Whiteclay Part 17B (Randian Nihilism Fearlessly Exposed.)

We walked back to the highway to find Robert's friends gathered between Straight Line and the Arrowhead. Eddie, Bryan, and Tony. "Who are these guys?" they asked. "Crazy fucking Wasicus" said Robert.

"That's a crazy fucking hat" said Eddie. "He looks like Bon Scott" said Robert.

It was decided to buy another pint or two of Sluricane and share them with the group. We were in good spirits. These were affable men. they were drunk, we were on the way. Dan stayed with the locals while Paul and I walked into Straight Line while Rebecca made her second or third attempt to pee in the woods. Did her mother know what she was doing right now?

"Doesn't he look like Bon Scott?" said Robert.

The clerk at Straight Line was an older man, I'm guessing the owner. I ordered two high-gravities and handed him my ID.


"Where you from?" he asked
"Lincoln"
"That's not what this says."
"Well, I'm from North Platte, I'm a student in Lincoln right now."
"Well, I'm afraid I can't accept this,just looks funny you know."

Paul tried to buy them and got the same treatment.

"This ID looks different."
"Yeah, they changed them just about a year ago" said Paul.
"Well, I'm afraid I can't help you fellas out, you look just like the types that the state patrol sends on one of their raids, you know., heh heh"

His laugh was so insincere as to blacken all the lights in the store. The temperature of the room dropped at least thirty degrees. I looked him straight in the eyes. They were nothing but grotesquely large pupils bordered by imperceptibly narrow irises, noticeable only for the orange glow they gave off. Paul looked up, shrugged, regathered our change, and walked out the door. I kept looking at the man.

"Why don't you tell me the real reason you won't sell to us." I said.

"I don't have to tell you anything, man lives to serve himself," he said.

"No, no" I said, "You think we're activists doing some sort of expose or something. Well, we're not really, in fact not at all. We're just tourists, no need to fear us. Just don't anger me and I'll give you an honest recording."

"You're just another damn hippie trying top make me feel bad." He said. "You're going to go drink with the unproductive and laugh about what an asshole I am. You think I care? (Glare in eyes grows more intense) I am above your corrosive altruism.
These men destroy themselves so that I may invent myself. You think you can change that? You're just another slave-mind. Your slavery is leading you right into the ditch with them and that's where you're going to stay."

A noticeable breeze kicked up in the store. The glass of the freezer began to bend and moan. I needed to get out of there. "I'll tell the world what you are!" I screamed. "My blog is read by dozens."

"Go ahead and spread your irrational guilt to the masses" he said. "I shall never live for another man. I am the lord of the dominion I have created. I cannot be stopped." Arcs of electricity exploded out of the light fixtures as I threw myself out of the door. An overpowering smell of disinfectant followed me back to the group.

"That asshole" said the group. "No problem man, just go to Arrowhead" said Tony. And indeed it was no problem. A Chadron State student sold me the two high-gravities and would continue doing so without questions as I returned again and again though the night.

"He's fucking Bon Scott" said Robert.

We marched to a spot behind the grocery and gathered in a circle by a couple of trees.

Part 17A, the night begins

"What are you guys doing here?"

I walked out of the Arrowhead Inn with three Hurricane High Gravities and saw the group circled around Robert. He said that he had quit drinking for awhile, but then his brother died and he lives here now. He was fascinated with my wardrobe. On lukewarm days I wear a suit jacket that I got at thrift store in downtown Lincoln and a pseudo-beret that I bought at Target. On cold days I wear a genuine FC Juventes scarf that I found lying outside of Planned Parenthood and I used to have this fabulous little jeweled plastic cross that I wore on special occasions but where was I?

"You're bound to get jacked wearing that hat up here" Robert said. He asked me if I was Bon Scott, over and over again, all night. He kept laughing at his joke. He had Bon Scott confused with Brian Johnson, by the way. Scott never wore a hat. He did drink himself to death, which is quite common and doesn't typically garner much attention.

"What are you doing here" he asked, all night. "We seek truth" "Guerrilla journalism" etc. Robert is forty seven, one year short of the reservations average life span. Too old to buy our nonsense.

I had thought up a cover story for us in the days before the trip. We would be outreach ministers for Campus Crusade for Christ. We would be there to study the effect of neo-paganism on alcoholism in Native communities. I would wear a suit and a tie and a Geddy Lee pony tail and generally make myself look convincingly Protestant. Dan and I thought it was hilarious. The utter stupidity of it became clear at our first human contact on the reservation and we never used a cover story. My god it was a profoundly stupid idea.

We offered Robert the towels of the oppressors that we had taken from the Gordon hotel. He politely declined. "I know hot shit when I see it" he said. The next day Paul took me aside to tell me that towels are a lot like blankets, and that maybe giving them away to Natives wasn't such good symbolism after all.

"A sort of spring break parody if you will" I said. "Well, what are you doing here?"
said Robert. We finally convinced him that we were on some sort of inquisitive journey. Serving no one and nothing but ourselves but how does that delegitimize anything? The curiosity was real. The compassion came in ebbs and flows but the curiosity was real. "We just wanna see what it's like here."

They're mine now. Come and get me.

"What do you want to know?" We really should have thought of specific questions, but there's a reason Dan and I dropped out of J-school, straight line and a goal.

"Sooo, Robert, had did Lakotas deal with tornadoes before the whites came and, yeah, before the whites came?"
"We ran."
"Right".

"In the time you've been here, has it gotten better or worse on Pine Ridge?"
"Shit. it's gotten worse, the kids here today all think they're gangsters or something."

This is true, Robert is acquainted with Warren and the boys, doesn't think much of them. Generation gaps are always about culture and personality. Some people justify them with moralistic language, especially in small communities where every relationship becomes exaggerated. It means nothing.

We had begun drinking the Hurricane in the local fashion, "the Lakota way."

"What do you wanna know? There's fucking ghosts out here.
"Well, you were around in the seventies when all of that went down right?"
"Yeah"
"Can you tell us anything about that."
"Shit, I was a kid. (You don't know shit you aimless white boys.)

"Naw, for real, there's ghost out here, we call the Nuggis, evil spirits." You don't want to fuck with the Nuggis out here. You wanna see some shit? You wanna see what Whiteclay is like? You spend the night here."

He talked briefly about drinking in blizzards, gathered around a trash-can fire with his friends. He spoke of a friend who went to sleep in a field and was found dead the next day. Constant drunkenness. No medical care, ever, this happens all of the time. "He just drank himself out."

"Rushville cops are assholes" "We stomped the shit out of one this one time."
"Say what now Robert?"
"For real, there's was a kid who got hit by a car, right in front of the mission. He's a Nuggi now. You can hear him bouncing a basketball on the street. That's what he was doing when he died."
"Right. About those Rushville cops..."
"Heh, for real though. This shit is real, there's a woman with no face out here, she comes out at night. You wanna see some shit? You wanna see how Whiteclay really is?
Let me show you this house. I don't usually go there because, shit I ain't that fucking brave you know,(grunt-giggles all around) but naww, let me show you this house."

"Okay Robert."

A boy who bounced a basketball on the highway. A woman with no face who dressed sort of Victorian style (or maybe not, he wasn't clear on this) and came out at night. These are Robert's main Nuggis. Is this really all they do Robert? I am well versed in underground Catholicism and whispered rumors of Satanic sacrifice and junior-high smoking-weed-out-of-a-pop-can mysticism. I am not impressed by the mere existence of spirits. The woman doesn't have a face you say? Well, she's dead you know. And what makes them evil anyway? The kid likes basketball. Give him a Nuggi hoop.

We came to a windowless white house house just east off the highway that smelled of piss from five feet away. "I feel them in here."

The floor was broken drywall and emptied hurricanes and glass. Robert walked in, than Dan, than me, than Becky, (offered my hand to guide her over threshold, politely refused) and Paul. I could have crushed one of the support beams with a light squeeze. Is that rat shit I smell? A tattered ex-blanket that hasn't been used in at least ten years. I shouldn't assume that.

We were all more intimidated than we let on, of course, staying poker faced in front of, each other.

"You wanna see another house." I don't go there. They'll kill you at night there. But if you wanna see truth. You spending the night here?"

"What do you think Josh?"
"What do you think Dan?"
"I think I wanna see how this goes down dude."
"Well, if we're not driving back, might as well drink more."
"Yeah, yeah we'll get to that."

This house was about thirty yards off the highway right up against the state line. Drywall, glass, a void in what used to be the dining room, this is where they lived.
Dan, Becky, and I made our way onto the beams lying under the former floor. They groaned. We crawled back out.

