Habeas Corruptus

By Christopher Ketcham

The TV-B-Gone, which fits in the palm of the hand, is a universal remote whose sole purpose and power is to shut down televisions. During last year’s Super Bowl Sunday, it resulted in at least one thrown bottle, two near fist-fights, twenty-seven (by my count) disappeared Hail Marys, touchdowns and tackles, one half-time show half-seen (or seen, rather, in a kind of slow motion shutter effect – I with TV-B-Gone closing the screen, the bartender mashing finger into the on-button like a man poking out eyes), and one near-hammering-into-pulp of a writer waving a TV-B-Gone. I deployed across Brooklyn that fateful Super Bowl 2006 with a single unit for a test run, assaulting mostly sports bars and taverns and also one restaurant (where no one in the crowd, not even the staff, noticed the quieting of the television – for me, a key indicator). I have since been terrorizing televisions almost daily. I go nowhere without the TV-B-Gone. I have killed televisions in Charles de Gaulle Airport, in Heathrow, on the streets of Paris, in the restaurants of small Utah towns, in a Virgin Megastore on Manhattan island, and in countless Brooklyn bars.

Mitch Altman, the 50-year-old inventor of the TV-B-Gone, tells me that when he feels depressed he arms himself and heads into the streets. “It’s almost a compulsion for me. When I see a TV going in a public place, I go out of my way to turn it off,” he says. “Imagine a room where there’s an uptight person wearing really bright clothing and jumping up and down and yelling. It’s hard to be relaxed when that person is present. When a TV goes off, I notice people’s shoulders and arms relax – the body language changes completely. When I’m feeling blue, I turn off a television or two and life just seems a whole lot better.”

Altman is a California technophile, a computer whiz, a self-described “geek.” He pioneered virtual reality technologies in the 1980s and early versions of voice-recognition software. He built disk drives that were always smaller and faster, and eventually co-founded a company called 3Ware, which perfects disk drive “controllers.” He was also a television addict. “I used to collect TVs off the street,” he says. “I had 50 TVs in my mom’s basement. She was very patient with me. I watched TV every waking moment of my life. But even as a little kid, I remember watching TV and telling myself, ‘I don’t like this, why am I watching this?’ I was five years old when I asked that question. But I kept watching. The one show that I really hated was Gilligan’s Island. But it delivered just enough to keep me coming back for more. That is the process of addiction.”

Then, in 1980, Altman was watching TV as always, and the question came up that had been dogging him since he was five years old, and suddenly TV was over for him. “I was watching Gilligan’s Island – nothing against Bob Denver, but I just couldn’t handle it anymore. I went cold turkey. And I’ve never had a TV since.”

It wasn’t just Gilligan’s Island. It was the physical and psychological awfulness of the experience of watching television. It was the fact that Altman one day sat down in a restaurant with old friends he hadn’t seen in years, “but there was a television playing nearby and we found ourselves watching the TV – unable not to watch the television – instead of talking to each other, being with each other.”

TV is unique in the EEG activity it summons in the human brain, and unique as well in that it drastically reduces the metabolic rate of the human organism. When you sleep, you use more energy than when you watch TV. When you stare at a painting or read a book or knit or fart in bed, you use more energy. EEG activity during television-watching is marked by alpha waves, those dreamy, spacey waves that also exist between sleeping and waking – a passive state in which sustained intense critical thought is pretty much impossible. Alpha waves are also associated with coma.

The technology that Altman devised to counteract this horror was simple. The TV-B-Gone consists of a computer chip programmed with a database of all the power codes of televisions in existence that Altman could track down from the public domain. The diode eye uses infrared light, which makes it felicitous to zap through clothing or across window panes or from a distance. “The chip speaks 214 power codes that work on thousands of different television sets,” Altman says. “The power code for a Panasonic is the same as for a RCA. The TV industry made it so easy on me! I’d love to have a Cell-Phone-B-Gone, a Bush-B-Gone. But those things aren’t so easy to get rid of.” I suggested a unit that expands and clarifies the purpose, a unit that permanently disables the offending television. “There’s no remote control code for ‘blow up the tv,’” Altman tells me. “You can always buy a brick. Certainly a bomb is a technology that’s been around for a while.” One possible avenue is the use of a concentrated electromagnetic pulse that would burn out the circuits. “But how,” Altman asks, “do you make it directional enough that it wouldn’t harm the button-pusher? That’s the question.” Researchers should get to work.

Since Oct. 19, 2004, when Altman launched his product, more than 112,000 units have been sold in every state and territory of the US, and worldwide in over 80 countries. In 2005, Altman traveled on a TV-B-Gone tour across Europe, appearing on BBC TV sixteen times in two days – ironic enough. “My main reason for going to Europe,” he says, “was for field-testing on European TVs.” In January, a host on New York’s WBAI talk radio, which was giving away TV-B-Gones for its winter fundraiser, noted that enthusiasts are now suggesting ingenious modifications. For example, one might mount the tv-killing diode eye in a hat, with the clicker device linked by cable in one’s pocket. Or you might build an amplification unit with multiple flood-eyes that literally, as Altman put it, “turn off televisions any direction you look.”

