14

Not long after my recovery, I began to see — if that’s the word — a gentleman, Ed Gibson, who lives about a mile from Boulder House as the crow flies, and not much more by road and rut. Soon, when I entered the club or the bowling alley, I would head straight for Ed if he was in evidence at the bar.

In a world where cowboys, hippies, and ’necks fuse, Ed is king of the kids. Almost the father to a valley desperately in need of fathers. There is absolutely nothing phoney about the man. His cowboy hat sits upon grey locks that hang almost to his waist, as though it was placed there at birth. His white walrus moustache is as full as any man’s, in a world where such facial accompaniments border on the compulsory. Sitting next to him, one could be sitting next to Buffalo Bill. Or John Wesley Hardin. He looks like a gentleman rancher who started as a cowboy and made his way to the top. Which, in a modern sense, he did. He looks good in suspenders, but being a cautious man wears a belt as well. At nearly seventy, he is good-looking, and his style attracts the glances of women thirty years his younger. He probably gets more stares from tourists than all the other wild-looking types, and is so much like the person you expect to see in the Wild West that you have to look again.

Ed worked for many a long year in the energy business before our utilities became criminal conspiracies. He had travelled America as a linesman, and had come, before his retirement, to understand how the giant power plants work — an achievement apparently yet to be matched by Governor Davis, or, to my reading, the Los Angeles Times. Or, for that matter, me. In the course of his work he had strained the muscles in his right hand to the point where two of his fingers were permanently frozen, as it were, to the palm of his hand. Frozen they may be, but at least they are still attached to his hand, unlike so many residents of the High Desert. Many handshakes involve grasping one finger, or perhaps two, and the remaining stumps.

The cause of my bonding with Ed was initially the cause of International Labor. His union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, had been good to Ed, and he retired at a level of comfort few working men enjoy. But Ed was as comfortable with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers as he was with the International Brotherhood of Love, the organisation established in the mid-sixties to promote, amongst other things, the evangelical movement to distribute LSD. His travels had taken him to many of the right places at the right times, and he had been fortunate enough to happen to be working up around Big Sur when the hippie movement was in its salad days. Ed became a crossover redneck. Naturally intelligent, he embraced flower power and, more literally, women, while keeping the state’s electrical power running. Ed straddled the two worlds, and their women.

The first few times I ran into him at The Palace he was gruff. People who handle enough electricity to power cities, who hang from poles high above the earth, and have seen friends turned into cinders, have a right to a certain gruffness. I doubt anyone would describe me as gruff — at least no one has to date — and in style we were most dissimilar.

But our shared history of organised labour united us, and soon Ed was bringing his monthly union journal to The Palace and slipping it, somewhat surreptitiously, I thought, to me.

There is something comforting about the papers that unions publish. At one stage in my life I would arrive at a desk in the Labor Council building in Sydney, and scour them, looking for something that could be turned into a story for the national press. The union tabloids no longer arrive at my desk, but when Ed slips me his copy I feel a link to a world I will never be part of again. It’s a world, for all its warts, I have loved. A world where men with sticks stand side by side before the guns of the cops and the dogs, and sometimes the armed forces. A lost world.

I was honoured to be invited to Ed’s home, which is situated at, or about, the convergence of Roadrunner Rut — itself more a river during rain, and definitely little but a dusty rut in the long summer — and Coyote Road. Here Ed lives amongst his guns and knives, his collectables, and his memories. He likes to sit at his bar, pouring Gentleman Jack, one of the better bourbons, and reflecting on labour history, the international order, national politics, and the economy, and the crooks who have taken over the country.

We sat amongst the guns and knives and whips (ones suitable for driving cattle), sipping the proud bourbon and discussing the market. Once, in an extravagant mood, I told Ed I thought there was a great big bear out there. An ugly, stinking bear worse than any that prowled the mountains above us three hundred years ago. I predicted that the Great Bear would soon be upon us. Ed nodded, sipped. Enough said. Ed is not the sort of man to invite a neighbour over to discuss his financial future, and the conversation moved to the familiar themes of the past. Of memories Ed did not want taken, unheard and unknown, to the grave. Most people in the High Desert think of bears as real, live animals, creatures that can be and are seen. Ed knows of the other bears, the bears of Wall Street’s imagination.

