3) Grand Junction CO

Grand Junction

I like dozing off for a while at odd times, which is good because I used to have to catch up on lost sleep all the time. There were always things that interupted any kind of sleep routine I might have had, whether it was because of my late-night delivery routine at Sac’to Weekly or adjusting to the daytime operation of the trade show in Las Vegas for that week, or on the train leaving all that and San Francisco behind.

It isn’t just that I have had good reasons to be up and around in the daytime: friends, events, scenery outside the train. It’s that my outlook on things can be entirely different after a short doze, refreshed. It’s worth doing even without having been deprived. Travel makes for lots of these opportunities.

Five days out of the Emeryville train station in the east bay meant that thoughts of San Francisco were almost as far in my past as life in Sacramento. On that morning, leaving Elko Nevada for a train station at Grand Junction near Denver, I figured I would nap when the hustle of boarding was over and the scenery became comfortably monotonous. Stuck with a soft-enough seat and enough lively murmuring around, with things to ponder or with huge natural desolation outside the windows to think through; nobody to get hostile with me about it; with things to lull me away from anything active, I could sleep for a few minutes there too.

I had long since arrived at a way to quell any insomniac anxiety about being the fugitive. I could close my eyes and think, “When I open my eyes, someone will be there to arrest me.” Accounting for it gave me a clean slate to sleep by. If anything like that happened, then I could be excused for having the achey irritability you would normally associate with a disrupted sleep pattern.

When the train-bound monotony came, I tilted my head back and to the side against the headrest and the dull ache from the runaround of boarding and stowing things faded. Then I reconsidered how to do this. I wanted to try it without my sunglasses. It might be interesting to see how hypnotic the changing pattern of light on my eyelids might be, so I took off my sunglasses and put them on the large table in front of me. A minute of this had me thinking it was too bright. I decided that I would want to go back to moderating all the changes in light that I was living with by keeping my shades on whenever I dozed, but I did fall asleep at that point with them off. When I woke up, the sunglasses were gone. This was obviously a drag, but it also put me in the way of some unfriendly locals when I hit Grand Junction.

I would like to think that I can find something good to see anywhere, but walking the mile or so north from the train station to a convenience store to get some cheap shades, the cityscape I saw was lifeless. It was drab little blocks of buildings with just enough half- hearted signage color to keep them from being the really good, easy kind of plain. There was plenty of traffic to keep the walk from having any good and easy quiet.

I found just what I was looking for though: A dusty pair of plain roundish frames that wouldn’t make me look like a malevolent insect the way a pair of more common wraparounds would have. When I happily told the checker how glad I was, she looked directly in my eyes with a totally blank expression and then turned her back on me, attending to some other business, before she said, “Anything else?”

I said, “No,” with curbed enthusiasm.

The checker took my money and gave me my change without facing me or looking up from the counter. While I was waiting, I asked the person in line behind me, “Was it something I said?” He didn’t respond and tried to find something else to pay attention to.

A wirey older guy behind him caught my eye, gave his head a quick tilt up and said, “We get a lot of strangers coming through.”

I let it go at that.

On my walk back to the motel that I had seen halfway there, I tried to imagine what he had in mind. Maybe his image of Grand Junction was as an archetypal small town with some monumental natural wonder at its heart. Maybe his imaginary town had just a few hundred people who all knew each other and they had a small quarry that their forefathers had unearthed that produced bright pink and orange marble that was in great worldwide demand for pet cemetaries. It would have been far enough from the interstate highways and major cities that a kind of pilgrimage had to be made to visit there. The good people of this town would have welcomed these visitors and their spending, as long as they didn’t dawdle more than a night or two and didn’t interfere. These tourists would go away refreshed and happy, yet not knowing what bliss the locals reserved for each other. This was not that town.

Saying, “We get a lot of strangers coming through,” was just the less-direct way of saying, “You’re a stranger,” and made it sound like people there might do their best to try to accomodate the unfamiliar tastes we visitors brought in with us. The truth was more likely that they had a large population who had little intimacy and little to offer each other and no interest in any fertilization from the outside.

It made me miss Nina and her easy way of dealing with mean, suspicious people. It had me missing everybody, and it reminded me of the day they had gone to the mall to check out a carnival in the parking lot for Michael. A few of the rides were ones that he had sold-off from his aunt and uncle’s defunct business. They had had a “ranchette” outside of Sacramento where they had stored the rides for years and had left them to Michael. He and Nina had decided that they could probably use some carny “wild sound,” in movie lingo — the kind of stuff you hear on the soundtrack when there’s no music or dialog — and everybody wanted to see what Michael’s giant-teacup/space-ship meditations might be all about in the real world of a working carnival. Maybe it would be more, there, than it was out in the weeds behind and beside the house — maybe less.

An hour or so into their wandering around at the carnival, Davie came up beside Nina. “There’s a rent-a-cop following us.”

She was already aware. “Yeah. Let’s ignore him and head for an exit.”

They went around and between some game booths.

Davie said, “Now there’s two of them and another guy.” The man with these security guards was in a tired plain suit that didn’t fit well.