Super Bowl 2006 was effectively my own field test. Why go after the Super Bowl? The Super Bowl by its attraction of those scores of millions of human eyes brings to bear what is arguably the most expensive and sophisticated marketing and propaganda apparatus in history, and therefore it represents television’s awfulness par excellence. Also, there is the issue of the essential but unspoken pathologic weirdness of men who never exercise gathering to peer at other grown men who run around on a screen in a plastic box chasing a piece of leather and smack each other on the ass when they catch the leather (at which sight the men watching the ants on the screen in the plastic box clap and jump up and down and touch each other as well).

When employing the TV-B-Gone among lunatics such as this, immense care must be taken. Here are suggested rules for terrorizing the upcoming event on February 4. First off, when the TV goes out, the TV-B-Goner should scream the loudest in protest to deflect suspicion. This makes strategic comrades of strangers who otherwise will want to smash your TV-B-Gone to bits. Second, order your drink before you strike; otherwise, the bartender will be too busy fending off the apes protesting the darkness at noon on the screen. Third, be drunk, even if you’re not; everyone else is. Fourth, frequently throw up your hands in cheers; you can also, to look normal, produce a steady black-pantherish fist to celebrate “your team” (pick one); this allows innumerable angles to grab the eye of the target TV. Fifth, and most importantly, do not stand up in the midst of the horror of the evening to announce, after too many drinks, that you and the TV-B-Gone are the source of the trouble and that the TV-B-Gone is just wonderful and you can buy it anytime at www.tvbgone.com.

Note: this article was originally published at CounterPunch.org.

TV-B-GONE ADDENDUM: READERS WARN THAT USE OF TV-B-GONE IS “TOTALITARIAN CENSORSHIP” AND DANGEROUS TO THE DEMOCRACY

In the wake of my little screed at CounterPunch lauding the pleasures of monkeywrenching the screens of Stupid Bowl fanatics, inventor Mitch Altman reported that orders for the nasty little device poured in at tvbgone.com. Others weren’t so enthused. One concerned reader, Chris R. from Scheissville, Penn., wrote to CounterPunch that the use of the TV-B-Gone was equivalent to book burning. He may have a point. Here’s what Chris R. wrote:

Only an asshole walks into a place where people have gathered to watch a TV and turns it off because you don’t like the content….I hope that someday a mob catches you in the act and gives you a good hiding.

Shame on Counterpunch for promoting censorship.

-Chris R.

To which I responded as any thinking person would:

Chris,

My experience has been that only assholes gather to specifically watch TV…..

And from there we were off and running. Following below is our brief degenerative exchange:

CHRIS R. FROM SCHEISSVILLE, PA:

That is a completely infantile statement [ie that only assholes gather to watch TV]. TV is the device which allows us to see and hear events in distant places, that’s all. It’s one of the most amazing inventions of the 20th century. If you don’t like watching something it’s your responsibility to remove yourself from the situation, not to censor. Do you at least accept the fact that you are a censor? There’s no defense for that.

Liberalism doesn’t begin when you allow people to do what you want, it begins when you allow people do enjoy what you wouldn’t. You are a totalitarian and an elitist prick.

-Chris R.

KETCHAM:

Listen…I don’t give a christ about the content. I only care about destroying the medium. TV may have been a fine invention at the outset but it’s been put to awful use as a mass sedative and brainwashing device and for the marketing of all kinds of useless crapola that no one needs….Moreover, 99 percent of the time when I kill TVs in airport lounges, in bars, in restaurants etc etc NO ONE NOTICES! As for being “an elitist prick”…..I am most definitely elitist, and perhaps a prick as well… who knows…..now….enough name-calling. Since we’ve gotten off to such a good start, I was wondering if I could add you to my electronic mailing list….

Cheers,

Chris Ketcham

CHRIS R. FROM SCHEISSVILLE, PA:

I’m copying Counterpunch on these so that someone there can see what an idiot they’ve published.

First you’ve directly contradicted yourself by saying that you don’t care about the content of the medium… and then complaining that the problem with TV are its commercial messages. Which is it?

What, do you think that TV started altruistically and later became corrupted? Just the opposite has occurred, TV started completely commercially and citizen effort has opened some spaces for other messages. In fact in the early days each program had it’s own individual sponsor and there were only commercial stations. In what conceivable way did it start off well at the outset?

You’d better also turn off other people’s radio as that’s mostly commercial. In fact you’d better shut down Counterpunch; they ran Google-driven ads to stay up. And they have book advertising. You’d better burn down bookstores as well, and newspaper and magazine stands – all ad-driven. Better turn off the internet too. I see you’re using Mindspring; don’t they advertise? Better cancel your email account.

Only a complete idiot attacks a medium for its own sake. Only an asshole manipulates other people’s property without permission. Only a coward does it all secretly. Only an elitist ass claims to have magical powers to see through a brainwashing method that ensnares the feeble-minded majority. You have no argument in your favor.

If you claim 99% of the people you turn TVs off in front of don’t notice; then why bother doing it? On the one hand you claim they’re brainwashed by TV, but then they don’t notice its off. It sounds like you’re the one so sensitive to the medium that it disturbs you. Get a story and stick with it.

