VAMPIRE RUN TO VEGAS AND THE JAMES DEAN GAS STATION
The day after the eclipse, we left Phoenix as the sun was setting,heading for Las Vegas. It was dark before we hit the strip of Highway 93 known asBloody Alley because of all the accidents that happen there.
My fantasies of agalactic highway system were tempered by my having watched the Mexican vampiregunslinger movie El Pueblo Fantasma before Emily got off work.
She alsobrought some of her mom’s ashes, after all, we were carrying on the traditionof the Maggie Devenport Annual Road Trip. Em also brought an audiobook ofStephen Fry reading ghost stories, to set a spooky mood as we glided throughthe interstellar blackness of the dark desert void.
My writer’s brain noted that a vampire making this drive would bea good beginning for a vampire story. It would need more, though. Stuff to keepit from being a cornball, here’s-the-vampire-folks thing. Too bad that JamesDean didn’t live to star in an R-rated, Seventies, “Vampire Run to Vegas.” Ormaybe in the story, he became a vampire, who now drives these roads at night .. .
At one point a pair of headlights came straight at us . . .
We gassed up at Kingman. $3.95 a gallon. The Petro station wasfestooned in Halloween decorations. The gritty realities of 2023 C.E. wereeffectively blacked out. Dime store demons were welcome companions.
After a while, Vegas materialized as an ocean of urban lights,triggering my visions of a galactic civilization.
Spent the night in Mike’s Henderson (just out of L.V.) house,parked our Elantra, transferred our stuff–including Emily’s mom–to his Prius, andhad no trouble getting to sleep even if a neighbor’s air conditioner played amechaniod concerto just out our window.
Next morning we whizzed past Las Vegas. The illusions of aglittering, mulitcolored, neon Oz on the edge of decadent galaxy gave way tothe sun-blasted, post-Apocalypitic deserts of Planet Nevada, its own world ofgambler’s utopia, legal prostitution, atomic testing, Area 51 . . . Hunter S.Thompson was right, this is the American Dream . . . Ha . . . Ha . . . Ha . . .
Henderson, and other Nevada towns, are Mars colony-esque. As mostof the arid Southwest–Aztlán, dammit!--is. This region is a dress rehearsal forwhat Terrestrial Civilization (if you haven’t noticed, WesternCivilization is an obsolete concept) plans to do to the Red Planet. It’ll belike Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, only a lot more bizarre . ..
Somehow, I managed to get to California without taking any PlanetNevada photos. The westward journey mellowed into a different kind ofweirdness. Then when it gets to California, the state of my birth, it becomesfamiliar territory, but then we were north of the SoCal of my youth, stillanother flavor of strange.
This popped into focus in Wasco, at the Jolly Kone Drive-In, now apostmodern archaeological ruin, boarded up with its wind and ultravioletradiation-eaten sign, and a mural blending into graffiti in the back. What I’vebeen talking, and writing, about. It could have been part of one of my Marsstories.
Then, in trying to find our way through farm country, a friendlyhighway worker pointed us to the James Dean gas station. It’s a local touristspot, the last stop Dean made before he drove off to have his fatalaccident.
It was selling gas for $6.35 a gallon. There was also a giganticstore/tourist trap with all kinds of stuff for sale, and photo ops that weren’tnecessarily on subject.
Dean probably would have made a great vampire in his old age. Nowone of the cutouts of him stands by the gas pumps, with bird shit dripping downhis face.
