it. Wow, I said.

That woke everyone up. A chorus of Ummmmm filled the room.

Chester Dugan! the teacher went.

Ummmm! went the classroom.

Wow, I said again.

Chess slugged me on the arm. Weirdo!

Ow! I went, grabbing my arm.

The teacher grabbed Chess’ upper arm and dragged him out of the classroom, leaving the children all alone.

I went back to reading, but not for long. I felt a poke on the arm. When I looked up, some of the class were standing around me.

Your brother’s in trouble, a red-headed kid noted.

Don’t I know it, I said.

I looked around the room. All the kids were staring at me. This I didn’t need. I pulled the plastic tray in my desk out. It was filled with crayons and other kindergarten implements. I dropped the book in and pushed the tray back into its slot beneath the desktop. I got up. The kids watched me. I pushed past them and out the kindergarten door.

I found it shockingly easy to leave. I had imagined that there would be guards, or that some sort of fence would pop up out of the ground, but the school had nothing of the sort. I walked down an empty corridor, my shoes clackity-clickity-echoing off the walls. I pushed through the big double doors and walked across the weedy front lawn of the school. The flag flapped in a gentle breeze. I didn’t see another human being until I’d left the school grounds, an old man working on his yard, pulling dandelions and placing them in a sack. The back of his gray work shirt was saturated with sweat. His bad comb over was coming unstuck from his pink and spotted scalp.

Whatcha doing? I asked, standing on the sidewalk.

A flying squirrel floated from one tree to another.

Shouldn’t you be in school?

They let us out early.

Oh. Early. The old man wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, stared at the sun for moment as if he might cold-cock it. I’m pulling these dandelions so my wife and I can eat them, he said. He went back to filling the sack.

No kidding?

No kidding, the old man said, pausing again and squinting over at me. You heat up a skillet, fry some bacon, add some sugar to the bacon grease and cook the greens in that.

Sounds awful.

Takes all kinds, the old man said, and continued on pulling his dandelions.

I walked down to the community pool, which had been emptied. A stoop-shouldered man was inside pushing a broom around. I watched him for a minute. The man saw me. I tried to walk away.

Hey, kid! he shouted up at me.

The sound of broom scratching stopped.

I walked back over to the lip of the pool.

Toss down that pack of smokes and the lighter.

I tossed down the pack of Kools and then the Zippo. The Zippo had a funny symbol on it. The man caught it with one hand. His other hand was a claw.

Thanks, kid.

I stared at the claw for a moment. The one-armed man held it up like a rake. Boo! he went, and laughed.

I left.

Lincoln was such a small town. Hardly anything to it. The father, Tech Sergeant Dugan, put on his blue uniform in the morning, nodded at the kids sitting at the kitchen table, kissed his German wife, and drove off to work. He looked like a bus driver, I thought, except for all the ribbons on his chest and stripes on his sleeves.

Hey, why aintcha in school, another lug asked me. Blonde man and redheaded wife, farmers in town for a day of goofing off. I was downtown. I’d walked that far, to my surprise.

They let us off early, I said. We had an atomic bomb drill. Reagan was president, so we were almost at war all the time. The bombing begins in five minutes. Har-dee-har.
No kidding, the guy said. He looked to be my father’s age, whatever that was. Hair cut close to the scalp. He and his wife wearing depression-era clothes, baggy and worn. Scuffed black shoes.

Whatdya learn?

Nothing important, I said.

Nothing important, huh? he said, skeptically. If an A-bomb drops on Lincoln, you think ducking under a desk is going to do any good? Reckon not, he answered himself, smiling at his wife. She smiled back at him. She had some fine horse teeth gleaming in her head.

I have to go in here now, I said, and ducked through a glass door into a hardware shop.

I realized what was familiar about the man and his wife. They were the farming couple I’d met on a field trip. Or maybe they weren’t the farming couple, but they reminded me of them. I’d only met them for a moment.

I realized that Sandra had asked me a question and was waiting for a response.

Um, I said. And finally: What?

I said, ‘Do you like my daughter?’ Sandra said.

Yes, I said. Very much so.

This is another excerpt from In Between Days, a novel coming Fall 2012 from Paragraph Line Books.

Second Street, March 2009, 'Treme' set.

I know a Mandingo warrior. Usually he does home repair and he’s got a catering thing, but for Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, currently in production in New Orleans, he became a Mandingo warrior for a day, fighting another Mandingo warrior no less, with the aid of three shots of tequila that folks on set downed before the scene. No idea if he’ll make it in the final cut.