I have no interest in getting on your list. I use Yahoo and reading your messages would expose me to more advertising. If I read your content I’ll end up brainwashed, right?

Get back to me when you develop an entire thought,

Chris R.

KETCHAM:

Dude — why all the name-calling? From what I read here I am a “complete idiot,” “asshole,” “coward”, and “elitist ass.” All of which I admit to except the “complete” part….But seriously, why so passionate about this issue? It seems that, first of all, you’re really into advertising. Which is fine….but I like to live where there is no advertising….say, in a tent in Death Valley…..which I did once for a month….and there was no advertising anywhere….incredible (a nightmare for you, I know)….no TVs, radios, Internet, magazines, newspapers, and, best of all, no homo sapiens yapping constantly….anyway, chill out, will ya? There is reason for hope: the TV-B-Gone is now being expanded into the TV-B-Totally-Gone, which will employ, as suggested in my piece, a carefully calibrated, digitally-directed 9 mm bullet to permanently disable the offending target…..I have myself employed a 12 gauge, a .303, a .357 magnum and a .30-30 version of this TV-B-Totally-Gone….and it works!!

See ya soon at CounterPunch,

Chris Ketcham

CHRIS R. FROM SCHEISSVILLE, PA:

“Dude” – there’s all of the name-calling because your elitist attitude is exactly what turns a good many people off to the Left in general. I’m passionate about this because I’m a civil libertarian, and because I recognize that humans are social animals and you have no right to disrupt that. You’re deciding what’s best for others because you think that you’re better than others.

It bothers me that you think you’re being clever when in fact you’re being passive-aggressive and difficult. It bothers me that Counterpunch would mix your drivel in with serious articles written from a perspective of respect for individual rights and democratic norms. People like you perpetuate the stereotype that every person left of center is a fun-killing Luddite totalitarian.

And you are very much a coward for using a device to turn off TVs secretly instead of having a conversation with the people who are authorized to turn it on or off. It’s not your property; you have no right at all to manipulate it. None. If you don’t want to be exposed to it, remove yourself from the situation. At a practical level you’re just fucking with people in the service industry, which is what rich pampered bullies engage in.

For your information I don’t even own a television. That’s my choice. Sometimes I enjoy watching particular programming with other people. That’s my choice. But I don’t shove that choice down others’ throats. That’s extremely illiberal. What’s difficult about that?

Even the makers of TV B Gone don’t advocate what you do:

“Q. Won’t I get hurt if I use my TV-B-Gone® remote control in someplace crowded?

When other people gather for the purpose of watching TV together – say, in a sports bar – we see no reason to interrupt their pleasure.”

Indeed. No reason unless you’re an elitist cowardly prick. You’re not funny and not clever. You have hatred for working class America, which you find beneath you. If you hate our species that much then do us all a favor, turn your .357 on yourself (“Jerk-B-Gone”) and leave the rest of us who enjoy socializing and the ability to use technology to hear and see other people at a distance alone.

-Chris R.

KETCHAM:

Dood — Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I was working on something else for the print version of CounterPunch. Anyway, I wanted to tell you about some of my recent forays with the TV-B-Gone. For example, I was in a restaurant/bar north of New York City recently and there were some fellows who were watching television and thereby, per your definition, were Working Class. Anyway, these Working Class guys were watching the death of Anna Nicole Smith repeated over and over on the screen….a real death-march, but without any of the relieving elements, such as shots of Smith with her tits out, which would have made the slog of “news coverage” worthwhile….so I shut that shit down big-time and these salt-o’-the-earth types let out a high-pitched squeal and turned it back on. I turned the TV off again and the working class guys cried out and turned it back on…so I shut it down again…now these Working Class Gods, as we should properly refer to them, put on a show worth recalling. They began a weird sort of dance. They stood up from their stools and began circling each other like drugged pitbulls in a betting ring. They tore at each other’s hair and started clawing at each other’s skin and running around like drunk baboons smashing plates of wings ‘n’ blue cheese over their heads and masticating checkered table cloths and generally making the buffet and dinner service unbearable….In the end, the good news is that the restaurant developed a type of Zyclon-B that can only be used against White Anglo-Scots Working Class People but which Elitist Coward Asshole Types like myself are immune to…. and, thus applied as an aerosal, we were able to wipe out these smelly fuckers who are dragging the morals and culture of the Great Nation into the pits and who should, ideally, be dying in Iraq fighting for “freedom” right fucking now….or, hopefully, sooner. All commerce and activity at the restaurant came to a screeching halt….no food was served, the lights went out, nobody spoke, the heat shut down, the cold rushed in….the only entertainment was Me, my voice disembodied, large as worlds, babbling on and on as the Working Class Drudges collapsed one atop the other in heaving fits, vomiting and shitting on each other in their death spasms….thereafter, the only thing to do was to chop up these Fat Fucking Working Class Swine and serve their corpses to a group of sequined mincing ballet dancers known as Leftists, who came barrelling in and immediately ordered the television turned back on and tuned to the Amy Goodman Show, which was showing over and over on Link TV……the Leftists gorged on the Imbecile Working Class Scumbucket livers and hearts and brains…..all in all a good day for the TV-B-Gone!