What interests me the most about the Nuggis is the pure anti-logic of it. This man was drinking himself to death, getting quite close now. He knew it, didn't care. These houses, these rotting piles that would collapse in a stiff breeze. these breeding grounds for tetanus or Hantavirus or the plague, were dangerous because of the Nuggis. These ghosts who passed the time with boring, meaningless compulsions. The ghosts of dying middle-aged men who have never left the rez and get giddy at the thought of a trip to Gordon. The ghosts of giving up on trying to look for jobs that aren't there and sitting in front of the TV, if they have one. The ghosts of going to Whiteclay at the crack of dawn, why not?, and staying there until it's time to tell the Sheriff to bring a body bag. The faceless woman, no one knows who she is.

"You wanna see where I live? Let me show you how we live."

Robert's shack is another thirty yards farther out, carpet for a door. A torn American flag over the window, a mattress so badly decayed that the entire middle is gone, covered with filthy sheets decorated in the same 70's shit-rainbow style that I slept on when my mother was still single. It smelled the same as the other two ruined houses. "This is how we live. Robert's roommate was there,sleeping on a mattress in the same condition. mattress in the same condition. We offered him a drink (Or rather, Robert offered for us) he downed half the can and went back to sleep.

Part 16

"We came here to spend time in Whiteclay, not to go there for five minutes and try to avoid people"
Dan

It was a warm afternoon, and a soft night. A month ago now, still much more pleasant than it is today. None of us really slept right for the whole trip, and we were all strangely tired for mid-afternoon, needed time to reflate. We were going to Whiteclay that night, it was decided. We would drink with the people there and, who knows what else? Find out their reasons maybe? Anybody who has ever realized how unimportant he/she is knows the reasons. same reason you're getting drunk tonight. Find out how they got along with the Rushvillans, the liquor store owners, whites in general? Not bloody likely. Why would we want to know anyway? You crazy white boys look like trouble. There were tribal officials and historians, people who hadn't surrendered, who we could have gone to for that information. But we never made any attempt to talk to them, we would talk to the broken ones and share in their vice. We were just Wisicus out rubbernecking, and it was clear that this was all we were just from the sight of us. What we would learn is what happens to people who spend their time with nothing but their regret and their deaths, and each other.

I tried to catch up on homework, Science of food, bitch of a class. The textbook came back from the trip looking like a dalmatian. It will always be mine now.

We put the TV on Animal Planet. Education was being crammed into a commercial-friendly top-ten list. Most pirate-like animals, at number one were ants who enslaved the young of other ants. Praise God and his delicate creation.

A Steve Irwin rerun came on next. He played his usual game, abusing snakes and komodo dragons, manhandling elephants, terrorizing locals. Dan was mesmerized. He had never seen the man at work before. This was shocking to me. There are a tiny handful of things that one needs to know about mainstream culture, and Steve Irwin is one of them. My God man, don't you watch TV at the folks house over Christmas?

Night came, I put away my homework and started scribbling notes of the trip so far on the yellow legal pad I bought. I asked Becky to write about her experience with Mark. She gave me back a page-and-a-half of sheep wool. Her account posted here comes via MySpace. I suggested that she should drink the Hurricane that had been reserved for her the night before and she agreed. No problem, we wouldn't be drinking that much up there. We'd only be there for a little while, have a conversation or two, certainly not drink to much to drive. Let your hair hang low.

It was around 9:30. Time now. We were excited, We were giddy We were doing this.
We got in the clown car and I popped Night at The Opera in the CD player. "Death on Two Legs" is an excellent driving song. Through town and out of it, right on 87.

It was just a jaunt.

Interlude: (Mr Trout, I Think, Figures in to all This)

Everyone on Three

One

Two

Three

So it goes.

The line is sarcastic. I'm sure you knew that. It's meant to be a vinegar enema, meant to flush out any illusions we may have of a just and orderly world. The world is not as it is meant, life is not as it is meant. We are under no obligation to accept our places, either as individuals in society or as a species in the universe.

Justice does not come from appreciating the order of things, but by realizing that the nonsense you imagine when you blink isn't imaginary at all.

Why should I mark the passing of an eighty four-year-old broken-down stranger? Because it was as unjust as all of our deaths. Young or old, violent or "natural". When one realizes how disingenuous, how fraudulent this blessing of mortal consciousness is, that is when one can feel true compassion. Compassion for the stranger, the loser, the criminal, the enemy. All of our standards of success, achievement, virtue, become irksome necessities at best and murderous lies at worst.

The human essence does not lie in victory, monuments, anthems, tradition, profession.

It lies in a three-year-old boy, running towards a sprinkler on a summer's day, laughing at the joy of running, and than getting hit by a shock of cold water, and starting to snivel.

It lies in the same boy, a ninety-year-old man now, dying on his couch in the house he bought sixty years ago. Wailing, allowing himself to wail for the first time since he was a boy, wailing at his pain, at his weakness, at leaving his great-grandchildren before they form personalities of their own, wailing for his own grandmother.

And it lies in his youngest granddaughter, twenty five, who has always known full well that she would outlive him, sitting by his side, holding his hand, they wail together.

That scream, those deep stuttering breaths that become broken roars, that is human.

Take that sound, remember it, it's coming. Take it to your family, your friends, and everyone you meet, and fight together. Breathe the summer air. Take the time to lie in bed in the morning and enjoy the meld between your body and a half-awake brain. Than wake up and say good morning to the first person you see. Invent something, a thought if nothing else. This is enough. Think, about everything, until your own universe gets turned off. You will lose of course, but you won't be a traitor. Which is what you will be if you accept the order, the standard, the material, the fatal, the nihil.

Listen, there are no scales, there is no great thread, there is no central trunk. Listen.

