Sep

19

It’s show time at the Range! 

Deep in the desolate Sonora, about 127 feet below sea level, out-of-towners file trailers and trucks and buses to a stage erected on a concrete slab to sit on it, in their vehicles like an old-time outdoor theater, or on junked sofas, busted lawn chairs, expatriated back seats of old cars, or rows of church pews, and rock all night under a zillion stars. 

Your host, Builder Bill, straps on his six string guitar and raises the roof with ‘House of the Rising Sun’. Then he rocks back on his heels, chuckles, and shouts for the 750th straight Saturday in 15 years, ‘Good audience!’ and the people holler for more.

It always is a great audience. Among the locals, it is their single night each week to come in out of the punishing sun in a drunken or drugged stupor and party among partiers. They double as anarchist lovers, after the tourists leave, and about this time at  midnight is when romance blooms on solid concrete.

A high-heeled polished escort drove a white Cadillac from the east coast to test the market. She brought a scheme to build an underground S&M Dungeon with whips and chains. She was smart enough to hook up with a local church investor to supply clients, and tithe a portion of the gross back. The world she would create revolved around sexual fantasy involving dominance and submission. She was going to dig and build it underground because weird tricks pay more money. The reason is they can’t go for what they want to someone they know, or out to a straight bar. The escort miscalculated that Slabbers have money just because there have drugs. I was one of the few with cash at the Range, but she kept staring at my crotch the whole time we talked, and I walked away uneasily. She didn’t even get a shovel in the ground due to lack of ‘pre-bookings’ to fund the hole, and turned around and drove her Cadillac back to New York.

A bearded man resembling Grumpy of the seven dwarfs jumped up from the audience and charged the dance floor with an 8” knife raised high over a scorpion of equal length with a raised stinger crawling amid shuffling feet. It was the largest Giant Green (Hadrurus arizonensis) I’ve ever seen. As the pair jitterbugged around each other, a lady in a tight mini-skirt butted in clamping a sawed-off 2-liter Pepsi bottle over it, and held it high for everyone to see. The music stopped, and I stepped up to identify it, and state that though the stinger is large, the venom is like a honeybee’s. Grumpy flashed the blade in my face, for he had been catching it for his girlfriend, and thought I was hustling her. She went on stage and rattled and raffled it off for marijuana. 

A drunk female in fishnet stockings fell in front of my armchair in the back row. There are four reasons I didn’t help her up: 1) She was drunk, 2) she was mistreating a dog to which she was leashed, 3) I had been taught by a high school cross-country coach never to help anyone up, and 4) she wanted a date or to stab me, because it was the third straight Saturday she had slipped in the same spot.

Dogs roam the stage. People come in a party mood, toting six-packs and fifths of whiskey and gin. Sometimes the dogs drink. I was sitting on the edge of the dance floor sewing in rhythm with the music threads of what I observed into a wall-hanging in my mind ,when, like it was a dog door, a huge brown Great Dane pranced through and looked down at me. Then it looked back to its smiling owner across the floor dancing. She had sent it over to invite me to cut in. I don’t dance, so the 180 pound animal lay down and was seven feet from tail to nose. The animal in me came out, and I scratched its ears. The girl walked over, and lay between us. I was afraid of what I might catch at her trailer, and got up and walked away.

Two women with mutual restraining orders to keep 100’ away from each other, bumped into each other on the 100’ wide cement slab of the Range as a band warmed up. The two women stood toe-to-toe cursing each other, while their teams of witnesses argued in a circle around them of who had arrived first, in order that the other legally be required to leave. Someone called the cops, who arrived in two patrol cars, doubly manned, as the officers piled out and surrounded the ruckus. They interviewed the contenders, their cornermen, and since it was unclear who had arrived first, they were ordered to technically break the restraining order by sitting 95’ apart at the far edges of the Range, and not molest each other.

As they had argued, each cast sideways glances at me for support. They are attractive seniors, but I have become cautious over my Saturdays at the Range. The last senior I picked up, later felt spited and lashed out, offering ‘Free blow jobs to any male who will hit him on the head!’ There has been a reprieve during a current affair with the chief arsonist, so the shanties of Slab City and I are safe as long as they are together.

Everybody likes to think on the first night that their relationship is the long haul. While no one knows for sure what the future holds, I have accumulated ten clues from normal society that can tell you if a partnership is built to last, and explain why each is nonsense in Slab City. 

Slabber girls are the best of any country I have visited, and the only caveat is that you have to keep your guard up. They are meaty, wholesome, savvy, and excellent. They will cut you if you perform less than your best. The reason is individuality: everywhere you look at the couples, you see happy singles, too. There are plenty to go around Slab, and few are particularly faithful. The ratio is about 3:2 and they vie fiercely for men. The pretty women sometimes do things no man would attempt anywhere else in the world.

