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SATURDAY
woke up around 9:00 after having weird make-out dreams about Johnny’s cousin Emelda. also somehow my t-shirt ended up ON my pillow like a pillow case...tho i have no idea how it got like that. sure i slept restlessly, but i rarely do weird things like that in my sleep... that’s the rest of my family. had eggs and toast and cereal and coffee with the fam, then thought the cats had somehow gotten out of our room which gave me the perfect excuse to go rummaging around the whole house. totally cool. we found the cats hiding under the sofa and then went for a walk around Bisbee. from our side of the mountain we could see across the valley to a long narrow staircase ascending the opposite side leading almost all the way up to a giant letter “B” painted in white on the mountainside (actually there are long winding staircases all thru Bisbee with an annual staircase race every 3rd weekend in October). we climbed up to where the stairs ended at the top-most plot of land (about two thirds of the way up to the “B”) on which stood the remains of an old burnt down house. i decided then and there, while looking out over the rooftops of Bisbee that when i retire... in 25-30 years...that plot of land will be where i set up shop. seriously. ive never had an area reach out to my so fiercely before. not even San Diego. at first i didnt like the town but it grew on me frighteningly fast. i’ll make my fortune in SD and save up to buy that space, build a simple little house with a huge deck, a garden and a hammock and wake up every morning to that incredible view. ill renovate a little store front downtown and continue to distribute YAC comics from there. maybe even teach comic-art seminars to all the local hippies and children and live simply. 
wandered around downtown after our little hike and fell even harder for the town. tons of ultra hip antique shops and miner history and haunted old buildings to explore and staircases to climb like an actual factual Castle Rock. sure there are a few too many hippies there for my taste right now... but they should all be dead by the time im ready to live there and ill take my place as a weird old recluse that lives at the top of the hill anyway. i really wanted to try to find an old mine shaft to climb around in but that will have to wait for another day. ran into ANOTHER of johnny’s cousins and went with him to St Pat’s church for a big fund raiser carnival they were having. ate lots of authentic mexican food and got totally caught up in the small town mystique of it all. got hit with another healthy dose of heart-stinging nostalgia...much like i got the night before while riding shotgun in the truck. it was incredibly clear and dark while driving thru the desert and i could actually see the Milky Way if i craned my head out the window far enough. the homesickness caught me off guard and kicked me in the gut. not just homesickness for Richmond and all my friends that i’d just left behind...but WAY back to when i was a kid on the farm and used to pull out the chaise lounge and a pile of blankets on warm summer nights and lay out under the stars till 4 in the morning looking for shooting stars. ooof. 
finally said goodbye to johnny’s extended family and left for tombstone by about 3:30. tombstone was a pretty big disappointment. totally rebuilt and painted over. every bit of charm and history squeezed out of it for the sake of profit. you’d think Val Kilmer actually WAS Doc Holiday with the frequency his face was plastered all over every available surface. fine commercialized establishments such as “SPUR of the moment” leather accessories and the “Pony Espresso” coffee shop only soured my taste for the place even more. while in Bisbee you could still feel the history in all the buildings... flowing through the very winding streets of the town...in tombstone it was very hard to imagine that people actually lived and died there even tho every building had the date it was founded garishly emblazoned on the side and the fact that you could pay \\$2 to stand on the exact spot where Billy the Kid lay bleeding to death in the dirt. 
things got a bit testy the next time we stopped for gas. joey and i decided that it would be best if we didnt try to kill ourselves trying to get to SD that night (we had lost too much time in Bisbee and Tombstone) but johnny was being pissy because we had rushed him around all day trying to get back on the road. i dont know why he was so pissy. i was just trying to get us into town so we could go to the party Chad and Brady were throwing and have that as a sort of positive punctuation of our arrival in SD. but it didnt look as tho we were going to be in any condition to go to a party if we pushed on so oh well... im sure there will be others. had to stop one more time in the desert because an alarm was going off in the truck. turned out to be nothing but we let the truck cool down for a bit anyway. wandered out into the moonlit desert for a little bit of privacy (it HAD been 6 days since i had had a moment to myself...and how often do you get the chance to jerk it in the middle of the desert...). the truck stopped making noise and we pushed on until Joey started to hallucinate. stopped in Yuma for the night and crashed out immediately. |