In Nomine Patris

Some people, like me, walk their dogs, no one walks cats, while in Desert Hot Springs, CA, guys walk their ankle bracelets. I heard the story at work, and even though it came from a person whose brother owns a filthy car lot at the corner of Hacienda and Palm Drive, still sounded as a regular exaggeration for plot building purposes; until I actually paid attention to it. DHS is strategically positioned on the opposite, northern side of I-10 from Palm Springs. It’s tough reputation is only surpassed by its harsh reality. It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one’s exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy. Instead of talking about the good old times, people here whisper about even worse recent past.

Due to my nostalgically claimed early years spent in a sister environment, I love it here; it’s my raw madeleine. When I visit the local Vons, the local Stater Brothers, it’s all cry beloved country. Yet it feels natural, feels free of bullshit conventions that day by day strangle my sense of freedom, with fake excuses offered as a part of the package. The most thought-provoking thought in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking. Guys here do, otherwise soon they wouldn’t be walking anything, wouldn’t be able to walk, breathe. It’s a tough competition and it’s called survival. These aren’t ignorants unable to perceive their own ignorance, they do seek remedy where remedy could be found. They don’t fall in love with their bracelets, still they don’t chop their foot in order to get rid of them; they know where they stand, and it doesn’t look good – it sure looks like the sand of Desert Hot Springs. Whenever I fight my own phantoms, quite often, I think of their encapsulated options and laugh at my petty beasts and small time temptations, since insignificant they stand in any civilized comparison. The moment these fellas hit the street they know they’re as good as dead, at least as wounded or arrested again for violating parole. It’s a tough walk and it takes a man to do it; no amateurs and wanna-bes here. Excluded by their birth and taste from the social order, they are not aware of any diversity. Nothing in the world is irrelevant to them, every single item on the daily menu has emotions written all over. This order, fearful and feared, whose details are all inter-related, has a meaning which escapes them despite their marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition. Their days are hardened with screaming sunlight and boredom like last year's loaves of bread: one began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference echoing with the flat sound of the wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful.

Their affairs cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization, as the dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time. Part of the affairs is the fact they wrestle with repulsion almost every single day. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, mostly without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat. Because they are the way they are, things don’t stay the way they are too long, as unexpected within expected may pop out just at any random tick.

Oh, my brothers! You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you; you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their imagined stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which devour both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief? We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone. When we speak the word ‘life,’ it must be understood that we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of facts, but to that fragile fluctuating center which forms never define. We have the excitement of seeing the crux coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings. It is thus that the few lucid, well-disposed people who have to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior. None of us has ever walked an ankle bracelet, written, painted, visited or called his parole officer, or lived in a separate reality, except literally to get out of hell.

It seems that Desert Hot Springs gradually turns into a materialized extension of their awareness, that the decrepit state of these once decent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflects their state of mind. Perhaps they lose their sense of reality to the precise degree to which they are engrossed in their broken environment, and perhaps that is why they see in the increasing complexity of their mental constructs a means for greater understanding, although they intuitively grasp they will never be able to fathom the intangibles that govern their course through life.

Immediately when you arrive in Desert Hot Springs, for the first or the eleventh time, you notice the dead air. An absolute silence prevails inside the town; and even within the busy places like the flea markets there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightaway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars and lurking temptations, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so the night never really goes dark.

You leave the parking lot of the local Stater Brothers behind, pass the homeless section lying outside, go to your car, or out to a nearby dollar store, you’ll freeze in an abrupt esoterism. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives here has undergone and which the French call le bapteme de solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here in this wholly alien scenery lighted by some unknown stars like flares, even memory disappears. A strange and by no means pleasant process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has ever stayed in the Desert Hot Springs for a while is quite the same as when he came. Possibly the logical question to ask at this point is: Why come here to begin with? The answer is that when you’ve been here and undergone the baptism of solitude you can’t help yourself. Once you have been under arrest of this vast luminous, silent town, no other place is quite strong enough for you, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. You will go back, whatever the reason you may find to justify the return, since the absolute has no price.

What are they doing here, what am I exploiting in DHS other than low rent housing commensurate with even lower income of mine? They all come to this large parking lot which in a civilized area would be named by the magic word ‘mall,’ and hang out an entire afternoon, lulled into a state of vague ecstasy by the people in motion around them. It is that happy frame of mind into which these guys project themselves so easily – the mere absence of immediate unpleasant preoccupation starts it off, and the front view of an eerie locale, or anything that occupies the eye without engaging the mind, is perfect for sustaining it. It is the world behind the world, where reflection precludes the necessity for action and the calm which all things seek in death appears briefly in the guise of repletion; where the spirit emerges as finally persuaded that the juice of perfection is within reach, no matter how fragile or chancy it actually exists.