Nina tried to reassure Davie. “Yes, we know. Let’s just keep walking, okay?”

The first security guard was a big man in his mid twenties, with soft eyes, light hair and a slightly long beard the same shade, on the center of his chin. Before they had made much progress toward a way out, into what was left of the regular parking lot, the other guard, looking tidy and determined, and the man with him that Davie had mentioned came around a ping-pong-ball-and-fish-bowl game booth in front of them.

The management-type confronted them. “What’s your business here?”

Nina tried to blunt his hostility or at least redirect it. “I don’t think you would actually call it ‘business.’”

“That’s not what I’m asking you. You’ve been here for three quarters of an hour and you haven’t done anything but walk around in circles. What’s your game?”

Jack and Bobby looked around at the booths and rides while Nina continued to give him her most soothing gaze. She smiled, “What’s our game?”

Mocking pride, Jack asserted, “Solitaire,” with a conspiritorial glance around at his friends.

The Manager looked at him, but didn’t ask anything.

Jack pointed at the bumper car ride, which was empty and wasn’t running. “Can I sit in one of those?”

Mr. Manager said, “That ride is down.”

Jack said, “I don’t want to ride. I just want to sit in one of the cars for a minute.”

Bobby asked, “Is the Tilt-A-Whirl going to be down today?”

They were thinking of Michael, laying on his back on the floor of the teacup ride at home, with his feet up on the seat, staring at the night sky.

The second rent-a-cop stepped in. “Can I see some identification?”

Nina turned toward him slowly. “I don’t think so. My name is Nina,” she said, putting out her hand to him. “This is Jack, Bobby, Davie. What’s your name?”

Mr. Manager said, “Hey!” and everybody moved apart. He settled down and said, “This carnival is for paying customers,” at which, Jack took out his wallet and started to offer him a few bills. The man ignored him in a puzzled way. “So, unless you…” He saw one of the guards looking from Jack toward one of the ticket booths and scowled at him. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Nina said, “Not if you don’t want to. Do you like it here?”

“What? This is my place of business.”

Nina asked, “Would you like to be here, if you didn’t have to be?”

“What?” Mr. Manager looked more purplexed.

Nina said, “We like it here and we aren’t even wanted. Do you like being here?”

Bobby let him off the hook. “Do you ever rent this out for parties?”

Mr. Manager was on more familiar ground. “Is that what this is about?”

Nina said, “No. Well, partly. We do things that kind of look and sound like this.”

Jack said, “It’s an art thing.”

Mr. Manager said, “Oh for Christ’s sake…”

“Are you a Christian?” Nina asked, with some enthusiasm. “Cuz…”

Jack laughed and looked around quickly. Probably checking for some iconography he might have missed.

The manager looked at Jack. “Eh…” His face tightened.

The bear-like one of the two security gaurds, a little wide-eyed, said, “I am.”

Nina sidled toward him, happier with this change in direction. The big man looked to his boss for approval, but Mr. Manager was looking at the ground out ahead of him like somebody reviewing a mental list.

Jack tried to snap him out it. He said, “Well?” but actually couldn’t have cared less.

Mr. Manager looked at Jack and followed his gaze toward one of the rides. Nina looked to see if Mr. Manager would offer anything, but the big guy saw this, caught her eye and gave his head a quick little shake after glancing toward Mr. Manager, as if to say, “Don’t count on anything steady about this from him.” Mr. Manager started after Jack and Bobby who had taken a few steps toward the bumper cars. Davie followed, probably with something inappropriately friendly in mind. The other guard moved quickly in front of Jack and Bobby and they turned back.

Nina asked the big rent-a-cop, “Do you read your Bible? Because I’ve been wondering… Do you know John 8? The ‘cast the first stone’ thing?”

“Yeah,” the guard answered hopefully, hesitantly, glancing toward his boss again. “Let he who is without sin…”

“Okay,” said Nina. “What do you suppose Jesus was writing on the ground with that stick? It doesn’t say. It just says they keep asking him about what to do with the adulterous woman and he keeps writing in the dirt, before he comes up with his admonishment.”

The manager was back, looking at the two of them, from one to the other and back again.

The guard said, “Umm. I don’t know.”

Mr. Manager said, “That’s enough. We don’t want to talk to these… people.” Then he said, quietly, to nobody in particular, “Shit disturbers…” He snapped a hard look at the other security guy. “Show them where to leave and make sure they do.”

The store of unspent misapprehension in the the air could have powered one of the rides for the littler kids; clutching non-functional steering wheels; their little unsure smiles moving slowly past the beaming nineteen-year-old mommies and their childless, single girlfriends; some of the toddlers visibly suspicious of this novel kind of fun.

When the Bandies were well away from the part of the parking lot where the carnival was set up, Davie brought up one of the things they were there about. “They didn’t say anything about the microphone.”

Jack laughed, “They didn’t know what it was.”

Nina was carrying a giant ancient movie-making microphone, with a mesh covering meant to make it windproof. She wasn’t hiding it, but there was no boom that could have been used to get it right up to any sound source. It had been stuffed part way into her backpack most of the time.

Davie said, “Yeah. They wouldn’t have liked it.”

