Hopeless Journey

Food, Shelter, and Laughter

Lighting a Candle and Cursing the Darkness

Willingness to pay someone to make you laugh is a sure sign society has broken down. One day, amidst their own pointless, possibly perverted laughter, Cheap Dude and Sons decided to pool their resources and make a Road Trip to Tucson, for the sole purpose of laughing. Their favorite Professional Laugh Generator was hosting a benefit show for the local Useless Animal Defenders. Despite indifference to furriness fans, they defied their poverty to pay Stan Hopeless—in advance--for laughs.

They began early that day, to make time for breakdowns, big city mis-navigation, roadside snacks, general confusion, and of course to Get Good and Drunk before the show.

Sons knew the words to old hip-hop, and Cheap preferred it to “classic rock” corpses or milquetoast baroque. Down the central mountains, through Phoenix Babylon, at Marana they stopped to drain bladders and buy lunch meat, the first Quest of the day.

Off the highway, past Texxon’s Quickie Mart Grease Pit, was a little brick market among dead cotton fields. First, coffee-guzzling Cheap had to pee, but the grocery clerk claimed he had no restroom—underpaid clerks never pee, apparently. In the laundromat next door, the toilet was “for customers only,” but his bladder couldn’t wait to do a batch. By the toilet a sign asked 25 cents for non-customers’ use, and an “Honesty Cup” for payment. The Honesty Cup had a hole, he had to set the quarter sideways to keep it from falling to the icky-stained floor.

At the little meat counter, he asked for a pound of roast beef. “A poun?!” she exclaimed. Uh, well, maybe just a half-pound. “Half-poun?!” I don’t know, is two-thirds OK? “Two thi’d?!” Just start slicing and I’ll tell you when. For $15 he got enough for sandwiches all the rest of the day, and 12 sweet carbonated corn drinks. Lunch and dinner for five, a buck-fifty per meal! Yeah, too much, but living large on a Road Trip.

They pulled behind the market. No picnic table, but here was free public urination. They ate standing in sunshine, a winter blessing On The Road. Nobody washed their hands, they feared germs not. Fed and emptied they continued.

Quest for Parking was next. One son had an electronic Googly, Cheap had hand-copied directions from an old paper map. At one point Googly showed them passing through a building. At another, a robot-woman’s voice began telling them when and where to turn. Absent actual women they responded redneck style to the insistent voice: “Shut up ya dumb broad, we heard ya the first time,” and “Zip it witch, ‘fore ah punch ya!” And such. Dudine would have whipped them all had she heard.

Neither navigational system accounted for traffic direction changes. Intended parking garage on a wrong-way street so looped back west through town. Next lot blocked by padlocked cyclone fence. Across the street, tent dwellers in a little park, facing down the massive Inferior Court building, would need heavier artillery than Crap-Mart tents and desperation.

Finally they got to the top floor of the big garage, several hours from the laugh purchase redemption. Now, on foot, the Quest for Lodging.

There had been no common decision on whether to sleep afterwards or drive all the way back to Flagstaff. One son had to be to work next afternoon. They had basic camping gear, could cram into one cheap room or just throw down on the ground somewhere. The Hotel Congress beckoned with big neon, but was “sold out” when the scruffy five applied. Sold out, or sold out for the Unwashed? He wondered.

Directed down the street, near the tents, they found the other place obviously too expensive, no need to even ask. At that point two of the drinkers began to press a Quest for Alcohol. This is where the Googly paid off. It showed a liquor store within a mile, so they gave up the Quest for Lodging for the time.

By this time a further Quest, to Pee again, also began. Perhaps the tent dwellers had made the Owners nervous, all the buildings had large “NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS” signs taped in the windows. The tall sign of an old motel beckoned near the joyously perceived “LIQUOR” neon, Cheap hustled down the street.

But the motel was boarded up and falling down. They took their sack of liquor east, another boarded motel then the Children’s Museum. Despite his dignified desperation, it was “against policy” for him to pee there. He cringed and frowned and went where they sent him, Armory Park across the street.

Armory Park was where the tent-dwellers should have been, big and flat and open, with a tough name. Maybe the well-to-do of Tucson did not want to explain homeless squatters to their museum-going kids. But every Armory door was locked. His bladder screamed, what now?! Back to Inferior Court for a Urine Deposition?

One shabby figure huddled face down at a “picnic table” on the perimeter. A healthier specimen mumbled gibberish with a hand-to-mouth smoking motion. Cheap bummed a cig from his nicotine-addicted son, strolled up, handed it over, “Hey man, where does a regular guy take a good old-fashioned piss around here?”

Fortunately the guy knew, with proper grammar and pronunciation, a little café down the alley, they’re pretty cool he said. Yes! Thank you “Shot in the Dark.” (Pee Quest: future cell phone program, telling where you can comfortably pee free in any city.)

Back to the parking lot they poured booze into bellies and brains, after noting “security camera” locations. (No need to advertise their ‘tailgate party’.) Further Pee Quests pre-empted with a large cup, emptied down the exit ramp.

