Tales from North Platte

This is the famous North Platte canteen. During World War II millions of servicemen rode through town on the Union Pacific and they could always count on being well serviced by the local ladies. Soldiers were served coffee, sandwiches, cakes, cookies, given a chance to phone home, etc.

North Platte became famous throughout the military for the hospitality shown to the troops. Old veterens still occasionaly write to the paper (North Platte Telegraph) to thank us for the warm greeting. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the Canteen was our most iconic landmark.

So naturally it was torn down by the railroad in 1982 so that they wouldn't have to pay for the upkeep and insurance. A marker and brick "park" sits at the canteen site today. (Downtown ar Front and Chestnut) It's a favrorite spot for the local hobos, speaking of which...



This is a shot of the South Platte riverfront. This is, by any measure, the most interesting spot in town. The bulk of our hobos live under the Jeffers street bridge. I used to work at the American legion club just north of the bridge. I brought a flashlight with me whenever I took out the trash and watched them scatter like cats. They'll murder each other every now and then, and at least one or two hobos will freeze to death under the bridge every winter.

The South Platte is, quite naturally, a favorite spot for teenagers to smoke pot, spray grafitti, and explore each other. This is the place where boys and girls find out if they like boys or girls in relative privacy.

If you are walking along the riverfront an notice a strange metal container and/or a foul chemical smell, back away slowly. You have encountered a meth lab, and you just might be about to encounter a boobie trap or a shotgun blast.

If you want to go sightseeing along the South Platte, do it in the daylight. DO NOT FUCKING GO THERE AFTER DARK. The hobos are very drunk at night, of course, but they arn't as big of a threat as the locals who come here at night, more on that later.

Most of the homeless are out scrounging for this or that during the day, the ones who are at their campsites are sober enough to have a friendly conversation with. What's really interesting though is to explore their empty campsites during the day. Our hobos are true profesionals; boy-scout quality fire pits, nice sleeping bags, buried cans of spam or oysters, logs with nails bored into them, tarps for the rain and long tree branches to support them, even old couches discarded by the locals

The variety of Malt liquors here is surprisingly low. Just the nationa name brands, Miller High Life, King Cobra, Steel Reserve. No Hurricane, no St. Ides, no Coqui...
It's strange, because the market for bargain-brand malt beverages is certainly here.

As for the local activities on the riverfront, well there was the baby bandit. Yes, this was 98 or 99 if I remember right. This was a man who liked to spend the wee hours of the morning walking up and down the hiking trail by the river and masturbating in front of whoever passed by. People were genuinely scared of this man, which I've always found silly. Anyway, he was eventually caught and sent to the Lincoln prison for several years. Feel free to make your own sex offender in prison jokes.

"Missing Legs Found" said the North Platte Telegraph two days after Vicki Soto was murdered in 2001. In its origional report, the paper said merely that Soto had been "dismembered" without going into details. But there were rumors going around. People were saying that her breasts had been cut off, or that the fetus she was carrying had been taken out and carved with satanic symbols, and this was a fire that needed to be put out.

At any rate, the poor woman's missing legs are critical to the story. Her killer, Daniel Losinger, was captured by the Wal-Mart security cameras carrying a leg-shaped package as he rode his getaway bicycle towards the river.

Losinger was a janitor at the bowling alley and was known to enjoy getting brutally drunk at the riverfront. He was a neighbor of Soto's, and some say they knew each other better than people knew. I'm not saying anything.

Something a bit more mainstream next time. read all about Buffalo Bill and Nebraskaland days.

Tales from North Platte

A brief list of Friends, lovers, enemies, and all of the above from my time here. I'll leave it to your own imagination to organize who's who.

Anthony Torango
Joshua Weatherly
Matt Warburton
Francisco (Cisco) Estrada
Tiffany Estrada
Ryan Bade
Micheal Ellis
Timeree Schmidt
Braydon Roberts
Lucas Savory
Christina Thomas
Kay Burbach
Adam Plaster
Rush Puls
Sam Barett
Bryce Nichols
Glenda Moderno
Joshua Wilson
Patricia Heath
Brandon Beam
Chad Beuer
Nancy Faulkner
Aaron (Boz) Bozvield
Christina Jeffers
Brian Jeffers
Tanya Wheller
Tom Goznell
Lucas Rabi
Jordan Menard
Elizabeth Hunter
Lindsey Jennings
Rick Peterson
David Peterson

Tales from North Platte

Every now and than I get a question on what North Platte is like. This is a difficult question for me to answer. Every time I come home to see the family most everything I see reminds me of how much time I wasted here, wheels churning in the most boring mud possible. My God, at least I could have been a degenerate in someplace where it would have been interesting, Detroit, Atlanta, oh but anyway...

Let's start with a physical description, that's nice and objective. North Platte is a market town of 24,000 sitting at the forks of the Platte river. The nearest major cities are Denver, 250 miles to the southwest, and Omaha, 270 miles to the east. The town airport, Lee Bird Field, offers four or five commuter planes to both these places every day. The nearest towns of similar size are Kearney and Grand Island to the east and Scottsbluff and Cheyenne to the west. North Platte is home to a daily newspaper, five different radio stations, and an NBC affiliate, KNOP-TV, which officialy makes the town a "media market". The 212th largest in the country out of 214.

Interstate 80 is the major road into town from the east or west, U.S. highway 83 is the major route to town from the north and south. There are two interchanges into town from the interstate. Exit 179 provides access to the airport and the industrial area at the town's extreme southeast corner. Exit 177 connects I-80 to U.S. 83/Jeffers Street and is the most direct route into downtown.

Like I said, U.S. 83 is known as Jeffers street inside North Platte and serves as the town's main drag. From the interstate to downtown, traffic is routed along a one-way pair, Jeffers and Dewey, where one will find the bulk of our fast food joints and hotels. Downtown itself consists of the courthouse, city hall, and various specalty shops. Despite the rise of Wal-mart and shopping malls, downtown is still home to some of the our most iconic busineses carrying our most powerful names. Hoover's jewlers, Whitiker's furniture, etc. There is even something of an embryonic underground living in the studio apartments above the storefronts, but they're nothing worth mentioning.

Major north/south streets besides Jeffers are as follows.

E. of Jeffers.

Cottonwood: (6 blocks E. of Jeffers)
Poplar: (7 bloks E. of Jeffers)
Bryan: (12 blocks E. of Jeffers)
Welch: (18 blocks E. of Jeffers)
Bicentenial (25 blocks E. of Jeffers)
Newberry access (2 miles E. of Jeffers E. bypass, access to I-80)

W. of Jeffers.

Willow: (4 blocks W. of Jeffers)
Oak: (8 blocks W. of Jeffers)
Mc'Donald: (15 blocks W. of Jeffers)
Carr: (20 blocks W. of Jeffers)
Buffalo Bill: (25 blocks W. of Jeffers)
Bare: (33 blocks W. of Jeffers)
Lakeview: (41 blocks W. of Jeffers, western limits of town)

It is the extreme western edge of town, by the way, where one will find the Union Pacific railroad yards, North Platte's biggest employer for as long as anybody can remember. Twenty years of train diesel fumes nearly killed my asthmatic uncle. They were kind enough to pay his medical bills after he sued them three or four times. He and my aunt are in Arizona now and better off than they've ever been, but anyway...

Highway 30 is historically the main east/west route through town. (U.S. 30 is also the "Lincoln Highway" the main cross-country route through these parts before they built the interstate) Historically, U.S. 30 entered town from the east along 4th street. Joined Jeffers downtown, followed U.S. 83 over the railroad to 12th street/Rodeo Road, and headed west through the north side past Bufalo Bill's ranch and the fairgrounds and out of town.

Major E/W streets: South of tracks
Front: (right along the tracks, downtown to trainyards, you will find my parent's house and, at the moment, me, one block south of Front along Lincoln Ave.)
4th St.
A/B St.
E St: (St. Patricks High School is located in the eastern half of town along E)
Phillip Ave.
Francis St:
Leota St:

South of South Platte River:
Halligan Dr.
I-80
Eugene Ave: (My grandparents' house is the green one with the cornfield in back)
Walker Rd:
State Farm Road: (Home of Mid-Plains Community College. They're fucking hacks. I got straight A's. I thank them.)

North of tracks:
8th St.
9th St.
Rodeo Rd/12thSt/U.S. 30*

(* The northeast quadrant of town has historically been the ghetto. Until recently, 12th street ended as a dirt track by an abandoned slughterhouse. As teenagers, we naturally took it on faith that this slughterhouse was haunted. Recently, U.S. 30 was bypassed around downtown and 12th street is now a nice 3-lane road. This is also the part of town where I found my first true love. Occasionally, when she needs to dry out, one can find her there still. Road improvements have done nothing to improve the character of the neighborhood. Watch what you say about Ted Nugent.)

Tomarrow, or perhaps later tonight, we shall go into detail about some of North Platte's points of interest. Until then, I urge my personal friends to look down upon O Street traffic and be thankful for what you have.

I shall return, oh yes.

"Who Will Rise Up" by Jed Smock.

The highlight of the UNL school year is when Matt "The Sledge" Bourgoult comes to town in the early fall to damn all of us potty-mouthed, fornicating, drinking, smoking, queer-loving bunch of hippy freaks. As amusing as brother Matt is, though, he's not very smart. The man clearly gets his cues from someone higher up in his church who's more well-versed in rhetoric. As amusing as brother Matt is, that's all he is.

