I got back to Prescott yesterday afternoon, after a couple of weeks away. I left on Sunday about noon and drove to Mohave, where I stopped into my usual Mohave digs. It’s a forty dollar a night dive with HBO I’ve stayed in for years. I decided I needed a third point in my orbital pattern, and Mohave is an interesting character in any story. It’s where the Space Shuttle comes cruising in over the airplane graveyard.
It’s also a highway town, built along the east side of the highway, with the railroad tracks running along the west side. Sometimes the wind blows hard enough it feels like it’s going to take off the roof, and other times it’s still until the train comes through, making the room rumble and shudder.
There was a sign on the door. ”Office closed.” And it gave a number to call if it was an emergency. Well, I supposed my wanting my room at six o’clock wasn’t an emergency, but I didn’t know what was going on. Maybe the Chinese couple that run the place were out to dinner with friends. The Chinese man who used to run it left and opened a whorehouse, from what the new owner inferred. I don’t care what he’s doing, he’s my friend. I once left a roll of hundreds on the dresser in my room and he gave it back to me. Come to think of it, that might have set him thinking about opening a whorehouse, seeing how much cash some old white men carry.
Now I’m well off enough I don’t ever have much cash in my pocket, in case you were thinking about hiding behind the fence around which runs a path through the darkness to the liquor store next door to the motel. I left the money in the room while I went to get some beer because I didn’t want to carry it on me. And lest I remember it was there, I slipped it under the ice bucket. Brilliant.
My first thought was to keep driving as it was relatively early. But it was dark, and I wasn’t going to drive all the way to Prescott, so there wasn’t much point in going on to Barstow or Needles. Besides, I like driving into the Mohave early in the morning with a cup of McDonald’s coffee and an aerodynamic egg on a muffin. It’s part of the Mohave ritual. So I decided to look around for someplace else to stay. My only requirement was that it be no more than forty bucks.
I picked out the one that seemed to have a few extras, like HBO, and didn’t look like a set for a B horror flick. The Indian man at the desk was pleasant enough, and the room itself was fine. I was especially pleased with the tasteless decor, with clashing forms and colors testifying to a frugal budget. A nice place would be suspicious for forty bucks. The television was bigger than in the other place and the remote actually worked. I pulled out my iPhone to get my email and was surprised to see that I had wireless internet. It just worked, with no hassle or password.
The only problem was that it was cold in Mohave on Sunday night, and the room heater fan rumbled like a truck on jake brake. With it on I had to jack up the volume to hear the television. HBO had something sucky on, so I was watching a movie on one of the testosterone channels: Con Air, with Nickolas Cage, about some murderous convicts led by John Malkovich. He murdered a few people before getting the bright idea of ordering passenger Steve Buscemi, “The Marietta Mangler,” be freed from his outfit, which was the same one Hannibal the Cannibal wore when he was transported from one facility to another. If you don’t know Buscemi, think of the skinny little kidnapper in Fargo. He’s a familiar face but maybe not a familiar name.
As you might imagine, that airplane was a bad neighborhood with no exit. Nick Cage managed to get a message to the U.S. Marshals Office by writing it on the chest of this guy whose body was stuck in the wheel well — which is why they couldn’t get the landing gear to come up all the way and were off schedule — so he he had to push him out over a city, and as a humorous aside there was this couple at a stop light complaining about a bug hitting the clean windshield … okay, you see where this is going …
I had put a half bottle of red wine, some pocket bread and pears in the back of the truck when I left San Francisco, and I got them out and had a little repast while I watched the movie. Another thing this other place had was a coffee maker, so yesterday morning I made a pot of coffee and watched the news before heading out into the desert, instead of going to McDonald’s. Instead I stopped at the Starbuck’s in Barstow for an egg salad sandwich and latte as provisions for the drive to Needles. You can drive forty or fifty miles without seeing signs of civilization on that stretch of I-17.
There was an accident on the highway between Barstow and Needles, and the traffic on the Interstate was eerily sparse. The electronic sign at Barstow said all eastbound lanes were blocked. I figured by the time I got there they would have it cleared but they didn’t. The only way around it was on side roads, including a stretch of Route 66. I put on the genius and got a country playlist seeded off of “Close Up the Honky Tonks” by Dwight Yokum off his Dwight sings Buck album. Then I relaxed into a back road adventure. It’s more kicks on 66.