Last Tuesday I was a NYC hipster circa 2008 for HBO’s Treme.  I’d registered with Caballero Casting hoping to score a role as an extra in the Treme shoot scheduled the second Sunday of Jazz Fest (Fais Do Do stage for an hour or so, then released to enjoy the Fest) but instead got called up for the NYC hipster circa 2008 group a few days post-Fest.

My wardrobe instructions (incidentally, such information is available publicly on a rolling basis at Caballero’s website):

The look is hip, stylish, Upscale casual.  Sleek and sophisticated.

Please bring 4 different outfit options. Come dressed in first outfit

BRING ALL ITEMS ON HANGERS.

Good colors are dark and deep cool tones, like black, grey, slate, blue, navy, deep, dark greens.  No pastels, no solid whites.

Men: good items to bring are:  blazers, sportcoats, sweaters, cardigans, ties, dark colored t’s for layering, dress shirts, button up shirts, vests (if you own and wear them), dress pants, dark jeans, dark casual pants, cords, dress boots, loafers, dress shoes.  All shoes and pants should be dark in color.

No linen, no seersucker, no shorts. NO HATS.

For my money the most telling detail was the bit about vests [my emphasis]: “If you own and wear them.” I took that as: Don’t try to play Wardrobe.

I printed out the instructions and handed them to Dedra. She quickly sensed the depths of my apprehension and flipped through my hangers, assuring me I’d be fine, pulling out black jeans and slacks, a dark sports coat. I reanimated and managed to find a couple dark t’s and a charcoal button-up shirt that I ironed.

I showed up at the prescribed time on Canal Street where a tour van idled. It felt weirdly reminiscent of jury duty, the relative randomness of our grouping, the 20 or so of us. Instead of registered voters, we were media whores–okay, that’s a little harsh. Idlers, busy bodies, nosers, wannabes, the broke.

I entered the Canal Street hotel and walked through the lobby to an escalator, following everyone else who seemed to know where we were going, up to the second floor where we checked in with drivers licenses and were issued an assemblage of papers stapled together, forms to sign while we waited to be seen by the wardrobe gatekeepers. Wardrobe would serve as our voir dire.

While I waited, I examined my clothes with new eyes. And these eyes saw clearly the thin collection of dreary threadbare clothes I had to show for myself. In the tour van I suspected this moment would come when I noticed that all the other men had their clothes zipped away in safe keeping, while I just showed up with all my clothes draped over my arm. I only brought the black Keens I was wearing. No ties. I tucked my shirt in and put the dark sportscoat on, thankful that I’d at least ironed my shirt.

A short, slender wardrobe woman scanned the clothes I was wearing, slowly up and down, then scanned through my other options, selecting a pair of dark jeans and asked if I had other shoes.  Disappointed at my answer, she asked my shoe size and found a pair of black dress shoes and sent me off to change. When I came back, she did the slow scan up and down again, and I could tell she was trying to talk herself into saying I was a go. I said, “Okay, right?” She smiled and nodded and I was off. She wore an earpiece–at any moment she could be given a new mission, or told the wrap up the current one; she didn’t spend a moment longer with me than necessary. A few minutes later we were summoned back to the tour van to be taken a few blocks up Canal Street to a tented luncheon area, where we were treated to a buffet about 15 feet long, as well as lemonade and I think iced tea.

A little less than an hour later we whisked back up Canal Street to a posh hotel, where we gathered again in a ball room before being sent outside to claim a prop drink from a table of drinks with each drink placed on a numbered square (I selected an Amstel Light, #42).

I sat at a moody NYC bar and made like I was having a grand time with the folks around me. Ambient noise, maybe the intro to a scene, I have no idea. Through the crucible of the experience I made fast friends with a few of the extras around me, finding little hooks of dialogue we’d use during each shot, building off contextual instructions we were given, and just trying to be some approximation of NYC hipsters out on the town hoping to meet someone important. I think it’s called acting.

I was released about four hours after I arrived. A fellow extra told me I will receive a check for $101.50 in two weeks.

I fumbled together my clothes and crossed Canal Street as it began to drizzle. I could see a green streetcar a block ahead on St. Charles, and I violated one of my firmly held beliefs about catching the streetcar and followed the streetcar I wanted to catch. It was about 5:30 p.m. and traffic was still cramped and I made up some ground on the streetcar, but once it crossed Poydras Street it pulled away. A couple blocks away from Lee Circle I waited and soon another streetcar broke free of the gridlock and I got out of the rain.