Jed Smock, the godfather of confratational campus preachers, is quite disturbingly smart. He has this ability to switch from phony down-home simplicity to phony intellectualism on a whim. Just the kind of man who actually could convert some guilty confused college kid looking for an excuse to never ask questions again.

Smock is still funny, or at least outrageous. (Same thing to me) His "Parable of the Five Dormies" is an absolute classic. Five strapping young lads are led astray by filthy, Godless whores. Brian hooks up with "Lustful Lisa" and has too much sex to study.* Fred catches an STD from "Sexy Sarah" and loses his chance to marry the pure virgin girl back home. "Horny Harry" is led so far astray by "Rock and roll Rhonda" that he becomes a homosexual and "probably has AIDS disease".

(*There is some truth to this, or at least truth in its opposite. Sexual frustration can be good for one's studies. "I'm going to analyze you so hard you won't be able to walk straight Othello.")

Harry's story is the climax of the parable. It's the oldest story in the world. A man's lust for dirty girls leads him to have sex with other men. When one reads Smocks' parable, logically decoding each word and sentence, it's easy to see how incredibly stupid it is. But this is a story that, much like late-era Queen, is best appreciated live. Just try to imagine Smock standing on a campus quad, surrounded by hundreds of detractors shouting out "Harry, you're a queer... Harry you lust after men, Harry, you're a Ho-mo-sex-u-al".

Boom.

As for the man himself, he's everything that you would expect. Persecution complex, love of himself projected onto his love for the "Lord". He spends a lot of time talking about his ancestry. He hates evolution and any suggestion that our existance is our own. The man has an obvious hatred for his own freedom that leads him to believe in a God who has predetermined everyone's purpose and demands that everyone lives under the same precise rules.

"There must be a book to reveal what life is all about." Not once did I ever consider the BIBLE" Brother Jed- as a wayward youth.

Smock has a desdain for "compromisers." Christian groups who try to convert the lost sheep with love and fellowship and whatnot. Jed argues that more souls can be saved by giving them the blunt truth of why we're going to hell and why we deserve it.

Smock was a dirty hippie in his youth. "I was not satisfied with a few 'tokes' or a few 'joints' but the very next weekend, I was back at the Haight to 'score my own lid'" He joined the academic elite where "I taught a communistic interpretation of the past and presented the lie of evolution as fact." He travelled to Morocco and joined a commune, but he was somehow unsatisfied "How much more natural can I become? I've been a good hippie." until an old schoolmate led him to Jesus in a Burger King parking lot, giving us the man we know and love today.

Most of us wrestle with the conflict between pleasing ourselves and serving society, between being a good friend and a solid citizen, but not Jed. The compromise-hating preacher has never even tried to be a balanced person. He has spent his entire life at one extreme or the other, and whose fault is it? Why, it's the socialists and the Darwinists and the Freudians and especially the feminists. What an asshole.

Smock married Dorthy Vallens, AKA Cindy Smock, in 1981. He was thirty-eight, she was twenty and clearly looking for the eternal father that Jed was more than happy to be. Cindy was a "disco queen" who was hard at work leading young men to ruin before Smock visited her campus in 1980. The girl was intrigued by Smock and decided to ask him out.
"Brother Jed, can I take you to dinner?"
"No, but I will take you. First, go homw and put on some modest clothes."

Eventually, she was totally coverted and saved from the Godless hedonism of the university.

"In May, God called me to quit school and begin harvesting the college and university campuses."

In addition to the expected hatred of homosexuals, Smock also has a deep disdain for "sissies" "pansies" and and effemenate men that could only be called a fixation. (Matt "the sledge" has a similar obsesssion.) You may have also noticed a somewhat unhealthy attitude towards women, but you really have no clue. You don't know what misogyny is. I don't know what misogyny is, or at least, not before now. Not before brother Jed laid his knowledge on me.

"A very spiritual Christian girl was by where I was preaching, and I called her a whore for wearing jeans."
"Many of the masectomies performed today may be a result of God's judgement on women for using their breasts as mere sex objects not desiring to have a baby."
"Since many use birth control, and others are murdering their own babies, God is making them disgracefully barren."
"Cindy has not disobeyed me once! Be God's grace, I have not failed to cherish her and give honor to her as the weaker vessel."
"Every woman has a God-given desire to marry and bear children for a man who will lovingly rule over her."
"After Eve's sin, God saw that since the woman is a more emotional being and more prone to be deceived by her sensibilities, she needs the leadership of a man who is governed by reason."
"Jesus taught us all to take the attitude of the servent. But the women of this generation are selfish, and they have been duped by the women-libbers, many of whom are lesbians."
"No wonder there are so many rapes on college campuses. These girls walking and jogging around campus with their shorts so short that their buttocks hang out are just asking for it. They might as well have a sign on their back saying 'rape me, rape me, rape me.'

Let's be clear; this sort of hatred for the vagina can only come from a man who feels forced to love it. I'm sure it's been said before, but it needs to be said again. Jed Smock is gay. Jim Smock fantisises about being a Roman lictor and making the naked Christ bleed. When Jed Smock is done having sex with Cindy, the first thing he does is rush to the bathroom and turn on the shower to hide the sound of his own vomiting.He than spends half an hour washing his member raw in a vain attempt to clense himself of the filthy, filthy vaginal juices.

Jed and Cindy have five children. They are all daughters. Take that bitch.

According to "Who will rise up" Jed and Cindy viseted UNL in the fall of 1991. I don't know if they have been here since than, but I really hope that they come here this year while I still have a chance to experience the master in action as a student.

I could go on and on about ole Jed, from his thoughts on masturbation, "Your masturbator of today is very likely to be your homosexual of tomorrow," to child discipline, "I've become an 'old pro' at using the rod." But I think the most importan lesson that Jed can teach us comes from the "Courtship and marraige" chapter in which he tells us everything we need to know about himself and othere who hate their own humanity,

"Our goal is to repopulate the earth with people who think and act like we do."

My goal is to meet your daughter sometime.

I'm bad like James Brown

Yesterday I walked into a gas station to buy a Sunday New York Times and a fourty oz. of King Cobra

"You got a story don't you"

"I got a few." I said.

"Well alright" he said

I gotta go now. I'm heading to the Antelope Valley Construction site to find a piece of wood that will make a good cross beam.

A voice spoke to me today

I woke up at nine A.M. today and felt quite proud of myself. Today would be a good day, a productive day, I was just an hour behind the rest of the world. I stood up and walked towards the shower.

Just then, though an overwhelming thought came to my head. It was so powerful that it could only be called a voice, and since I am not mad, a bit unstable perhaps, but not mad, there was only one explanation.

It was God, God was telling me to go back to bed, and he created in me the irresistible
urge to obey. And I did, I am a child of God, I am his humble servant.

When I woke up at eleven I was shamed, but the voice said nothing. I could feel the angry glare of our Lord staring down on me as I dressed and walked to campus.

If our Lord means to make a prophet of me than I am of course his humble servant. Otherwise, he surely understands that I have business to attend to and I can't just sit there while he dallies around.

Right now God is telling me not to clean my apartment. Who am I to refuse?

I welcome more rain

Wash the streets clean

Happy lapse Catholic Madonna/Whore complex day

Don't act like you don't know.


(Love ya ma.)

Hell yes

[ Rhimeson ]

Can I roll with you?

[ Prode'je ]

Nigga, what can I do?

When I still seem

To day-dream and fiend for green

Cause one plus two, broke muthafuckas, don't equals naythin

In a buck-fortyfive's what I'm waitin

[ Rhimeson ]

So now it's time for me to grab the strap

And put you in a sleeper eternally

That's what my psychic's tellin me

So now I'm ridin to the sun, and I

Know it ain't shit for me to lose...

[ Prode'je ] ...So I

Asked the big homie to put it down for me

When I was down you been around for me

Give me nine ounces, and count this stackola

That I can rack for ya

[ Rhimeson ]

For sho', yo ride, as I slide to Kansas City

Not lookin for hoes that shake no titties

But to drop off ki's and collect my g's

My fees for this job is three g's

[ Prode'je ]

Let's see if I can get it crackin for me



[ Prode'je ]

Can I roll with you?

[ Rhimeson ]

Nigga, what can I do

For you, now that it's really on and poppin?



[ Prode'je ]

Went to the city and my big homies is ???

With my 3 g's, can I get it crackin for me?

I always heard that bullets turn curves like Nike stripes

So one silent night they take flights to put out headlights

[ Rhimeson ]

Turn to your skull where your brains was

Game recognize game, can you dig it?

I did it, stackin to see what's happenin

Loop - there it is, I'm handlin my biz

[ Prode'je ]

With this I'm buyin powdered shit

So I can rock it up and make it whoop, the loot

Chop it into doves to serve em love like Herbie

This whooped-up lley gon' freeze they brains like slurpies

[ Rhimeson ]

But I'm tryin to kick back, relax and stack a meal ticket

Motivation is good preparation, so I rolls with it

(In a '86 coupe) in a '85 cutlass

2 O.G.'s on fo' d's, and we're comin



[ Rhimeson ]

Nigga, what's happenin?

