The Spirit of America (1976)

 

The Spirit of America (1976)

I  figured I couldn’t  lose. Not that I am a particularly sharp guy, but I figured, if you got the vibes right, if you are in touch with the harmony of the Dao, or Tao, or whatever it is that hums in the background of the Cosmic Flow of Things, then you can’t lose. I guess I thought I was in tune with all that.

Ya see, I’ve been doing some Yoga (Yogi?)  meditations lately.  Yogi called the pitches and (if nobody was on second) one was a fastball, two a curve, and three is a knuckler if you have reached the point where you can stop the Universe from spinning. But then, I never would have been much of a catcher, being so skinny and left handed.

Anyway, me and a certain Mr. Constantine Delaney, he works down at the shop with me, we’ve been tracing down the circuits checking for shorts, trying to design on-the-fly a system superior to the present model. We figure, sure it seems kind of faddish and hokey, but at least it was, so far as we could tell, ecologically sound. And - they paid us, not very well, it’s true, still who are we to complain?  We just work here.

We got results too. We got the juice to run through all the circuits without burning anything out.   We had trouble turning off the machine sometimes, because, (we aren’t ready for any kind of demo yet) the self-sufficiency function, the perpetual motion aspect of it just would not turn off.  It worked too good, which of course was the wrong thing to say to the boss.  It’s like it would get stuck in the wires.  We are still adjusting it, and sometimes it seems like we are making progress, but what does that mean anyway?

A Talk with "Cuny" Delaney before Commencing the Mission 

“Of course the system is infallible if the operator is properly trained,” said the chief operator (or so he was called around the office).. 

“Infallible?  Trained? …  Infallible? …  Come on!”

 

“Control is the key,” said the controller, without looking at me.  I stared at him with studied absorption.  Could I handle it, I wondered? The housing of the system seemed solid enough, if a bit worn from age. “Have you been practicing?”

I hesitated. “Yes,” I said with forced confidence. 

“Then you should have no trouble.”

“But…?”

“But what?” 

I felt a welling up of power from Delaney.  I definitely felt it. There was no denying it. 

“But nothing,” I said. “I can do it.”

Remember - it’s all in your head.” I nodded. “You are on your own now. Now get the fuck out of my shop!”  I saw “Cun” Delaney no more.

A Mostly True Account of a Journey Across the Desert in Search of Riches and Freedom

She was in the bathroom, teasing out her beehive, and I was looking out the window, polishing my Seventh Cavalry belt buckle. I was confident. The only thing that bothered me was that we were leaving so late. I wanted to make the Salt Flats by sundown, and it looked like we would be lucky if we made it past the lake before it got dark.  Before I brought him over the Rockies with a heavy U-Haul hitched to his ass, my Javelin could have made it once we were out of the city. I remember once, coming across Southern Illinois at four in the morning, a jacked up Ford Mach One tried to…

“Come back,” I could hear the master’s voice in the ether. (he might have sounded like Alec Guinniss). But was he really saying it or was it just my conscience?  But wherever and whoever, it didn’t matter. Right now I should be meditating and I should have been doing that even more then. I should have been getting in tune with the Tao or Dao, or whatever, because I was going to need to flow with the tide if I was going to get anywhere. 

“There you go again,” I heard his voice again (was it Reagan this time - no, couldn’t be…)  I needed to get completely together, fitting the jigsaw puzzle of my soul into the seamless pattern of the big kahuna.   I’ll be honest with you. I’m talking about things that seem far away, things that took place too long ago. I was stupid thinking I could get away with this blasphemy. A minor poet wrote during the last days of the Roman Empire, :There is nothing to write about anymore.  Everything worth mentioning has been told before.”  

The scholarly medieval historian who pointed this out noted that this was typical of a society in decline, a society that had outlived its usefulness. I promised myself I would never succumb to this kind of attitude. I would be original regardless of where it took me, no matter what the implications. I will not be decadent. 

So I packed my cash (fifty bucks) and we headed out on I-80, toward Wendover with dreams of making piles of money, but most importantly, proving that we had mastered the Dao (or Tao) of Chance.  I have been successful in the last few weeks in my meditation exercises. I had begun to smoke a pipe too, and as I watched the smoke curl out of my mouth, I would watch it closely, and I could read signs in it. This smoke had been to the core of my being and would leave with the foretelling of my future. Cancer of course, but also what was in store more immediately. I felt I was ready. 

In the rear view mirror the Wasatch Mountains shrunk as the sun reflected in my eyes off of the Great Salt Lake. The radio said, “Lord knows I’m sinnin’ and a drinkin’, he don’t need your big mouth to tell the town.”  As I sang along, I sensed my mission was turning into a holiday, a respite from the struggles of life.  I turned off the radio.  It was sabotaging my focus.

The Sex Machine raced the sun and in middle age showed a hint of what he had been in his prime. 80,90,95 then he coughed and I let up, and we sailed on like we had just left nothing for nowhere. She slid over next to me, between the bucket seats, and the sun went down before we reached the Salt Flats, but it didn’t matter now because I knew that whatever happened didn’t matter. 

Didn't matter? Yes - that was it! That was the ticket to ride!

Wendover was brightly visible in the dark, a magnet in the wilderness, and like a spacecraft hurtling toward a planet, we picked up speed as we got closer. The gravity pulled us off the freeway and we crept up to the State Line Casino.