-Chris

CHRIS R. FROM SCHEISSVILLE, PA.:

Was that supposed to be funny? It wasn’t.

Clearly Mr. Ketcham has no interest in addressing any issue related to the fact that he is a censor who enjoys screwing with people in the service industry. I expect this from Fox News’ caged pets, not CounterPunch.

-Chris R.

By Christopher Ketcham Almost all the country within their view was roadless, uninhabited, a wilderness. They meant to keep it that way.  Keep it like it was. — Edward Abbey, “The Monkey Wrench Gang”

Ken Sleight is 77 years old, lean, dusty-booted, hard of hearing, wears old jeans and long-tailed shirts untucked. It is said that as a younger man he was the model for the lapsed Mormon renegade Seldom Seen Smith in Edward Abbey’s novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” which itself became the incendiary model for eco-saboteurs such as Earth First. Sleight owns a horse farm called Pack Creek Ranch, up on Abbey Road, outside Moab, Utah, in the high red desert of the canyon country, where for the last five months I’ve been renting a cabin 33 steps from the door of his lodge. I see him every day in his old blue Ranger pickup, or tending to his Appaloosas and Arabians with his wife, Jane, or laying gravel with his tractor and shoveling manure for shade trees.

I like Sleight. I like him because the other night he drank me under the table, because a few days later I got stuck in a September snow in the mountains above the ranch and he dropped everything to get in the Ranger and winch out my truck. I like him because when he drives long distances he pisses in a bottle instead of stopping at the side of the road. “No time to waste and why pollute the water,” he says. I like him because on his horse a few years ago he charged two bulldozers in the forest near the ranch, refusing to dismount until the drivers shut their engines. I like him because he reminds me of my father, both of them agitators and nostalgics, angry young men more than twice my age, twice as angry as the young men you meet today.

Sleight talks about the way things were in southern Utah before the too-many strangers like me showed up, before Arches National Park, so beloved by his old friend Abbey, was snatched away by the seekers of heat and light and solitude once just his own, before the motor-home panzer units full of speedboats and mountain bikes and grandpas and babies in diapers. Just under 800,000 people flocked to Arches last year, almost a fivefold increase from 30 years ago. Everywhere in the red rock national parks of southern Utah — in Arches, Capitol Reef, Zion, Bryce, wherever motorized man can find a way — the people are coming. Sleight calls this “obscene.” Too many “goddamn people,” Sleight says. “In such a conglomeration, it’s like down in Rome when all those masses see the pope. I don’t understand how in the hell they get any meditative spiritual great stuff with so many damn people around.”

Which would sound blinkered, curmudgeonly, elitist, plain mean if it were spoken by anyone else but Sleight, who says it with a sad, generous smile, sipping whiskey at noon. Sleight at first glance has settled down in his old age. He has been a river runner, cattle driver, canyoneer, sheepherder, wilderness guide and, as once denounced by a land developer, a “dangerous saboteur.”

In “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” published in 1975, Sleight, aka Smith, topples road-grading Caterpillars off a cliff, derails a coal train with dynamite, and attempts to incinerate the armatures of three bridges north of Lake Powell, which he refers to as “the Blue Death,” the water having drowned the marvels of Glen Canyon. He prays on his knees atop the dam that created the hated lake. “Dear old god,” the jack Mormon river rat cries out, “how about a little ol’ pre-cision-type earthquake right under this dam?”

Abbey and Sleight met in 1967 at the put-in at Lee’s Ferry on the Colorado River, 15 miles below Glen Canyon Dam, which had been completed four years earlier to charge a hydroelectric turbine that, in turn, would power casinos in Las Vegas and electric toothbrushes in Phoenix. Abbey was posted at Lee’s Ferry as a park ranger with a penchant for cadging beer from river-runners. “Instant recognition,” says Sleight. “We sat there and built a fire and drank and laughed until 3 in the morning. Talked about how to get rid of the goddamned dam! That was probably the start of the Monkey Wrench Gang right there.”

So was Sleight really the model for the marauding Smith? “I admit to nothing except the Mormon part,” he tells me.

In reality the character is not as effective as the man has been himself. “Ken has tilted at more windmills than Don Quixote could in 10 lifetimes — he never gives up,” says Jim Stiles, who publishes (and writes and edits) the Canyon Country Zephyr, southeast Utah’s only alternative newspaper.

Sleight indeed has had a very real hand in stopping more ill-conceived and rapacious projects threatening red rock country than probably any other Utahn. He was the first elected chair and catalyzing force behind the radical Glen Canyon Group of the Sierra Club’s Utah Chapter (his original vision for the group, he would discover, was too radical). In 1999, he was bestowed the David R. Brower Award “for Outstanding Service in the Field of Conservation,” with Brower, the unruly and iconic mountaineer and environmentalist, personally presenting the plaque. For eight years, Sleight honchoed the San Juan County Democratic Club, his chairmanship mostly spent trying to elect Native Americans, more than 55 percent of the jurisdiction, in a county ruled by minority whites. (He himself in 1990 would run for the Utah House of Representatives on an Indian ticket and lose with 35 percent of the vote.)