Shall we get to scrappin or cappin?

A king-size .44 magnum to tag em

[ Prode'je ]

Well, I guess we'll get into some gangster shit

I let my strap holler at your chest while Mouthpiece holler at your bitch

[ Rhimeson ]

And I'm checkin eyes, so you best to recognize

When I let these bullets fly, from this heat you gon' die

[ Prode'je ]

Right, you muthafuckas wanna see the gangstas

I'm comin from the squad, I ain't no peace treaty banger

[ Young Prod ]

I was born in the hood and raised, I stayed in the hood, that's real

>From emptyin my clip, from dumpin on niggas, I'm pistol-whippin your grill

But still you feel me in attempts to pull my card

I'm rollin a fo' do', Eagle out the window, dumpin on y'all

[ Rhimeson ]

And all I did was struggle for my land

And I'm too much of a gee to die by another man

[ Prode'je ]

And understand you gotta bury me, you won't worry me

With your playa-hater strategy, for my enemy

Dear MySpace Spam-whore

Thanks Angel, I'm really glad you've taken an interest in my son. Unfortunatly he was killed in a drunk driving accident last week and he won't be able to return the favor. He was a wonderful person and I'm sure you would have loved him, we miss him dearly and we are crushed in our old age.

What about you dear? You seem a bit lost. Are you in trouble with drugs? Do you feel like you need constant male attention to feel worthwhile? Just know that whatever your problems are, Islam, true Islam, under the guidence of the honarable Eligah Mohamed can save you. Accept that you are here to be pleasing to pure African manhood, and you will find peace.

I find peace in my heart knowing that my son accepted his place as a slave devil and now sits in the least oppresive regions of hell serving the most wicked and misguided Nubians. May Allah bless you you blue-eyed whore.

Sincearly,
Joan Beran

Conclusion

Eventually, the general end-of-trip feeling took over. Coffee in Grand Island, than the interstate. Tired, quiet. I felt like we should do something when we got home but my idea was shot down.

The penis, the trailor parks and used car dealers of West O street. It was colder than it had been during the trip. A ride home from Becky, a shower, a trip to the student union to check my various internet holdings, a reluctant trip to the grocery store, in bed by ten. In bed until eleven.

Seven weeks, I've been at this, with various interuptions for schoolwork and the odd job. I've never tackled anything this big before. I'm still don't know exactly why.
I knew that I was going to write something about the big trip to Whiteclay. Once I started I realized that the whole eighty four hours was, if not a single day, than a single conscious experience, that the mundane details affected how we perceived the big moments and couldn't be seperated from them. So I included the hangovers and the matza bread and the penis pills. It's all of a piece.

Our relationships to each other are subtly different, but you wouldn't know it from the sight of us. We do what English majors do. We drink microbrew we can't afford, we mock society, we beg our way to C's in any class that offers practical vocational knowledge. It's summer break now.

Dan and I continue to compliment each other disturbingly well. He's not as cynical and outgoing as he seems. I'm not as philosophical or "different" as I make myself out to be. We're something resembling a functional person together. Paul is still a bit mysterious, not quite as disheveled as Dan or I, and inaudaciously talented. Becky continues to call out our bullshit with a level of accuracy and compassion that's simply amazing.

My emotions are more intense than they were before. My strengths are less important to me, my failings more important, than they used to be. I like to think I'm starting to actually feel a sense of duty to others that I only grudgingly aknowledged before and completely ignored before that. A big reason why I did this is to see if I could focus on something that was both more personal than politics or pop culture and not so much about myself. The results are mixed at best I know.

But Warren, the 28-year-old who called himself "pretty old" and seemed perfectly ready and willing to die, isn't going away as long as I'm here. The Whiteclay boys, waiting for their chance to not wake up, I'm going to care about them as much as they care about themselves, I think I can handle that commitment.

I've seen what happens when an isolated place and the larger society agree to ignore the existance of each other and I refuse to stand for it. We are all of a piece, the best and the worst of us, the most and the least. I am not a socialist or a Randian, I don't believe that freedom and justice can be provided by the state or the "market". We must create these things within ourselves and then maybe we can spread it to the larger world around us. This means recognizing our universal vanity and depravity. It means realizing that heritage, tradition, common interests and personality types, common language, culture, etc. do nothing to inoculate us from our own humanity. Things will continue to be rotten until we stop treating anything produced by our dirty hands as sacred. That includes our home towns, our families, our country, and our churches. (I mean especially the church.)

Any vestigal notions I may have had about becoming a social dropout again are dead now. I'm a part of this country now. I've signed the moral contract and I will contribute, somehow or another. I will mock us whenever I feel the need to, but only with our best interests in mind. I am here, and I am us.

I go to Pioneers Park on weekends and take in the statues of things destroyed by the pioneers. A giant Indian, a giant buffalo, natural pririe grass. The west end of the park, where the grassland starts to take over, looks much like Wounded Knee.

Millions killed in the Native genocide. Thousands of pioneers killed by the Platte River; Typhiod, Cholora, dysentery. The whole of the Great Plains is a mass grave. Some spots get markers.

They lay there under our feet. They killed and died for the right to call themselves the people, and the right to keep the delusion that this was an honor.

Whiteclay part 25

Okay, so let's reiterate, when we came to the village of Halsey, Becky had to pee. The only public buildings in this "town" were the post office and the school. The post office did not have a public restroom. The school did not have qa sign indicating that it was a school. We didn't know that we were entering a school, and once we did, well, business had to be taken care of. If we had any ill intent, we surely would have picked a bigger town and....

Never mind, are we clear so far?

It was at Merna that a Custer County deputy began following us. I had been going about sixty-eight in a sixty-five and I thought that's why we were being tailed. But he didn't pull us over, he just stayed behind us. I was a little concerned, I didn't want to have to wait another ten minutes for lunch.

It wasn't until we reached the edge of Broken Bow that he turned on his cherries. There was a Broken Bow town cop parked there as well. Another Sheriff's department car, he looked to be the sheriff himself judging by his age and manner, kept circling around us.

The cop who had followed us from Merna walked up to the car and asked for my license and registration. We explained that it was Dan's car and we were driving in shifts. He acted as if this was unheard of. He asked me why I handed him an I.D. card instead of a proper driver's license. I explained that my license had been taken away fro drunk driving (sorry about that society) but had since been restored. I simply hadn't bothered to get a physical license, as my i.d. card still shows a white man with medium-long hair and I thought that sufficient. At any rate, I know full well that the police can check their computers to see if I'm allowed to drive in Nebraska or not. I'm hard like that.

We had a good idea about what happened. Someone had uncovered our James Joyce scam. We were going to jail for vandalism and theft by taking. One way or another we were going back to Sheridan county in chains to face the just revenge of the common people. We would be the laughing stocks of outstate Nebraska. We would never live this down, and it would be a good three or four hours before we could eat solid food at the jail house. Sliced turkey on white bread, or maybe meatloaf and green beans. It would be better than what we had been eating but I was hungry right now.

A white Ford Explorer with internal sirens joined us. A man in a psuedo Oscar De La Renta stepped out, talked to the local cops for awhile, and walked up to us. He was a special investigator for the state patrol, sent from North Platte just for us.

"What were you doing in Halsey?"
"Just passing through"
"Uh-huh, what were you doing at the school?"
"Our friend had to use the bathroom"
"Yeah? Well why couldn't you just go behind a bush?"

"I was actually the one who had to use the bathroom sir" said Becky.
"Uh-huh, next time just go behind a bush."

He left us and went back to consult with the local cops. Soon one of them came to the door.

"What were you doing up there in Halsey?"
We repeated the story?
"Where are you coming from?"
"Pine Ridge"
"What were you doing there?"
"It was a Spring break trip"
"Spring break, huh, when's that?"
"Right now"
"Umm, well, your license plates show you're from Omaha, Lincoln, or Sarpy County, what are you doing up here?"
"Like we said, Spring Break trip"
"Um, and when does that get over?"
"We go back Monday, don't we Josh?" said Dan
"Yeah, Monday, sir"
"Ummkay, you all students then?"
"Yes sir"
"Where at?"
"UNL sir"
"Your ID's show you from North Platte, Mc'Cook, Omaha, what are you doing in Lincoln"
"We're students sir"
"Ummhmm, out for Spring Break?"
"Yes sir"
"When do you go back to school?"

He walked away, the police talked among themselves some more and the man in the budget suit returned.

"Mr. Beran?"
"Yes sir?"
"I see you don't have a license"
"I actually am licensed to drive sir, if you check your.."
"Why don't you have a license?"
"Well, I was actually a bad person and had my license suspended for DUI. It's sinse been restored but I just haven't gotten a new one yet."
"Mmmhmm. Is there anything you're not telling me?"
"No si..."
"What were you doing in Halsey?"
"Our friend had to use the bathroom."
"Right, you know if you're hiding anything from me I'm not going to like it. I received a report of possible terroist activity in the area. I just drove seventy miles, they told me it was an urgent situation"
"Are you seri..."
"Yeah, so what were you doing in Halsey?"
"Well our friend had to.."
"How do I know you didn't leave a pipe bomb in the bathroom just for shits and giggles?"

"Ummm"
"No, tell me why I should believe your story, why shouldn't I believe that your up to something?"

