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March 3, 2006
Alaskan in Exile
by Neil Zawicki

     I’ve been very busy this week moving the Exile Bunker to a newly undisclosed location beneath a charming Lebanese couple. I can explain later. In the meantime, and in light of all the work I’ve been doing with boats and hanging art in strange and dark Portland drinkeries, I am left with no time to bang out a column. Not to worry. I’ve instead dusted off a little something I wrote a few years ago ... and it all really happened, just as it appears ...   


Under the Fake Star of the Empire

     The Hotel Congress in Tucson is where John Dillinger was finally apprehended. He set fire to the building in order to prolong his capture. There are photographs. With this, perhaps we might think the tone of our trip had been set. And in the end, there was a kind of relationship, because in the end, we took pictures too.

     But a common street lunatic set the real tone of our trip when he said to us as we passed, “Hey! You know that guy in there with that picture in the church of Scientology? And they killed six hundred million queer nigger COPS!”

     His forehead was covered in a Moorish tattoo pattern, and he was sitting on a bench, yelling these things as we made our way past. What was he trying to tell us? From his perspective, and in the calm still of crazy, he could very well have been simply asking us for the time.

    Melco led us to a tight little box of local culture that serves Mexican food and Lattes. Disturbing artwork was positioned on each wall. Outside, a road crew was cutting through the street with a giant circular saw. The sound was deafening.

    We had lunch, and were on our way to Sierra Vista to meet with Johanna, a local business woman from whom we were to gather information on the finer points of the magazine business. We had with us a car-to-car radio system, and as we passed through the southern Arizona chaparral, a region that Melco relentlessly used the radio system to refer to as “Steinbeck Country,” the weather was turning cold and stormy. Soon we were under low and unstable clouds, digging for warmer clothing. The walk to the physician’s doorstep was quick and shivery.

    The physician was our host in Sierra Vista. He and his wife enjoy the color and culture of southern Arizona. This is a region that still creaks with the newness of the now old west. The physician loves it. Get some booze in him, and he’ll proclaim his candidacy for mayor of Tombstone, the town too tough to die.

     We managed to put together a business plan that night, while occupying the “drinking veranda” in the shadow of the local “drug blimp,” a device used to photograph the influx of illegal substances from Mexico and into the empire. We were safe; we were among the blimps, north of suspicion, in the center of the empire.

    In the morning, barely able to focus, we resumed. The car ride to Bisbee was short and quiet.  We traveled through sprawling prairie land, dotted with small cacti, under post snowstorm skies. Delcan was snapping pictures out the window along the way, as Melco and myself settled in to enjoy the ride. This is the land where Wyatt Earp once rode. This was once part of Mexico, until the empire purchased it.

    After arriving in Bisbee, a town rich with subculture economics and early century architecture that clings to the very rock, Melco and I both had a shot of whiskey, and were back on track. Delcan breezed into the bar and began to take pictures of everything. Even in the freak land of Bisbee, Delcan stood out. In a crowd, he took on a sort of aura that removed him from any other motion. He was his own kinetic system. He was the force that was happening to the surroundings. He was the exception.

    We hit the street, jarred to action by the whiskey, and started up a very steep, very long staircase. This led us to an isolated hilltop, which accommodated a garage made of corrugated tin. Gangland graffiti blazed from every inch of the structure, back dropped by the giant west, with its sky and cliffs. The odd silence lent itself to the surreal B-movie quality of the scene. The three of us cast long shadows on the dirt.   

     It was here we met Alexandra, our guide to bigger business. Alexandra had thick, shiny, curly hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and two dogs, Zoe and Neb. She was all road. Faded this and worn-in that. Delcan fell in love. After all, she was an angel.

    We told her about our plans to produce a magazine that would chronicle the raw, true side of travel and adventure, and she listened carefully. She had the type of head that just digs anything worth trying. But angels like Alexandra are not easily reached; they are only breezing through.

    Later, down on the main street, she made a donation to our cause. Melco and myself witnessed this as we looked up from the narrow Bisbee street. There, framed by old brick buildings and antique awnings, Alexandra discreetly handed Delcan a rolled up paper bag as he prattled on about how easy it is to “do your thing in the center of the empire.”

     Once we were back on the road, we opened the bag she had given us. There they were. A little dried out, still intact, and unmistakably orange. Our evening was planned.

     After a little preparation back at the physician’s estate, we made our way into the Huachuca Mountains, an Apache word for Thunder. We made camp in a small valley. The area was thick with knee high yellow grass and juniper trees. The nearby ridges gave our location a sort of amphitheater quality.

     We divided up our gift, and each of us enjoyed an ample handful of psilicyben. Remember John Dillinger? Remember how he set fire to the hotel and how pictures were taken? This is where our pictures were taken in our hour of desperate and hilarious madness.

     The mushrooms came on gradually, during a short walk up the trail. At first it was a little light. Some laughter, babbling, unnecessary focus on rocks and leaves. But when the full ride took effect, the sights and sounds were not of this world.