Today is the only day that matters in your life

Today in history
0896 Formosus ends his reign as Catholic Pope
1081 Alexius I Comnenus occupies Byzantine throne
1460 University of Basle in Swizerland forms
1541 Ignatius of Loyola becomes 1st superior-General of the Jesuits
1552 Mauritius van Saksen begins alliance with Karel Anikita Stroganov
1558 Czar Ivan IV gives parts of North-Russia to fur traders
1581 Francis Drake completes circumnavigation of the world and is knighted
1588 Christian IV succeeds Frederik II as king of Denmark
1625 Viceroy Frederik Henry marries Amalia countess von Solms-Braunfels
1655 Battle at Postage Farina, Tunis English fleet beats Barbarian pirates
1660 English King Charles II ends Declaration of Breda (freedom of religion)
1687 English King James II orders his Declaration of Indulgence read in church
1716 Russian & Prussian troops occupy Wismar
1737 Anthony van Heim installed as Dutch pension advisor
1818 Congress decided US flag is 13 red & white stripes & 20 stars
1828 Casparus van Wooden patents chocolate milk powder (Amsterdam)
1832 Charles Darwin aboard HMS Beagle reaches Rio de Janeiro
1850 City of Los Angeles incorporated
1859 The opera "Dinorah" is produced (Paris France)
1862 Battle of Yorktown begins
1862 US begins Peninsular Campaign aimed at capturing Richmond
1864 Skirmish at Elkin's Ford (Little Missouri River), Arkansas
1865 Lee's army arrives at Amelia Courthouse
1870 Golden Gate Park established by City Order #800
1887 Susanna Medora Salter elected 1st US woman mayor (Argonia KS)
1896 Announcement of Gold in the Yukon
1899 South Africa all out 35 vs England (Trott 4-19, Haigh 6-11)
1900 Assassination attempt on prince of Wales/king Edward VII
1900 British garrison of Reddersberg surrenders to Boer General De Wet
1902 Cecil Rhodes scholarship fund established with $10 million
1905 Earthquake in Kangra India, kills 370,000
1911 Hugh Chalmers, automaker, suggests idea of baseball MVP
1912 Chinese republic proclaimed in Tibet
1912 Army fires on striking mine workers at Lena-gold fields Siberia
1914 "The Perils of Pauline" shown for 1st time in Los Angeles CA
1916 US Senate agrees (82-6) to participate in WWI
1918 Battle of Somme ends
1918 Food riot in Amsterdam
1920 Arabs attack Jews in Jerusalem
1921 Stanley Cup Ottawa Senators (NHL) beat Vancouver Millionaires (PCHA), 3 games to
1922 WAAB (Baton Rouge LA) becomes 1st US radio station with "W" calls
1926 Greek dictator Theodorus Pangalos elected president
1929 "New Moon" musical opens in London
1929 1st AAU Greco-Roman wrestling championships held
1930 Andrew Sandham makes Test Cricket 1st triple century
1930 Les Ames makes the 1st Test Cricket century by a wicketkeeper (149)
1932 Vitamin C 1st isolated, C C King, University of Pittsburgh
1932 George Bernard Shaw's "Too True to be Good", premieres in NYC
1933 US Dirigible Akron crashes off coast of New Jersey, 73 die
1937 4th Golf Masters Championship Byron Nelson wins, shooting a 283
1938 5th Golf Masters Championship Henry Picard wins, shooting a 285
1939 Faisal II ascends to throne of Iraq
1940 R Rodgers/Lorenz Hart's "Higher & Higher", premieres in NYC
1941 German troops conquer Banghazi
1944 British troops capture Addis Ababa Ethiopia
1944 De Gaulle forms new regime in exile, with communists
1945 Hungary liberated from Nazi occupation (National Liberation Day)
1945 US forces liberated the Nazi death camp Ohrdruf in Germany
1945 US tanks/infantry conquer Bielefeld
1947 Largest group of sunspots on record
1947 UN's International Civil Aviation Organization established
1948 84-year-old Connie Mack challenges 78-year-old Clark Griffith to a race from home to 1st base; it ends in a tie
1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) treaty signed (Washington DC)
1949 Israel & Jordan sign armistice agreement
1949 WKRC TV channel 12 in Cincinnati OH (ABC) begins broadcasting
1950 Dirk Stikker becomes chairman of OES
1951 Dutch Prince Bernhard visits Juan & Eva Perón in Buenos Aires Argentina
1953 KFDA TV channel 10 in Amarillo TX (CBS) begins broadcasting
1954 Louise Suggs wins LPGA Carrollton GA Golf Open
1955 British government signs military treaty with Iraq
1956 Enid Bagnold's "Chalk Garden", premieres in London
1957 Heitor Villa-Lobos' 10th Symphony, premieres in Paris France
1958 1st march against nuclear weapons (Aldermaston England)
1958 Eugène Ionesco's "Tueur sans Gages" premieres in Darmstadt
1959 Federation of Mali, consisting of Senegal & French Sudan (dissolved 1960)
1960 Project Ozma begins at Green Bank radio astronomy center
1960 32nd Academy Awards - "Ben-Hur", Charlton Heston & Simone Signoret win
1960 Senegal declares independence from France
1964 Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love", single goes #1 & stays #1 for 5 weeks
1964 "Anyone Can Whistle" opens at Majestic Theater NYC for 9 performances
1965 Mickey Wright wins LPGA Baton Rouge Golf Invitational
1966 Pirate Radio Scotland changes name to Radio Ireland
1966 US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
1967 Dutch De Young government forms
1967 Marines chase "Nozems" out of Amsterdam Central Station
1968 Apollo 6 launched atop Saturn V; unmanned
1968 "Education of Hyman Kaplan" opens at Alvin Theater NYC for 28 performances
1969 Dr Denton Cooley implants 1st temporary artificial heart
1970 Firestone World Tournament of Champions won by Don Johnson
1971 Marine clay under houses liquifies, 31 die (St-Jean-Vianney Québec)
1971 "Follies" opens at Winter Garden Theater NYC for 524 performances
1972 1st electric power plant fueled by garbage begins operating
1974 Hank Aaron ties Babe Ruth's home-run record by hitting his 714th
1975 Steve Miller is arrested for burning his girlfriend's clothes
1975 USAF transport carrying orphans from Saigon crashes killing 155
1976 5th Colgate Dinah Shore Golf Championship won by Judy Rankin
1976 Seni Pramoj's Democratic Party wins elections in Thailand
1979 Jane M Byrne (D), elected 1st woman mayor of Chicago IL
1980 USSR performs nuclear test at Eastern Kazakhstan/Semipalitinsk USSR
1981 Henry Cisneros becomes 1st Mexican-American mayor (San Antonio)
1982 11th Nabisco Dinah Shore Golf Championship won by Sally Little
1983 6th space shuttle mission, Challenger 1 launched
1983 45th NCAA Men's Basketball Championship North Carolina State beats Houston 54-52
1984 Winston Smith in Orwell's "1984" begins his secret diary
1984 Michael Frayn's "Benefactors" premieres in London
1985 Tulane University cancels its basketball season amidst scandal
1986 Wayne Gretzky sets NHL record with 213th point of season
1987 Dow Jones up 69.89 points, ending at record 2,390.34 points
1988 Eddie Hill becomes 1st to drag race a ¼ mile in under 5 seconds
1988 Largest crowd (55,438) at a season game at Riverfront (Cincinnati Reds vs St Louis Cardinals)
1988 50th NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Kansas beat Oklahoma 83-79
1988 Last broadcast of "Crossroads" on British TV
1988 New York Mets set Opening Day record with 6 homeruns
1989 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's last NBA game in Seattle
1989 New York Yankee Tommy John ties record of playing 26 seasons, his 287th win puts him 19th overall as Yankees beat Twins on opening day 4-2
1990 "The Marshall Chronicles" premieres on ABC-TV
1990 Gloria Estefan released from the hospital after her accident
1990 Security law violator Ivan Boesky is released from federal custody
1991 "Lucifer's Child" opens at Music Box Theater NYC for 28 performances
1992 Game 1 of Mayor Challenge - New York Yankees beat New York Mets 6-4 at Yankee Stadium
1992 Jury deliberations begin in the Noriega case
1992 John Tesh (Entertainment Tonight) marries actress Connie Selleca
1992 Sali Berisha becomes president/Alexander Meksi premier of Albania
1993 12th NCAA Women's Basketball Champion Texas Tech beats Ohio State 84-82
1993 5th Seniors Golf Tradition Tom Shaw
1993 Trish Johnson wins Las Vegas LPGA at Canyon Gate Golf Tournament
1993 Wrestlemania IX at Caesar's Palace Las Vegas, Hulk Hogan pins Yokozuna
1994 1st game played at Jacobs Field, Indians beat Mariners 4-3 in 11 innings
1994 56th NCAA Men's Basketball Champion Arkansas Razorbacks beats Duke 76-72
1994 KLM Saab 340B crashes at Schiphol, 3 killed
1994 Largest Opening Day crowd at Yankee Stadium, 56,706
1994 Los Angeles Dodger Darryl Strawberry begins substance abuse treatment
1994 Netscape Communications founded as Mosaic Communications
1994 Tony Curtis undergoes heart-bypass surgery
1996 "Inherit the Wind" opens at Royale Theater NYC for 45 performances
1996 Howard Stern Radio Show premieres in Austin TX on KJFK 98.9 FM
1997 Anaheim Ducks clinch their 1st-ever playoff berth
1997 Braves officially open Turner Field against Cubs
1997 DMSP Titan 2 launched
1997 STS 83 (Columbia 22), launches
1998 NFL Europe (Formerly WLAF), kicks off season

And oh by the way, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered on this day in 1968.

And than in 1981 I was born

You are commanded to abandon your work and start drinking now.

Whiteclay part 15

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Whiteclay part 14

The Prairie Wind hotel is brand new, in fact pre-new. Plastic tarps and drywall everywhere. We walked accross the lot to a front door surrounded by scaffolding with two men painting the siding on the top. We asked them if the hotel was open. They said there should be somebody in there. This was close enough to an answer as it gave us permission to explore somewhere.

Paul and Becky were filming the place like it was the tomb of Christ. The place was nicish, like a Ramada or a Red Lion. Guests will enjoy AC, minifridges, cable with HBO (Porn on special order) an indoor swimming pool, a nicely designed courtyard, soft interior lighting, wall paintings that look like they came from the Rapid City mall, light pastel carpeting, full internet access. The contrast with how actual citizens of the rez live is obvious. The casino and hotel are owned and operated by the tribe, and is just one example we would see that day of why socialism doesn't work.

The place clearly wasn't open yet. Signs of construction were everwhere. Some rooms didn't have fridges. Some didn't have beds. Still, we needed official documentation, as we are professionalism incarnate. One of the foremen in what looks like will be the managers office gave us that confirmation, and after two more trips through the visually arresting motel hallway we headed back out the front door and toward the casino.

The casino stands in a big metal box at the east end of the lot. No one under twenty one, no cameras, no one visually intoxicated, turn your cell phones off please. a security guard in neon green dutifully looked at us as we entered. Smoking permitted in the entire establishment.

Poker, blackjack, slots, Wheel of Fortune slots, "Wheel of Destiny" slots. The copyrighted and the uncopyrighted sitting together alike in dignity. I've written of the casino experience before, and I see no reason to repeat it here. This place was just the same, reservegas or no. http://mrheartland.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html

Except that the clientèle were quite old. People in most casinos tend to be older, but these folks were really old. Not old in a "You're still in your twenties and you don't know what old-age hell really is yet" way but, seriously, the average age was eighty. They appeared to be mostly white ranchers and townies from the areas surrounding the reservation. some in cowboy hats, some pulling on their Camels. It reminded me of walking into any given village Pump-and-Pantry and seeing an eighty-year-old man sucking on his non-filter and cackling at the World-Herald. Everything you hear about smoking is true, don't doubt that. One has to travel to the strangest ends of the earth to find an eighty-year-old smoker. It's just that rural whites are immune to lung cancer. It's a simple fact. Put some miles on your car and see for yourself.