The man clearly knows his Kafka, and let this be a lesson in legal reasoning for you. The main reason why the burdan of proof is on the state in criminal cases is not so much because of kindness or compassion, but because it is nearly impossible to prove a negative. I climbed Mt. Everest last year. Prove that I didn't.

"Well, this looks really suspicious to me, I mean what are you guys doing out here?
I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask to search your car."

Note the choice of words; "Im afraid I'm going to have to ask you" delivered in a firm, commanding,voice. Sitting there, reading the plain text from the comfort of your own home, without the cold eyes of justice staring down on you, you can plainly see that the phrase means nothing. I just wanted to point this out to you; so that when you are accused of terrorism, and you will be, you will know how the game is played. This also goes for any drug smugglers out there who might be reading this. I love you guys. You provide a vital service to the community, and it just breaks my heart to see so many of you folding like paper in the breeze before that commanding voice.

He looked at Dan, he looked at me. He was trying to break us, divide us. He clearly had no idea of who or what we are, otherwise he wouldn't have bothered. Why are you looking at me? You know it's not my car. If I give the okay for you to check the trunk it will get thrown out by any judge that doesn't have the ten commandments on his bech and you know this. I know you checked my criminal history on your computer.
Does this look like my first rodeo to you motherfucker?

He looked at me, I looked at Dan, he looked at Dan.

"And if I were to refuse, what would happen to me?"
"I'm afraid there isn't much I can do. I will find it suspicious, and I'll make a note of it."

Firm, commanding voice.

The firm, commanding voice, of our triumph.

"I'm going to have to say no to that" said Dan in the ringing voice of liberty.

Yes, yes, make your note and get the fuck out our face.

"I don't want to see you around Halsey again."

"Okay"


There was another brief consultation. The original deputy who had followed us from Merna came back with my I.D.
"So, on your spring break trip huh?"
"Yes sir"
"You students?"
"Yes sir"
"At UNL?"
"Yes sir"
"When does school start again?"
"Monday sir"

He gave me a hundred dollar ticket for driving without a license. It hangs on my fridge. Last week they sent me a warning to pay or a warrent would be issued for my arrest. I mailed them a check for fuck you and thirty cents.

Words can't describe how proud I am to have been accused of terrorism. Finally, my childish acts of rebellion gain official attention. In the context of the trip, it was the best thing that could have happened. Coming home from vacation is usually so anti-climactic and depressing. This was just what we needed. This was fire and glue.

We drove into town and had lunch at some plact that was too expensive. A "sports bar" built to cater to hunters from Lincoln and Omaha. Great food, though. I had the kilbasa with grilled veggies and strong coffee. Dan was still worried that the local authorities still might tie us to James Joyce but I assured him they had missed their chance.

And now, in the name of full disclosure, I provide them with another one, if they care to look. Just what does it mean to be 'noted?' What would happen if I tried to board a plane?

We drove out of Broken Bow toward Grand Island and Lincoln blasting "Fuck Tha Police"
Yeah, we went there.

Come down to the valley, come down to the city, come down, come down.

Whiteclay part 24

It was ten PM and I was being restrained from writing on the wall. Then it was eight in the morning. I only had three Hurricanes, and we bought eight, so somebody who claimed to have had only one is lying.

And oh what a fine wreck the storm had left. The trash had been filled up and abandoned for at least twelve hours, despite my brilliant subterfuge the day before. Towels, food wrappers, "clean" clothes, all about the place.

I decided against a shower in favor of sucking down as much coffee as I could in the time alloted. I would be driving the frontier half of the trip. This would require staying awake, and it's not as if a shower would have left me feeling like any less of a sweating battery.

Our loot from the Nebraskaland; the bible, a local phone book, the coffee pot, and some more towels. I threw a few extra things on the floor, just to show my contempt for,,, Becky clearly did not approve. She kept cleaning up what I was dirtying. She is clearly too young and immature to understand the importance of breaking minor rules lamely.

We stocked the trunk with obvious deviousness, and we were off. One last trip to the Pump and Pantry for coffee and breakfast. I bought a gas station grease biscuit and found it most unsatisfying. Another stop in Gordon for gas.

As I've said, the sandhills are much more pleasant in the daylight than they are at night, especially when one is feeling lightheaded for one reason or another. They're nothing but grass, so even the slightest breeze or extra beam of sunlight peaking through the clouds can have a profound effect on how they look. One really has to have lived out here to really know all of their colors and moods.

The sun gradually came out and by the time we reached Ellsworth it was bright and clear. I suggested getting lunch at Hyannis and Dan said he would prefer we wait for Broken Bow. I really would have preferred getting something solid in my stomach sooner rather than later, but this was a return trip, quiet and peaceful, everyone who could sleep without killing us all eventually did and I wasn't going to argue.

The groups of buildings that have names but can't properly be called villages; Ellsworth, Ashby, Bingham.

I drove at eighty miles an hour, thirsting for my kitchen and my bed. Hyannis, Seneca, Mullen. We passed a local sheriff near Thedford at eighty five an hour and he did nothing. He knows the score, good man.

Neko Case, the very voice of sympathy, guiding me through my hangover as we drove through the sun. Fucking exquisite.

Just past the main turn-off for the Nebraska National Forest, (Note to non-locals, yes we know it's funny) Becky said she needed to pee. Very well dear, the next village is two miles ahead. Perfectly routine.

We pulled up to the post office in Halsey and were informed that they didn't have a public restroom. They advised us to go to the bar, which they said was on the main street. We thought that Highway 2 was the main street; we saw nothing here leading off the highway that could be called an artery, while on highway 2 itself we saw a boarded up gas station, a boarded up hardware store, and I'm not going to get cute about it you get the idea.

After driving from one end of the village to another for a few minutes, we came to a place that, in Dan's words, looked "vaguely barrish." We knew it was a public building of some kind. It had an American flag and functioning cars parked in the lot.

We walked through the front? door to find ourselves in a gymnasium. Ah, so we were in a school than. The bathrooms were right there at the back of the gym, no more than fifteen feet from the main door. Everyone who had to go or felt that they might have to go later went.

I thought it might be funny if I stole a basketball, or climbed onto the stage and started busting out Richard III. Strangely, I thought better of it.

I joined Paul outside. The elementery teacher was using the flag pole to teach some kind of math lesson to the kindergarteners and it was the cutest damned thing one could ever see. She looked at us. I think I may have given a little wave.

We got back into the car and continued southeast towards the flatlands. There was a state patrol wagon sitting at the junction with the Arnold road. I thought that it was a good thing I had slowed down to sixty-five.

Whiteclay part 23

The liquor store was on the other side of downtown from the hotel. Me, Dan, and Paul walking as a human wall along the sidewalk. I could see living room lights and TV's flickering through people's houses. That's always made me feel a bit guilty. I don't have too look into their houses to have some idea of what they're doing. Dan said it was a shame that Becky wasn't twenty one so we could all go to the bar together. Maybe, I'm thinking probably not. We would have met some cool locals I'm sure, people who came here for the scenery, people who had had kids right out of high school and were becoming shells but still had their sense of fun and dance and were great conversationalists at the half-drunk stage where everyone is a great conversationalist. People like my old friends in North Platte.

But you can meet people like that at any bar anywhere, it gets maddening. It reminds me of when I go home for some holiday and see my friends at the bar, exactly as they were when they were eighteen.

At any rate, the beer selection at village pubs is terrible; Bud Light and maybe Bud.
And the place in Rushville closes at ten, what a cocktease. And we would get the same questions of where we were from and what we were doing here and honestly I had had my fill of this place.

We walked into the liquor store and bought seven or eight. The variety of malt liquors was quite impressive, and of course the Slurricane was prominent. We got seven or eight, a mixture of high gravities and regulars. Than we walked home.

The sheriff's office here is most impressive. I saw two deputies watching TV inside. I believe I saw a swimming pool as well.

We got back to the hotel and divvied up the cans. I treated myself too a high-gravity and drank it in twenty minutes. Than I grabbed another.

I was at a family gathering at my grandmother's house two years ago. Two of my cousins both slightly more than a year old, were playing in the living room. They both knew how to walk, but one of them, Kylie, was still afraid too. The other one, Katrina, my uncle's girl, kept telling her "get up, get up."

I spent my youth in western Nebraska surrounded by people who live life crawling on their knees. To justify it, they build up their own mythologies and subcultures. Elaborate romance and naked, unapologetic bullshit blended together so well that one has to look very hard to make out the component parts.

It would be much better, I know, if I allowed myself to break down without alcohol. Even when I am drunk, I still usually manage to keep my disaffected face on.

I drank until I fell into a sleep of red, like I was napping in the summer sun. I tried to write on the wall a few times, said some things that may or may not have been profound, touched on personal problems that I had no right to bother my friends with.

I wanted to vomit at the first sight of Pine Ridge. But no. When I am alone in my apartment, I can barely bring myself to say "God Damn it all" to the suffering, servility, and fatalism I see around me. Every pair of eyes I see show pain that wouldn't dare reveal itself to one's brother, one's lover, one's self.

I dream of a society that accepts it's neccesity without making any attempt to justify itself and I know it won't happen. I see the race between my dreams and my vices and know that I am losing.

