Way Out West

Twentynine Palms Book Festival, Lowlife Las Vegas

A couple longish things lined up on the runway after a month or so hiatus, but first an account of a few days out west at the Twentynine Palms Book Festival, plus some book location scouting.

The Deuce-Nine

I landed in Las Vegas later than planned, which meant I had to drive across the desert in the middle of the night. Something I had not done in a long time. It was strange to feel the tidal pull of the neon and immediately turn tail and leave. Stranger still was the rental car I left in. The guy at the desk told me I lucked out. A free upgrade to a Jeep Rubicon. When I saw the color of the thing I almost went back to see if the Hyundai Elantra I’d paid for was still available.

I looked like an asshole but it turned out to be a good vehicle for barrelling through absolute darkness. In the three hours it took to get to Twentynine Palms, I saw four cars and two trains. If the fog lights on the bumper weren’t bright enough to beam me through, the paint job was there to help them along. I arrived at the motel at four a.m., happy I’d picked up a bottle of Centenario tequila at the airport Liquor Library earlier. I poured a nightcap and sat outside a bit before bed, finally taking a good look at the stars I’d been driving under so long.

The festival, run by a cowboy Frenchman named Patrick Zuchowicki Jucaud, was created to celebrate writing that represents the wild spirit of the high desert. There’s a strong focus on crime fiction, which makes sense. Motel noir. People hiding out, at the end of the line, living under assumed names. Ants under a magnifying glass. All those buried bodies. But there’s also no shortage of western, horror, sci-fi, etc. stories set out there, so it was a good mix of writers. Twentynine Palms is also home to the largest Marine Corps base in the United States. Some local military writers were there, along with writers with a focus on the local history and natural environment.

It was an eventful weekend. I did a reading at a cemetery chapel. A signing with my friends Duncan and Craig. A panel with friends Nolan, Nevada, Brian, and others. I got to hang out after hours at the Out There bar—the last cold beer on Highway 62—also with Nolan.

I also got stranded in the desert with my friend Jim. Jim also has one of these newsletters. A wider-read one called Message From The Underworld. I suspect he will also have an account of this incident.

Early Saturday morning, Jim asked if I wanted to do a little desert exploring. Places he’s writing about in his new novel. Had I known we were going to be off-roading I’d have taken us in the fluorescent chariot. But he picked me up in his VW wagon and we drove down the Twentynine Palms Highway to Wonder Valley, where we poked around what was left of the Stars Way Out bar. From the outside it seemed long abandoned, but it looked surprisingly intact inside when we peered in the windows.

Next on the itinerary was The Palms, a legendary Wonder Valley bar, restaurant, and music venue. Instead of looping around on the GPS-suggested route to Amboy, Jim had an idea to shortcut up one of those long unpaved roads you see crisscrossing the main highways out there. Chadwick Road, in this case. I’ll never forget it. It started off scenic and then it got bumpy and then there were random tires scattered everywhere and then we were sunk. We had no water. Just a couple hotel lobby coffees. Some failed shoveling attempts with makeshift instruments taught us a very simple, useful lesson: the more you try to dig yourself out, the deeper you dig yourself in.

Jim called AAA. The tow truck arrived an hour later and promptly sunk in the sand. A woman with two children in the backseat—one of them a type-one diabetic headed home to take her medication—also made a wrong turn up Chadwick. She sunk. The tow driver was calling for backup when we saw a small cavalcade kicking up dust in the distance. A mix of dune buggies and jeeps. One of them waving a bright red Trump flag. A jeep the size of a minor-league monster truck broke off from the pack and started in our direction.

Did you see that movie Civil War? There’s only one good scene in it. The one with Jesse Plemons. Depending on the range of your ideological shock collar, or how much you interact with other human beings in real life vs. online, you might be surprised to learn that this scene did not play out like that one. In reality, the most surprising thing about the sixtyish Philp Baker Hall-looking-and-sounding veteran who took more than an hour away from his Veterans’ Day weekend festivities to haul us all, including the massive tow truck, out of the ditch was the fact that he smoked clove cigarettes. He had a deck of Djarums right there in the center console. I saw it when I climbed into the cab of his truck so we could catch up to Jim, who’d been instructed to gun the VW until he was on solid turf again. You never know about people.

A group of us finally got to The Palms the next morning for a long breakfast. Then Jim and his wife Nuvia and I took off for more high desert weirdness at the Integratron and Giant Rock before they turned toward San Diego and I headed to Las Vegas.

I’m lucky that I can usually get out to the desert, even from back east, for at least a few days every year. Sometimes I imagine living there, but then I realize it’s a drug I don’t want to build up too much of a tolerance for. I like to keep it as a place I can escape to like another planet. Vegas is similar but opposite. So much everything versus so much nothing. But the effects of both places still work on me.

Roll Another Number

For more than a year now, I’ve been inching along on the sequel to my novel Zig Zag, currently titled Roll Another Number. A lot of the action takes place in Las Vegas, so I walked around to soak up some ambience and scout some potential locations. Luckily no off-roading—aside from the spiritual or moral sort—was involved this time.

It was a quick stop before flying out the next day. I stayed at the Hotel Apache downtown, played a few games, and had a late-night bite at Evel Pie, where I sat at the bar beside a relatively milquetoast but paralyzingly drunk family man, temporarily off-leash while his brood slept back at the hotel. He told me about his failed blackjack strategies and tomorrow’s family trip to the Hoover Dam (a six-hour tour package, including lunch) while he attempted to shovel a slice of pepperoni into his face. On my way back to the room, I stopped off at the. D. for a run at the Sigma Derby horseracing game, which happens to be featured in the new book.

Here’s some other stuff.