Fried chicken was the main dish on the buffet. I must have been getting hungry, because it was looking pretty good even though it was surrounded by filth. All of the tables were covered in the dishes of their last patrons. The wait-staff was taking a half-hour smoke break, as a unit, along with one of the painters from the hotel.

We toured the place for awhile and gradually broke off into individuals. Near the center of the room was a formally red-haired woman who had chained herself to her favorite slot. It was some sort of VIP card inserted into the machine connected to a neon-green bungie cord that was securely clasped to her blouse. She was playing at least twelve games a minute, too fast for me to tell if she was winning or losing. I stood right at the side of her for a full two minutes, staring like she was a falling mountain. She never flinched. I could have told her that all of her grandchildren had offered to service me for crack, and she wouldn't have noticed.

What is it about casinos that appeal to the elderly? Outside of Vegas, and especially on a dry reservation, the casino is just about the most sexless place you can possibly imagine. Mechanical, deterministic, (straight line and a goal) sterile, inorganic. The casino also offers the capitalistic promise of achievement and social advancement that hookers and Hurricane pints do not. A sexless vice that involves trying to make money is no vice at all, in the eyes of some. True, there's no hard work or inginuity involved. No individual supermen improving society in their quest for self-gain. But our economy has never really been based on that, and it takes quite a bit of scamming to make anyone think that it is.

The time had come for gambling. I put a dollar in a Western-themed slot (shoot em up sheriff or something) and promptly lost it. That was enough, I had paid the price for admission. Paul made a ten-dollar profit at his machine and promptly lost both his winnings and the original fifteen he put in. He later theorized that the machines are designed this way. Certainly not.

After losing my dollar, I found Dan sitting at the blackjack table. Poor fool. He just wanted to avoid the tacky slots and do something worthy of the experience. Anyone who knows gambling knows that blackjack is the worst game that one can possibly play. The dealer only needs to sit back and wait for you to make the wrong moves, and you will. Dan lost twenty dollars in less than five minutes.

While this was happening, Becky had been caught taking pictures. Security gathered around her and told her to leave, or at least to take her camera to the car and than come back. They never did ask for her age or her ID. She walked out the door and promptly walked into the hills to become one with dying grass.

Suppose she had caught the face of one of the patrons, and one of us put it on one of our personal internet playpens, what would the reaction be? What's the general attitude toward hitting up the reservegas in these parts? What do the people who go tp Prairie Wind think of themselves?

It was clearly time to go, the place had somehow failed to seduce us. So we eventually regathered ourselves into a unit and got back in the clown car to,

Well, that wasn't really clear.

Whiteclay part 13

A place just outside of town offered Buffalo feeds for five dollars. I've seen buffalo before,I waited twenty minutes for a herd of them to cross U.S. 385 near Hot Springs when I was a teenager. There's more buffalo out there than you think, (The American bison, the American Indian, and Mark Twain all have something in common) and they're really not that impressive, to tell the truth. Domestic cattle fill the same biological niche today, and they're every bit as mystical. And don't you feel just a little bit dirty, guy whoever runs the place, catering to what the Wasicus expect?

This is also the home of what are clearly the cheapest political campaigns in the Western world. Splintered wood on the side of the road with slogans like "Tom Conroy, law and order" or "Vote Brenda District 7" If you spend more than a hundred dollars trying to get on the tribal council, you're a filthy plutocrat.

Halfway between Pine Ridge and Oglala sits Red Cloud Indian school, a Catholic academy.If you know anything about the history of Christian acadamies offering their services to Native children, this might make you a bit uneasy. Rest assured though that Red Cloud is a throughly modern school that respects Lakota tradition. (The place is certainly in much better condition than any of the public schools on the rez.) The experience of going there is no different from what any Catholic school kid has to go through, which should be more than enough to make you uneasy; poor bastards. The man who runs the place, until just recently at any rate, is one Fr. Klink. Any kid who breaks the rules at Red Cloud has this face to deal with.


Imagine if you will this Pennywise the clown face glaring at you in anger. I find it hard to believe that having your native tongue beaten out of you could be any worse.

It is also around here, just off U.S. 18, where the shootout at Jumping Bull ranch occurred. FBI agents Ronald Williams and Jack Color met their deaths here in 1975. One Leonard Peltier sits in prison for their murders today. His guilt is disputed. The incident happened at a time when the reservation was in a state of general havoc and I'm sure you've heard a thing or two about it. I may or may not give my own thoughts on the matter in the future. A neutral source of information on the matter would be appreciated though I know it's also damned unlikely. As for now our journey drags.

The village of Oglala is home to a few more than 1200 people, or so the Census Bureau tells me, I have my doubts. The place is even more ragged and disorganized than the Ridge. Even the smallest Midwestern villages create the feeling of being enclosed on their central blocks. Oglala is shacks and trailers flung out in every direction on the prairie and one never really feels like being inside anything at all.

The post office here is nice, at least from the outside, at least compared to the private homes. A man slept on the front step. When we drove back through the other way he was sleeping on the back step.

"Women are Sacred" said the signs, as indeed they are in Lakota tradition. Of course, the purpose of the signs is to discourage wife-beating, as embarrassing in their way as the "Never Ever Shake a Baby" signs that our own Health and Human Services department puts out.

"Why Die?" say the signs where somebody did, sometimes next to the more traditional white cross and teddy bear. How many of these wreck victims were drunk? Certainly not all of them; law of averages you know.

Speaking of gambler's fallacies, we had some trouble finding the casino. We're from the city you know. Patience is for the serfs. After driving west from Oglala for about five minutes we got bored with the tan and determined that there couldn't possibly be anything out here. So we turned back and drove all the way to Pine Ridge.

We decided to ask for directions at Big Bat's before giving up completely. The existence of the casino was nothing but a rumor to the townies. This didn't look good. Finally one of the clerks said to just keep driving past Oglala until we reached it. "Are we just stupid" Dan asked? "That may well be." I said.

Prairie Wind Casino sits on the opposite end of the reservation from town, some thirty miles. We had driven for forty minutes longer than necessary, biblical punishment for our lack of faith. Its location is meant to catch traffic bound for the Black Hills and Rapid City. So here it sits twelve miles from the nearest settlement, it's parking lot covered in a fine layer of eroding sandhill.

I had been to casinos before, and found them all to be hilariously stupid. I never had been to a reservegas though, and had no idea what to expect.

Outside the wind was nearly deafening, and we could barely here Tupaq's
"Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z." from the car stereo twenty feet away.

Part 12 (Warren)

I've been through Pine Ridge before this, a quick roll-through on Ne87/SD407, but I hadn't been off the highways before. A friend from Chadron took me through here on a side trip to Rushmore, but he refused to stop.

The side streets are dirt tracks, no signs, no names. The ditches are filled with beer cans, cheap cans of food, diapers, broken glass. The houses with boarded windows, broken-down cars, some blackened by kerosine fires. (Most homes don't have central heating. It's very common for one to get burned out by an indoor campfire.) Roofs caving in, doors flown off. Still there were children playing in front of these places. People lived here. Broken down cars. Churches with bars on the windows, needles in their yards. The grafitti, the rusted septic tanks, the dust. The lung-chewing dust of urban decay. Dogs that should have died months ago from whatever was turning their coats into mats of blood and pus.

Trash filling the yards, the ditches, the same deritus of living hand-to mouth that one finds in any Nebraska trailer park, but at every single house in this town.

We walked into one of the burnouts and filmed it. It was to badly damaged for anyone to live here (as far as we know) but was still used at a party pad. Probably by thirteen year-old kids who worried about getting caught by their thirty year-old parents out doing the same thing. A heap of broken drywall and Hurricane cans. Some more graffiti on one of the remains of a wall. Back outside, people with fifty year old faces on twenty five year-old bodies tottering into one of the shacks.

I kept my sunglasses on, tried to keep my face neutral, more out of respect to the people we were gawking at than any sense of personal dignity. Don't hide your face in your hands, keep breathing. Look straight ahead, this is what you came here for. Keep walking.

A man walked out of one of the burnouts and asked us what we were doing. (We're gawking at how poor you are) (We're treating your town like a haunted house) (We're taking pictures of your neighborhood without anyone's permission to impress our middle-class friends and we would appreciate it if you stopped trying to accost us you filthy street urchin.)

"We're seeking truth" I said.

"Ha, ha, that's good." "Lot's of truth on the Rez."

"Is there a hotel here?"

"Ha, ha, no! Try the casino."

