31

The most hazardous activity in the High Desert is undoubtedly driving. Last year, no fewer than sixteen people went to be with Jesus within fifteen kilometres of my front door. This, in an area with a total population of twenty-six thousand. If translated to, say, Los Angeles, that would result in an annual death toll of sixteen thousand. Nationally, it would mean a road toll of millions, a figure that would equal and maybe eclipse the murder rate inflicted by the tobacco industry. Locals, taking a cue from the nations to our south, have begun erecting crosses and shrines, and Pioneertown Road has developed an Andean look.

The cause of this carnage in the area is the chronic alcoholism, the ageing population, a considerable adolescent population, the chronic consumption of speed, inadequate roads, and the endless stream of concrete trucks that roll down Old Woman Springs Road. Driving out to 29 Palms to pay a fine at the DMV, I witnessed an extremely old and frail woman have her licence renewed. She had shrunk, apparently, and was about the size of Lenin after eighty years in his tomb — and in equally poor shape. So blind was the old duck that she couldn’t locate the place to sign her form, so some helpful locals lifted her high enough to be able to reach the counter, and the DMV official guided her hand to the correct spot. Then she was held up so her photo could be taken and — presto! — the right to drive was confirmed. At times like this, the expression ‘defensive driving’ assumes a new perspective. Usually, such person’s lives are terminated when they wander before a cement truck while driving white Cadillacs.

Another cause of the carnage was exemplified of late when a woman lost her Harley on Pioneertown Road when she got into trouble and decided to use the front brakes to slow down while negotiating a bend. Thousands of would-be outlaw bikers visit the area every year, and, though they have spent a fortune trying to get the look right, they have not learnt to ride big motorcycles. This lady, who was AirEvac’d to civilisation and lived — we know that because the coroner, for once, was not sent to the scene — did what poorly trained riders and drivers inevitably do when confronted: she hit the brakes. It’s the last thing most people who are killed in accidents do.

A fundamental reason for this ‘massive road crisis’ is the assumption, one of many, that there are no other cars out there to worry about. Because the roads — and there are only three tarred ones — appear to be bereft of vehicles, a driver used to the intense concentration required for negotiating a freeway is blinded by the absence of fellow travellers and assumes none exist. But they do, and they appear when the unwary are unwary. And no one likes to be surprised by a cement truck.

Though the dead are many, the escapees are also plenty-fold. Corners are actually named after amazing saves. The best known is Barrymore Bend on Pioneertown Road — named after the actor John Barrymore Jr, who spent, until lately, much of his retirement at Ernie and Carole’s motel, and had regularly crashed on a difficult bend halfway down the road.

A few nights after Sean’s party, Crinkly Jim and Lil Debbie rolled their car on a particularly nasty stretch of Pioneertown Road. Neither was injured, but a tyre had blown, and the car, having landed in the long-suffering yucca forest, sank into the soft soil that follows the rains. Both were too drunk to negotiate the replacement of the tyre — their jack having sunk deeper into the soil. Figuring the same would happen to my dinky jack, I repaired to The Club to arrange for a few locals to get Jim and Lil Debbie from harm’s way before the authorities at Yucca got to hear there was money to be made up the hill. The hour was not late, but it was the Sabbath, and few were prepared to take the chance of driving to a wreck and having the cops inquire into their sobriety.

Only Dan Dan would come to the succour of Crinkly Jim and Lil Deb, and we set off to right the situation. Much of the beer in Crinkly Jim’s car had exploded under impact of the roll, and the trunk was dripping with a telltale smell. Worse, Jim had found a bottle of cheap vodka, a polyester cup, and some orange juice, and he and Lil Debbie were mixing a fresh drink as I crawled under the wheel to help place the industrial-size jack that Dan carried in his truck. I wasn’t nervous about the police because I had managed only two beers. Not for long. Jim set the vodka bottle up on the truck, and with the first movement of the jack it fell on its side, delivering a stream of vodka across the truck’s surface and down onto my head.

I stank like Boris Yeltsin visiting Ireland. But we righted the car, and somehow Crinkly Jim and Lil Debbie were soon careening home while necking the remnants of the vodka.

I pulled out as soon as I was sure they could move and get home safely. The next day, I ran into Dan Dan, who informed me that Debbie or Jim had rolled the car again about half a mile further down the road.

I had noticed some alarming skid marks on the road at that point, but it had not occurred to me that these idiots could manage to roll a car, successfully, twice in the space of a thousand yards. How could they have even got up the speed?

A few days later, I called to see if all was well. Dan Dan’s version of the story was, as all stories told locally, wrong. They had not rolled the car again. The skid marks were from when Jim had rolled the car the day before. A completely different incident, Jim informed me indignantly.

Following the party, Sean’s life got better with each passing day, and soon he was lost to us in favour of Debbie, a high school friend whom he had re-met at their twenty-year high school reunion up at Big Bear. They married, and Sean got a steady job — leaving me with a few tools and little expertise to finish the renovation of Boulder House. This was a task akin to the work carried out by the Egyptians at the time when all but the higher reaches of the High Desert were still part of the Sea of Cortez.

The next day, I heard that Buzz was sick. For a time, Buzz was increasingly, alarmingly, sick. His liver, according to the VA, had almost ceased to function, and his survival was a source of wonder to all. But the same was said of Crinkly Jim’s liver, and he had, for the moment, kept the undertakers at bay.

