30

Sean, who had got lost in a drugged wilderness from which he was emerging, wanted to make a mark on the citizenry for his thirty-eighth birthday. A few weeks before, we had gone together to take some cactus from a former friend of Sean’s, an amphetamine dealer who lived in a dilapidated trailer at the base of Goat Hill. It was thirty kilometres from Boulder House and an entirely different moonscape. Only goats and cactus and speed dealers could possibly live in such a place. Goat Hill is a jumble of broken volcanic brown rock surrounded by barren washes. The dealer had a generator — we were far from electricity — and the thing chugged away as we approached the caravan to inform Sean’s acquaintance of our intentions. The dealer wasn’t unfriendly, as Sean had once been a major customer.

I looked into the tiny ramshackle dive and saw a girl. She had once been very pretty, but speed had taken care of that. The spots on her face were identical to those I had seen on the coke whores of Venice. Her body was in good shape and most of it was in evidence, but she showed no modesty before my brief glance. The guy had the dope, and she was his chattel. He didn’t care who looked at her, and neither did she.

Sean explained our intentions, and the guy said it was cool — which it definitely wasn’t. Sweat was running from the leather band of my Stetson. We picked our way through the rubbish, old tyres, and equipment that lay baking in the sun as we returned to Sean’s truck. By the path stood a wooden box some three metres long and a metre high and wide. The remnants of a mattress spewed from a hole in the box, and Sean stopped and appraised this forlorn sight.

‘I lived here for six months,’ he remarked at the box. ‘In the summer,’ he added. ‘I was sick most of the time.’

Nothing else needed to be said. Sean was once a top gun in the coast guard. He had a letter signed personally by president Reagan, complimenting him on his role in the detection of a boatload of marijuana some years before. He lost the letter — and everything else — in the course of his speed addiction. He had come a long way from such distinguished service, but was fighting his way back.

The birthday party was partly his way of showing just how far back — and it had to be done right. Sean had been respected by the community for his strength and his mechanical skills, and before sinking into the slops had been well liked in Pioneertown. The party was his chance to let the town know he had returned to the land of the living. But this I was just learning.

We knew we were living in methamphetamine country. All around us were bits of blown-up houses that used to house meth labs, and we had wondered about them. Sean explained the dynamics of the drug.

‘You start taking speed, and you are up all night. You might fuck for three hours. And you are drinking and smoking all the time. You can drink a lot of whiskey and smoke a lot of cigarettes on speed. And of course you have to have dope [marijuana].

‘And you have to pay for all this, so you work for the speed. You need more speed to work. So you are working for speed. But the work you do is no good. You think you are working hard, but you are just making more work. And you never get the adrenaline naturally, because you are snorting or shooting adrenaline.

‘I’d clean a room, but really would have just taken a mess and put it somewhere else. So you lose your job, and you sell your tools for more speed. I once sold my welding equipment for three days of speed. One hundred dollars. It was worth five hundred. Then you start stealing stuff. I never did — I got too sick.’

Sean developed pneumonia in the course of a binge. Things got ugly, and his woman took his guns. Things got even uglier, and Sean ended up in the box in the desert, where he lay in delirium while a local Christian brought him food. The payoff for the food was Sean’s promise to attend church, so he found himself hiding out on Sundays until things got so bad he decided on religion before speed. His face was full of sores from the impurities in the speed, and his body was about lost.

‘I would have died, had I kept going,’ says Sean, who is now as fit as a trout and as strong as a brace of oxen.

Boo and I went along with the idea of a massive celebration, partly on the grounds that we felt one was due as well. We had successfully moved from the city to the desert, and had made peace with the locals.

Sean went to great lengths to ensure that none of the speed fraternity heard about the party. He wanted to be painted with a new brush in the collective consciousness. I feared that if the speed freaks discovered Boulder House, they would return and steal all but the boulders.

Sean, who was given to waxing biblical far too often (the Bible had played a major role in his rehabilitation), decided that the party had to include the killing and eating of a fattened calf. I argued that we needed Buzz Gamble and the Daily Blues.

We reached a compromise and agreed on the music, but in the place of the calf settled for a fattened pig.

A few years before, when Sean was amidst his battle with speed, those given to alarm had convinced themselves of the coming of the end of the world due to the Y2K bug. Sean had taken responsibility for a number of piglets to be raised so they could be eaten when ‘the system’ collapsed.