What Came to Pass in the Bowels of the Monster, 

How it Devoured Our Hero, 

and Spit Him up, and 

How he Returned Again, 

Only to be Vomited Again, 

and Be Driven Back Across the Desert  

Thick carpets, gaudy colors, Tension, more tension, no smiles, packed like sardines, packed with people who smell like they eat sardines while they smoke. The Black Jack tables are full, there is no room to play. Crowd around the Crap table like victims of a dysentery epidemic around an outhouse. No smiles when they win, no frowns when they lose. Surly barkeep. Hokey  entertainment. I feel like I am starting to crumble.

I came back from the cashier with quarters, and started playing the machines. “Keep pumping those quarters in,” quipped a hippie with a leather headband, long silky hair, knee-high buckskin boots, an Indian print pullover who was holding hands with a lifeless, hollow-eyed hippie fairy queen. The old lady next to me did what was commanded and kept pumping in quarters. I went looking for a drink.

Frank Sinatra had been there only last week. He cussed out the woman he came with and pushed her down. His karma still hung over the room like a bad smell, and there was an anti-matra humming in the room that was staining the souls of everyone there.  We sat in the lobby, away from the machines and watched two young children talk to one another.  It seemed profound at the time, 

“Wow, I said.

She shook her head. 

I said, “You know this isn’t like the friendly poker games we have at lunch hour at the shop.”

Again, she shook her head.

We sat there, in stunned silence wonder what we were going to do next.

The Crap Table    (a parable of green)

A forty year old woman, alone, was standing across from me at the crap table. She was drunk and getting drunker, chain smoking, betting sporadically, and needed more Poligrip. I was betting and losing irregularly,  winning just enough to keep me at the table. Every four or five passes, when I ‘won’, she would reach for my chip as if it were hers. Sometimes I wouldn’t be sure if it was mine or not.  Mostly she would just hold it down with her finger, pushing it in a circle, but once she took the chip. I just stared at her. The croupier looked away.

“That’s mine, mam.” 

She stopped and acted like a helpless flower about to be picked by a wanton little boy.  I looked to the right, and an older man,  in a cowboy hat, who had a complicated betting system said, “It’s yours.” She slowly pushed  the chip away from her pile with her forefinger. She looked at me, and then the man with the complicated voting system and laughed with a slightly hysterical tinge, then bet again.  I suddenly realized I had lost my thread, that any good vibes I had before left the building after I submitted to the judgment of an old man in a cowboy hat for a lousy five dollar chip. The magic was gone, if it was ever there at all.

This Is My Problem

I had ten dollars left out of the fifty I brought. I thought, OK, don’t go back broke, quit now.  But something still gnawed at me.  

“Forty bucks, just like that!” I said to no one in particular, even though she was walking right next to me as we searched that parking lot for The Sex Machine. I was half hoping someone would try and rob us. I wanted to fight somebody. 

But she was grinning. Her beehive was drooping over her ears. This was just a masquerade ball for her, and I think she was amused by my distress. She had shown no interest in my theory of riding the Tao to bending the laws of chance in our favor.

We had about an eighth of a tank of gas in the car, about enough to get back the Salt Lake City.  It was close though. We had decide now, because there were no gas stations out on the Salt Flats. Play it safe, buy more gas, or play for keeps and hope the camel can hump it home.

“Let’s get something to eat,” I said.  I wasn’t talking to myself when I said this, but I might as well have been. Then I saw her shake her head, almost imperceptibly, so I was pretty sure she heard me.

“Look,” I said as we walked into the diner, where the walls were covered by a multi-generational panorama of the many rocket ships on wheels that had broken succeeding land speed records on the flats  just west of here, “are you pissed off at me for losing almost all of our money? For nothing?”  

And she knew what I meant by nothing too, because the whole evening had been a drag, as if we were being dragged behind one of those rocket ships on wheels, over cold sand and cacti. Or cactus. 

“Naw!” She gave me a big kiss. Then I looked closer at the wall behind her. It was Craig Breedlove standing next to his rocket ship on wheels,  “The Spirit of America”. It was beginning to make sense to me now.  It wasn’t a drag - we were being pulled into the future.

We split an order of onion rings and a BLT, both of which tied for the title of “The Worst”. 

“Ya know,” I said, not quite between mouthfuls,”We got about six bucks left.” She nodded.  “And they have almost forty five of ours.” I paused to let that sink in. “This is a critical decision, right here honey.” She looked puzzled, but I was beginning to get my bearings. You can’t go wrong if the other person doesn’t not know what you are talking about. THey can’t second guess you then. “We have to go back to the casino. If we quit every time things don’t go our way, we will never get anywhere.”

“Let’s put some gas in the car fir…”

“No!” She shook her head and rolled her eyes, as she finished my coke. I wanted to ask her for a sip to wash down the bacon that was sticking to my teeth, but I wanted to save any moral strength to rally her for our counter attack on the casino. 

“What if we lose?”

I didn’t want to entertain that kind of question. “Don’t worry honey.”  The thought of her doing a little ‘play for pay’, passed through my head very very quickly, but I dismissed it unequivocally.  I was almost sure we had enough gas to get back. We were going uphill, and the gauge was a bit below a quarter tank, but it reads like that on an up-slope.

Anti-Climax

I looked at my watch, and drummed my fingers. How long was this going to take. I kept staring at the door, waiting for her to come out. She never takes this long. Finally, she hiked up her slacks as she walked toward me. 

“You wouldn’t believe that bathroom,” she said.

It was after one. We went back in and it was packed.  But the black jack tables were closed for some reason.  I knew it was hopeless, but we tried craps again and the band was playing, as the croupier took our last $5 chip, and she laughed as walked out to the parking lot.  Maybe I am not such a big Zen Master after all.

But we couldn’t stop laughing as the Sex Machine took us home, and that felt pretty good. "Kun" Delaney is going to have a big laugh too on Monday morning. But really it was only fifty bucks after all.