Strip clubs and vato bars

This week was the worst in a long time. Still no parking permit, and the iPod was stolen from my backpack after having only been away for 10 minutes to get lunch.

Weekend’s been busy as I am beginning assignments for the TV reporting class. News is a terrible profession and I’ll only go into it as a last resort. Last night I went on a ride-along with fire marshals as they visited nightclubs and issued citations. Two gentleman’s clubs were on the list which made it the first (and probably last) two visits for me. Losers inside seemed to get excited by the presence of a video camera. The things I do for a passing grade.

Texas football at Colorado next weekend, and you’re damn right I’m making the trip.

Ghosts

I’m not one to live in the present. I’m always planning ten moves ahead, or else I’m daydreaming in my seat, dwelling on the past. For all of the moments when I looked at my disheveled self in the mirror and thought my best days were behind me, I saw one thing above all others on my trip this summer that put everything in perspective. You see, as of press time, I’m still alive and kicking. What I came upon on an abandoned stretch of road had been dead for years, and the skeleton won’t be around many more in its present state.

The scene: Arizona, Route 66. Indian Country. A place where tourism centers around the romanticized highway of old: Instead of gift shops, there are trading posts. In place of souvenirs, curios. My brother had read about a popular haunt for American automobile history/tourism buffs. We exited Interstate 40 and turned onto a rough dirt path, took another turn and found ourselves on the old alignment of Route 66 before Eisenhower’s plans reached fruition. The narrow asphalt strip had been chipped away by the elements and sported an array of weeds and sagebrushes which had grown through its cracks. I winced more than a dozen times when hearing these things hit the undercarriage of my sedan. And then, 2.5 miles later. Shit, man. Shit. Would you look at that.

The Painted Desert Trading Post. A relic of the burgeoning U.S. highway system in all of its ancient splendor. A way station for the downtrodden making their Depression pilgrimage westward. A watering hole for postwar middle-class families en route to the Petrified Forest, Grand Canyon, Disneyland and beyond. And it clearly has been dead for a long, long time.

We exited the car (after positioning it back toward our point of entry and leaving it running in case of an encounter with brigands, highwaymen or property owners whose barbed wire and KEEP OUT signs we failed to notice) and slowly made our way into the building. No, structure. A building in this state would have been condemned and mercifully flattened decades ago. Inside, a broken television set. A piece of waste one brought for miles out here to dispose of, presuming that the final resting place of semi-indoors prevented it from being called “litter?” I goose-stepped gingerly across rotting boards and dust, fearing rattlesnakes but finding none. Ryan took a walk around the perimeter. My peripherals detected something galloping fewer than a hundred yards away outside one of the holes that was formerly a window. A deer, maybe? A feral cat? Didn’t see it again. A dozen minutes, maybe we spent. Mostly in silence. Nothing to be spoken that didn’t come from a running V6 engine, the occasional breeze or that staccato open-field buzz that’s either some kind of field insect… or that rattlesnake I came prepared for but never encountered. And the rumble of trucks on the interstate a scant two miles away. Checked my phone. Several bars worth of service, so at least there’s piece of mind of something went awry. Still, how the hell to direct someone out to where we were? The roof will surely cave in soon enough, and I don’t want to be underneath it when it does.

“You ready?”

“Huh.”

See it while you can, because age will take the Post from us sooner rather than later. It’s already caving and I’m anxious for the next time I come near Holbrook, for I may take that same ghost road, and may be severely disappointed with what I have found.

12 minutes inside part of American History. For something that dead, I never felt so alive.