The year 2000 came and went, and the piglets continued to do what they do best — eat. Knowing about these animals, I had inspected them in their sties, where they had been nurtured on the overflow from Harriet’s kitchen, and they all looked delicious. But one had struck me as particularly tasty, and I’d pointed the revolver that we had been playing with at the best-looking pig, and suggested that we — and everyone else — eat the thing.

Sean had agreed. There is something about eating an animal you actually know compared with the ‘faceless’ animals that arrive on most people’s tables. We once knew a farmer in Australia called Sam who claimed he bred the best veal in the world. He was always talking with wide-eyed enthusiasm about putting one sort of bull over one of his various breeds of cows, and went to the end of the world to find the perfect combination — ultimately a Sindhi Brahman over, I think, a Hereford Black Angus. Sam was exceptionally strong, and ate steaks, sausages, bacon and eggs, and half a loaf of bread for breakfast. His refrigerator dripped with rich red blood. He butchered his own meat, and this perhaps led to his downfall. Sam couldn’t keep his hands off his vealers, and would drive around his property relishing coming meals.

‘I can’t wait to eat that beast,’ he would yell as his truck bounced over the fields. He would lick his chops and grin obscenely at the animals, and then at Boo and me. It was as if breeding the animal, delivering it, and then watching it grow to just the right moment for butchering, hanging, and then eating it made for a tastier banquet than a trip to the market for a cut of steak.

Unfortunately for Sam, his appetite got in the way of his wallet. The prize beasts could be sold for far more than the average beeve, but Sam’s massive, promiscuous appetite had him eating the profits. A whole animal — worth perhaps $4,000 — would be consumed in a matter of weeks.

Sam started losing money at the rate he gained muscles, and he took to supplementing his income through the production of a notorious cash crop.

Sam ate his way into jail.

I didn’t know Sean’s pig that well, and have to confess I have forgotten its name. But the experience of selecting, preparing, and eating taught me much about how Sam got into the condition — over a period of six years — he ended up in.

Sean arrived a few days before the big day aboard his tractor, to which he had attached a backhoe, and proceeded to dig an exceedingly deep pit in the granite. It took him the best part of a day — the ground being solid rock — but when he exited the backhoe and accepted a bottle of tequila, he could proudly exhibit a hole deep and large enough for a prize pig and a couple of its friends.

While Sean had been tearing up the granite I had visited Buzz, proposing that his band play at our collective bash. Considering the prospects of the speed fiends turning up and having to be turned away, I hired Mike Bristow to enforce whatever laws he thought should be enforced — and hoped for the best. Harriet warned me that the police would raid Boulder House and that druggies would take off with the silverware, and at one stage Sean suggested that maybe the party should be moved to The Palace.

‘Dude,’ he said (Sean has an irritating habit of calling all and sundry ‘dude’), ‘do you really want to go ahead with this?’

‘A man doth not put his hand to the plough and turn back,’ I replied.

The neighbours were duly informed and invited, as the night promised to be long and loud. Though the nearest neighbour was half a mile away, we expected the sound to travel many miles in the thin mountain air.

Buzz readily agreed and promised the attendance of the band, but did mention the matter of money. Four hundred dollars. It seemed a fair deal, given that they would have to drag their equipment all the way to Boulder House, set up and play from six till midnight, and Buzz had a strict policy of ‘no pay — no play’.

A few days later, the butcher arrived with the pig. The porker I had admired in Sean’s pens was now both headless and hideless. It was also — I was relieved to see — gutted.

It was dumped on a huge piece of cardboard on the floor of the poolroom some fifty yards from the pit. Having inspected the pig, we lit a fire six feet down at the pit’s base, and piled a cord or so of wood onto the flames. We went early to our respective beds the night before the party.

At 3.00 a.m., almost twenty hours from party time, Sean woke me with a bottle of his prized tequila and announced it was time to prepare the animal.

He had bought six pineapples and gallons of plain yoghurt after consulting all and sundry on the basics of cooking a pig in a pit, and concluding that this was the appropriate way to go. We stuffed the pineapples into the pig’s gutted cavity, and then smeared the yoghurt on the flesh. Then we wrapped it in sacking and chicken wire. Finally, we drove an eight-foot pick bar through the thing’s throat and the pineapples, and finally out via the back passage. We hoisted the bar, and carried the pig to the fire pit, lowered it onto the white-hot ashes, and, like thieves in the night, repaired to our beds.