Occasionally, before or after entering the Stater Brothers supermarket, I’d slow down, stop, and exchange a few words with Steeler, a young, bright Mexican, fairly tall and slim and, of course, tattoos all around, with eyes that gaze into deserted infinity built of silica. He’d bum a cigarette from me here and there, and our word exchange would grow with every next encounter. Initially, we were both struck by how many things we have in common; from being brought up in barbarous surroundings, hating bullies, to perusing a lot. He also serves as my local journalist: I have a genuine interest in how the underworld community in my vicinity breathes. Steeler tells me that a few days ago, in an instant, be became conscious of a grim vision in the air, something which had been there all the time but which he had never isolated and identified. The mise en scène was in him, he was a part of it, and so was the doom a glimpse of which he caught; it whispered to him how short time is, how the world he lives in approaches its end. It was the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihilation, and it had always been there with him and in him, as elusive and as real as our conversation. Steeler pulls two loose cigarettes out of his pocket and hands one to me. ‘Ah, man’ he sighs. ‘Who knows what’s going to happen to me. Do you? Then again, I always have ‘hog’ to go to.’

Weed and its derivatives are strictly prohibited in Desert Hot Springs – regardless of the California’s recently eased marijuana laws and all the hoopla around its ‘medical use’ – and the natural correlative of this ban is that the angel dust or ‘hog’, far from being frowned upon as it is in other towns painted with a more civilized brush, is consumed almost freely; being unsupervised; it can be bought at any relevant street corner. This fact is no mere detail – it is of primary social importance, since the psychological effects of the two substances are diametrically opposed to each other. Weed blurs the personality by loosening inhibitions, delivering feelings of invulnerability and exaggerated strength, including distortions of space, time, and body image. It provides with a sense of participation. Angel dust abolishes no inhibitions; on the contrary it reinforces them, pushes the individual further back into the recesses of his own isolated personality, pledging him to contemplation and inaction. There is a close relationship between the culture of a given boomtown and the means used by its members to achieve release and euphoria. For the local DHS cops the gist is in issuing of undeserved traffic tickets. For the civic parole officers the endless humiliation of their parolees is rated higher than sex. For the writing community the means has always been alcohol; for those arrogant in their ignorance it has been hashish: the former seeks dynamics of inspiration, the latter chases delusions of the mainstream. If a reading audience wishes to touch the realm of taste, first let it give up the mainstream; the rest will follow, more or less as a manner of course. Conversely, for a writing community – if one existed here – if it desires to isolate itself in a radical fashion from fancy barbarians ante portas and introduce to our ankle bracelet audience what words mean when used in the right order and backed by calvaries behind them, the quickest and surest way is to keep on writing. After all, who is a writer if not a spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the information across the border, back into afterlife. Then he can be given a mythic personality: he spent time among us, betrayed us, and took the material across the border to Mexico.

After finishing his sentence, Steeler appears to me a relieved man: that monkey off his chest rejoined the circus and left Desert Hot Springs in search of fresh victims. His look lost ten years of suffering. These are the first moments of his new being, a strange new existence in which he already glimpsed the element of timelessness that would surround him. The person who frantically has been counting the seconds on his way to catch a train, and arrives panting just as it disappears, knowing the next one is not due for many hours, feels something of the same sudden profusion of time, the momentary sensation of drowning in an element too rich and too plentiful to be consumed at once.

‘And let me tell you one more thing, Jorge: the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind . . . nothing, I suppose.’ Steeler shifts from one leg to another.