‘The people at Loma Linda told me they don’t do new livers for alcoholics,’ Buzz said, with half a smile and half a grimace.

Buzz served his nation, but it wasn’t a two-way deal. I told him, ‘You can’t die. You’re Buzz Gamble,’ and he seemed to think that might be true. But he was truly sick.

I discussed the matter with Dan Dan, one of Pioneertown’s success stories, a man sought out far and wide for his skills with music and lighting systems. We agreed that if Buzz was to eat — and he hadn’t in a week— he’d have a better chance. His only nutrition in six days had come from the Sprite that he’d been adding to his bourbon. I wondered if the drinks they give people with AIDS and other diseases that attack the appetite — little cans that contain, in fact, meals — might help. Dan Dan said they were expensive, and threw twenty bucks on the bar.

It’s not exactly health care, but Buzz is amongst the most uninsurable people in America. The only doctors he can afford to see are those at the Loma Linda Veterans hospital — a two-hour drive that has always ended in him being told to take counselling. Buzz needs more than counselling. He needs a new liver. But the position of the state is that alcoholics are to be denied livers until they give up drink, and can prove so. Buzz used booze to get off a twenty-three-year-old heroin habit, and he thought that was something of an achievement. But those who have sworn to give their life to healing the sick must think that alcoholism is not a sickness. Certainly not one that should be encouraged by handing out fresh livers.

The fact that Buzz might just be the best white blues man in the US, that he gives joy to all who know him as a singer and as an all-round guy, that the blues are his blues due to the pain of being him, a pain that he treats with booze ’cause heroin just means jail — does not make him worthy of a fresh start with a fresh liver.

According to the medical dictionaries, which are all we are able to consult in the absence of a health system, stopping drinking, followed by rest, is essential for the liver to have a chance.

But Buzz needs to work, and his job is as day barman at the Joshua Tree Saloon, a bar at the foot of the Joshua Tree National Park. It’s not the place to give up drinking. It’s a desert bar, a bar where people come to drink, and drink a lot. It’s an old-fashioned bar — a drinker’s and a smoker’s bar. Probably the worst place on earth to give up drinking. But it’s his job, and, apart from singing, is pretty much the only thing he can do.

Dan Dan and I discussed this situation at some length. Buzz should have been on sick leave, but as with many jobs in the desert, Buzz and everyone else are paid under the table. He gets $3.50 an hour — more than a dollar under the legal hourly wage. Buzz lives off the tips. Being a showman and something of a local hero, he does better than most men. But he can work twelve hours, and leave with only $50. The question of sick leave was not even raised by his employers.

But it was by Dan Dan, whose business had been flourishing, improbably enough because of the resurgence in religious activity. The local churches, flush with money, were lining up to put in the sort of sound systems that The Rolling Stones would be proud of.

Dan asked me to watch his beer. As it was a Bud Light, I said I’d rather not, but he headed out to his truck, returning with a cheque for $200.

‘Take that around with the health drinks, and tell him there is more when that runs out,’ Dan proclaimed.

I drove the few hundred metres to the home of Buzz and Laura, his girlfriend. Buzz waved me in, too sick to get up. He was in his cell, the tiny TV room about the exact size of a jail cell, and the room he feels most comfortable in.

He was naked except for a blanket, and was running hot and cold, shivering all over. After an hour or so, Laura came home and I headed out. The sun was a few inches above the San Bernardino range, and the light was at its best.

Old Jack, the honorary mayor of Pioneertown and long-time resident of the motel, had just made it through to his going-away party. He was as yellow as a submarine, but the party was a happy affair. Jack’s days were numbered in hours — about fifty of them, as it transpired. Most of the town was in attendance, and the young girls flocked to old Jack, who smiled and gleamed like a fifteen-year-old. He was presented with a grey top hat — the last having been stolen — and a fine grey cane. Jack’s face never lost its toothy grin. Two days later, he was dead.

Bob Dix wanders the world with a concoction that he calls coffee but which is, in fact, homemade Black Russian. It saves him money at the bar. His constant companion, Adam, will drink nothing but Budweiser unless he’s run out of it, which doesn’t seem to happen often. In the absence of Bud, Adam will drink pretty much everything except the excellent water from his well. Lil Debbie used to drink only Kessler — a sign of her loyalty to Buzz, as Buzz would drink nothing else. But as Buzz had shown no intention of leaving Laura, Lil Debbie recently kicked the stuff completely and now just as religiously drinks vodka with orange.

Crinkly Jim did not cheat The Reaper. Having exquisitely renovated the house by the pool, he repaired to Lil Debbie’s, weakened by the daily assault on his liver and a bout with Hepatitis C. Boo visited, and, alarmed by his colour, took him to the emergency section of High Desert Memorial Hospital in Palm Springs. The doctors rushed him in, one remarking, ‘Sir, you are glowing!’

Jim was in high spirits, and expected to be discharged quickly. But when Lil Debbie went to see him a few days later, she found a virtual corpse. His skin had gone dark, he was snoring loudly, and was dead to the world. She tried to wake him, but he snored on. Finally, a nurse coldly informed her that her man would never wake up again. He was effectively dead.