RoBoTNiK

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Wayne Newton built an empire there. Randall Flagg made it the capitol city of evil. Sammy Davis Jr. called it “instant swinger.” What am I talking about? Shoot, boy, I’m talking about Vegas, what the hell you talking about?

When we arrived around 6 pm, it was an infernal 120 degrees F, cooling to an oven-cleaning 110 by midnight. To fully experience the true Vegas gemutlichkeit we stayed in an absolute dive. The Motel Monte Carlo in Bob Dole’s own Russel, Kansas was a respectable second, but Las Vegas’ Casablanca Motel wins the coveted Jenkie Award for Scariest Motel of Our Trip hands down. The Carpet Formerly Known as Orange Shag was itself carpeted with about a pound of cigarette butts and ashes, where they hadn’t burned through to the concrete floor, that is. The paper-thin Reel-Wud ™ walls didn’t quite reach to the ceiling, and the tap in the bathtub didn’t actually turn off. The air conditioning didn’t work exactly, but it did emit the cooling scent of carcinogenic freon. But neither heat nor hail nor roach motels could keep us from our appointed rounds: which is to say checking out the fabled Strip.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Hey, you kids! Shut up back there! It’s time to play:

Here’s how it works: Stop kicking the back of your mother’s seat and sit quietly staring out the window. When you see any of the objects or signs listed on your BINGO card, mark that space with a coin, a counter, a half-chewed Chiclet, a booger, or possibly a small dried bean. Be sure to share those beans with your sister! When you have marked out a complet row, column, or diagonal, you win! (Do NOT yell “BINGO.” That word is a registered trademark of which you are not a holder, and besides, your father is trying to concentrate on traffic. Just congratulate yourself inwardly and sit still. Maybe you can name all of the presidents.) These are all pretty much things we saw on our trip (the twister was very small), so if you can’t complete your card, I have no sympathy for you.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

“You never leave a man behind!”

You-Had-To-Be-There Moment #45

“Hey, do you smell kibble?”

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Why hasn’t this been in a Robert Rodriguez movie yet? There’s a highway through the New Mexico desert called Route 666!

We’d seen it marked like a prophecy on a huge road map on the wall of the Elvis Diner in Memphis, and we resolved over fried peanut butter and quaalude sandwiches to drive that bad boy. 3,000 km later, we were there! What I really wanted was a picture in front of one of those black and white shield shaped highway signs saying “Route 666 South,” with all of us throwing the heavy metal devil sign in front of it. Knights in Satan’s service, that’s what we are, yeah.

But our half-inflated dark master was not smiling on us this day. We drove fifty damn miles up the Highway of the Beast, and every single Route 666 sign had been swiped, no doubt to be hung with pride in college dorm rooms and fun family restaurants across the Southwest. In the end, we had to make do with a little green and white mileage sign and some admittedly deckid highway to hell scenery. It was real Roadrunner and Coyote territory out there, with mesas (mesae?) and tumbleweeds and big red boulders precariously balanced on slender fingers of rock.

Afterwards, we passed the MTV Rock The Vote bus heading the other way, so it could’ve been them that stole the signs. I wouldn’t put it past that noted defender of democracy Jenny McCarthy.

[2006 Edit: Well, the world is just a little less cool today: In July 2003, Route 666 was renamed Route 491, “putting an end to decades of devilish innuendo and road sign thievery.” Navajo medicine men were on hand to bless the new highway and ‘cleanse’ the demons of the old one. OK, the part about the Navajo medicine men is a little cool. And Route 666 never became a Robert Rodriguez movie, but it did become a Lou Diamond Phillips movie, which is almost as good, right? “Not terrible,” raves “User Comments” at IMDB.]

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Besides UFOs, New Mexico is also near and dear to our hearts for a little something called the Manhattan Project, the birthplace of the bomb.

The National Atomic Museum is on an Air Force Base with checkpoints and military police and everything, but is actually owned and operated by Sandia Corp–a subsidiary of DOW Lockheed Boeing I.G. Farben Geffen Globex You Get The Idea. We got onto the base and did the tour and oohed and aahed at Titans and Peacemakers and other death-dealing phallic symbols and avoided eye contact with Japanese tourists. You had to goof on the ghoulish “Better Living Through Massive Retaliation” sunniness of the place, from the Sandia Corp’s happy sunshine logo, to their “Cavalcade of Nuclear Bombers,” to the handmade chocolates in the gift shop shaped like Fat Man and Little Boy. The crunchy sweets that vaporised Hiroshima and Nagasaki… atom-o-licious!