From what I can tell living at Pack Creek, Sleight doesn’t sleep. Often I see him at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. or 6 a.m. — “Ken keeps wolf-hours, watch-hours,” says Jane — heading north in his Ranger on the 260 miles of exhausting road to Salt Lake City (bound for a quixotic morning meeting about draining Lake Powell) or driving more contentedly south to work with the Navajo and Ute nations, where corporate prospectors claim the land for coal, uranium, oil and gas, calling it progress; the Indians, left to suffer the cancers and clean up the mess, call it “energy genocide.” At the age of 75, Sleight himself was diagnosed with prostate cancer: “You know what this guy does? He’s getting radiation therapy five days a week in Salt Lake City,” Jane Sleight tells me, “and he’s sleeping in the back of his pickup, in November, in a parking lot. With no heater.”

Today, in Moab and Monticello and Blanding, main habitations in southeast Utah, Sleight’s enemies, a good number of them ranchers, sprawl boosters, oilmen or mining scions with interests in industrializing the high desert to no end, will say (off the record — “in respect for Ken”) that Sleight’s got too much Abbey in his head, too much of Abbey’s doomy vision of technology and sprawl and greed run riot. Maybe this is so.

The drowning of Glen Canyon in 1963 transformed Sleight, but in the end the change had nothing to do with Abbey. If the wilderness needed no defense, only more defenders, as Abbey would write, Sleight was destined for the duty, though his birth would seem to have conspired against it.

——

Sleight was born into a family of Idaho conservatives, ranchers, horsemen, farmers, his father, who ran a feed business, insisting he was conceived in a saddle (his mother loudly demurring). As Sleight understood it, conservatism among his Mormon kin meant “you go slow, you don’t change dramatically,” Sleight tells me. “You conserve!” In 1951, he took a river trip, his first, down the Canyon of Lodore in what is today Dinosaur National Monument. The first white man to run Lodore, the one-armed Capt. John Wesley Powell, wrote in 1869 that the cliffs of Lodore, blood-burgundy and sheer, were “a black portal to a region of doom,” the rapids quickly slicing in half the first of his four boats, the water-roaring walls, awful and without egress, driving his men to bad dreams. Sleight and his crew, 15 drunken guys and gals in three boats, fared somewhat better — only two of the boats flipped but washed up worthy — and Sleight, 22 years old, was reborn.

There was an interregnum of war, college, confusion. He served in Korea, fought with the 48th Field Artillery Battalion at Pork Chop Hill. He soon had a wife and two children, with two more to come. He graduated in marketing and accounting at the university in Salt Lake City, finding a job with Firestone balancing the books for tire sales. He wore a bow tie to work. He went to John Birch meetings, backed Barry Goldwater; the know-nothingism soon wearied him. He remembered Lodore, “the most exhilarating moment of my life to that point.” Within four years, he had quit Firestone and relocated his family to southern Utah and was in the guiding business, buying a fleet of old Army landing rafts, 8 feet wide, 18 feet long, at $50 each, calling the venture Wonderland Expeditions.

Sleight was a good guide, though the business, by its nature, destined him to a glorified poverty. He was puckish, and a flamboyant cook at camp, and he had the right instincts in the canyons. He could read clouds and white water, could smell out springs in the barrenness of rock. Jane Sleight tells me how once they were leading a group of horses and tourists in a canyon under blue sky, and Sleight turned to her, quietly, his nose twitching, and said, “Maybe we’ll get up outta here.” Minutes later a torrent of floodwater the color of smashed tomatoes filled the arroyo — dumped silently from clouds far up the drainage — and would have carried them and their beasts and clients away.

In 1955, Sleight took his first trip down Glen Canyon. If Lodore had shouted to him, Glen Canyon whispered, laid him down. In 1955, it was among the most remote places in the United States, and it should have been ranked as a wonder of the world. “It was inculcated in my soul,” Sleight tells me. “It was heaven on earth.” When Sleight talks about Glen Canyon, his voice goes quiet, almost murmurous — he stops tonguing his whiskey, there is no shaking of fists or banging of tables, no wanting to charge you with his horses.

“The deep canyons, the meanderings, the quiet of the water, the great beaches,” he begins. “I could show you all down those canyons the silhouettes of a woman’s attributes, her body. The sandstone was petrified dune. It was sculpted, had a natural tendency to curve, everything rounded off, sensuous. And the color: oranges, browns, reds, always changing. You’d sit in one place, the sun’d come up and the colors — the feelings of each of the colors! When the sun was straight up in the sky, I’d go off into a little cavish place and watch the little things of the desert, the closeness of the land, the rock, these fleeting images. I wondered how come a certain place is so calm, so beautiful. Why do I feel so good here? I wondered about the glens along the way, how I’d ever get to know them all. Hundreds and hundreds of amphitheaters, alcoves, tucked away in the cliffs, shadowy, full of maidenhair fern, the dripping springs, the green in the yellow rock — the greenery, the fragrance, it hit you all at once. And always there were no rapids. Water smooth and calm. A matter of floating.”

Sleight pauses. “So the places came to you: Cathedral in the Desert. Music Temple. Temple View. Temples! You’d wait for them in the morning, you’d wait in the evening — spectacular. Eliot Porter” — the photographer whose book “The Place No One Knew” is today’s classic elegiac portraiture of the pre-flood canyon — “told me, ‘Wait for it. Just wait for it.'”