A superb listener and a determined talker, Ed has found that happy convergence where one respects the rights of another to hold the fort of conversation if they will yield equal time. This is not the norm in Southern California.

Of late, he is inclined to intimations of mortality, and this depresses me greatly.

‘Seventy ain’t old, Ed,’ I say when his thoughts turn to Old Man Time. Ed looks a bit like Old Man Time.

‘Ninety is old,’ I add.

Ed lets the matter rest. But something in his eyes reminds me that almost seventy years for a working man who has pushed his body hard at work and play is a long time. It scares me, this thought. Without Ed, I would have no deep male soulmate in the High Desert — just a lot of mates.

The conversation turns to the heartier topic of the expected arrival of Danny, the little Indian, and Adam’s shooter, who is soon to return from jail to the cottage closest to Boulder House.

‘You still don’t have a gun, do you?’ Ed inquires on one visit.

‘Nope,’ I reply in half-hearted defiance. I have long worn the absence of a gun in the house as a badge of honour. To my knowledge, ours is the only household bereft of guns within twenty kilometres. But a violent criminal would soon be very near our property. The prospect was vexing.

‘Would you like one?’ Ed inquired whimsically.

‘Well,’ I started, then stop, remembering the nights when I lay awake and pondered our vulnerability, convincing myself that my concern was for Boo or Sailor, that I was not getting armed because a half-crazed criminal with marked recidivist tendencies and an apparent collection of like-minded men and women who made their trade in the manufacture and sale of ‘ice’ were about to descend upon our happy haven.

‘I suppose I would, I guess.’

Ed rose slowly.

A few minutes later, he returned carrying a very large and powerful shotgun: a long-barrelled 12-gauge Remington Magnum 87. I almost blanched as I took control of a weapon more than half my size. I had shot the same model at Adam’s a few months before, and almost lost my shoulder. I remember Adam saying a slug from this creature could pass through the block of an old Chevy truck. I also remembered the bruises to the shoulder. Adam’s shoulder was black, and he was more than familiar with such weaponry. But Adam had bruises on his bruises.

‘Got any ammo?’ I wondered out loud.

‘Not for you. You will have to get that yourself.’

I lugged the thing out to the car and drove it home.

Ed is the titular head and co-founder of ‘DILLIGAF’ an organisation that has no head. DILLIGAF (Does It Look Like I Give A Fuck) is a collection of some fifty men and women who meet at The Palace around three on Friday afternoon, and about the same time on the Christian Sabbath. The women have seen fire and rain, and some have ridden behind men whose jackets carried the Death’s Head.

In the absence of a police force, matters of import, such as they are, are attended to by the DILLIGAF, the motley band that Boo and I had first observed when we entered that establishment on our first visit to Pioneertown.

Though it is one of the most informal organisations on earth, its roots lie in better-known company — that of the Hells Angels. At one time, The Palace and Pioneertown itself were controlled by the ‘Red and White’, as the Angels are known to insiders. At the mention of DILLIGAF’s antecedents, Ed and other prominent members of The Club turn particularly reticent, muttering things about ‘those days’ and giving one every reason to believe that in a distant time they had what people out here call ‘connections’.

Here I have to be pretty careful and not too specific, for the dead are many. When Pioneertown was a movie town, it boasted two bar-restaurant-bloodhouses. One was the Golden Stallion, presumably named in honour of Trigger, who was actually white, but perhaps Roy was reticent about the place being called The White Palomino. The other was the Red Dog. As we have learnt, a tit-for-tat burning, rebuilding, and re-burning finally left no trace of the Golden Stallion, and the Red Dog fell into decline.

