A straggler Indian and his two lovely daughters
dig bullets out of the sides of trees at Tehachepi.
Bullets only hit one side of anything here because,
no
matter which direction they’re fired in,
they always fly east with the wind.
He can remember a lost civilization
in the Mojave,
when the desert was still a valley of perpetual bloom.
*
Don hops a ride on a ship
hauling donkeys from
New Orleans to Turkey.
As the donkeys shit, they all rise higher in the hull.
When George dies, his widow
calls his old teacher, Clyfford Still,
and Clyfford tells her he’s more into real estate than painting.
When
Diane's daughter dies,
she destroys as many of her own paintings as she can.
*
Peter Biggs is the only barber in town.
He's
more than happy to introduce a stranger to female society.
Afterwards and during the war between the states, he's
known as the Black Democrat.
He comes here as a servant of Captain A.J. Smith, of the dragoons,
then makes a ton
of spondulix in various speculations,
and marries a Spanish lady, in all the glory of a swallow-tailed coat with brass
buttons,
white vest, and gloves, redolent in the perfume of “Araby the Blest.”
Mr. Biggs makes a “corner”
shipping cats to San Francisco as a remedy to their rat problem.
Los Angeles is over-run with cats, and it is left to
the fertile brain of this distinguished Virginian to equalize this great seeming inequality in the nature of things
by
gathering up all the cats he can get, either by hook or crook,
to be sold up north, at prices from $16 to $100 apiece.
Two coops of cats are left exposed to wind and weather on the vessel,
and some 100 cats are drowned. He sues the shipping
company and wins,
yet like all great men of the period, Mr. Biggs is addicted to gambling,
and the pay from his
magnificent enterprise helps
fill the coffers of the casino princes of the Bay City,
before the crestfallen forestaller
of the San Francisco cat market returns
to the bosom of his beloved angel, a wiser if not richer man.
*
In São Luiz (Maranhao), Brazil,
a girl wears a t-shirt with a Wild West town on
it.
It has an American-sounding phrase printed under the picture
which reads: Crossroads
Sultriness in the Heat Scene.
*
While breaking ground for the new Department of Water and Power,
contractors unintentionally
dig up what was once the Red Light district.
They halt construction, and give archaeologists two weeks to excavate bones
from superior cuts of steak, oyster and lobster shells, the finest in English china,
and hundreds of jars and bottles:
face cream, champagne,
“Darby's Prophylactic Fluid,” and “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup,”
an apparently popular tincture of brandy and opium.
*
At Thompson's Willow Grove House,
the mud floors
are always damp.
So the furniture puts forth verdure,
takes root, and covers its occupants
in a canopy of sylvan
green.
*
A host of fire fiends take on the element devouring
Bill's asphaltum camphene laboratory.
Bill is fortunately absent when the explosion and fire occur,
having
stepped into the drug store to divert his mind
in the chemical concoction of a Wellingtonian
cocktail.
The damage could have been worse, had it not been for the grace
of the greatest and most wonderful
saint,
housed in the old lady's oratory above the lab.
*
The Mission has three great saloons.
One seconds as a hanging
court.
The squirrels only come out for funerals,
of which there are a lot.
When the bells toll to announce
some spirit’s passing into the great unknown bourne,
they sing this tune….