Later I looked up the names of Glen Canyon on a map of the river where it ran before the flood. Here was the Cathedral, and here was Last Chance Canyon, Hidden Passage Canyon, Rainbow Bridge, Salvation and Forbidden and Twilight Canyons, all gone now. Looking at the graveyard of the map, I thought of Sleight and his reverie and suddenly I felt like bursting into tears, a ridiculous sentiment no doubt, given I’d never seen the place and probably never will — yet the loss seemed infinitely sad, personally tragic.

——

When, in the 1950s, Glen Canyon Dam began its inexorable ascent at the town of Page, it was to be one of the great works of humanity, 800,000 tons of concrete rising 58 stories above the river, costing $750 million and the lives of 16 men. To Sleight, it was mania, a nightmare. He tried to stop it, forming a group called Friends of Glen Canyon with six other river-runners. But no one heard the plea, no one listened. Even the dauntless David Brower, then executive director of the Sierra Club, cut a deal favoring Glen Canyon Dam in exchange for the federal government’s abandonment of a dam project in Dinosaur National Monument. (Brower would forever curse his compromise, and to Sleight it would be a bitter irony when he received the Sierra Club’s highest award from Brower himself.)

Sleight watched the water rise, tortured himself with its rise. “Growing up on a farm, I learned to feel that the land was a part of you, part of your being, your very mind,” he tells me. “I don’t care if it’s public land, you can call it under any jurisdiction or bureaucracy you want — Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, National Park Service — but it’s your land, it’s my land. Glen Canyon was part of me. And the water starts rising and covering up all those little canyons that I took people into for years. Sometimes a foot a day, sometimes 2. The most agonizing thing. Would you have your temple flooded? How would you feel if your house was bulldozed down? That’s a hard one to think about. I feel it to this day.”

Stiles of the Canyon Country Zephyr always wondered why Sleight stuck around to watch the disaster unfold. “It was as if he felt the need to die some when Glen Canyon went under, as if it was something he owed the canyon,” Stiles says.

The loss radicalized Sleight — or, rather, he understood that the “conservatives” pressuring for development in the Utah backcountry were in fact radicals in disguise and probably dangerous, the kind of zealots who refused to “go slow,” who wanted to conserve nothing. As the 1960s unreeled, Sleight organized. In the good Mormon town of Escalante, Utah, where he was living in 1965, he helped fight off a multimillion-dollar highway that was to have paved easy tourist entry into the slot canyons and towering folds of what is today the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The Mormons of Escalante turned on him and his family, threatening Sleight from the fearless anonymity of crank phone calls; Sleight even found his truck sabotaged, pushed into a ditch in the night.

Stopping useless automotive-tourist-gerbil-wheel roads became a habit. Thanks, in part, to Sleight, the Book Cliffs near Desolation Canyon on the Green River — where a massive road project was planned in the 1990s — today remains the lower 48’s largest roadless area, a place pretty much untouchable except to the toughest traveler. And thanks to Sleight, the canyon that first welcomed me to the Utah — the winding lonely Davis Canyon outside Canyonlands National Park –remains as it was intended and just as it was when I came there in my tent four years ago under the watch of the rims and the buttes.

In the 1980s, a Mormon cowboy tycoon named Cal Black, representing the interests of progress and profit in conservative San Juan County, was pushing for the nation’s first high-level nuclear waste dump to be sited at Davis Canyon. The plan called for a 640-acre floodlit compound, a truck-haul road, a power line, a rail line, and nuclear waste to squat in salt beds underground for 100,000 years or longer. Sleight was his usual nuisance self, writing letters to his congressmen and governor, protesting at the public meetings, questioning the authority of Black, who didn’t like to be questioned, especially not by a Mormon who every Sunday skipped church.

It was on the figure of Black that Abbey based the chief antagonist in “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” the unforgettably leather-faced, yellow-toothed, power-obsessed J. Dudley Love, better known across San Juan County as Bishop Love, the veritable Bishop of Blanding. (Like Black, who hailed from Blanding, pop. 3,100, Love the booster was a bishop in the Church of Latter-Day Saints.) Here’s how Abbey has Smith describe Bishop Love: “neck deep in real estate, uranium, cattle, oil, gas, tourism, most anything that smells like money. That man can hear a dollar bill drop on a shag rug.” Per usual, Abbey exaggerated. “I liked Cal,” says Sleight. “He was sure of himself, could speak well, write well, make his case. He used to wear a bolo tie that had a vial of uranium strapped to it, wearing it on his chest, over his heart, to show it wasn’t dangerous.” Black got lung cancer and died in 1990 at the age of 61.

By 1986, Sleight had settled down with Jane at Pack Creek Ranch. In the last years of the decade, Abbey often stayed in the ranch’s cabins, where he completed at least one of his 14 books and conceived his fifth child. When Abbey wasn’t pecking at his typewriter or sucking liquor and ogling teenage girls, he’d head out hiking or on horseback in the summer afternoons, usually accompanied by Sleight. The two men talked, as they always did, about Glen Canyon and the dam. They considered alternatives to its violent destruction: How about just draining it like a bathtub? They drank to the notion. In 1989, Abbey, at 62, passed away, battered from a life of alcohol abuse.