‘Sure. Have you seen The Truman Show, it’s a movie? No? Your thought reminded of it. Let me tell you something, Steeler: there always lies a challenge behind what we see, be it, say, the horizon, or a sentence, and most of the time we’re unable to touch it and find out what we’re up against; so you better get used to it, yet keep on reaching beyond. What is strange here is not the sky above Desert Hot Springs – it’s you realizing it, and while quite capable of doing so you still have no plan to get out of your life’s Dodge here, being enlaced in too many emotions that immobilize you right where you are as we speak. I know I’m a smart ass, but I’m also an intelligent ass as well, and like you, I paid for that education dearly. An intelligent hell is still better than your dumb hog paradise, Steeler. In comparison to what you and I have suffered from ourselves, the humiliation and suffering inflicted on us by others fade into insignificance. How old are, twenty eight? OK, close enough. You’re already heavily indebted by all the student loans forced upon you by your merciless destiny: get better get your money’s worth. People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The guys who get on in this world are those who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them. Are you ready to kill or be killed over a skirt or a card game where the other fella is cheating? Are you ready to be one of the idiots that make tragedies still possible in this hi-tech age? Are you ready to be called scum, a sinner, a whore? Are you going to stand here for the rest of your freakin’ life smoking hogs and shit, like a captain who is trying to preserve his ship by never leaving the port; are you going to do something about it? Get real, Steeler! In the next world they will not ask you why were you not Pancho Villa, they will ask you why were you not Steeler. As much as I enjoy talking to you, my vision is not to see you ever again when I come here to buy the groceries. Period. You think I’m going to stick around DHS until I die?’

Desert Hot Springs, where God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and went fishing, speaks the language of the desert, and it is here to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance. One of those moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees. ‘You are finite,’ desert tells you in a voice of boredom,’ and whatever you do is from my point of view futile.’ As music to your ears this of course may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequence and the attendant self-satisfaction. And this stillness of desert does not in the least resemble a peace. It is the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looks at you with a vengeful aspect. Steeler sensed it behind the clouds.

The book about this town and its hot thermal waters should be read by everyone but those with clamped lidlocks on their eyes, such as in A Clockwork Orange or Laser-Assisted Sub-Epithelial Keratectomy. It mirrors like a fun house mirror and amplifies like a distorted subwoofer one of the great poppycocks of our time, the imprisonment and the life on parole of the wild imagination. The wilderness part has been so debased that imagination – being imaginative rather than being the lynch pin of our existence – now stands for a synonym for something outside ourselves. Like a Grisham novel, one skeumorph after another – his books are read like the gospel by impressionable amateurs in this heart-attack-serious business, amateurs who have no idea a novel should come into contact with the spontaneity of the inconclusive present, which keeps the genre from congealing – or some new laxative, or even a veiled insult to some cheesy idol glued to our hearts. What a wild summer recipe: live at the last Western frontier before dementia eats away your spelling skills!

Freakin’ imagination has to cease being our link, I mean our most personal link, with our depersonalized selves. What it’s good for, still, is to simply imagine having breakfast at Tiffany’s before the first bite into Egg White Delight McMuffin. What is schizophrenia if not a horrifying state where what’s in your Tiffany box doesn’t match up with what’s inside that muffin. No wonder imagination has become a synonym for style. Because the style is dead and readily buried by peasants just in time for them to fire their tall Deeres and start heading for a night at the stadium. No one even meditates about lights out under the starlessly thick desert dome, let alone a brochure inquiry, or a sample of thermal waters. The last one who tried got killed at the Dillon’s Roadhouse, some two miles from the aforementioned corner of Hacienda and Palm Drive. From what I heard post festum, he was badly slow at the draw. At least he got shot, got somewhere. What scares me even more is the common negligence when it comes to detail and precision. What happened to counter mainstream slow hand – who shot that fella? Not being heard is no reason for silence.

Backstabbed by self-inflicted wounds and bleeding profusely, this tiny town offers a living inside a movie, where half the male population walks like Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider despite the fact that they have recently received a prosthetic left leg made in Somalia, while the other half considers itself being Clint Eastwood. In this instance, as you can see, nature, social nature, which is a second nature within nature, amused herself by making truth more interesting than fiction; whose beauty an artist (at this time there really is one in DHS) had lately painted as an ideal envenomed arrow.

But the ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives from this desert scenery where the sand is speckled by yucca trees and shrub are derived at a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression; with the cause surfacing behind the plain, deceiving effects. As for the rest of them, they fall into animal stupor that gapes at existence and likes itself.

The day will arrive when at the crash of dawn I will put a leash around my neck and walk myself in a leisurely manner, one step at a time, out of Desert Hot Springs never to come back. Not even for a brief sojourn. Then another day comes and DHS no longer has any significance. All I will remember is likely to be perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of emotion and detached from the past reality of this unreal environment. The bottom line will read: I lived in an apparent world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image within a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things is no longer definitive but limitless, this fictional awareness now frees me from the reality external to myself. In a word, my stay in this forgotten desert boomtown was one of those perfect episodes which occur more frequently in memory than in life, since we can remember minutely and precisely only the things that never really happened to us.