Ben plotted our route east through California and inadvertently took us through a series of towns of varying significance in my childhood. First Wasco, where I lived partial summers with my Dad's parents, a gentle and jovial Baptist preacher and his twinkly-eyed, self-righteous, Dutch and Potowatami Indian, Oklahoma farm-bred wife who grew and canned her own vegetables and walked me to and left me to turn brown at the community swimming pool across the street from their trailer park every day except Sunday, when we went to church to hear my grand-daddy preach. It nearly shocked the devil's own hell right out of every last Christian one of my Dad's six preacher and missionary siblings when, years after his death, research into family ancestry turned up evidence that grand-daddy Greenwalt was ethnically Jewish. Thank you, Internet. I'm still laughing about it. This shit is so rich.
We stayed that night, Monday, in Tehachapi. Tehachapi is a really charming, western, high desert town, small enough to hear a train come through every 15 minutes regardless of where in town you happen to be. Mostly we were inside our room at the Ranch Hotel Motel, not to be confused with the Ranch House Motel a stone's throw up the road. This was undoubtedly the coldest place I have ever slept indoors. We might have been warmer had we used our blankets to seal the two-inch opening under one corner of our door.
Ben: (Shivering) It's freezing in here. Do you feel this draft?
James: (Teeth chattering) Y-y-y-yes! There is light coming in under the door. A lot of it. It was so cold last night I literally died.
Ben and James together: Shrieks of hysterical laughterEntering town, I missed some of the charm because it was getting dark and I was freaking out that this was the town where my dad had killed a man when I was eleven. I don't know that I would have believed it but for his decades-long disappearance to Mexico and subsequent trial and conviction in my adulthood. I had no idea we would be passing through Tehachapi and we certainly had no plans to spend the night, but the whole thing was too surreal not to, and so we did. No revelations came out this night of huddling together like skinny dogs to preserve body heat; we simply woke in a sunny, charming western town, refreshed and happy to get back in Billy, whose heater works like an absolute dream. Thanks, Billy, for taking us away from here.
Tuesday night we ate Mexican food and drank a margarita in Twentynine Palms. My Dad's most corpulent and sanctimonious brother and his well-matched wife shepherded one of Jesus's flocks here in the eighties. I visited as a kid and played monopoly and watched the original Footloose with Kevin Bacon as the dancing high school hero and Kenny Loggins as the behind-the-scenes magic maker. Bacon seemed really old to me then. Not so much now. I grew up under some ferocious Baptist doctrine and was able to shake it off early (otherwise I might have been a virgin until I was 38), but just recently started dancing out loud in public, like at the grocery store or anywhere else a pop song is playing. It's so fun. Despite being an amateur, I am pretty sure I have the moves like Jagger. After dinner we slept in a kooky roadside motel on a hill overlooking the desert, with brightly painted cabin-like rooms--lime green, pepto pink, lemon yellow, littlegirl lavender. It was horrific and wonderful at the same time. Also, a small space heater in our room radiated pure love and I loved it right back. The innkeeper/owner was a sweet, laid back man from India who was so tickled when I interrupted his phone call and asked him if I could buy one of his washcloths (what? they are that good kind of scratchy that makes for remarkable exfoliation) that he gave me a small stack of them like weird souvenirs. That's right, he just gave them to me. I guess he figured I could have simply stolen his bleached burlap bath linens and so deserved a small reward for not being a sneaky jerk. Thanks, mister. Now we are both tickled.
