Too Poor, Dumb, and Ugly
By Ken Layne
Few people move to the Mojave Desert by choice. It’s usually the last stop on a long road of regrettable decisions and bad luck, a vast dumping ground for everything too poor, dumb, and ugly for Los Angeles and its gentler climate.
Looking for a nice little bank-owned stucco box surrounded by thousands of other foreclosures? Not moving up the Gang Management ladder back in L.A.? Want to bomb things for the Marines by day and burglarize houses in Barstow by night? Got a disability check and a neckload of tattoos? Child support payments cramping your style? Need to dress up in a multi-colored rubber suit and ride a motorized dildo in dust-cloud circles around your double wide?
There’s another desert, of course – the one without the obese hordes, the jacked-up-pickup traffic jams, the insane jarheads, the filthy haze spilling over from the “Inland Empire,” the Hummer stretch limos parked at the AM/PM in Baker on Sunday afternoon, a bloated orange-skinned gal vomiting out of every passenger door.
That other desert is the majestically weird Mojave of Mary Austin’s “Land of Little Rain” and Edmund Jaeger’s “California Deserts,” a land of shocking beauty and bizarre creatures and beautiful solitude that still exists, often just beyond the I-15 and the miles-long junkyards and the grim brown suburbs of our current Stucco Apocalypse.
The Indians wintered here, and had the common sense to go to the mountains and rivers during the crushing summers. The Spanish took a look around and sanely decided to stay on the mild green coasts. Only an American could look at this thirsty wind-blasted land and think, “Yeah, I’ll just drop a trailer and a propane tank on this acre of creosote sand and pay a few bucks from my Social Security for the water truck to stop by every few weeks.”
Hike down some apparently forgotten jackrabbit trail in the Joshua Tree foothills on the north side of the San Gabriels, and a ravine full of construction pallets and wrecked pickup trucks and crusted old jockey shorts will break your heart. A pleasant path through gnarled old junipers and sagebrush will invariably end at an OHV-rutted wasteland covered in Bud Lite cans and plastic shotgun shells, a couple of wild-eyed shirtless meth cases firing at an abandoned car, an ice chest, their unneutered pit bull, anything that does or doesn’t move.
Meanwhile, there is breaking news. It’s right there on the front of the Victor Valley daily newspaper’s local section, our four-days-late, awkwardly assembled chronicle of the muggings and murders and carjackings and suicides-by-cop which generally happen beneath the security halogens in the parking lots of fresh new half-empty strip malls next to fresh new half-empty subdivisions.
“Landmark Jesus mural in Lenwood defaced by vandals.”
This is just the kind of story you want to read while having tacos al pastor and beer and iced tea at Taco Chon on the parched hill over the I-15 frontage road across from the landfill and next to the shooting range.
Painted on the side of “a now-vacant printer shop,” the mural of Jesus was terribly defaced by a cruel vandal who blacked out the eyes of Christ and “added a mustache.” Some guy who used to own the abandoned building “commissioned” the painting two decades earlier, to “show his repentance for actions in his younger days as a biker.”
Who would do that, to Jesus, in Lenwood of all places? I finished my breakfast, Google-mapped the intersection and found the mural, just a half-hour up the road at the crossroads of the next vaguely habitated settlement between Stoddard Wells and Barstow. I called for the check.
Old Route 66 runs through the crumbling, closed-down roadside businesses and troubling trailer parks of Lenwood, but now we are supposed to call the Mother Road the “National Trails Highway.” Ah, there was Jesus.
The bucket of black paint was still there in the dry dirt, along with the usual cigarette butts, Kleenex, sports drink bottles, and hamburger wrappers. Faded Jesus actually looked a little better with the blackened eyes and Latin Lover mustache over his weak blonde beard of old. Behind the abandoned print shop was a typical Mojave tableau of battered mobile homes, decrepit cars up on blocks, trash piles, and makeshift sun shelters. Nothing was open for a block in any direction. A few late-model pickups sped by in the 104-degree afternoon, burning $5-a-gallon gas.
Published: 07/16/2008
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