We walked up to the a church, filmed the barred and boarded-up windows, and decided to make our way back to the car. We could have crossed the highway and gotten more of the same. We all knew we were tresspassing, no need for anyone to step away from their curtains and tell us so. We were leaving now.

The man came back out holding a can of Natural Ice. "I got your truth right here" he said. We gave him a noncommital dude-laugh and a nod and kept walking. After a few steps I turned back and asked him what his name was. It was either shame or curiosity that made me do it. I was a coward back in Whiteclay, simple as that. Now had we come here to learn something about the people or keep treating them like goblins for three days?

His name was Warren, and the burnout was one of his crash pads, him and his buddies Spanky and Derrick. Spanky's face was scarred from some sort of burn injury. Huffing accident? The kerosine fire? Acid attack? He didn't talk about it, I didn't ask him. He knew I was looking at it and was curious. I knew that he didn't want to talk about it.

Dan has documented this incident as his cliff-notes version account of the whole trip on his blog, complete with modern visual technology. I prattle on and on about it because, I don't know. The story of this place needs to be told from street level, without angles, without powersuit reporters asking the people how miserable they are from a personal canyon away. Or maybe I just like writing about myself so God-damned much. http://www.whyareyoukillingme.blogspot.com/

So, yes. No heat, no electricity, no plumbing, perfectly normal. Spanky said they had promised to bring electricity to the place some months before. Who they were, I don't know. A case of Hurricane sitting in the corner. "Yeah, no jobs, no opportunities, so we just drink."

They asked us who we were and what we were doing. We were all students, all cornhuskers we said. "Guerilla journalism" I said. I've always been good at thinking up clever sounding bullshit on the spot. Warren said that he liked the Cornhuskers. Spanky likes the twin cities pro teams. I said that I liked the Dodgers in baseball. Clever bullshit on the spot.

They invited us into their drinking circle. that's how they do their drinking here. One can at a time, shared amongst all. It's a deeply moving bonding experience until the money starts to run out, then drunks will be drunks. Me and Paul partook. We wern't tresspassers anymore. At any rate I had been sucked in by the nihilism of the place, felt the same need to feel something that Warren and the gang did. (Even those who hadn't fallen to drinking at noon on Tuesday just sat on their porches or walked nowhere. Pine Ridge has as much economic activity as a village one tenth it's size.)

Warren is twenty-eight. He was a fugitive protected now from South Dakota justice by Lakota sovereignty laws. He had been caught delivering three pounds of weed to Rapid City in a friend's or a friend of a friend's car. Sentenced to five years in prison. His mother died about six months ago, he was given furlough from the prison in Yankton to attend the funeral. Now here he is. He has a son by a nominal girlfriend that is not quite a year old. The boy lives with his great-grandmother. Warren is allowed to see him if he hasn't been drinking.

All three of these men claimed that they had a chance to "make it". Get off the rez and live a nice middle class-life somewhere, through sports. Warren played basketball, Spanky ran track. They spoke in hushed tones of the fourteen year-old boy who had won the state championship in 100 meters. Than he was shot by someone and died.
The dropout rate is sky-high here, and it's easy to see why. All the men in this group were high-school graduates. It gains them nothing. The junior college here, same thing. A degree doesn't change the fact that there are maybe two hundred jobs here for three thousand people. Warren is hoping he can get a job at Pizza Hut. He'll huff gasoline sometimes. I don't know why one would buy a lawnmower here even if one did have enough money for it.

That's his story. What else is there to say? Would Warren be better off in prison than his home? Would his son be better off with his father as a rumor instead of the wreck that he can see for himself? Three meals a day, running water. The risk and bother of making a batch of payo would ensure that he drank less. Or would he simply lose the last of his humanity? Come back indifferent to his son and grandmother? Help contribute to a culture of surrender? "This is how we live"

"No jobs, so we drink, so you know, fuck it. Fuck everything"

That's his story.

We took some pictures and eventually left. We went to Taco John's for lunch.

Paul was inside ordering the food when one of the rez dogs showed up. (Her name was Sheila) She knew it was the humans lunch hour. Some people, the ones with freshly painted trailors and cars from the late nineties, have personal dogs of their own. Mostly it's the rez dogs. They are everybody's and nobody's. They are filthy, skinny, ridden with sores and parasites. But they have names. call them by their names and they'll tolerate your presense. Give them food and they'll wag their talis and maybe hold their tongues out.

Dan decided to give her the rest of the Matza bread. So we dug it out of the pile of travel deritus and handed it to him. He gave Sheila a piece and she inhaled it. Some more dogs, four or five, emerging from around the alley in full submissive begging poses. Dan divided the bread as best he could and gave it to them

He cut quite the saintly figure. He looks older than he is, with his shaved head and hermit-like attire. So here was this middle-aged Teutonic monk bringing succor to the beasts. It lightened the load on all of our hearts, I think, took us out of the funeral home and back to the vacation.

We decided to try to find this casino. We'd rather sleep here than in Gordon or Rushville. Warren told us it was past Ogala. Those should be directions enough. Why should we start planning in any meaningful way now?

Whiteclay part 10 A ( Going fractured narrative on your ass)

"Ok ok ok. So Mark. Mark was a rotund man, no cowboy really. Just somewhere verging on a "good ol' boy" but not very mentally collected. At least not very sharp. Just slow and jowling. The quote for the baby thing came after he was talking about his 1yrold niece, and he asked me if I had kids, of which I said I'd none, and he said, oh, well, it can happen at any time, if the Lord wills it. So apparently I would be doing no willing. But I told him I willed it not, I hoped it not. He told me he wished I'd come back around and he would show me around sometime, if ever I'm around to let him know. Et cetera. Then he was dismayed at my confession that we were headed to White Clay, and the rest you know. But, he was a simple, large man who assumed I had a husband and children and was a little taken aback when I said I was so young as to still be in college. The end."

R. Ankenbrand

At about the same time, I was getting my own taste of local culture at the c-store down the street from the hotel. Some of the jowling good ol boys' were sitting at a table with the town cop (I think he really is 'the' town cop, and he gets paid to drink coffee at the Pump n Pantry and maybe arrest a Native for tresspassing every now and then. ) and having an animated discussion about guns. Not the politics of guns mind you, but disccusing their own guns as if they were their children. The cop had an SKS. It has a hell of a kick. Now, I have nothing against guns (Though I keep a chainsaw for self-defense myself) but this sort of country-guy talk has always mystified me. Why it is that guns and cars are more fascinating than clocks or refrigerators is something that Western Nebraska boys like me are just supposed to understand. ("I went to Catholic School for twelve years." "Why arn't you more religious?.....)

It's true that we males can never have enough surrogate phalli, but have some fucking taste about it. I smoke cigarettes. I read really big books. I drink expensive microbrew. I grow my hair long and feel a bit queezy when a portly middle-aged woman trims it with her long, savage, barren antiseptic shears. In short, I satisfy my fixation with more class than you do. So I don't suffer from the steaming fantasy, I mean worst nightmare, of having to pump my lead into some dark intruder who penetrates my door.

So, there's Gordon for you. Women who are unmarried and childless at nineteen are things to be pitied. A conveinence store serves as the town square. The constable is a de-facto welfare hound who speaks openly about his guns with other men. People don't even try to hide their contempt for the Lakota (That was the 'rest' of Becky's conversation with Mark. They make more money than you or me.)

I find Becky's account to be a bit dissapointing. It has none of the arrogance or contempt that makes for great comedy. I took a polite overheard conversation between upstanding members of society and made them out to be jackasses. That takes some talent, if I do say so myself. But Becky, It's as if she actually pities the riff-raff. If only she had lived in outstate Nebraska, then she would see these people for what they are, big fat sacks of nothing; vacant assholes who necrophilize
tradition so they don't have to go through the trouble of forming their own personalities. These people deserve neither pity not courtesy.

So I'd like to take the liberty of reworking her statement into something a bit more truthful.