Still no show for three hours though. Looking off the concrete edge, they noticed tents and crowds in rows down a regular street. Drunkish folks kept coming to their cars, arguing or laughing stupidly before driving off. One little family got to their car quietly, until mom shrieked at one of her kids, “STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!” So began the Quest for Free Amusement. Googly acknowledged the existence of the Fifth Avenue Fair or something, so they went People Watching.

More citizens, slightly happy/drunk, exited the traffic barriers as they entered. Rows of little tent booths selling mostly artsy stuff. No better than Crap-Mart, but “local made” at least, or not. The same as Sedona and Jerome, one son noted. They bought nothing, even the food cost too much, but rows of portable poop-houses reduced Pee Quests to mere pee taking, which should be called pee giving.

They smelled pot for about a hundred yards, strong, folks were looking around and sniffing and making wisecracks about it. Threading through humanity, every size, shape, color, and economic level. Next street almost deserted, not a rich men’s ‘hood, walking back. Guitar-playing singer belting out country music under the train track overpass, good acoustics down there without cars.

Another hour to kill after picking up the tickets; seven was “doors open” not “show starts,” they discovered. Marched into the Congress despite their earlier snub, ordered two $2 beers and sat across from the registration desk at the edge of the crowded lobby. The beers allowed the five of them to sit in the warm noise, no way could any of them afford to drink seriously at a bar.

Exiting they found a line for the show stretching down the street, and they bummed heavily until one remembered they already had tickets.

It worked, they all laughed. Cheap kept noticing tears running down his face. Stan Hopeless as always working the edges, sometimes the only way humans could directly face life’s horrors was with laughter. He got on a roll, the show ran late, and that was OK. Sons complained later their guts were sore from laughing so deep and hard. (Ha, “deep and hard.”)

With the nervous energy of a dissipating liquor buzz, Cheap decided to drive until he got sleepy. In Phoenix they pulled off for gasoline. At a motel advertising $40 rooms, cops swarmed one wing. Paper taped to the lobby desk said no room at the inn.

So two a.m., sober and cranky, and three hours from home. After the $40 titillation he would not pay more, so he kept driving, past the last Outlet Mall of civilization. He’d been up almost 24 hours by the time he took the last low desert exit. Too cold to sleep higher up.

Table Mesa Road: literal translation Table Table Road. 50 feet from the Interstate it turned to dirt. People had been pulling off here for years to drink, get high, shoot guns, camp, drive “quads” (motorized toys), cool their machines, pray, whatever. Three a.m., they threw down their tarps and pads and bags and pillows and slept.

Fatherly nervousness kept Cheap from sleeping for long, he woke at the first sign of light, finally got up and made coffee on his little backpacking stove. Smoked and walked around. They’d slept amid broken glass and bullet shells. They had laughed at a possible gang-rape finale, by a truckload of drunken desert-billies from Black Canyon City, looking for release with weapons and sodomy, preferably both. But this is not that story.

Down the road, a sign proclaimed entrance to the T T Ranch. “T T” was one of the family’s most common penis euphemisms, so it was appropriate for their all-beef adventure.

Another sign stapled to the first sign, “NO SHOOTING ATV’S.” No one actually shot All Terrain Vehicles. Actual cowboys used them on actual ranches. Hunters hauled their victims whole, no longer wrestling gutted animal chunks down the rocky hills. Everyone else used them to go fast on public lands. This was fine if you were leader, but no one else saw anything but rear wheels and dust. Popular spots’ dust was plentiful, and went everywhere, coated every eyeglass, alveoli, and sandwich.

Scattered trash. Scrap lumber in one dumped pile, possible firewood. Cholla cactus shotgun-blasted, a vicious plant that deserved to die.

Out of boredom and cheapness he began freelance mining, gathering aluminum nuggets and brass bullet shells from the ground. Defraying costs. Like panning for gold but the nuggets were everywhere, and worth much less. Maybe there was hope for the States, there were still shiny metal objects on the ground for the taking. Smashed can of a new Mexican beer brand, Blanco Basura, “White Trash.”

The barbed wire fences were rusty, broken and twisted, easily crossed.

So when you go off the main track in the Old West, you no longer find an old cowboy and his horse, by a stream and a campfire. If you are lucky, some of the trash on the ground will be worth something, and people you meet good-natured idiots. The trees have been “harvested,” and the desert wrecked by hungry cows and lazy humans.

Real treasure: a handful of unfired bottle-rockets on the ground. He launched them as direct sunlight peeked around Table Mountain. Living in gun culture, you could always shoot off fireworks. If people heard ‘em, hey, it’s OK maw, “just someone shootin.” Wake up, fornicators of your great-grandmothers, almost home!

Beyond sanctimonious church ignorami and angry Elks Club rednecks, there was another oddball community, of comedy. Yes they’d paid people to make them laugh. But where else could they be among so many like-minded citizens? Was it “worth it?”

There would be much secondary laughter, recalling “good ones.” Laughs per dollar a lifetime calculation. Always worth it. Sometimes, all they had.