Back then, The Palace was a gas station, but one with a licence to sell beer. It was purchased in the early sixties by Frances, then a heart-stopping strawberry blonde who took advantage of the absence of a proper drinking hole, and turned the gas station into a bar. Thus the concrete floors, which once housed petrol pumps. Frances had ‘connections’ with the ‘Red and White’, and the place was ideally suited for weekend runs for two of the nation’s largest Hells Angels chapters — Barstow and San Bernardino — both a couple of hours’ ride from town. It was decreed that what we now call The Palace be neutral. Outlaws from any club were welcome as long as the internecine warfare between clubs stopped at the doors. Outside those doors, anything went, and at times men bled to death in the dirt a few yards from the bar.

But Frances and her powerfully built husband, John, kept order within the premises, and as the years passed it developed a reputation for being as peaceful a place as one could expect, given the clientele. Frances’ daughter Harriet had been a beauty and something of a sexy singing sensation in LA and Vegas in the sixties and seventies. She had toured Vietnam extensively with her burly husband, Pappy, but her public career was drawing to a close as the years passed, and Frances, starting to get on in time, thought it was time to hand over the reins.

Harriet and Pappy became the new owners of the cantina. They renamed it Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace. But the outlaw image frightened the respectable citizens who were slowly discovering Pioneertown, and so a deal was cut. The gangs collectively agreed not to come to town, at least in their colours. As the years passed, so did the outlaw bikers, and though they still make appearances, only those with a skilful eye can detect a current, fully fledged Hell’s Angel. If, for instance, a wild-looking tattooed bunch arrives wearing T-shirts that read ‘If it don’t look right — start a fight — and support your local Red and White’, it is fair to assume one is dealing with the real thing.

Ed scoffs at any suggestion he was a Hells Angel, but admits that he rode with the gang, and remains in contact with the former president of one of its US chapters. He rode with another outlaw gang called The Nuggets, a gang out of Anaheim.

‘We were affiliated with the Hells Angels, but all gangs are. The Angels make the rules of the whole organisation.’

I was surprised. All my journalistic life I had assumed, when I wrote the phrase ‘rival outlaw gangs’ — a not-uncommon journalistic expression — that the gangs were in fact rivals.

Mike Bristow, a senior DILLIGAF man (women make up almost half the organisation), did concede that formal ‘connections’ exist — and he informed me that it was okay to have a DILLIGAF badge sewn on your jacket, as ‘the Red and White gave us permission’.

‘Only,’ Mike added, ‘if we do not use their colours.’

Thus the DILLIGAF patch I wear, on my hat, is black and white, and I wear it partly because it shows an attachment to the old industrial society and the kind of solidarity that once expressed itself in the trade union movement. But it is the least formal of organisations. When I learnt of its existence, I asked Buzz Gamble, a long-time member, how one joined. Buzz replied that I was already a member. The ethos seems to be that of Our Lord’s: ‘When two or three are gathered together in my name — there am I in the midst.’

Buzz never rode with a gang. Buzz was more a one-man gang bent on a course of destruction. ‘Give me three of him, and I could destroy the world’ might well have literally been inspired by Buzz’s life of astonishing criminality.

Buzz began his crime-and-dope spree having been ‘honourably discharged’ from the army, a fact which itself suggests that reform of the institution was greatly needed thirty years ago.

He attended every jail in Texas, but based his early curriculum at Huntsville, and as he talks about the place, one pays quiet tribute to the makers of the film Cool Hand Luke.

Buzz can’t just sing. He can act. His whole life has been one great Shakespearean folly. Folly, but not all fun. With a few people around him, Buzz’s stories will take you to the places that wise men try hard to avoid. And just as when he sings I can close my eyes and believe it’s Ray Charles, so when he tells his tales, he takes his audience into his world.

One Friday afternoon, the DILLIGAF has gathered at The Palace for its get-together, and Buzz is holding centre stage — his favourite and rightful place.

Survival in jail requires skills, and one of the fundamental skills in a world where boredom is punctuated by brutality is storytelling. Buzz has had a lot of practice. The DILLIGAF have all heard the story before, but they lean forward, eager to hear it one more time.