     The tip off came in the form of a lone mountain biker, who seemed to appear out of nowhere. He startled Delcan right off the trail, and prompted Melco to wave and shout, “Hey there!” as he rode by. I stood and watched him pass in silence, studying his head for signs of affiliation with the nearby army base. He in turn watched me with a look of tense apprehension on his face. He was out of sight as quickly as he came.

     He was completely oblivious to the fact that he was our ambient messenger from reality. A final reminder that there is a planet, and there is a society, and soon all three of us would return to it. But for now, there was an incredibly fascinating cloud in the sky. It was lower than the other, darker clouds, and seemed to exist just to entertain us. The wind stretched and twisted the thin little clump of water vapor. It couldn’t have been more than sixty-three feet above our heads, and began to turn colors like teal green and maybe purple, but not quite. It was sort of becoming every shape and color at once.

     Next, a herd of fleeing white-tailed deer startled us. Melco wanted photos, and so turned to Delcan and shouted, “Shoot ‘em!” This threw Delcan into a stunned fear, until he connected with the message, realizing Melco was talking of cameras, not rifles.

     Too late now.

     By now, the heaviest part of our trip was approaching with the ferocity of a steamship. We sat right down on the trail, howling through a world that was colorful, liquid and scary. From my perspective, Melco Shank's head was perfectly defined against a backdrop that was cartoon in nature, and sliding in all directions. Delcan’s laughter took on an elastic quality that seemed to start where it finished, and finish where it started. I remember moving down the trail, shouting, “We’ve got to get a fire going before the rams get to us!” I looked over my shoulder to see Melco and Delcan interacting with the cartoon landscape. Their voices were blending and re-arranging to create a sort of delay flanging effect. It looked from my point of view that I was leaving the scene of some terrible event, which meant no good to anyone or anything.

     Soon we were back in camp. I was lying on my back, looking up at the clouds as they were forming into swirling shapes and crystalline clumps. Stray noises and wind-related sounds were following their motion. Delcan appeared standing over me. His bright orange jacket and bald head were stark against the vivid purple-blue sky as he starred at me through his horn-rimmed glasses. I remember saying, "Look at your head! I wish I had a camera!”

     “You do!” he shouted, and then vanished and reappeared with a Nikon sm 4000. I snapped a few photos of him from the ground up, and he did the same in return.
We were all settled in and things got quiet. The wind stopped twisting itself; the clouds spiraled silently above me. Delcan was standing up, looking over his shoulder. Melco rolled over and began investigating the trunk of a small bush.  Just when everything was as quiet as it could possibly get, Melco broke it up with one statement.

     “We’re trippin,” he declared.

     The three of us, not regulars in these parts, had settled in for the introspection segment of our experience.

     I was having episodes of fear and apprehension. What did I expect to find out? Are there really queer-nigger cops? Of course not. Were the mushrooms laced?

     I sat up.

     Instantly I was in a world enveloped by the repeating whoosh of my having sat up. I blurted out, “These are mushrooms!” To which Delcan replied, “Where!?”

     “No, no.” I said. “ What we’ve eaten. Mushrooms?”

     Melco rolled over, “Yes, these are mushrooms, and they last for four hours.”

     I was satisfied with that. Of course they’re mushrooms. But Melco and I were ready to wrap it up.

     Delcan had become madder than mad. He was purple. His jacket was orange. He was squatting over the fire and flapping his arms while he shrieked and whooped. Or was he? He was the lunatic muse stoking the engine fires. And he was hard to miss as the sun was setting, creating a feel of impending end.

     It was later that the effects of the mushrooms took a welcome exit. I remember looking over my shoulder at the sunset. I felt a light breeze on my face. It was a real breeze. I looked at Melco Shank. He was a real person. The hills beyond him looked real also, no longer that vivid-quick version of screaming yellow. We smiled.

     The trip was over and we were okay. We had come out the other side and were, as Melco put it, “at a place now.”

     I was happy to be able to notice things like the sky, the fire, all looking normally.

     By now, the drug blimp was rising into the air to monitor the fringes of the empire, and our camp had taken on the placid atmosphere of a cowboy trail song, cool and dusty, beneath a massive night sky. Delcan looked up to notice a star above us. The star was moving. He deduced that it was not a star, but a satellite. To this, he made a proclamation:

     “Man, we don’t even have stars anymore, what the fuck are we doing? We have Fake stars!”



 



Neil Zawicki, exiled Alaskan, is Editor at Large for Insurgent49, a former reporter for the Alaska Star, and winner of the Alaska Press Club's 'Best Columnist' award. He is now living out the rest of his days in an undisclosed location in Oregon. He can be contacted at -  neil@insurgent49.com
- Columnists -

Editor's Desk
by Aaron Selbig

Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

Alaskan In Exile
by Neil Zawicki

The
Bramble Bush
by Kevin Morford





- also by this writer -
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in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership.