BAKERSFIELD, CA-

One night I was a guest on the Red Eye Radio show with host John Wessling. It was midnight. I was sitting in a bathroom near Disneyland. I had called in and started telling the show host how I was on a mission to find out if some of the dolls on the “It’s a Small World” ride were really little people from around the globe who were cryogenically frozen.

“I’m ready to unravel the mystery,” I said. “These sad little people need not go on display for the sake of international fame!”

My family was flip-flopping in the other room on uncomfortable beds, disturbed by my muffled bathroom cries to save the frozen children of Disney.



(more…)

SOUTH COAST, ENGLAND-

‘Goddamnit woman!’ I remember thinking. ‘SQUEEZE! YES! But for the love of God please shut the hell up!”

I hadn’t travelled all the way out to California to hear a rubenesque Midwestern woman squat out a deuce. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert, and this, apparently, was log country. I was not sat in a glamorous and expensive convertible — clearly. I was on a coach, heading to Las Vegas. I had the good fortune to be seated in front of the chemical toilet at the back, able to hear the whole dirty performance.

Whilst chewing on cold curly french fries, an ill-advised purchase from a stop at Arby’s, I had an horrific and horrendous thought: What if she’s pleasuring herself?! She’s been in there a damn long time! How can I know for sure? How can any of us know? And will the mental scars ever heal?

(more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I got onto the hood of our car and stared up at the milky stars. Eric’s yellow school bus was parked right behind us. Desert shrubs looked eerie in the moonlight. Olaf grabbed a blanket and walked off into the desert while I found myself dreaming about the past and the walking stick in the trunk and the mysterious man we had stumbled upon in the middle of the Ohio woods many days before.

Then I listened for snakes. I remembered what my parents had told me about the time they broke down in their old Volkswagen Beetle in the desert in the 1960s. My mother saw dozens of rattlesnakes when she took my sister for a pee by some shrubs. The way I remember my pop telling the story, there were snakes in the road, snakes winding past shrubs, snakes tangled, slithering, everywhere. It was like one of those classic old desert horror movies.

(more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I pulled up to the gas station in an old clunker, a 1978 Bonneville that was by far the worst car I ever had to drive or ride in. My girlfriend had that same stupid, sweet smile she had on her face as when we’d stolen some gas a few days before. We were in Akron, Ohio. A few days earlier, we had poured about sixteen bucks worth in the tank and took off without paying. It was easy as that.

We were living on the edge, but that was the state of things back in 1996. We were traveling in a terrible car, wishing we had more money, wishing we had a real vacation. We were living on the edge like some kind of drugless Hunter S. Thompson fiasco. My girlfriend had just gotten a job as a waitress at a restaurant where she stole bread each night for us to devour. It was that and the eggplant from a forest ranger who had a big garden in his yard. He made his own mulch, grew his own delicacies. Nick—that was the ranger’s name. He’d bought his car cheap after some people drove it into a lake and drowned in it. “The car smelled for a while,” he told us.

(more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

El Camino. 1984. V8 engine. 350. I never had one and I still don’t. But my just-graduated-son Landen gave me and a six-year-old punk girl named Jai Ann our first El Camino joyride. Destination: McDonald’s.

VIDEO: El Camino Cruisin’

It goes like this: We hit Gosford Road and flew like the Furies were chasing us. Clouds rolled past. Time slowed. This was our video game. Pull out the joystick. Hit the fire button. Blast some asteroids. Jump like Frogger. Fly like the Pacman family. Donkey Kong it. You get the picture. Soaring Xervious adventure. This was old school. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

She was a head-injured quadraplegic at a nursing home. I took care of her sometimes. The other assistants who cared for her brought her Playgirl magazines. They’d open them up to a photo of some guy’s package, which brought a big smile to her contorting face. A former Cal Trans road worker, she had been smashed by some kind of vehicle. She couldn’t talk, only smile. She couldn’t eat except through a tube that dangled from her side. But she loved porn. You could see it in her eyes. I had to turn her constantly to keep the sores off her body.

A head-injured man shared the room. All he could do was eat. I spoon fed him and had to massage his throat so he would swallow. I changed his diapers, took him to a shower room and hosed him off while he lay on a big blue gurney. He stared a lot. That’s all he could do. I didn’t sense any thought behind his eyes. I figured any kind of reasoning was hidden far behind a veil of fog so thick that his soul was in a constant winter.

His mother, whose fingernails looked like strange spades, would come to his room once a week and rub his head. She thought he might wake up. “He’s going to come through,” she said. Her little puffs of grey hair and big glasses hid a motherly anger I didn’t ever want to rouse.

I hung out with a couple of CNAs at the nursing home. James was a large black man who would tell me lots of Bible stories. “You know Christmas trees are in the Bible,” he said one day, then launched into the old testament tale on the topic.

“Fool, that’s a bad word. Don’t ever call anybody a fool,” James said on another occasion. “People don’t know they should be afraid of that word. God will punish them.”

I was glad to be at the nursing home, far away from the clinic where the angry head-injured like Ken Svent couldn’t throw his breakfast at me, or scream until his ribs shattered, or like Herman Burger the former six-foot, five-inch-tall gay lumberjack — he couldn’t lunge at me with his razor or throw his shoe at his Alaskan wilderness lover, miss, and hit a window.

My favorite head-injured was an old timer named Tom. He pitched in the World Series back in the 1950s and still had enough wits to show me his slider and curve ball. His smashed brain could at least put together those memories. I always wondered if he made the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. Anyone who played in a World Series should be so lauded, at least in my book.

The rooms and halls of the nursing home smelled like piss. That’s the difference between a clean hospital and any senior living center. The old in the hallways constantly piss themselves, the floor, their rooms. The smell lingers in a cloud of human waste.

I studied in the nursing home. I read and then fed the injured. I remember fall months and the leaves tumbling through the air outside the windows. I remember James saying he had another story for me. “It’s about God’s covenant by fire and water,” he said. He came into the room often and saw a bit of God in there. I know he did.
********************************
N.L. BELARDES is a journalist and videographer who manages a news site in central California. His bizarre trivia book, “Random Obsessions” is due to hit store shelves in late 2009. His work has appeared on the homepage of CNN.com and other news sites all over America. You can purchase Lords: Part One, which describes the infamous Lords of Bakersfield. N.L. welcomes humorous notes and news tips to his MySpace or Twitter. He also has the twitter novel, “Small Places,” a literary micro-blogging corporate mockery that you can get a sentence at a time via the Web or cell phone.

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I don’t know what happened. I could be one of those people who black out, who say things in moments where there’s no clarity, no real consciousness, just daydreaming –  starwalking in silent dreams during schoolyard bells.

The bus dropped me off near Geneva Avenue — that’s on the southside of Bakersfield. It was a poor blue collar street with stray dogs, tumbleweeds and the shitty kids I grew up with.

Walking home, I remember a short Asian-Mexican boy with a cleft palate. His face always looked angry, distorted. He had a mouth like a pumpkin scar. He was in the group of kids following me, encouraging the boy at the front of the pack to get me. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

I didn’t know there were going to be robots.

I stood on top of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I had just sat in a red metal pod with Brenda Knight. “There’s going to be pods,” she said. She was right. There was also a swimming pool. A girl slipped into it, glided through the water. Buildings crowded all around. The U.S. Bank Tower with its thousand lit windows looked like it could grow feet, step over the Standard and run into the ocean. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

The glue was pink. Barrels of thick pink glue.

Pink liquid poured through tubes, was sucked into basins where rollers whipped through them, coating pads. The rollers spun like little worlds on their axis. The pads, if you used your imagination just right, were shaped like continents and dripped with pink goo.

As each piece of paperboard shot through the rollers, pads would leave their marks. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

The bus rolled out of Bakersfield and went straight to Los Angeles. We crept out of the Central Valley, past cornfields and vineyards. Alfalfa lands sprouted purple wildflowers. An ascent into the Los Padres and over the San Andreas Fault meant an eventual descent with the bus like a rocket onto L.A.’s dirty streets. The grimy Greyhound station was in neighborhoods covered with graffiti and barbed wire. I expected smoke stacks on a cutting horizon, glowing neon “Blade Runner” umbrellas held by half-Chinamen and steam-faced cyperpunks in leather and make-up. This was 1998. No 1999 party yet. No new Millennium glitter. Just the excitement of the L.A. bus station, its high interior walls, addicts, travelers, pickpockets and lost souls. We were in a reality that steps over sad-faced women huddled around piles of clothing and bums sleeping on benches covered with the L.A. Times. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s happening again. I’m slipping as the ledge gives way. I close my eyes and see sweeping shades of brown: crumbly red-brown wet dirt, rushing mud waters, entire banks of sweaty boiling brown. Hands caked, grabbing, clawing. They’re covered in muck. Dirty tears are streaming.

I can’t hear my own cries for help.

I take a walk because I don’t want to think about it. I always do when I make decisions where I’m drowning in uncertainty. I mentally fight against the slide just like I did that day: arms and legs kick out to plow the mud as I slip further toward the torrent. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

His ashes were scattered on an alien landscape near the place where sand once fused to a nuclear sky. A few days before his ashes were strewn, an explosion of color filled the desert forest in between Lees Canyon and Mt. Charleston: a rare desert bloom…

Himself, he was Mexican cowboy who dreamed of wealth: St. Ignatius hidden desert caves filled with gold and glowing gems, and a royal flush on a well-rigged slot machine. He was a gambler and addict. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

As river systems flow, the Kern River is one of the mightiest in California. A star of films in the early 1900s, John Wayne stepped into its waters to shoot Injuns and fist-fight villains. The river lapped at his feet, sparkled, smiled, shone its teeth, and wore its own watery cloak like a glittery dress. If it could have walked the red carpet in hundreds of premieres starring itself, it surely would have. Fatty Arbuckle, Gene Autry, William Fairbanks, Rin-Tin-Tin, Gabby Hayes, Rex the Wonder Horse—they were all in the Bakersfield area, Hollywood’s backyard, just 150 miles northwest of a big fat Chinese theatre, and digging their claws and hooves into the succulent waters of the Kern. That’s just before it flows into the lands of the Great Central Valley. (more…)