It is interesting to note that the American sexual revolution was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas it was just another stage in the historic rise of individualism. The sexual revolution was to destroy the idea of a permanent couple and family in a community of them, and free the individual to dip and out as he pleases, and that destruction continues to this day, and is accelerated in Slab City. The sexual revolution also marked the greatest sexual tactic of my life in getting a vasectomy. That, as an opening line, works better than deodorant.                                                                    

The Beach Boys bragged about ‘California Girls’, but my Chicken Science professor explained the biological reason why Slab City females are hornier where the sun shines more. They don’t wear clothes. We – humans and chickens – have a third eye called the pineal gland located in the middle of the brain, which secretes melatonin at night. That’s what helps us sleep. Melatonin blocks our sex hormones, and the long days of desert sunshine (or light bulbs in chicken coops) increases our libido and fertility. Plus, when Slabbers shed their feathers when it’s hot, it subconsciously makes us think about sex. 

The other admission is that mates on methamphetamine are like an outlaw and his horse under tail, and he/she’s got to ride that nag till it drops. Slab City girls have more tattoos per square inch of skin than anywhere in the world. Tattoos that tell stories of crime and passion, of regret and punishment. They express the outlaw from the outside in, and you don’t even need to look into the eyes of a date to know her horizontal waltz. Sex is somehow extended and better in direct proportion to the number of tattoos, and there’s something to talk about after instead of smoking cigarettes.

Another tip is to watch them dance. Graphic is invented on the Music Range slab. Bras-less, panty-less loose delights reveals the hidden language of their otherwise impenetrable psyches. Each movement is a word, each chorus a sentence, and each song a statement of who she is. They speak in paragraphs all night, because if you’re on thin ice with the law, you might as well dance.   

In the wee hours, like at any other event, the couples pair off and wander into the Creosote, the Rhino Room outhouse, adjacent abandoned trailers with cracked mirrors, or under Ironwood shadows on discarded couches that smell of pet urine that acts as an aphrodisiac while on meth. . The stuffing over time is knocked out of the couches. You cannot stop a Slab whore, not even by tying her to the Salvation Mountain tractor. No Slabber I ever heard of accepted money for a trick, because there is none, however few have refused to trade a bowl of weed for a bowl of pleasure. It is an accepted form of capitalism for which some females build up reputations as entrepreneurs and are very successful.

To think that all this arises from human behavior, all motivation, all our hopes and fears, heavily colored and largely controlled by the fascinating pattern of reproduction. Its significance is underestimated. They get it on, rock gently, make a harmonic, and then ride hard to climax. 

Like Steppenwolf’s Nature Child, they were born, born to be wild. Slabber girls have a special way of communicating like the chipmunks that used to crawl over me at the Sand Valley camp. They encounter someone on the street, get real close, smell their breath, and maybe peck a kiss, and then backtrack the person if they like the taste of the drug. They are useful dieticians also in tasting sperm and prescribing what you should eat. The best could hire out as government drug test kits.

The upper crust of outlaws own banks of drugs, though they will never admit it. They identify themselves by a surrounding of the most beautiful women, so, like anywhere else, they can afford to screen them. The town Arsonist asks, ‘Is your IQ higher than mine?’ The top car Bomber asks, ‘Are you a life support system for a vagina?’ The town Fence, oddly, is monogamously pussy whipped. 

Some of these females are smart enough to make you dizzy looking through them, like sitting across the chess table from one who makes all the right moves. Soon, you sense mate and don’t care about the opening, or middle game, and just want to see her coup de grace. I'm tired of watching attractive people trying to be ugly, struggling for authenticity. Why not be yourself? Like a fighter, I cut to the chase, asking, ‘Can you fight?’ With judo and wrestling skills, I could probably stay alive.

This is squattersville off the grid, and we welcome you every Saturday for the sundown concert at the Range. 


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2 Comments so far

  1. Curious on September 27, 2017 11:58 pm

    This whole article smells of Margaret Mead in-field academia. Locals pulling pranks on infatuated interlocuters.

  2. Lynn on November 12, 2018 3:47 am

    You stole MY WORDS. I offer blowjobs on mad Max’s getting beat up. But you just take the words right from my mouth, put them into Trisha and Kim’s story, and call your self a writer. You define petty thieves for us in your stories, is this an example of petty plagiarism? I promise that’s my line, and no one has ever taken me up on it,as if beating up a rapist isn’t incentive enough. You trash the place you live in these stories about whores and incapable people and all the good deeds you do. I like you better in person but write one more story slandering slabs or especially WOMEN and you might fight blow jobs on YOUR head bo Keely.
    The girl with the Great Dane and fishnets wasn’t even 18 when you wrote this, pig.
    Total inaccuracies. I wonder what would happen if all these poor violent drug addicted slutty desert thieves were actually capable of reading and forming an opinion. Well they are and they certainly don’t read this shit.

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