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

New Mexico: It’s The Newer Mexico

Do you think they ever get tired of jokes like that in New Mexico?

<--The picture they don't want you to see: me witnessing an alien autopsy, or Jonathan Frakes hosting a crappy special on Fox? You be the judge…

(Don’t Go Back to) Roswell

You may not consider it anything to brag about, but I was a UFO geek long before a certain alphabetically named television program brought the wonderful wide world of ETs, MIBs, and EBEs into America’s living rooms. And–with the possible exception of Nevada’s Area 51, which is in the middle of a missile testing range and not real hospitable to roadtrippers–Roswell, New Mexico is the Mecca of UFO geekdom.

Here’s the facts, sort of. In July 1947, something crashed in the desert northwest of Roswell. A U.S. Army press release said that the army had recovered pieces of some form of “flying saucer.” The next day a second press release declared that the object was in fact a weather balloon, and that’s been the official story ever since.

Now, maybe “flying saucer” was just a poor choice of words by some dumb Army Press Department hack who has been peeling potatoes for his screw-up ever since. Or, just maybe, the Roswell Crash is one lone crack in the facade of a fifty-year coverup engineered by a massive and ruthless conspiracy stretching to the highest level of government, if not the very stars!

Now, which explanation do you think brings more tourists to Roswell?

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

By the time we entered Texas, it was clear that Brown Jenkin’s air conditioner, barely adequate at the best of times, had gotten one taste of Dixie in August and packed itself off to freon heaven. Hoo boy! Just in time for, let’s see: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Death Valley, the Mojave Desert…

Jack, Bobby, & Elvis Chasing Tail Together in Heaven

So we were well and truly cooked when we got to Dallas, our boiled brains quite incapable of dealing with traffic lights or onion rings or human communication. No matter, though. We didn’t come to Dallas to make friends (though we made a chum of the gas station attendant who spied our cooler of beer and was rewarded with a cold one). We came for one reason only: because in this city thirty-three years ago, a mail-order rifle put a bullet through America’s collective consciousness, not to mention the skull of a president and Harvard man.

There is a museum in Dealy Plaza devoted entirely to the Kennedy assassination, located, appropriately enough, on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. Unfortunately, the museum is done with restraint and good taste. No blood-splattered death car a la Buford Pusser, no “interactive” rifles with telescopic sights, no black velvet paintings of Jack, Bobby, and Elvis chasing tail together in heaven. Kennedy was treated positively, but it was no hagiography, and the assassination itself was presented with realistic skepticism towards both the Warren Commission’s official explanation and the many theories of paranoids the world over. What a let down.

A Stroll On The Knoll

What visit to Dealy Plaza would be complete without a stroll on the knoll? The Grassy Knoll, that is, where, conspiratoid legend has it, Kennedy’s real killers were perched that fateful day (not to be confused with the Grassy Gnoll, who can attack with his trusty flail or claw/claw/bite for three attacks per round, hey-o, tip your waitress). Many fine books and videos were on sale there on the sidewalk, each one revealing the Real Truth, no doubt. We pretended to be Men In Black and lurked and skulked and made only 90-degree turns.

The years have taken their toll on the knoll. It was less grassy and a lot more stinky than we’d expected. In fact, the knoll reeked of urine. This was probably just the work of a wino lacking in historical awareness, but still I had this mental image of the Cigarette Smoking Man coming back to mark his territory.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

So this part was written in 2006, not 1996. You can tell by the italics: my words are bent over by middle age, like myself.

This seems as good a place as any to reiterate: I wrote all this ten years ago. That means the zine was the work of a much younger guy, a guy just out of university with no students to try to look mature in front of and no tenure committee to impress. I am resisting the urge to censor our adventures, and the much stronger urge to take out the parts where I sound like a smart-ass Canadian punk. I ask you to read the zine charitably in return. Trust me that lines like “bust a cap in yo’ ass” sounded fresher ten years ago, and don’t ask why I felt the need to explain what The Rockford Files was.