Buzz is on a road gang, hoeing weeds from the roadways with his colleagues. THE MAN, straddling a horse, watches the crew through the sort of sunglasses associated with Latin American despots. The guard is nursing a rifle and wearing a pistol, and he’s bored.

‘Gamble,’ he shouts, ‘you take a run. I’ll give you half an hour.’

‘No, Boss man,’ Buzz replies. ‘I ain’t runnin, Boss man.’

‘Gamble, I’ll give you an hour. You can move a long way in an hour.’

You listen to Buzz, you close your eyes, and you hear James Lee Burke.

But Buzz knows he can never escape. The Boss man and his good ole boys will get their guns and dogs, hunt him down, chase him up a tree, and ‘shoot his ass’.

‘You can’t escape from a Texas jail,’ Buzz explains. ‘You can escape from one, but only to enter the grounds of another.’

Prisons like Huntsville were always an extension of the slave system, but whites were allowed to join. In the Civil War, one and a half million yards of cloth were produced at Huntsville in a single year. The cloth was desperately needed by the increasingly ragged Confederate Army, but little of it ever reached them.

Huntsville, Buzz recounts, is just part of a vast prison system that is distinguished only by the fact that ‘It’s where the chamber is.’

The white, black, and Latino inmates were totally segregated, and the inmates work long and hard. The cotton planted during the Civil War is still picked, and it’s processed at the jail’s textile mill.

‘Everything you eat, everything you wear, the mattress you sleep on, the pork, the meat, the vegetables, it’s all produced here — nothing comes into Huntsville ’cept prisoners. And no one escapes, not for long.’

Texas tired of Buzz, and he of Texas. The authorities indicated he should take his one-man crime spree to sunny California, otherwise the consequences would prove fatal. He moved to California to get away from the cycle of dope and jail, but things came horribly unstuck.

He talked his way into running a bar in Salinas, and booked country and western singer Johnny Paycheck, writer and singer of the redneck international anthem ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ to perform.

‘All Johnny asked for was some money, a fifth of Jack, some pills, and a young girl,’ Buzz recounted.

‘I got him the Jack and the pills, but couldn’t manage the girl. After the show, I got to drinking with Johnny, my half-brother, and his real brother, and we drank and drank and drank until about four in the morning. I was counting the money while we drank. I stuck $1,800 in a money belt and put it on.’

Buzz had a ’69 Dodge Charger with a transmission that slipped so bad he had to get it up to about 4,000 rpm to get it moving at all. He was on his way home to his wife, who lived in a trailer park. He hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, and needed to smooth things over. But he was hungry, and the only thing open was a Winchell’s Donut House with a Wally Cox–type guy behind the counter. He was about five foot one, and had thick glasses. Buzz asked for three plain glazed doughnuts.

‘He looked at me and said, “Three plain glazed doughnuts. That’s it?”

‘I said, “Yeah. I want three plain glazed doughnuts.”

‘He said, “You’re a real big spender. Real Diamond Jim Brady.”

‘I said, “What did you say?”

‘He said, “You really gonna spend some real money. Three plain glazed doughnuts.”’

Buzz was particularly irritated. He was carrying $1,800, and some four-eyed geek was sneering at him for being cheap. But he also had, stuck down the back of his pants, the great equaliser — a nine-millimetre Beretta.

Buzz asked the doughnut man to ‘Repeat that, please.’

He said, ‘Yeah. You’re a real big spender.’

‘I pulled the pistol out, cocked it, and stuck it in his face. I said, “See all those doughnuts you got out there?”’

Buzz waved his Beretta at the next day’s doughnut supplies. And the man, much humbled, replied, ‘Yes, sir!’

‘Load ’em in my car.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I said, “Load the fuckin’ doughnuts.”’

The only thing disturbing the tiny mall that night was a vacuum-cleaning truck, which circled about the parking lot sucking up a day’s trash. The man in the truck watched in wonder as the doughnut man carried box after box of doughnuts out to the car. Buzz, who had assumed a firing stance, with both hands clasped around the Beretta, followed the doughnut man’s movements.