Walking up the street from my stop I came upon a neighbor of mine walking his dog ZZ, a crazy active white long haired dog that loves to wrestle with our dog when they meet. I chatted with the guy, telling him about my turn as an extra. He said he’d been an extra on Treme as well, and he was trying to get on with some swamp zombie movie that’s shooting. He said HBO is the best though. “They treat you right,” he said. He’s trying to get as much extra work as he can.

Note: Fellow B2L2 contributor G Bitch did the Treme Jazz Fest last year.

We had just finished packing our 29 foot Winnebago Minnie RV – which we’d taken to calling Winnie Cooper – after a lovely week on the Oregon coast. We had interviews to get to in California, but we had many days in between. There was no rush. I had put the new Dido CD in the player, took my coat off. I started the wipers on the big tin can. The rain was coming down sideways, the wind coming in, too, 30-40 mph. But the view was clear. We had finished cleaning the house we had rented for a few days, put the keys back in the lockbox, and we were headed out of the driveway. Until the crunch.

When I got out and got around the side, I saw the problem. The rain gutters on the front of the house had pierced the roof of the RV. We had chunked up against the house’s eave, a 2X6’ board under the gutter had been torn off, about a 9” chunk laying on the driveway.

The house looked okay. I was grateful I didn’t tear the metal gutters down. It would be an easy repair. A shitty break, but not the end of the world.

On the other hand, as I struggled to pull my gigantic ass up Winnie’s ladder, I kept thinking: “Please, God, I know I’m a sinner, a dirty dog sinner. I know I’m doomed. But this time, this one time, please don’t let there be a tear in the fiberglass.”

And of course, there was one. 24” or so. I could see inside the coach from the top, down to the Styrofoam insulation – I’m not making it up – down to the drop ceiling in the bedroom closet. And the rain kept on. The wind howled. I stood there on the ladder, 9 terrifying feet above earth, and wished with all of my strength for a pistol so I could blow my aching brains out.

But I trudged down. My wife and I left a contrite note for the house owner, and got rolling.

When you have a hole in your roof, and when you don’t really know where you are, it makes sense to drive just about any direction. They’re all the same. The storm was swamping the entire coast for a hundred miles north and south. We just started north on US-101. My wife started looking at the big RV guide, looking for something, maybe a big ad that said: “Are you in Oregon? Are you a dumbass? Do you need a place to park where the rain won’t ruin all of your belongings? Call 1-800-SHATTERED-DREAMS.”

20 miles later and we pulled over at Newport. We found a large tin building with a gigantic For Lease sign, and we parked tight on one side, letting most of the wind and the rain shoot over top.

It was the first break we had gotten since the crunch. My wife – bless her – hadn’t said a cross word. She knows me. She knows that the self-loathing was deep. She knew that I was beating myself up in exquisite ways, interesting ways, varied ways, ways that could not compare. We worked on the phone, looking for a repair place. We don’t carry every yellow page for every small town in Oregon, so we kept burning the cell phone for information.

Finally, we located a place, 90 miles north. It was Sunday. Noon. In this part of the state everything is closed on Sundays. The streets roll up. The gas stations close at 4 pm.

The phone rang and was answered at Valley RV in McMinnville, Oregon. The guy had the same name as me. He understood. He felt bad for me. He didn’t judge me. I loved him.

He told us to come his way. Their service bays were closed till the next morning, but, by God, they had a big awning and I could park there if I wanted.

The sun parted the clouds in my foggy soul. The rain kept up, but now the wind was behind us. My wife went back to closet every once in a while, and yes, what a surprise, the ceiling was getting wetter. The water kept coming in. Things were getting soaked. The wood was getting saturated. The RV was losing resale value as fast as I normally make my way through a big bowl of pudding.

But we got there. We pulled Winnie out of the storm. The nice man inside gave me the yellow pages and we found a cab that took us to a Best Western.

There’s a TV movie on. I’m showered, clean. My wife has brought me a beer. I look out at the blinking signs outside my window and I see a place where later – in several hours – I will go to breakfast. I will show these Oregonians who’s boss when it comes to biscuits and gravy.

And maybe, just maybe. The phone will ring. Winnie Cooper will be fixed. It will cost us more money than is reasonable. It will cost what it normally would to send a kid to a large state college for a year. But Winnie will be whole. We will load up again. Smarter. Better. And we will roll toward California.

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Some of this comes from W.T. Pfefferle’s travel memoir Poets on Place.