I once read a review of U2’s Rattle and Hum that complained the Irish rockers didn’t know the difference between coming to America and conquering it. Rattle and Hum was their American roadtrip zine: “Look Ma, here we are at Graceland! Here we are in Harlem! Here we are with B.B. King! We’re real American rock stars now!” Bono and the boys can certainly be smug at times, and when white rockers cross the pond to pal around with the black musicians who inspired them, well, there’s a whole weird history there. But Rattle and Hum remains my, and probably nobody else’s, favorite U2 album. I always figured they just had to make that album because they’d come to America and America was so damn cool. They sang with B.B. King because he’s B.B. King, damn it, and they were thrilled to do it.

A couple of years after the road trip I spent a few weeks researching for the Let’s Go travel guide in San Francisco, and I hung out with a bunch of Irish backpackers I met in the youth hostels there. By then, I’d been in the States just long enough to act blasé about it, but they were so excited by America! Everything delighted them. That was probably the best Fourth of July I ever had.

What I’m saying is, hopefully enthusiasm excuses immaturity. In 1996, I was just newly arrived in America, still goofing on the novelty of it all, and parts of this zine make me wince at the smart-ass I was trying to be back then. I’m pretty sensitive to Canadian smugness about the U.S. today, because I’ve had so many good years there and because I grew out of some of that smugness myself. But I hope that my genuine love for the place shines through. I did, and do, think that things like Enterprise Square (the very next post) and Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden (we’re getting to it) and the Things Museum four miles north of St. Joe, Arkansas, are both hilarious and wonderful. I love that side of America, $2 steaks and all.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

“No beer is needed here!”
–anyone remember what this is from? anyone?

Thirty beers (or “thirty beer,” as we say in Canada) for under thirteen dollars (or “thirteen dollar,” as we say in movies about the Vietnam war) is pretty astounding to us Canadian boys, but better yet is the fact that you can buy said beer at an Oklahoma gas station called “The Git N’ Go.” Give me a yee, give me a haw. That was about an hour’s worth of driving humor for us right there.

You-Had-To-Be-There Moment #23

Oklahoma City is, like the song says, oh so pretty. We hit the Motel 6, and were offered a great deal on hot jewelry by a dissheveled lady living out of her car in the parking lot. Her sales pitch was great (one diamond engagement ring for thirty beer), but her demographic targeting left a little to be desired. Once in the motel, we set about drinking that beer, and got out Derek’s guitar to write some musical accompaniment to our adventures so far. This got stupid even faster than you might imagine, particularly because Derek’s muse (or the heat) required him to wear only his paisley undies.

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Seems to me like you can’t throw a dead armadillo in the Upper South without hitting some Grand Ole Opry-style country music jamboree. And for some reason, every single one features a sad chinless old drunk named “Gummy Joe” or “Cheaplaughs Johnson” or “Gurner Pete”* as comic relief. Pictured here are “Stinky Willie” and Ida May from the Baldknobber’s Kissin’ Cousins Good Time Roundup, or something, in Mousetail Landing, Tennessee. Can you imagine just how offensive this would be if they weren’t white?

*A “gurner” is someone with a rubbery face who can swallow their chin or make other weird expressions. They’re almost required for shows of this ilk. Pete taught me that word on the trip, actually. See: World Gurning Championships.

[2006 Edit: Sorry about the crazy pixellation of that photo. I’ve long since lost the flyer for the Baldknobber’s Inbred Stereotype Hoedown, or whatever it was called, so I had to scan that page in from my zine. And when I made the zine, I didn’t know diddly about scanning and resizing pictures. Actually, the zine really pushed the limits of the technology available to me when I made it. I remember I put most of it together in the computer labs at school, and that meant saving it all onto disk (remember disks?) each time I went home. But if I added all the pictures, the whole zine wouldn’t fit on a floppy. So I laid it all out with the pictures, then deleted them all and printed the pages with blank spaces, then cut and pasted the pictures back in with actual scissors and tape before taking the whole thing to the indie anti-Kinko’s they used to have in Harvard Square. True story.]

Next: The creepiest museum in Arkansas, and that’s saying something.