‘I made him fill up the entire car with doughnuts — until there was just enough room for me to get in and drive.

‘We went back into the store, and he says, “What about the money — aren’t you going to take the money?”

‘I said, “Fuck the money.”

‘Then I shot the cash register and blew it sky high, and told him to lie on the floor.’

Buzz squeezed in amongst the doughnuts, started the Charger, revved it to the required 4,000 rpm, and screeched away at almost five miles an hour. The little electric truck took chase. It was probably the only getaway car ever to be chased by a vacuum truck. Buzz made it to the highway, and finally to the trailer park and into the arms of his wife.

But the vacuum man had his numberplate.

The smell of doughnuts that had spent the day in the sun greeted him as the amazed rocker opened the door of his Charger the following afternoon. Buzz, with no memory of his drink-fuelled exploit, concluded that his half-brother — a prankster — was responsible. He squeezed in amongst the doughnuts, and headed to work. A few kilometres down the highway, police cars materialised behind and in front of him. Cops came at him, training shotguns. Buzz was lying spread-eagled on the ground when the events of the previous night came back to him.

In a case that was to be known as ‘The Great Donut Robbery’, Buzz was charged with the theft of 169 dozen doughnuts and the use of a firearm in the execution of a crime. The latter charge proved to be the more serious of the two.

The next day, ‘Peanut’ Anderson, who owned the bar, bailed Buzz out. Peanut had determined why Buzz committed the robbery.

‘It was for the dough, huh, Buzz?’

Buzz’s legal strategy was not to relinquish the evidence, the doughnuts, and at each appearance over the next eleven months the size of the evidence diminished as the doughnuts shrank. The plan was two-pronged. The doughnuts had shrunk to the size of golf balls, and what once filled his car could now be produced to the court in a few small bags. The crime became pettier with each passing month. Rats and mice had also taken their toll, and the police stolen-property rooms were attracting a good number of rodents. They were causing distress amongst the law-enforcement agents. Buzz’s lawyer hoped that by not relinquishing the evidence, the police would grow so tired of the guests that they might offer a deal.

‘He called it his bargaining power,’ Buzz explained.

By the time Buzz was sentenced, the 169 dozen doughnuts, which had started off being wheeled in — in three large laundry carts — could fit into a shoebox.

Buzz was tried by his peers, who laughed a lot during the case. Jury duty could be worse. Even the judge was unable to maintain a stern countenance, and Buzz would probably have walked had the new ‘Use A Gun — Go To Jail’ laws not recently been enacted. He was given five years to life. The prison was Soledad. The sentence was for armed robbery, and no mention was made of the doughnuts. So, when asked, Buzz informed his fellow inmates that he had robbed a bank.

But the mood in Soledad was vicious.

‘Black, Latino, Mexican mafia, Nuestro Familia, Aryan Nation, I was locked in a city with nothing but criminals, and everyone was expecting a riot. The tension gets really high,’ Buzz recalls.

The blacks, whites, and Latinos were busy preparing, as ever, for the next phase of the great, never-ending American race war. Buzz almost made it before the real trouble came. He was only a few months from getting out when the word came down that there was to be ‘a big major race riot’.

‘For two days, the tension on the exercise yard was really heavy. Everyone was grouping up, and you knew they were fixing for people to die, and you didn’t want to be one of them.

‘You can’t understand the sound of seven hundred men running towards each other at the same time. It sounds like an explosion, like a stick of dynamite going off. Anyway, the riot lasted in the yard for two days, and I knew what was fixing to happen. I didn’t want to get killed, so I wrapped magazines around my body and tied them with bed sheets. Then I put two sweatshirts on and a jacket. Most of us had weapons, but they were buried in the yard.

‘When it did come down, the fucking explosion, there was burning, there was windows breaking, there were shots being fired from the towers. They were shooting at groups of us — I’ve got scars from the shotgun pellets where I didn’t have the magazines down low enough.’

Buzz pulls up his T-shirt to show his rapt audience his scarred flesh.

‘I was lucky.’

Buzz has had his share of luck.