If anyone had observed our behaviour, an impossible task unless conducted from the air by Edwards Air Force Base F18s and F14s or by satellite, they might have thought they were witnessing a fiendish, satanic ritual. And we both admitted to feeling guilty — not over the fate of the pig, but our nocturnal activities, the burying and cooking of an animal we had come to know.

Sometime before, Tony and I had been chatting up two LA girls in The Club. I was doing my best to make Tony agreeable to at least one of the young filmmakers, and for a while it looked like he was in with a chance. I suggested the girls come back to Boulder House. They were nervous, but Tony gave the place a grand description, and they were almost persuaded.

I thought to put their minds at rest by saying they should not worry.

‘It’s not like we’re going to sodomise you and put you in the lime-pit with the other girls,’ I remarked jovially.

I heard Tony’s face drop. Immediately, I realised that my lighthearted banter had miscued. The girl next to me turned another colour, and her acquaintance started fussing and talking about ‘getting back on the road’ — always a bad sign.

Suddenly, they had both disappeared, and Tony was as close as he could get to a rage. I told him I regretted my comment, but thought it just a frivolous aside.

Tony was boiling.

‘A frivolous aside,’ he almost screamed. ‘Out here in the desert, where even they would know that bodies are dumped every day!’

Tony gaped, and stared at me in silence.

‘I think they overreacted,’ was the best I could manage.

Clearly, I had said something that had cost Tony a decent chance to get to know a young lass from Hollywood better than he otherwise might, and I felt poorly about the outcome.

But here we were, at dawn’s early light, lowering a beast into a burning pit. I had butchered, burnt, and eaten animals in the past, but these activities had not been conducted in the presence of a man who, having lowered steel doors over the pig, returned to his Bible and tequila.

Upon the day that Sean reached his thirty-eighth year, and as the sun slipped behind the mountains, Buzz Gamble, his microphone covered by one of my socks to deny the wind, opened the party proper with ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. From then on, the rocks rocked. A hundred or so people gathered in the amphitheatre or danced on the cement dog runs. Elderly ladies from the church adjusted their bifocals and jitterbugged with gay young men in caftans. Bill Lavender perched on a boulder with his girlfriend, Phyllis, watched as the band played, and people danced on the cement that had once been the runs for his famous Rotts. Others sat up high on the rocks that surround Boulder House as the kids of the upper desert thrashed about in the pool under the floodlights. Horseshoes were thrown, and volleyballs were tossed across nets by bikini-clad girls. And so went the night.

Finally, it was time to retrieve the pig. At nine o’clock, when it had cooked for the day, the great steel doors that Sean had placed above the pit were lifted, and the pig was brought forth. Everyone, starving by now, gathered around, salivating. Unhappily, the pig was seared but not actually cooked, Sean having used pine for the fire rather than a hardwood. The starving masses took the disaster stoically — things always went wrong in the desert. But Sean was mortified. His pig was a failure. It reflected poorly on him at a time when he was trying desperately to prove he had made a successful return to the land of the living.

‘There’s only one thing to do,’ he muttered, pulling me aside. ‘Chinese takeout. I’ll leave now.’

Sean was trying to remember where his car was, so he could embark on the thirty-kilometre trip to Yucca and back, when a Hawaiian gentlemen whom no one seemed to know materialised and called for more wood and coal. The man happened to be an authority on the cooking of pigs in pits, and, almost at midnight — after the good folks of the High Desert had demolished mountains of beer — the Hawaiian brought forth a perfectly cooked pig.

To me fell the task of carving the animal. Much of the outer layer was fat, but the people of Pioneertown, Pipes Canyon, and Rimrock could no longer be restrained. They tore, like beasts, at the huge slabs of pork that I slashed from the carcass. Knives, forks, and plates were forgotten by the multitude, as people grabbed cuts of hot dripping pork from my hands and stuffed themselves. The temperature was still high at midnight, and I had stripped down to an undershirt. The fat gushed from the pig, and soon my butchering had rendered me slick from the waist up, my arms and shoulders and even my head dripping with fat as I took part in a fantastic, bloodthirsty orgy of delicious, unforgettable food.

In the early morning hours the guests began leaving, only to find police cars parked at the end of Coyote Road. The cops could have locked up half of the citizens of the High Desert, but instead determined who was drunk at the wheel and had them replaced by more sober passengers. They had been alerted by the noise and had come up from Yucca, but for once their concern was not to fill the jail but to see the residents safely home. People marvel at that to this day.