"Mark nearly ground me under his wheels as he swerved to a stop in his corroded 1981 Ford F150. The smell of Coors Light and gravy oozing out of his pores was overwhelming, even with the stench of the three rotting puppies in the back that he had beaten to death the week before to punish his daughters for backtalk. Mark weighed over 700 pounds and his clothes became covered in fat beer-sweat over the next five minutes as he worked up the energy to talk. He finally asked me why I was walking alone and unveiled like a common harlot, ' Is you trying to emberress your husband?' he asked. When I told him that I didn't have a husband he soiled himself in rage and stopped breathing for a full five minutes. Than he asked me why my father hadn't arranged to have me married to my cousin, as this was the custom in emergencies. When I told him that I was still in college his face froze in shock. He refused to believe that there were places in the world where women are allowed to read. So I spent a good fifteen minutes reading off street signs to prove that this was the case. Mark put his hand on his chins and thought deeply, the smell of his rust-colored persperation was worse than ever. Finally he looked at me and said 'Well, yer gittin up there in years girl. So you musta had at list eighternine kids by now even if you ain't gotta husband. Add that to yer (pants uncontrollably) fancy book lernin and red-devil lovin ways and ( Face takes on color of a plum) holy shit! Yous a witch ain't ya? You headin up to Pine Ridge to drop devil spawn sos the savages can eat em ain't ya?' He than reached his arm out to try to strangle me but it got stuck in the window. As I walked away I could hear Mark weeping while he moaned for Jesus to smite me with a cloud of fire. The end"

Back at the hotel we managed to rouse Dan and Paul out of bed a half-hour before checkout time. We quickly loaded our stuff and also took the Gideon's bible, a local phone book, and of course the bath towels. These were "towels of the oppresors" I reasoned, and redistributing them to the Natives would be a noble act of peaceful Trotskyite rebellion.

Dan parked around the corned to hide, himself, as I walked up to the office and handed the room key to the manager. He had the emotionless accent that one finds in the most isolated parts of the Great Plains and looked at me with obvious contempt as I handed him the key and told him to have a good day. I walked back around to the car and suggested to Dan that we should get out of this town very quickly and that he should wait until Rushville before he got his breakfast.

Off into the wall of tan. Clinton, Rushville, right turn on Nebraska 87.

Whiteclay part 11

The Happytown sign was a decrepit old billboard sitting along the east end of town along Highway 18. Some long ago patchouli shop set up by white college kids who came here to score peyote and get in touch with their inner Earth Goddess. I believe we failed to get any video of the sign, and that would be criminal if we did, because it's just to fucking perfect.

I had thought that the current coffee shop there, "Higher Ground" was run by similar types, but a quick web search revealed that it's actually owned by some middle aged-white women out to spread the love of Jesus.

The Natives, you should know, hate white do-gooders, especially the tie-dye wearing liberal-until-graduation set, and especially the bible thumpers, nearly as much as they hate the government. As well they should. This was not a problem for us. We had not come here to dance with the buffalo or wrestle with our spirit warriors in the sweat lodge. Our party is free of delusion to the point of being dysfunctional. Especially Dan, who has no soul and only makes a fool of himself when he pretends to have one in that flat cracker monotone of his.

So no, we had not come as messiahs to free the cute little race of natural born hippies from the system. We had come merely to observe, to mingle, to drink the local poison with the locals, and so we would.

We drove up and down both of Pine Ridge's paved roads for a few minutes, seeing what there was to see, downtown (which we've discussed) Big Bat's, the school (a light skinned child was being bullied by some of the redder children. Far be it for me to guess why.) The hospital, which is quite nice, the homes peeled paint, broken windows, outhouses, marks from kerosene fires. Some of the worst had laundry on the line or some other obvious sign that people lived there. This is just what we saw from the car.

We determined that we should get out of the car and walk through one of the neighborhoods to get a better feel for the place. So we pulled onto one of the dirt paths in the south part of town, parked where we found some space, got out, locked the door.

Whiteclay part 10 B.

The hills were beautiful. A slow-motion sea. Dried grass stalks, still dormant from the winter, took on the same color as the sun. The rare tree, also still dormant, empty, most of them looked old, sick and maybe dead, look noble and serene in this environment. Short bluffs and cliffs that wouldn't be noticed in Colorado or Arizona stick out like a frathouse heterosexual out here. The sky seems to take on the same look as the sun and the grass, dirty white, with traces of true yellow.

Everything made by humans here is fucking hideous. Cattle yards; mud, shit, puddles of water being churned into post-facto diarrhea and splattering onto the bored animals. There's a couple dozen abandoned houses out here. Some long ago tribe of brain donors, probably Kincaiders, tried to farm the sand out here. Their legacy is a scattered group of decaying heaps corrupting the perfect wall of tan. Sinking roofs, collapsing floors, windows that have been broken since before my mother was born. The abandoned shacks continue right up into Whiteclay, where many have been reclaimed by the Natives, sleeping off their hangovers and groaning their lives away
on moldering mattress-springs. The average family home in Pine Ridge, government funded, about one-third the age of the abandoned homesteads, looks almost the same.

The contrast between the natural perfection and man-made filth is cliche, but undeniable. The Buffalo Commons point of view looks very reasonable to one driving up Nebraska 87. At any rate, Manifest Destiny, the dogma that every patch of North America must be occupied or at least owned by whites, is exposed for the absolute lunacy it is. This is why the Lakota were conqured. This is why their culture was destroyed, their population decimated, the survivors broken and humiliated as a matter of policy. So that white Christians could exercise their God-given duty to bring proper American industry here and fail miserably.

The construction work was in full swing on the approach to Whiteclay. A teenage girl was directing traffic. She could have been fourteen or sixteen or maybe even eighteen. The cowgirls out here have the same look throughout their sexually active years. A little mascara, copious blush, blue jeans, pony tail. It's hard to tell the difference between a sixteen and a thirty-six year old, particularly since they're expected to act the same too.

Becky needed to pee, so we pulled up to Whiteclay grocery. A man at the door asked us where we were from. "Lincoln" we said.
"What are you doing here."
"Just seeing how it is"
"Heh heh, wrong place, keep on going."

Whiteclay grocery did not have a public bathroom, none of the liquor stores in Whiteclay do. If any place did, it would be Studio 54 on a Friday night. Becky walked out of the grocery and coolly trotted up the street. A man walked out of the bushes behind the grocery and motioned for us to come see him. That night, we would soak up the local culture and find that this was perfectly normal. As of now, the sight of a man emerging from the brush, spectre-like, and telling us to come to him really didn't rub us the right way. So we thought it best to ignore the man, pick up Becky, and find a restroom in town.

Becky was amused at our concern. She's amused by a lot of things. I'd like to know where she went to prison to be so cool on the streets of America's infected colon. But she was collected and we made our way across the border, marked by a sign reminding the driver that it was a dry reservation and nothing else.

The reservation landfill is as close to Nebraska as possible, as is the jail. The two miles of country road from the border into town is wide and well-lit. There are still somewhere around three hundred fatalities on it every year.

It's hard to say exactly where the town of Pine Ridge begins and ends. Neighborhoods peel off from the highways haphazardly for about two miles in every direction from "downtown" which consists of the grade school, a coffee shop, a Taco John's, a Pizza Hut, a grocery store, one or two thrift stores that may or may not have been open, one or two churches that may or may not have been open, a police station, which as far as we could tell consisted of a single SUV on the sidewalk, and Big Bat's gas station, right at the corner of highways 407 and 18 and clearly the anchor of the town.

We slowed down as we entered the town center from the south, passed the school, and, after some classic tourist driving maneuvers, pulled into Big Bat's.

Happytown.

Whiteclay part 9

"Does size matter?"
"Oh definitely."

I slept on the floor. The next two nights I would end up with the bed somehow and it was hardly any better. I squirmed for five or six hours and than I got up. The Slurricane is more insidious than anything I've drank before. Nightmares, delusions. I can easily understand Robert and his ghosts. He's spent his entire life, waking and half-sleeping, under the influence of this shit. Whether drunk or hungover on Hurricane, the effect is much the same. A humid washcloth for a brain, no real difference between being asleep and being awake, a constant, unresting consciousness that starts to tear very quickly. I was shattered after three days, left to flail and grasp on blind impulse for another three days after that. The people who live the Whiteclay life, the ones who sleep in rotting houses and sleep on disgusting "beds", I have no idea how they keep their shells walking.

I'm not going to say that they're dead inside. That's not only a cliche, it's a no true Scotsman fallacy. Nowhere is it written that real life can't be grinding, humiliating, filth-ridden suicide. Millions have lived and died this way, drunks, soldiers, the average citizen of Malawi, of Pine Ridge, the average citizen of the world.

No, these people are alive like you and me, but they are shells. We in the white middle class, we in the first world, have been taught that we are, if not important, at least important enough to impact our social environments; our towns, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our circles of friends. We have influence over people and we can and should seek influence over more people.

The shells, those ninety percent of the human race, don't have that. They have surrendered to whatever environment they're in, become it. Never quite surrendering but becoming surrender. But of course they still live. They feel as much humiliation over wearing the same clothes for three months or getting sick from rat shit as us spoiled rich folk would. They simply don't think they can do anything about it, and nothing in their lives has given them any reason to think they should.

Oh but it's all their fault, you know. the world is magically, automatically just. Those Indians, they make more money than you or me you know. It's a welfare ploy. Every man the master of his fate, straight line and a goal. Stay in Gordon Becky. Marry that Christian cowboy and will yourself a baby. Don't waste your pity on what is meant.