‘I only got hit twice by the knives and some shotgun.’

After the rioting came the inevitable lockdown. Six and a half months of it. Total lockdown. No movement at all, except for solitary visits to the shower. During the lockdown the tension rose, and word spread that there would be reprisals. The word went down, and the word was that the blacks were going for three hits, and one of those hits was Buzz Gamble.

‘In the yard, during the fighting, somebody got screwed up really bad. Someone who was trying to kill me.’

The man was killed, and whether Buzz did it he couldn’t exactly say. Prison riots are confusing affairs. In the mad frenzy, it was impossible to know who did what. Buzz thinks he might have killed the black man, and his tone softens. He is not proud or ashamed of what he might have done. But the blacks had determined that when the lockdown was lifted, Buzz would die.

‘They told us that lockdown would end on Tuesday morning at ten o’clock. Someone was going to kill me, and it was all happening over 169 dozen doughnuts. I had already taken my radio apart, and made two knives out of the handle.

‘I stayed in my bunk, and the doors opened and the adrenaline started pumping so bad that when these two black guys showed up at my door and charged me, I jumped up and stuck one, and I stuck him here.’

Buzz places his finger under his jaw and makes a thrusting upwards motion. The knife, he indicates, entered the man through the soft tissue under his jaw, and continued until it had finished the opponent’s time, not just in jail.

‘The other one was still coming. He was swinging a sawn-off baseball bat. He hit me in the jaw and knocked out all my teeth. He ran back to his cell, but the guy who I had stuck was laying half in my cell and half out — and the doors couldn’t close.

‘I couldn’t get him out, so I pulled his legs in. So I’ve got a dead black guy in my cell with my radio handle sticking in his neck.’

The guards and the higher echelons knew exactly who was going to be hit, and as long as Buzz didn’t leave his cell it was self-defence.

He got an extra fourteen months for possession of a prison-made weapon. Buzz collected his teeth and pulled out a few that were just hanging on, and flushed the lot down the toilet. The prison was locked down again — for four months — and Buzz had lips ‘like beer cans’. He was fed soup, which he took through a straw, and lost thirty pounds. Finally they took him to the dentist over in the central unit.

Buzz is a vain man, a showman. Not the sort of man who would take kindly to the loss of his teeth. So he slipped the dentist a few twenties and told him he wanted to look like he used to — with the gap and all between his teeth. Without that distinctive gap, Buzz wouldn’t be Buzz. The old dentist told him to bring a snap of himself smiling — something Buzz does more than most — and by the time he walked out, he had a perfect version of the teeth that had accompanied him all his life. Probably better.

Buzz left prison and took a house in Salinas. Derelicts and junkies populated the block, and Buzz had vowed in jail that he would never go back. He was on parole, and he knew he could never make it in a town full of dope fiends. So he spun a globe and stopped it wherever. Where he would live. The finger stopped the map at Palm Springs — which is only fifty miles from Pioneertown. Buzz was getting closer to what — for the next twenty years and doubtless the rest of his life — would be home.

He found peace and safety in Pioneertown, partly by chance. A friend who cultivated marijuana asked him to mind a crop of sensimilla high up in Pipes Canyon. The friend brought food and booze, but no money. When winter came, Buzz packed eight pounds of weed into his backpack, saddled his horse, and tried to ride out of the mountains. The snow was thick, even down low in Pioneertown, when he rode into the village. It seemed deserted, but Harriet’s mother, Frances, who then owned the bar, found him shelter in a sort of barn down at the corral. Back when the town was founded, it was named the OK.

To the amazement of the entire parole board of California, Buzz has not seen the inside of a cell for nine years. Giving up heroin was a good career move.

Buzz is a master storyteller — a skill he has honed through twenty-eight years in county jails and state prisons. It’s a skill much in demand here in the High Desert, where there can be as little to do as in prison, especially in the summer months when the heat drives locals from whatever work might be available. An hour passed as Buzz told his tale. Most of the listeners gathered in the weak winter sunshine hadn’t interrupted even to get fresh beers.