Nina acted puzzled. She asked him, “Would they have been any less happy with us?

Bobby chuffed, “They didn’t think it was a bomb.”

Davie said, “They could have made a lot more trouble.”

Nina stopped walking, turned and waited for him to elaborate on this, but Davie didn’t offer anything more, so she said, “How?”

Davie said, “They could have taken it away or called the police.”

Nina waited again. “How would that work?

Davie had no answer.

Bobby said, “Good of you not to announce it.”

Davie said, “Maybe we should have asked if we could record and stuff.”

Nina asked him, “Stuff? What would that have meant to them? What if they had said no?”

Davie asked, “Why would they have said no?”

Nina asked, “Why would they have said yes?”

Davie’s answer was, “We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

Nina waited. She would give him a chance to think this through, as always.

The sun had gone down, behind one of the stores. They shuffled on, further from the rides and lights and blasting carny rock; the microphone still picking up the ride-rumble and diesel generator noise over the music and crowd sounds.

Davie just went on. “Anyway, it’s their place… We should have talked to them and worked something out.”

Nina tried to get him to look at it another way. “If you had said you were coming over here by yourself and Michael had given you the rig to record it for him, what would you have done?”

Davie immediately replied “I would have asked them.”

Bobby asked him, “Who? When?”

Davie was pretty sure of this. “Them. Those guys.”

Bobby demanded, “Who are they? Where would you have found them? How many days ago? Let’s go back and ask them if I can take your picture on one of the rides.”

Davie said, “No. I don’t think…” He stopped and said, “That’s different.”

Everybody looked at him and waited.

Davie said, “We could have told them it was for something…”

Everybody waited.

“For Michael,” Nina suggested flatly.

Davie said, “No…”

Michael knew exactly who they would have had to talk to. Bobby too, and it wasn’t Mr. Manager. A lot of the reason for visiting the carnival that day had been to get back some of what had been lost in the transaction when they had sold the rides, and to maybe get something more that could only come from seeing the rides in their regular operating situation; things that could never have had anything to do with business, accept what was different about a ride that was working for a living — how that compared to languishing in a field just outside of town.

Michael and Bobby had briefly considered operating the remaining rides out in back of the house their own way, but couldn’t imagine how to finance even just the power they would require and didn’t know what kind of certification would be involved if they were open to the public. They had vaguely pondered how they might donate them to a non-profit that would be happy to run them for some needy little kids somewhere.

The neighbors along the road were continually more determined to get the derelict rides cleared off of Michael’s aunt and uncle’s property now that they were gone. Everything stacked up against Michael or the rides being there much longer. The only way to make the house habitable and come up with what was past due on the mortgage and property taxes, was to sell the place. The new owners could install a functional water heater and all that.

When they got back from the mall, they found Michael on the living room sofa; his head back. He would have been looking straight up, if his eyes had been open. He had a science fiction book flattened across one knee, a giant box of nose wipes wedged against his thigh and there was some tea in a fat mug warming in an inch of water in a rice cooker on the coffee table.

“His problems are over,” said Jack.

Michael brought his head up and said, “I’m not dead yet.”

The comedy halted when they saw that Nina wasn’t amused. “Did you kick off the blankets because you felt too hot or because the fever broke?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, but she was close enough then to see that his forehead was glistening, so she straightened the blankets out and draped them over him, up around his neck. He fished out the book and fell over to one side.

Bobby had set up the stuff they recorded to play back through a sound system and when Michael recognized it he propped himself up a little on one elbow and a cushion. A repetitious ponging sound made him smile. They listened to the whole thing straight through, without a word. Sometime before the audio of the authority-fracas came along, Michael had fallen asleep.

The recorded carnival sounds faded, replaced by normal parking lot sounds and they heard Jack say, “We’re from Hollywood. Sign here.”

Bobby had said, “We look like we’re from local news. Don’t we look like publicity?”

Nina had seemed a little stricken. “We look like trouble, and I’m tired of it.”

Davie had smiled, out of synch, and tried to reassure her. “You guys just always make everything a problem.”

Bobby had then gotten into the back seat of the car and had thought he might close the door on Davie for a second and then open it to let him in, but he had thought Davie wouldn’t get it.

That was then, but this is not nostalgia. It’s not actually about looking back, and I needed to start thinking about getting out of Grand Junction and on to Denver. The longer I was there, the more likely I would talk to somebody, and they wouldn’t be happy about it. It’s dangerous to be just about anywhere with nothing to buy into, but that seemed like a particularly bad place to say, “I’m not selling anything,” and want to tell them all about all my elaborate disinterest. It could only make things worse; probably make somebody more than just suspicious; prabably annoy them, accomplishing the exact opposite of what I wanted to find somewhere. It might even get me caught.

I had no illusion that I would stumble on some amazing cohort of gratuitously convivial creatives in Denver. The Idea was to keep stumbling on and improving the odds, hoping for lively scenery, or at least a limited number of commercial interuptions in my little broadcast. In Grand Junction, they were like the worst bottom-feeders on late-night TV and AM radio. Denver promised something dubiuously cosmopolitan. If nothing else, it was someplace else.