To the south, which is for why always west, or should be, into illimitable Freedom…mapcalled, flatcolored Fleedom — the House of Bondage, a new essen&M themed leather joint risen at the Mexican border: a place friendly for a rest, an inexact shave and a wash, a sip cerveza and a hot meal on the way outcountry; a bar & grill, a waystation and hideaway, too, made of metal, roofed and walled, of the refuse of repentant bikers that’s piled out back, as well, and, also, in the sandlot up front — riders hunkered down around their flaming wrecks, Harleys smelted to holy. To the north, then, and to the east, which are the same directions, which is — a grayhaired exheavy in a visor and ten cableknit sweaters for the cold stands a soar atop his private, No Trespassing mesa, keeps his head down, his eye balled, swings himself out into the sandtrap we call the desert, a sunset pastel, and then in disgust at his shot and with the weather, throws his driver up to the sky to tangle with a bolt of lightning come down — and from it, the neon…necromantic, illuminating each and every failure, among them one (Emanuel) L. Leeds, the Good and rt. Irreverend L. survived, today the appropriately yarmulked and side-lockladen Rabbi El he’s aliased as (a costumey disguise, though he’s liking it perhaps a lach too much), bedding down in the back of a jeep he’ll hotwire from its unfortunate owner tomorrow, up on the sixth floor of the parkinggarage of the Al-Cohol Hotel & Q’asino, kept warm by a bottle of Vat 613 and a pack’s worth of smokes flavored besamim he’s rolled himself. They’re out for L., and L.’s out for Him, too — can’t stand the memory of that Joysey humiliation…reeling tales as tall as Him about the One that got, gevalt, away to a host of obliging or just pitying unionists: Double Triple Quadruple Pay / We Ain’t Gonna Work on Sa-Tur-Day, them striking out for the picket-line that hazards the tourists’ turquoise rim of the moon; their ostentatiously jewelried rep giving good quote…“we don’t believe in an end to God’s bounty, or in a border to our country, either, America, the world.” Which by an estranging yet commodious rictus brings us westward ho, which is southbound, again, as it’s been said with a smile, and, if given to belief in all the signs that bedevil the toothless, tongueless, gaping beyond, the north and east, too, all of it together and around again if the mystic’s your thing, also if not: silver highways that, if you obey the recommendations of their contingently blinking advisories, if only you would heed their wondrous warnings arcaned in ways symbolized of arrows and stars, promise to take you out as far as the garden of Angels, which is Holywood, the second city that is all cities, but is all other cities perfected, made irreal: apparently, a place of pilgrimage, the developers now sell it as, per the glossed propaganda a mystical shrine, in which dream need not be its own fulfillment, no matter how common its interpretation nor how brute its price. Here there are intersections and there are causeways and byways, there are interchanges and coded connections, known only to the select under hidden numbers, by secret names. To approach this wisdom, it’s said, you must follow the wide wave of the desert, then turn — averting disaster — just before its break, forsaking its spill over the concrete and the meridian there, to abandon its wake that drifts sand as if stars to constellate the further beach, which gives itself over to the Pacific as a grave, the bottommost burial of the world…this is the ocean, the other ocean. A rumbling wave prays in thanks for the sacrifice of the shore, the land, the dry earth. As here, as much as everywhere else, the heavens open: every weather crowded into cloud. It’s Friday already, it’s the Sabbath again, and we tumble into its fissure, timequaked — the void of yet another Shabbos.
Here, one line of many, infinite, or, in another interpretation, the one and only line — this leading to the nameless, perhaps stockless, and so just reliant on false word-of-mouth, OffReservation liquorstore (a line that alternates lame hosses and lamer pickup trucks with the odd pulling, motorpuling tractor modified into a snowplow thrown in to keep it interesting, everyone awake, at attention) — snakes through the early evening’s long quiet plaining to holy. A slight past the line’s middle three eligible Injun bachelors in ripped wifebeaters, two of them in meshbacked caps over slick mullets, hurry to replace a gutted tire on their white Silverado, while Kuskuska her name is she sits I’m too pretty, smart, important, and female to deal with ya’ll in a battered bluecollared recliner nailed down to the flatbed and facing exhaust. Atop this poor sprung stuffless throne she’s just singing along; all the radios are on and are loud.