But don't worry about me; that is, if you ever had any mind to. I owe something to the people who have resigned themselves to marginalization without submitting to the standard rural mythology. All of my friends in the trailor parks and duplexes of North Platte, who knew when I first opened my mouth that I wasn't one of them and chided me for trying to be one of them. Warren, Robert, Tony, revealing things about themselves that no one with any self-esteem left ever would... No. That has too be something more than one pack of self-destructive hacks talking to another.

This post was going to be funny. I was going to tell you how drunk I got and all of the clever little things I did.

I'm getting too old for that. It's starting to give me the same chill I get when I look accross the street, and see the overweight woman smoking her Marlboro lights with that eternally angry look on her face.

When I turn the magnifying glass that I point at the world on myself; well, I'm not going to lie, I still like myself better than the world. Having said that...

Clarity. Acheiving clarity without destroying oneself and giving others an excuse not to seek it. It's hard to do. There's no excuse for not doing it.

I woke up the next morning to find that my body had flopped out long after my brain did. I had fallen into a dead sleep fully clothed without any pillows. The rain had finally come at some point in the wee hours and it was very cloudy outside. I was thankful for that.

It was time to go home.

Part 22

We were, oddly enough, very hungry after all this. We hadn't eaten well for the entire trip, you know. You really have no idea how physically draining it is too... never mind.

So we drove back into town and ate at the Pizza Hut. The Pine Ridge Pizza Hut sits inside of a corrugated metal shack. No salad bar, no Parmesan grinder, no free sides of ransh with our orders. No beer for sale of course. With twenty dollars we got a medium pizza with a giant circular mozzarella stick for a crust. It was transcendent.

On the wall a flier offered burned CDs to whoever wanted them. (Whatever Music you Listen TOO! Hip-hop! Rock! Rap! Country! Oldies!....) A tiny handful of people here have internet access, and they can make quite a hell of a living. There are no video or music stores here; there aren't any hotels or banks. So if one manages to scrape up enough money for a reasonably modern computer, the groupies will have to draw numbers.

We were in generally good spirits as we got in the car and turned towards Nebraska. We were going home tomorrow,and starting to think of the trip in the past-tense.
The money situation was starting to get interesting. We would be fine as long as another unexpected emergency didn't come up.

One last trip through Whiteclay. At the "tavern" on the south end we saw a heavy-set lady get dropped with a single punch to the face. Women are sacred.

Back to Rushville and the hotel. I worked on my notes and caught up to the present moment. We never did take that night walk around town, good. We were all drowsy and more introverted than usual. Dan showed flashes of maybe shutting the hell up. He never quite got there.

Paul and his blood feud with Ben Nelson; never mind. It was rather stupid, and really not pertinent to the narrative anyways.

There was one more thing left to do. Dan and I had spoken of brining a large shipment of Slurricane back to Lincoln. We even dreamed of converting people away from Old Style. We really didn't want to go back to Whiteclay again, that ship had sailed, but there was no need. We could just walk to the liquor store on the other side of town and get all the Hurricane we needed. We would have to hurry though, everything here closes at ten PM.

I'm afraid that we were'nt able to introduce the Sluricane to the capital city. Our claims to its effects are nothing but hearsay, believe what you will. Like I said, the money situation was getting interesting, so we didn't buy that much.

Well, I suppose we bought a fair amount, but, you know, the last three days had bee such an emotional rollar coaster, so once we started going, we....

we....

we...

Yes, we drank it all.

Wounded Knee

The village of Wounded Knee sits about eight miles off the highway along a narrow blacktop road. It was here in February of 1973 that several hundred armed Lakotas, led by AIMsters but by no means restricted to AIM members, seized the village for the purpose of calling attention to their plight. They knew that the world and recognized the Wounded Knee name and so they did. Press coverage was quite intense, as was the government's response. FBI, U.S. Marshals,Tanks, F-16s, advisers from the regular military. The siege lasted seventy-one days before the protesters, low on food, ammo, and medical supplies, surrendered. Two people, both native, died in the battle. A few government agents were badly wounded but survived. Considering the amount of shooting that occurred, the butcher's bill was miraculously low, certainly compared to the attack on unarmed Natives that had occurred eighty three years earlier. Maybe the NRA is on to something after all.

Three years of general chaos followed, AIM, GOONS, suspicious deaths, unsolved murders, low-scale terrorism and destruction, federal agents up to some unspecified form of no good. The tension between Zealots and Herodians infects life on the Rez to this day.

Some of the veterans of those days, Russel Means, Dennis Banks, etc. speak of "restoring the spirit" of Wounded Knee. A lot of talk of strong "spirituality" and moral victory. If that's what keeps them going, than so be it. The revolt accomplished nothing of course. The status-quo was re-established most vigorously, the Native activist movement became incoherent and cannibalistic. The village of Wounded Knee today looks just like every other settlement on the reservation looked then and looks now; decaying shacks, dirt trails, broken-down cars, the boldest statement is a demand to respect nothing.

A couple miles past the village lies the place. We came upon a brown circular building that turned out to be a "Wounded Knee Information Center." It was closed. Through the window we could see various museumish-looking swag. It's outside features included a water pump where I refilled my bottle and a few dozen Hurricane cans. The only spot in the entire area that wasn't littered with cans was the ceremonial circle behind the building. The importance of this place is revealed by the horse droppings as well as the lack of cans.

A small footpath led to the cemetery. Inside the hill are buried many of the victims of the 1890 massacre. The spot is also used as a general cemetery, home to those who were lucky enough to die individual deaths. The dates range from the turn of the century to the present day. There was a huge concentration of death in 02-03, another in the 1920's. So many babies here, oh God, their graves lavishly decorated with teddy bears, flowers, and cigarettes. Lots of people here in their twenties, thirties, forties. A lot of military veterans, a tiny handful of people who died of old age, their graves honored as much as the babies.

It seemed quiet, but there was just as much ambient noise as one would hear in a medium-sized town. It was the wind and the traffic on Big Foot trail, (named after the leader of the murdered band)and the birds and the rodents avoiding snakes. It was a perfectly appropriate sound. The weight of this place is overwhelming, but only for us. Three hundred people starving people butchered and left to freeze, birds briefly scatter at the sound of machine guns, come back, keep chirping. We heard nothing that we didn't expect to hear so we didn't hear anything.

I'll go to cemeteries sometimes, when I'm out getting my air. They're very pleasant; much quieter than the town park, much more intimate, and I fail to see anything distasteful about it. I can walk into my mother's house unannounced. I invite myself to the cemetery for the same reason. I go there to chide the shells who were too accepting. I try to avoid the children, they have no idea what they lost and if they saw my face they would know I'm hiding something. Mostly, I go there for the bankers and the mayors and the priests and the generals who have been dead a hundred years. I go there for the people who are used to having attention and now don't even get grandchildren who were forced to visit them. The ones with the elaborate crypts are the ones who need us. They can't talk too each other.

It wasn't so different here. Some families could only afford homemade wooden crosses for their dead. Some came from middle class-families and had their photographs etched on their headstones. They were the ones who took flattery and respect for granted, too busy and straightline to worry about aging. People people, couldn't stand to be idle or alone. They hate the nights here.

I removed my hat in the most genteel way possible. I took a cigarette from my pack and offered it in the way Robert had shown us. (Why are you acting like you know us boy?) I tried to think of something to say but, no,no, they were already suspicious enough. Too many white tourists who were deadly sincere until they got back to their hotels. We're just here to look, you know that. We're going to take some pictures too if you don't mind. We'll stay quiet, leave everything as it is, thank you for letting us come here, and don't you appreciate some spontaneous company every now and then?

Down from the hill and across from the building was another graveyard. It was a shambles. Rotting wood markers lying in the grass. A few Hurricanes had snuck in. No. No. There's enough room in this country to give everyone a permanent space. I don't understand why your graves have been left to decay but, here.

At the northeast corner I found the cross for a man who had died in the 1910's. I picked up a rock and pounded his cross into the dry ground as best I could. Than I took some pebbles and placed them around the cross. I did this for a couple other graves and I could hear Dan doing the same on the other side of the yard. They might have held for a week or so.

A married couple from New Jersey pulled up in the lot by the building and started turing the place. They were kindly.

Our group spoke a few words to each other over the half hour or so that I forget. The sky slowly went from that bruised look to mostly cloudy. It was still too warm and dusty. It would rain somewhere in the near-east, not here.

Down the hill and on the other side of the road is where the worst of the massacre took place. This is where people were shot in the back while trying to run. There's a road marker there, an elaborate one, a couple thousand words front and back, but just a road marker. Efforts to turn the site into some kind of Federal monument have fallen short so far.

The creek sits about twenty feet off of Big Foot trail. To the right of the road marker a gravel road runs off the blacktop and over a cheap bridge to a group of buildings, too small to even be called a village. We all made our own way towards the creek, we were all on our own trips now. I came to the bank, It would be more proper to call it a wash. It takes a hard rain or a real winter to get the water flowing through here. In the bed lay three empties of Natural Light and a couple more Hurricanes. Here?

I walked into the creek-bed and stood there awhile. There were fewer trees back then.
Machine gunners on the hills could see their targets in the banks perfectly well. Nothing for the people to do but keep running until they got cut apart or just stand there and face reality. Fuck that, show them you have some blood and keep running, running is the dignified thing to do. Facing reality is what turned my home into a desert. Facing reality is what's killing this place right now. People accept their places when they face reality. They stand there and wait. They drink Hurricane or Coors Light (It doesn't matter) until the good dreams go away and they can face more reality in their sleep.

The woman from the village who noticed the tourists at the spot and came to sell her trinkets, she faces reality. She was disappointed that we had nothing to buy. She had nothing in particular to say. The massacre was very sad, she said, lots of children killed.

I stood on the bridge and listened to the noise. How lucky will I die an individual death, with a Catholic-sized church organ to make noise for me,an obituary written by my closest relative, (which will probably be a second cousin) a stone with my name on it and, hell, dream big, maybe one of my own quotes?

I understand now why people fear terrorists or random loonies with Tech-9s so much. I mean it's really beneath capitalist dignity to die in a big group like that, isn't it? Thank God we have the government to protect us from that.

Respect Nothing.

The sky, the atmosphere, had taken on a hazier look. The wall of yellow had a sponge-painted look to it, not as grainy as it usually looked but somewhat viscous. It was humid, it might well rain later.

Up 87, through Whiteclay, three or four people on the mission steps. Into Pine Ridge and east on U.S. 18, The road is inadequate, at least on the approach to town. One good thing to say about Nebraska is that it maintains its rural highways quite well. the reservation roads are something out of Connell. Anyone who tries to drive them drunk simply doesn't care if they live or not, simply,

RESPECTS NOTHING.

This was the command from one of the shacks along the Wounded Knee road. RESPECT NOTHING painted in block letters along the top of the wall near the roof. It's a common myth that nihilists are incapable of feeling passion. Actually they are often highly motivated by the naive belief of others. These people had put a huge amount of time and effort into covering their house with RESPECT NOTHING, and they knew preciously what they were doing. These people live on the road to one of the most infamous spots in North America. The sign is aimed directly at tourists boiling in white guilt and stealing themselves for an earth-shattering experience. the sign was made for us, just the four of us. It was made just to mock me, just to punish me for name-dropping Nieztsche like a junior-college dropout. You think you're bad boy? You can never bring yourself to respect nothing you closet incense-burning twit.

Sure, religion can inspire that kind of motivation every now and then, but it seems kind of lame by comparison. A three-hundred-foot statue, a cathedral that takes a hundred years to build... It's just too authoritarian, too communal. It doesn't have the same force, the same, yes magnificence, as building your own personal rejection of whatever passerby may believe.

There were a few clouds and the sky took on a sort of bruised color. We passed over a steep hill foretold by a sign that said HILL and we were in the village.

Whiteclay part 19

I woke up disgustingly early, about 8:45. Less than five hours of sleep with a head full of swill. But I live alone and wasn't used to the community arrangement. I never lost the knowledge that there were others in the room. I did end up with the honor of sleeping on the bed somehow. Dan was on the other side. It's about time we stopped living a lie.

Paul in the chair, Rebbecca already up and out on one of her scouting missions. I put on my shoes and shirt and stepped out.

It was freakishly warm again. Already sixty-five degrees on a March morning. Damn that sun. I've become sunglass-dependent in the past few years, albino-eyed. I was wearing them now, of course, but still... I hadn't really drunk enough to be hungover, had I? (a dog-lick of this shit would be enough to give you a headache you fucking idiot.) There was no way to really know how much, what with the elevated alcohol content and the "Lakota Way". Enough though, and not enough sleep. Damn that sun.

I think I was paranoid; not "feeling" paranoid in the pothead-Vizzini use of the phrase, but clinically paranoid. I could hear, I think, all of the dogs in the village. They were all barking at me. I saw three or four human figures a couple of blocks off the highway, they were looking at me, talking about me to each other over their fences. The people with houses along the highway were peering at me through their windows, trust me on that. I do question my mind sometimes, or was it the quiet? There are villages smaller than Rushville in the Platte Valley that aren't this quiet. There's always a train horn or the distant hum of semis on the interstate. This was 9:30 AM, Tuesday morning, peak of the business week. Besides the two or three trucks that drove down the federal highway in the twenty minutes I spent outside (drivers looking at me) I heard dogs and birds. Some people claim that they like it this quiet and "peaceful". They must be joking.

In and out of the Pump n Pantry, black coffee and the World-Herald, back to the hotel. One thing about Rushville, the abandoned buildings and failed businesses look better than the places that are still open. It's like that in a lot of tiny towns.

Read the paper, drink the coffee, brew some black tar in the house coffee pot. Shower, attempt to do homework through blurry eyes. Becky reading her Munro on the other side of the room, Dan and Paul still dead asleep. Still quiet.

Eighteen hours is more than enough time for four people to ruin a single room. So I decided to take on the Joyce persona to fetch trash bags and fresh linens.

The maid was one door down. I slipped out of our room in such a manner that she couldn't possibly see in side. The top half of me was sticking out the door at about an eighty degree angle. I asked her where the maid was, she said she was it.
"Could I get some fresh towels and some trash bags?"
"No problem, just bring out your trash and your towels and we'll leave you some new ones by the door. Need anything else?"
"No, no, we're fine, I mean that's all I need."

I brought out two bags of trash (Don't add any of the trash lying about the room, she'll know there's more than one of you) and the dirty towels, all three bath towels, all three wash clothes, and both bath mats, slipped out the door at the same brilliantly mendacious angle, and handed her the refuse.

"Here ya go"
"O.K. sir, is this all the trash"
"........ yes"
"Will you be needing anything else today"
"....... No, we're fine............ I mean no."
"O.k than, have a good day."

Say what you will, they haven't caught us yet. If the hotel owner is reading this, than let me just say, Dan made us do it. I'll give you his address and phone number in return for immunity, and maybe a little something extra on the side.


Noon came I realized that I wasn't going to stay awake through the whole day, so I snuggled back in next to Dan and laid down for about an hour. Much better.

I woke up feeling very hungry. Ramon and a sandwich simply wasn't going to do it. We had bought a large tin of ravioli, along with paper plates, plastic knives, forks, and spoons, two kinds of lunch meat, two kinds of mustard, pickles, olives, and pickled eggs. No can opener, though. I was not eating another sandwich. I would go back to the IGA and get a can opener. I would take that initiative.

I walked across a churchyard. That same maid was there, looking at me. A went into the grocery store and was eyeballed for the entire time. It took me ten minutes to find a three-dollar can opener. Sometimes, if you buy a can opener this cheap it will break into three pieces the first time you try to use it. I was willing to take that chance. Straight line and a goal.

The other males were starting to stir when I got back to the hotel. Good, we can turn the TV up now. I flipped through some channels and came across a soccer match. Two mid-level Premiership teams were tied 0-0, hell yes. We could all have ravioli for breakfast now. We would bond this way, become not merely friends but brothers, nay, a single being.

The TV and microwave were plugged into the same outlet. This is a standard arrangement in hotels and even some private homes. It's nothing. I put my plate of ravioli in, the TV flickered and turned off. I turned it back on, the screen turned dirty-bathwater white and flickered off again. My ravioli was done. I shut off the microwave and the TV went back to normal. It was clear that the outlet couldn't handle powering the TV and the microwave at the same time. Too fucking bad. This is America and we will discipline our technology into obedience if we need to.

I believe Paul's serving was in the microwave when the TV began squealing like a dying rabbit and belching white smoke. This went on for a good five minutes even after we shut off the microwave. We were transfixed. We're used to running our TV's stereo's DVD, and Playstations out of the same outlet at the same time. Things apparently don't work that way in God's country.
But I'm glad that it happened. It was meant to be. It was a post-modern, passive-aggressive, ultra-ironic protest against mass-media. We had already abandoned our Ipods and Facebook for the trip. Passe, anybody can do that. What we had done is traveled back in time to a Sandhills village that was still deep in the twentieth century. We had come to this hotel and, through Freudian "accident" destroyed this piece of antiquated technology. Nothing left to do now but break cuneiform tablets against the radio, but we were still kind of tired, and the smoke alarm was going to go off if we didn't do something. So I had to settle for opening the window and tearing off the curtain. (Becky said that I castrated the curtain. This is nonsense. I merely circumcised the unnecessary length.)

It was three in the afternoon now, and we were starting to feel the tourists guilt about not doing something. My drunken demand that we go to Wounded Knee became a sober suggestion, and we all agreed that it was a good one.

Part 18: Penis, penis, penis, penis, penis.

Like I've said, none of us have cable, so while we are awake during traditional infomercial hours we have no idea what the dinosaurs who still watch TV for entertainment actually watch at that time of night. I remember my childhood, sitting awake at two in the morning, wanting to watch Cinemax but worried that my mom would catch me, so I watched Jack Palance pimping his juice tiger instead. The sight of so many full-grown idiots had a real effect on me, helped to make me who I am. I came to realize that the only thing sillier than society are the people who take it seriously, and that the best jobs go to those who make fun of it. Infomercials, George Carlin, Bevis and Butthead, and Ween. Ah yes, halcyon days. So ever since I became elite I've been a little curious about advances in infomercial technology.

Apparently these Extenze commercials have been around for some time. There's an old version hosted by Ron Jeremy. Though I must say it really fails to measure up to expectations. Jeremy's show follows the same formula as the new version that we saw. Man on the street interviews (Extenze is used by every man in Los Angeles.) A quick interview to see what the women folk think ("Does size matter?" Oh definitely.")