She was accosted by said cowboy, somewhere out in the town, when I gave up trying to reach R.E.M and stood up. It was about 8. I needed coffee and the dry absurdest humor of Nebraska news before I could face the day. It would be a very long one.

Whiteclay Part 8

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Whiteclay part 7

Lewis, I think deserves better treatment than just being a convenient end point, so a few more lines about him.

He asked us where we would be staying, and we said the hotel. "The one right over there" he asked. "Yeah, we said." "Oh yeah, that's a good place, you can sing and dance and they won't bother ya." We may never know what he meant by right over there. Was he talking about the casino with the unfinished hotel that was 30 miles away? Was he talking about Rushville? There was a bit of singing here, a modicum of dancing, some minor fraud, and various acts of lame passive-aggressive vandalism, so that seems the most likely explanation. A place to sing and dance just doesn't quite fit the description of the place though. On my next trip there, and I am going back, I'll make it a point to track down Lewis's ghost motel.

Me and Dan walked into straight line and a goal liquor and ordered four 24's of Hurricane Malt Liquor. The place had the look of a bait-shop or a small town jail. White walls, white paint thats old but not really crumbling, two strong lamps spreading lights unevenly. The clerk was a younger cat. I interviewed him the next night and found out he lives in Chadron and attends Chadron State. That was the extent of the interview.

A word on the Slurricane; it's one of many regional "economy" malt liquors. Like many low-quality liquors, it is "brewed" and bottled discreetly by a major company, Anheiser-Busch in this case. (I'd have ten of them before I drank a single Bud Light) The Slurricane reigns mostly in the northwestern part of the United States and the Pine Ridge/Rushville/Gordon area seems to be the southeastern limit of it's range.

The Hurricane is what we had come for. We had come to mingle with the natives and hear their stories, sure. But what we, I should say I, had come for was to walk straight into Whiteclay, straight into Straightline Liquor, straight into the physical heart of rural American nihilism and evil. Right into the tangible result of the arrogance and self-worship that lies just barely beneath the surface (and hidden less and less these days) of the white Midwestern simpleman.

The Whiteclay shops sell Hurricane chiefly in 24 ounce cans. Why they don't sell it in the more collectible 40 oz. bottle I don't know. (Too many broken glass incidents?) The alcohol content is not printed on the can, which I believe is illegal. Though it should be said that the Hurricane 'High Gravity' can proudly displays it's 8.1 % alcohol content. The taste is like chasing battery acid with cyanide. The effect, dear lord, of drinking a hurricane or two or three is a chapter unto itself.

Let's just say that old men know it's coming when they feel a chill in their bones.

Let's just say that just when you think it's over, you ain't even halfway there yet.

Let's just say that anything that isn't nailed down is getting smashed the fuck up.

Let's just say that you better lock the kids in the basement, cause the Sluricane's coming bitch.

I'll stop, moving along than.

Whiteclay part 6

The rest of the drive was eternal. There was the Osborne Expressway through the west end of Grand Island, with its strip malls and box stores, painted to look like they were in Arizona for some reason. The "mall" in North Platte has the same bullshit adobe look, must be some sort of marketing dogma.

The turn onto Highway 2, which covers the majority of the distance from Lincoln to the ridge. Cairo, the town of Egyptian street-names thought up by someone who clearly didn't know much about Egypt. The main intersection is Highway 2 and "Thebe" street.

You might have heard about the friendliness of rural Nebraskans. This, is a God-damned lie. You might have heard of the "two-fingered wave." It's an old anecdote of travelogue writers and hack on-the road reporters . It works like this; while driving past someone going the other way on a country road, you raise the middle and index fingers of your left hand (Be sure to keep them together or else you'll accidentally give the peace sign, and make sure not to give the "New York wave" LOL) about ninety degrees counter-clockwise towards the driver passing by in the other lane, up and down, real quick. Add casual nod or faint grin as desired. That's the country wave. You can look up a diagram yourself if you feel the need to.

You might have heard that country people are so gosh-darn friendly that you have to be prepared to constantly flick your left middle and index fingers in response to their greetings. This is a black falsehood. Dan and Paul gave the two-finger to almost everyone we drove passed between Grand Island and Broken Bow. Barely a third waved back. The truckers would uniformly blow their horns at our request but this was hardly compensation. No, what we encountered in the Nebraska wilderness was not promiscuous friendliness but rather thinly veiled contempt and cold courtesy. The distant icy stares of the Rushvillians, the curt businesslike manner of the gas station clerks at Bow, Thedford, Hyannis. These people clearly didn't want us to be there. Just because we openly mocked their intellectual inferiority, they treated us like dirt.

Farmland gave way to hills, towns grew further and further apart from each other, it got dark, and we still had a long ways to go.

The magazine rack at a big green C-station in Thedford had twelve different mags dedicated to hunting and none to news.

We drove, I was at the wheel, consciously darting my eyes about to keep from slipping into the oblivion of the highway. Why was I out so late last night? The sour-bloodedness of hangover was gone but I was still lethargic. And it was up to me to drive another a hundred and fifty miles with nothing but three small villages to break the monotony. The Sandhills are beautiful during the day. At night they are the most anti-human excuse for a landscape one could possibly imagine.

"There is only the highway, and that's all there's ever going to be. You people have been dead for quite some time I'm afraid. You had better get used to each other's company."

What do the nights here do to the people? The ones who live in the villages, or on the ranches, surrounded by black. The winter nights, the blizzards, stuck for days with only your immediate family for company. (Oh fuck no) Just you and the same handful of people you'll see every day while you live and die here, surrounded by the nihilism blanket of night.

Nihilism,nihilism,nihilMcNihlynihilism. It's only going to keep coming up. Get used to it.

At Hyannis I bought some manner of liquid stimulant that I had never seen or heard of before. It was in a pill-style bottle, and I thought that's exactly what it was. But what it was was about two ounces of some Red Bull like-substance. The town had a motel/bar (A saloon!) that was closed at nine P.M. Surely this was an aberration. Surely there was no other place in the continental U.S. that was so out of time.

The formula worked. I was wide awake now and able to drive the final hundred miles. The trees and shadows shimmied a bit like they will when one is artificially stimulated, not nearly as much as when one is on coke, but the effect was there.

In Gordon we ate shrink-wrapped sandwiches and it was a fucking revelation. If you, dear reader, are ever reduced to getting your meals from a gas station (and don't assume you won't be) don't be shy about hording the condiments. Mustard, mayonnaise, salsa. all plastic wrapped in air-tight packages, safer than your own refrigerator. Gas station condiments are free for a reason, you know. They're the difference between a welfare meal and a real meal. Feel free to slip yourself a few mustard sacks even if you're not buying any food. I won't tell if you won't. Long live the revolution.

After that it was back out into the night ant towards our actual destination. Rushville, the right turn at the edge of Rushville pointing towards Pine Ridge S.D., Nebraska 87, the most dangerous road in America. the odd church in the middle of the blanket, the construction zone left abandoned for the night, and we were there.

From five miles away, Whiteclay looks like a single fluorescent light beneath the scattered yellow ones of Pine Ridge. At the south end of the hamlet stands a Lakota-themed Christian mission. There were no services going on that day or the next day or the day after that. On this first trip we saw two glum, dead silent gentlemen drinking Hurricane on the porch, same thing we saw there the next day and the day after that.

Whiteclay grocery, which to their credit really is a grocery store. They sell more liquor than food of course, but so does Russ's Market in Lincoln. Arrowhead Inn, which, much to my personal chagrin is not an inn but just another dram shop. I have no idea why they call themselves an inn. People know how the money is made in Whiteclay. Nobody's going to think any more of you if you call your cirrhosis factory an inn.

Still, the name fooled Travelocity, which told me that the place was a hotel, so I was fooled too. I had told my companions that we would be spending the night here. We all had sweet visions of what kind of place this was, the screams in the night, the fifty year-old hookers walking on one broken leg. It was humiliating, letting the homies down like that.

State-Line liquor. Pure, honest, a straight line and a goal. This is where we would go, this is where we would interact with the,... residents. Here is where we would purchase, the Hurricane.

In the gravel parking lot, we were accosted by a Native (our first interaction with a Lakota, and also our lamest one.) who called himself Lewis. He asked us what we doing here, getting beer we said. Where were we from? Lincoln. Did we want any weed? No, not right now, balling on a budget you know.

He didn't seem to believe us. He said he would be glad to get us some skunk if we just got in his car with him. (Don't be racist/don't be stupid) Two or three times he repeated his offer, and who could blame him?

Why the fuck else would we be there?

Whiteclay part 5 (York)

We made our way to the York Wal-Mart to get a real tire change. I believe that it was Paul and Becky who tried to bring their cameras inside for sight-seeing because, hey, fucking Wal-Mart. But cameras wern't allowed inside. It violated company policy.

There is nothing inside this Wal-Mart or any other Wal-Mart that would shock you. All Wal-Marts are desinged the same, you know. Groceries on the north end, pet food at the front-south, sporting and auto goods at the south rear, etc. Everyone has been inside a Wal-Mart, everyone has been inside every Wal-Mart. This particular Wal-Mart was slightly deficiant. The lights wern't as bright, and the floors didn't shine. But there was no shocking capitalist dystopia inside, no unspeakable truth that the cameras would have revealed. So they probably have benign reasons for the no-cameras policy. Fear that they would be confused with stolen merchandise, or something.

So no evil Wal-Mart stories for you people, sorry. That wasn't the point of the trip, and it isn't the point of this series. We went beyond the interstate strip, far beyond what passes for sterility,banality, poverty, physical, cultural emptiness, drudgery, nihilism, surrender, to most people. Never mind Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is just a symptom; a major complication, to be sure, but not the disease. Never mind Wal-Mart.

Except there was this field, between Wal-Mart and the interstate, filled with trash; maybe a thousand plastic Wal-Mart sacks, maybe more, processed food wrappers, a crushed and emptied six-pack here and there. Moldering porn? Condems? Needles? probably, if we had taken the time to look. It was just that kind of a field. A field for fourteen year-olds to explore each other, sixteen year olds to drink and fight, a field for vagrants of all ages to do all of the above. It's been said that the most crime-addled spots in America are the parking lots and environs of Wal-Marts. A field for everything that doesn't happen in small towns; savage beatings, the occasional murder, teenagers making love. A doomed and blessed field, a field on the short-list for euthanization, soon to be replaced by a Lowe's or a Menards or another gas station/Burger King. A field to be paved over while there are still some vestigial corn-stalks and people left to see them and remember what their grandparents dreamed about, instead of being left to wilt into dust as the Nebraska summers start to elbow each other and the breadbasket refuses to give anymore, and the unsullied virtue of the Heartland is nothing but fertilized dust and decaying Wal-Mart Supercenters and no one will remember the tax breaks, the groundbreaking with the mayor in his hardhat and the high school band playing Hail Varsity and the kids drinking miracle potions to pass the piss-tests and secure their futures in the tire and auto department and the silly malcontents complaining about things like culture and fair wages and dignity.

We ate lunch at Runza and my hangover was more or less cured. Perhaps I was a bit over-analytical in that field.

Whiteclay Part 4

The tire exploded about a mile west of Gohener. I didn't realize this right away, I was reading the paper. I only knew that we were somewhere west of Seward. I noticed that the clown car started shaking more than usual, I looked to the driver's side and saw nothing but smoke. If I remember right, I asked Dan if there was a problem. He said something along the lines of yes. He pulled the car into the median and killed the engine.

The tire looked like it had just starred in the Zubruder film. At least a dozen seperate ragged threads still connected to the wheel and forming a vaguely wheelesque shape. It continued to smoke for a good half hour. We got it on tape, it's amazing. Dan said that we had come too far to give up. This went without saying. It wasn't a question of whether to keep going or give up. It was a question of whether or not we had any choices to speak of. The trunk carried the standard equipment, a doughnut and a shitty jack. We get the joke now Detroit (you too, Tokyo), you can bring back the real tire change kits.

So my fear was that we didn't have the option of going either east or west but rather that we would be stuck forever in the no-mans land between the roadways. This was our first purgatory. We would be forced to eat roadkill, suck stagnant water out of the grass, relieve ourselves in front of hundreds of passing eyes. It could be days before a state patrolman pulled into the median for the sake of tracking down a speeder/drug runner/terrorist and maybe deign take the time to arrest us for vagrancy and deliver us back to civilization.

Me and Dan set about trying to get the old tire off and put the psuedo-spare on. Cars in the inside lane passed inches in front of us with total indifference. they had their skiing, and their Cabela's, and their seminars to go to, you see, and it was our own fault for being in their way. A straight line and a goal. Press your foot down on the gas and keep it there through all hazards. The new masculinity, it leaves something lacking. I shouted my belief that all you motherfuckers can fuck yourselves. There, that's better.

They were important people on their way to do important things, that's what they told themselves. But they wern't really the ones choosing to come within three inches of turning us into stew. They were controlled by the road. The same road that tells you to risk soiling yourself rather than make an unplanned stop, because you don't want to lose five minutes on a 36-hour trip. The same road that tells you to get gas at the first place off the interstate even though you know it's the most expensive place in whatever town you're in. the same road that tells you to keep driving, keep driving, as your eyes sink lower and lower at three in the morning, but you simply must make it to a town big enough for a Denny's. We are all controlled by the road when we are travelling, it can't be helped. Some of us manage to regain some control of ourselves when we are back in our own hometowns. Others let the road control them for their entire waking lives. The worst of us like it. They are important people on their way to do important things.

The attempt to change the tire failed. the ground was soft from snowmelt, and the jack simply sank into it every time I cranked it. I got some minor scratches on my knuckles, I bleed for you Whiteclay. I decided to call AAA. I wasn't entirely sure if they would service a car that wasn't mine, but it was the only possible way we could get out of purgatory and continue worshipping the highway.

Paul went off in search of a mile marker so that I could give our location to the operator. As of now I could only tell her that we were somewhere between Seward and York. The Nebraska department of roads claims that it has a mile marker for every mile of every state maintained highway. this is a lie. Paul walked for at least a mile in every direction and found nothing. The operator was from... somewhere. India, Malaysia. She mispronounced Seward, than she asked me if we were still in Lincoln, than she put me on hold for about ten minutes. It went on like this for some time. Our fellow travellers coontinued to whiz in front of our faces without getting into the other lane.

eventually, I recognized the white church standing next to the bridge to the east and realized that we were about a mile west of Gohener. I recognize Gohener from my frequent trips between Lincoln and my family in North Platte. It's the only village in Nebraska that's right there along the interstate. You can see the whole place from the road. Keep that in mind if you ever find yourself in a predicament similar to ours.

I relayed the information to the operator, and after some more holding and new-age muzak, she told me that a tow truck would come and change our tire for us within the next ten-fourty five minutes. I've had car trouble before, and normally this means two hours. But the tow truck driver was at the sight within half-an hour. Midwest Towing, Seward Nebraska, repay the favor the showed to Mr. Heartland and call them up if you're ever in the area and need a tow.

The sky, which had been cloudy, turned sunny while we waited. we signalled for semis to honk at us and they obliged. a man in a red truck took our hand signals as a call for help. With great skill and at great risk to himself, he negotiated his way from the right lane accross the carriageway and into the median to meet us. For reasons that arn't entirely clear, me, Dan, and Paul all walked up to meet him toghether.

He looked the O.G. Harley-davidson type. White hair and beard arranged in that lion-mane style, tattos, etc. He had clearly been partying the night before, or perhaps that morning. The smell of old liquor leeking through his pores was obvious.
He asked us if we needed any help. I spoke for the group, I took that initiative. I told him thanks but no; I had called AAA and the tow-truck was en-route. He said alright, and reentered the road with as much skill as he had left it. That was it. This was easily the nicest rural white man we would encounter on the trip. He had wasted his time for us, how sweet.

The tow-truck came, with a Seward County deputy escorting him. The cop was nice, the nicest I met and easily the nicest we would meet on the trip. He tried to gesture traffic out of the passing lane. They ignored him as if he was just another bum like us. A straight line and a goal. He cursed them with far less skill than I had. The tow-truck driver had a pnaumatic jack and changed our tire for us in about three seconds. He did not, alas, have a real tire for sale. We would have to go to York, the nearest proper town, for that.

I asked the Deputy if it would be better to take U.S. 34, which paralles the interstate some five miles to the north. I knew the answer was yes. The doughnut is not designed for high-speed travel, any idiot knows that. But I wanted to make a show of respect towards authority. He had taken the time to help us, and I have latant small-town tendencies.

The deputy said that it wuld be a good idea and suggested that we take the Beaver Crossing road to the two-lane. It was then that I realized that this man was a fucking idiot. I pride myself on my knowledge in certain nerdy subjects, and obscure Nebraska roads is one of these. I knew that the Beaver crossin road was gravel between the interstate and the two-lane, and was likely to grind the doughnut to pieces. So I told Dan to drive in the slow lane to the second exit, which was the Utica road, and take the blacktop north from there until we hit 34.

Sitting in the median purgatory, contemplating pissing in front of hundreds of strangers, this was the highlight of the trip. It would descend from amusing anecdote to utter nihilism. Lunch and repairs in York.