The word penis is never used. The purpose behind this directorial choice is unclear. Penis can be used freely on the nightly news. This is a late-night infomercial on basic cable. Perhaps the Extenze Corporation expects is customer base to be composed of middle-aged men, pillars of society responsible for upholding public decency. Still, this is easily Ron Jeremy's most disappointing work.

We first encountered the Extenze commercial on the first night, in Gordon. the results were immediate, it was amazing, certainly funnier than anything you'll read here. The man-on-the-street-interviews were gold. ("Yeah, I've heard of Extenze. I use it in fact. It's uhhh, nice! It really, uhhh, works."
"Well, what do you mean"
"Well, I'm, you know, bigger."
"Bigger how?'
"Well, you know."
"Oh yeah, I think I do.")

The women:
"Does size matter"
"Oh, definitely. (Delivered in monotone)
"If your boyfriend was bigger, down there, would you have sex more often?"
"Oh yeah!" (Also in monotone)
"I was in a relationship for seven years and I hardly ever had sex with my boyfriend because, you know, he just didn't have the confidence because he didn't feel, adequate."

Oh, unconsummated love! Don't be a small-cock tease ladies. Let your man know how you don't feel. Don't let both of your youths go hopelessly frigid. If you are unable to say the word penis to your own boyfriend, well, that's perfectly understandable. Just make the call to Extenze yourself and they will understand.

The highlight of the show is undoubtedly Dr. Stein. Stein runs the Stein Institute for Sexual Health and Happiness in L.A. (Cut to shot of institute, (I'd bet twenty dollars that the entire building is stuffed with shredded gift-wrap.) His credentials include appearing on several national television programs.

"Is it normal for men to want to be 'bigger'?" asked Edward R. Murrow.
"Oh definitely" said Stein. "I think that no matter what a man's size, weather he's below average, average, or even a little above average, he could always stand to be a little bigger."

"Is there real science behind Extenze?"
"Ah yes, Extenze is a complex blend of twenty-six different Nutrisuticals. All of them with the potential to improve a man's sexual performance."

Cut to the hotel room in Gordon. We laughed for five minutes at the mention of "Nutrisuticals" and than I turned the channel. We thought that we had seen all there was to see. So I returned to inventing the concept of videotaping myself and we went to bed soon after.

The next night, in Rushville, after Dan and Paul returned from oblivion, we were all sitting about the room reflecting upon the day, everyone more insomnia-giddy than drunk now. We were mocking the, how you say?, emotions we had felt in Whiteclay to re-acculturate ourselves to the world. Reasserting our English majorinity after showing vulnerability in front of outsiders and each other. The philosophies are the life, bitch! Take that proletariat.

The TV was still on. I flipped a few channels and, what do you know? Stein wasn't done yet.

Murrow continued his grilling.

"Does Extenze really work"
"Absolutely"
"When you heard that Extenze can add up to four inches to a man's size in less than a week, didn't you feel a little bit skeptical."
"........ No....... Not at all"
"Would you recommend Extenze to your patients?"
"Absolutely, in fact...........
....... I'm using it right now."

I can't stress how important it was that we saw the end of the interview. For one thing, there actually is such a thing as a "nutrisutical". Or at least, there are people who claim they exist. What does the scientific community outside the new age health shop think of the concept? Who the hell cares? The point is that Stein didn't actually invent the word on the spot, and that's a real let-down.

But "Did you ever feel skeptical" "No not at all" totally makes up for it. Never again will I seek medical advice from a doctor, a so-called scientist, prone towards skepticism. No, I will stay virile into my eighties thanks to the unyielding belief of Dr. Stein. He's appeared on several nationally televised programs. All hail the new age of faith.

The program came to a head. It was nearly four in the morning now. We talked awhile about how awe-inspiring the program we had just watched was. It was just the thing we needed after a day like this. Then the conversation turned to how tired we were and how good it would be to sleep the whole next day away. We stayed awake for another hour discussing our hunger for sleep, then we actually got around to it.

This was, without doubt, the central day of the trip. We had found whatever it was we were looking for. Now the question was what to do on our last day. The night before, when the Hurricane first made landfall, I had angrily demanded that we go to Wounded Knee at some point. Just the thing to do on a drunken lark you know. First, we would sleep.

And in closing, here's the suggestive images you've surely been looking for.

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Part 17E: Night reveals itself

They stayed for about half an hour before it was decided that it would be better if they didn't.

They continued to recommend that we go to Gordon/Gomorrah. Robert continued to say I looked like Bon Scott. He continued to ask us what we were doing here. The novelty was wearing off. The drunk, not wearing off so much, the Hurricane takes a few days to really taper off, but mixing with drowsiness. We were dividing back into our own social classes, subconciously, bitterly. This was probably a mistake, bringing them here, but we couldn't seperate, not while we still under the spell of Whiteclay and the Nuggis and the ruins of murder houses and songs that may or may not have been about dead ancestors. But what is there to say? We were back in a heated room with basic cable. We were back to our world, or at least a loose thread to it. These men drank, that's what they did. We were using them to satisfy some undefined morbidity, and they knew it, well enough. No bitterness, no hatred, just an understood annoyance.

"You've got your degrees, you've got your philosophies, but you don't live the life."

I've lived the life more than you know, Robert. Keep yourself high and on autopilot until death gets rid of all the decisions you're putting off. That's all there is that there is to know about the life, except that there are places where the drugs of the life are better and the danger is more immediate and sexier and their are places I could have gone where I could have wasted three years of my life so much more productively and had a better time. And how many wasted years have you had, Robert?
How much regret and self-loathing do you sleep with at night? And what was up with the crack about Jews? Where in the sweet fuck did you learn anti-semitism? There arn't any Jews for five hundred miles. "We're not savages, we're not Jews... We're not the bad Indians." You want me to go Breakfast Club on your ass? We "rich" white folks have lives to live too. And no kind of life is pretty, and I'm taking the wide spot by the TV to sleep on and you're on your own.

Dan decided to take the locals back to their plague-shacks. He would take Paul with them.

(Beautiful idea Dan, yes, go home friends, go home.)

(Are you fucking mad? I know you're drunk, you'll never make it.)

"Are you sure Dan?"
"Yeah dude, I'll be fine."
"Are you really sure?"
"Yeah, it'll be better this way"
"If you go in the ditch call me first"
"Alright"

Right, call me first. No need to get the authorities involved. I'll just walk there myself. I'll pull the car out of the ditch with my bare hands, administer O-Negative to the wounded.

"Where are we going" asked Robert.
"Back to Whiteclay" said Tony.
"Why did you even bring us here?"
"Comon, these people need to sleep."
"We should of just stayed there."
"Comon man"

And they were gone. It was time to sleep, Becky was long out. Just me now.
Not time for me to sleep though, time for me to play the mother, make sure the boys got home okay and spring to the rescue if they didn't. What would I tell the Sheriff? Mom, (Speaking of mothers) would you mind driving two hundred miles to pick me and a friend up? And if it's not too much trouble, could you get out of bed and start coming now? We really need to be gone by noon tommarow, before they figure out that the DUI casulties brought friends along.

Turn the lights out, keep the TV low, back in the shadows where the Hurricane shows its true self. You already know the worst is true. The worst is the only possible truth. CNN, Bill Maher is really dull when he's not in his own environment. I thought I saw on the crawl that Chuck Hagel was running for president. I saw wrong, he was only paying his respects to Magritte. It will take them forty five minutes, there and back. No excuse for taking any longer.

Fifty minutes passed. I called Dan, I called Paul, no answer. They're dead, you know very well they are. They're dead Becky. We're stranded. We're at the mercy of the locals. Mark will be on the jury, he'll have his way with you. I'll be at the oppisite end of the Sheridan County jail servicing men who traded their Harleys for crystal meth and got kicked out of the KKK for beligerence. They'll brag about it to their adoring girlfriends sporting the armcasts that their men got locked up for.

And it's my fault. I should have been the community hero, ripped the keys out of Dan's hand and declared that the Indians were spending the night here. I'll figure something out. But the dancing shadows, the mild hot flashes, the sour carbonated blood, makes things difficult. Don't panic boy. Go outside. You'll think of something there. I'll throw a brick through the Pump n Pantry and steal a cup of coffee. That will be a good start. That will get things rolling.

I walked outside and heard a dying old man from the other side of town. Where the hell have you boys been?

Richard McBeef, a review

Novice readers should recognize the allusion to Richard III, Shakespeare's villain usurper. The connection to Hamlet is also obvious, as the story centers around John, a troubled but brilliant young man, who accuses his stepfather, the title character, of murdering his biological father and making unwanted sexual advances to his new stepson.
Casual readers should also be able to catch the double-phallic imagery of the title. The double-penis, or hemi-penis, is a well known biological feature of serpents. So here we see Richard McBeef as the serpent, Lucifer. The banishment from the garden, the lost innocence of youth, just in the title.

The simplicity and directness of Cho Sueng-Hui's prose continues to the story itself. He truly has a genius for economy and understatement. Cho never dilutes his message with flowery allusion or metaphor. His references are as direct as a bullet to the brain. Yet he combines the force of Hemingway with the ecstatic wordplay of Nabokov.

"Me what?! You want me to stick this remote control up your ass buddy! You ain't even worth it man. This remote was five bucks. You are such an a--- "

"What are you, a Catholic priest? I will not be molested by an aging balding overweight pedophillic stepdad named Dick! Get your hands off me you sicko! Damn you, you Catholic Priest. Just stop it, Michael Jackson! Let me guess, you have a pet named Dick in Neverland Ranch and you want me to go pet him, right?"

Some may mistake Cho's simplicity for hackery. Nothing could be furthur from the truth. We see, not only in his writing but in his neo-dadist photography, a cultured man who still deigns to respect the artistic heritage that he so profoundly transcends.


































The photos above are another example of Cho making a brilliant historical reference seem blunt, even crude. The world has lost a true master. As a wise man once said, "How long shall we kill our prophets?"

Anyone who has ever deluded themselves into thinking they have any artistic abilities
can only realize that we are so much slime compared to Cho's genius. You must read Richard McBeef. Read it, and weep at your failure.

Rating: 14/10

Part 17E (Rhapsody in Gordon)

"You guys wanna hear a sacred Caucasian song?" I said. I don't typically say something so stupid, and this was the second dumbest thing I said that night. Fucking Hurricane.

I've grown out of Freebird. Fuck those crackers. I've grown out of mindlessly worshiping most of the traditional rock anthems. I still love Zeppelin, The Stones, Beatles, mind you, but their discographies run so much deeper than what one hears on the radio.

BoRhap though, it always delivers. Just enough metal, prog, and ballad, not too much of any of the above. Mercury was still young and frisky. Not middle-aged, domesticated, and paying his sin-wages by melting alive. Stretching 1975 technology to its limit; the voice, the harmonies, the guitar, the dynamic tension. My God it's as beautiful as a Pilsner Urquell and a cigar in hand on a summer twilight.

And we all sang together and the oppression of driving at night in general and driving through desolation in particular was lifted. And Bohemian Rhapsody did everything that a well-known song is supposed to do to a pack of drunks, which is one of those things that's terribly important to me.

The locals were practically shaking with excitement. "Let's go to the bar" one of them said. "Let's go to Gordon, the bars are open their till 2:30. "They know how to have a good time their.

"The bars in Nebraska close at one everywhere." I said.

"Nah man, they know how to have a good time there. Where are we going? Let's go to Gordon?"

We had spent a night in Gordon. The town is small enough to hear any late-night revelry going on from anywhere else in town. These men's version of Gordon was a phantom, a fantasy, like the hotel where you can sing and dance all night without trouble that we heard about on the first night. Just how isolated were they for a village thirty miles away to be a rumor?

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

We got to Rushville before midnight. The calls for Las Gordon with its rivers of champaign and nubile women grew only louder.

We went back to the hotel instead. To do what exactly we didn't really know. A red-on-white homosexual orgy would have been hot but it still wouldn't have been Gordon.

Fuck everything. Respect nothing. Nothing really matters.

17D: The circle/Fat-Stealer Woman/Socialism doesn't work.

The first song they sang was a funeral song, that was the consensus anyway. They performed three or four songs for us, couldn't agree on the words to any of them. They seemed to sincerely believe that the first was for dead ancestors though. I was obliged to take my hat off. Then we sacrificed a cigarette to the subjects of the song.

Then a cigarette was lit and passed around the circle. We all partook. This is the Lakota way. It also happens to be damned convenient for people who spend the day scraping up a dollar-forty at a time. A factory rolled-cigarette must be a rare treat for these men, smoke and drink like gentlemen. Nobody who enjoys the occasional drunk (or a constant drunk for that matter) never smokes. They are the only things in life that are meant for each other. If you're concerned for your health, than by all means do neither, good for you. But the rare strain of freak who drinks but doesn't smoke, something, is just a hater, pure and simple. They kill the comradery. It's like going to a party and seeing the nun who taught me fifth-grade math staring through the window. And don't even get me started on people who smoke but don't drink. Tortured obsessive-compulsives. These are the folks who kill themselves when they try to smoke through their oxygen masks.

The hurricanes went around the circle in the same way of course. Each made about one-and-a-half trips through the eight of us. I took my normal coffee-cup sized swigs, which are considered quite healthy in a college town, and was left feeling quite unfulfilled. These men were clearly on another level. This is what sharing among addicts is. Bryan whispered to Dan to hide one of the cans between the two of them and surely the rest of us wouldn't notice. I longed for the honesty of a rigidly capitalistic meth sale. Everyone gets what they paid for measured out to them at Glock-point. Straight line and a goal.

But never mind. These were affable men, talkative and funny. That counts for everything. Robert let on that maybe he just did have some involvement with AIM back in the day. "I'm on America's Most Wanted" he said. "No, that's just your butthole" said Bryan. We would buy more beer. Whiteclay has a couple of ATM machines, which I must say I found rather surprising. The average customer at Straight Line Liquor doesn't have a bank account. But my surprise is my own fault. I underestimated the place. Mogadishu has ATM's.

So it was off to the Arrowhead for a couple more, and then a couple more and a couple
more until the place closed at about eleven.

Rebecca was receiving special attention. Robert offered her his coat, and I believe they sang a special song just for her. Wasicu-weia, white woman in context, literally fat-stealer woman. A bit offensive to whites? Probably. Though keep in mind that the Lakota had no need for a generic word for white person until granddad came, stole the fat, set it on fire, pissed on the flames, and than claimed the right to shoot anyone who touched the ashes. But I stall.

The billboards came up. "Women are sacred." Robert said that they treat their women like princesses. I told Becky she could be my princess.

Jesus fuck. Yeah. That was me. I said that.

I knew it was stupid almost as soon as I said it. But it is only now that I realize how asinine it truly was. This woman went on a thousand-mile round trip with three casual acquiescences. She drank and cavorted with us without fear for four days. She drank with four old leering strangers with better panache than someone like, say, me, was able to. Princess? Jesus. A fucking warrior she is. I'm sorry Becky. Understand that my only prejudice is against those who aren't me. I don't compartmentalize beyond that.

One of the rez dogs (Sarah?) had made her home in Whiteclay and the our hosts were familiar with her. She was malnourished, but not that dirty. I gave her a pat or two and only got a layer of dust on my hand.

The beers that we bought just before closing time were drank even faster than the rest. "You're spending the night, right?" said Robert. Fat thief concave...

"What do you think Josh?"
"How are you Dan"
"I can drive dude"
"You sure"
"Yeah"
"Well, you wanna go than"
"Yeah"
"We're bringing the guys along right?"
"Yeah, of course."
"Will they fit?"
"We'll make them fit"
"Where are we going."
"Well, Tony said something about Porcupine."

Indeed he had. Apparently his mom cooks a good pot of buffalo stew. We wouldn't know.

We headed back toward Rushville, two to a seat. The low growl of the 92 Honda became a ghoulish moan.

17C: Adoption

Tony claims to be a great-grandson of Crazy Horse. This is plausible enough. Lakota chiefhood was never hereditary, and if it was what good would it do Tony now? So the fact that Tony doesn't have a sequin-suited retinue to carry him home at night does nothing to disprove his claim. Of course, this also means that neither he nor Eddie, Bryan, or Robert had the authority to adopt us into the tribe. They simply took it upon themselves to do so.

What do I say to that? I can only speak for myself on the matter and let my comrades do the same. The honor I felt was real. These men had taken us into their lives and freely shared it with us. They hid nothing, they have no social veils, which is traditionally unthinkible here in the on-grid world. That's changed a bit in the age of narcisism, of course. The age of writing concept albums about ourselves and building 5th amendment-defying photo dossiers of ourselves and writing endless tomes about ourselves. (Yes I know.)

But it was completely different with these men. they shared the details of their lives not out of vanity, not to keep themselves in the head of some girl they drank with and dude I totally know she likes me. They share themselves not out of vanity but the fatal lack of it. They live shamefully. Honesty is all they have, and I cannot excuse their suicides after building a friendship built on honesty. They live shamefully and they know it. Their ancestors who fought for them damn their surrender and they know it. So they die.

I too, live with shame. I'm a 26-year-old undergrad for God's sake. I've lied, cheated, been to jail. How then can I lecture older men? Because friends lecture each other, when there's a need to. I live with my shame gentlemen, I live with it. I do all I can to turn it into knowledge and fight with it. I strive to face my own putrid humanity in the mirror and laugh at it, with it. I strive to make others see themselves for what they are as well, to tear down the walls of tradition and pride and materialism, to deny them the opportunity to dilute themselves in the larger society and force them to take a look at what they are.

No, I am no Lakota. I thank you for the gesture but you know you don't have that power. I havn't lived without heat or plumbing, in a moldering or burned out shack.
What I am, what we are, is Whiteclaysians. The stumbling drunks and the fat-thieves, vagrant shells and rubbernecking arrogant hedonists. Singing together, laughing together, brothers in honest depravity.

Strip away society's justification myths and see your human skin for what it is. Then weep. Then laugh. Here is our unity. Here is our brotherhood. There, you have real morality now.

Wherever I stand I stand with you. Wherever I walk I walk with you. Now fight, Goddamn you. Get the fuck out of those plague-traps you live in. Stop offering tobacco to the smell of your own deaths as if it will make a difference. Track down whatever family will still have you at least hold them before the last elastic piece of your liver hardens. Live.