——

Today the National Park Service has made clear that Glen Canyon shall neither exist in memory nor in the history books. “The Place No One Knew” is not sold in the bookstores at national parks. Nor is “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” Nor is the DVD of the recent film in which Sleight appeared, “Glen Canyon Remembered,” a documentary of interviews and archival footage and photography of the pre-flood canyon.

If the dam was built in service of gigantism and profligacy — at once an electricity mill for out-of-control sprawl cities and a cash cow for the Colorado River Storage Project, which itself financed out-of-control high-waste agriculture and still more dams across the Southwest — then its net effect on the culture of the canyon country was expected. Lake Foul, as Sleight dubbed the reservoir, allowed access to wilderness that once required days of travel through labyrinths of rock. Now you could find the drowned ruin of Cathedral in the Desert in two hours via houseboat. It was Lake Powell that first welcomed, in organized form and en masse, what Abbey called “industrial tourism,” which depends for success on accessible wilderness and wildness as a marketed commodity, complete with hotel and restaurant chains and the kind of air-conditioned comfort stations that pimple the shores of Powell and the well-paved roads of parks like Arches and Bryce and Zion. Too many people on too many concrete paths, wanting to see too much in too little time, with too many signs telling them what they’re missing, and what they should see next.

Of course, industrial tourism has in part morphed in the past two decades into a cosmetically greener version of itself, but one no less effective at exploiting the land. Now there are the rock climbers and hikers (like me), the canyoneers, the mountain bikers, and the river rafters and their guides. The hypocrisy of attacking adventure tourism is not lost on Sleight, for the adventure tourists are the very class of citizen that he once catered to as income, to whom he revealed the secrets of the canyons. The difference, offers Sleight, is that there are now too many adventurers. “Maybe,” he tells me, “I shouldn’t have guided one damn person into those places I loved so much.”

The people come, and the developers come, faster than Sleight can counter. They come into his backyard, up into the hills behind Pack Creek Ranch, in jeeps, on mountain bikes. The bulldozers come, enforcing the Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative, chopping down the juniper and the pinyon trees. “I told the Forest Service, ‘I want meetings on this! Bring us in as stakeholders!'” he says. “They said no public meetings.” So last year, still the renegade, Sleight on his horse blockaded the ‘dozers in a standoff that lasted 15 days. The uranium prospectors come, heirs of Cal Black, smelling money in the soaring price-per-pound of the ore. Operations are set to expand at the White Mesa Mill in Blanding, the only working uranium mill in the United States. The nearby Ute Indians don’t want it. The Utes say the mill fouls their water and their soil. At public meetings, Sleight shouts that the plight of the Utes amounts to “environmental racism.” His is a lonely voice among the whites of San Juan County.

A cynic will say that all of this rings of NIMBYism in its most crotchety form, but what Sleight really hopes for is sustainability, a simple and enduring concept by which he means the limited use of resources for limited ends. “There is a carrying capacity to everything,” Sleight tells me. It’s a phrase he repeats over many conversations.

One day in the cool of autumn, Sleight and I rode on horseback into the forest. We rode up a rocky gulch to a hillock where a petrified log had once lain whole, prone as a body, colored cobalt and rust and amber. I looked along the length of the log. Blocks of it had been chopped out like cake slices by scavengers who’d somehow gotten access, back here, where there were once no roads, no people. Sleight looked depressed, standing over the remnant of the find. “Not much left the way it was,” he said. “I think this’ll be gone in a couple years.”

(Author’s note: This was a piece originally written for Maxim Magazine for the Feb. 2004 issue, regarding violence on the U.S.-Mexico border. But the piece never ran. I print it here given the timeliness of the issue of border politics.)

The bullets sprayed through the windows of the two covered pickups, and cut holes in the vinyl, and suddenly blood was on people’s faces and on the floor. One of the victims was hit in the neck and died instantly. Another took a slug in the stomach. A third got a toe blown off. There must have been terrible shouting when the passengers saw what was happening. They were Mexicans – illegal aliens, packed together in the beds of the pickups like animals – and thought they’d made it to the promised land. Now the van that had been chasing them for two miles on Interstate 10, just south of Phoenix, Arizona, had caught up and pulled alongside. The door had slid open, and three men, also Mexicans, leveled their assault rifles in the whistling air.

In all, four people were killed and five others wounded during the three-mile highway melee in November, 2003. By Christmas, four more bodies of illegal immigrants turned up in the jagged desert hills near sprawling Phoenix – executed in separate incidents, shoeless, face down near a pile of cow bones. None of these dead were carrying drugs. They didn’t need to. They themselves were the cargo. Each was worth $1,500.

Welcome to the new face of Mexican smuggling. By some estimates, the trafficking of human beings out of Mexico is today an awesome billion-dollar-a-year trade. The draw for Mexicans is jobs north of the border, escape from the poverty at home. The problem is that more and more are ending up dead – markers in a turf war among rival smugglers, known as coyotes, or simply victims of the hard desert passage.

Still, the migrants keep coming. About a million illegals each year get caught jumping the 2,000-mile Mexican border, and that’s just one-quarter of the estimated total who make it through. And as the Feds crack down in populous border cities across Texas and California – warrens like El Paso and Tijuana that once offered an easy crossing – the flood has bottlenecked in southern Arizona, along remote and waterless paths, sunboiled highways like I-10, and in the ghettos of Phoenix, teeming violent hub of the human-smuggling trade. Centuries ago, Spanish explorers rightly dubbed this part of the American desert “El Camino del Diablo” – the Devil’s Path.

PERIL IN THE MOUNTAINS

You start in the desperation of a place like Puebla, 1,200 miles south of the Line, la Linea. This is where Jose Andres Perez, 21, had his home, a three-room hut that he rented with his mother and father and 13 others. They worked a lemon farm, but the money wasn’t enough – 300 pesos, or $30, a week – and his parents had become sick, their backs broken from the labor. So Perez, who had the big eyes of a boy, made the journey north over 20 days’ travel, moving day and night, mostly on foot, but sometimes, if he was lucky, on hitched rides.

At the border, just before crossing, bandits robbed him at gunpoint of 500 pesos, about $50, along with his backpack and food – everything he had. In the dusty broken-down bordertown of Naco, he found a coyote to guide him over the desert, into the towering Huachuca Mountains nearby, which run like a north-south spine across the Line. Coyotes prey, like their animal namesake, on pollos – chickens – like Jose Perez. When a coyote gang leads pollos north, they march their cargo fast and cruelly. Families are often separated, wives from husbands, mothers from children, to keep them scared. Sometimes the coyote feeds his pollos stimulants, a 500 milligram diet pill mix of ephedrine, caffeine, and aspirin. Stragglers are abandoned.

Ironically, the diet pill slows people up, because of its diuretic effect – migrants literally pissing their lives away in the desert. Thus the Huachucas in high summer litter with corpses that turn black in the sun. Indeed, for eight months out of the year, when temperatures regularly top 100 degrees F., the entire Mexican border turns deadly, with at least 2,500 migrants dead from exposure since 1994. In one of the worst incidents, in May of 2000, 14 illegals got lost and perished of thirst near the town of Sasabe, where a coyote named El Negro – the Black One – had bungled their passage. El Negro is among federal authorities’ top five most wanted coyotes.

Jose Perez crossed with a group of 16 others, after midnight, in cold December, so he wore three torn layers – a plaid button-down shirt, an orange vest, a blue windbreaker – to keep warm. His dusky face was covered in dirt, his jeans – he wore two pair, one over the other – soaked in red mud. The group labored up the ridges, through the spiny cactus, to 7,000 feet, and snow fell as they climbed. Then they dropped, exhausted, into a sheer valley called Ash Canyon, where the coyote told them to sleep. As Jose Perez lay in the snow, he thought of Los Angeles, where his two brothers had a job for him, sewing pants at a few dollars an hour.

HOLDING THE LINE

The Huachucas are national parkland, and so they’re patrolled largely by U.S. park rangers – a different breed of ranger, in fatigues and carrying assault rifles, walking the peaks trying not to get jumped or shot by coyotes gone haywire. Until recently, the Huachucas’ most dangerous Mexicans were marijuana “mules” with Ak-47s – in 2003, rangers here captured $19 million worth of smuggled dope – but now the drug cartels have branched into the equally lucrative smuggling of people. In December alone, two Border Patrol agents not far from the Huachucas were attacked and beaten with stones by desperate coyotes. Before 2003, this never happened.

I went out with ranger Joe Larson on a freezing December night. Larson – one among thousands of overworked border cops in Arizona – is short in stature, tall in spirit, with piercing brown eyes and a soldier’s calm under pressure. His great-grandfather fought in World War I, his grandfather in WW II, his father in Vietnam – all survived – and Larson himself fought with the National Guard in Desert Storm, where he nearly died in 1991 running over a land-mine in a truck. He went on to spend five years as a Border Patrolman before joining the Park Service.

Larson gets a kick doing night patrol alone. “Joe has no fear,” said his fellow ranger Tim Havens. “Just like tag when we were kids,” says Larson, who is 37. “What other job can you have this much fun and be in danger, too?” He stays busy: Of the million illegal border crossers last year, over 1/10th – some 115,000 illegals – are believed to have entered via the tiny 3.5 mile section of border represented by the Huachucas. “Lots of cover, trees, washes,” says Larson. “Primo crossing, dude.” Larson suited up in long-snouted night-vision glasses, looking like a bug or alien or a robot buzzard, and we hiked out through the brush onto Smuggler’s Trail, a web of pounded foot paths that converge and snake north from the crappy barbed-wire fence the U.S. government deludedly calls a “border.” Jose Andres Perez took this same trail system, after slipping under three strands of wire. Litter blighted the path and the brush and washes around: there were diapers, gallon water jugs, candy wrappers, condoms, tuna cans, an infant’s cowboy boot, and lots of women’s filthy underwear (but no men’s underwear, which was telling). Larson says rape along Smuggler’s Trail is common, a perk among coyotes.

The night was black. Stars popped out. A meteor fell. Larson crouched in a field of brown grass. We waited and whispered. He explained the business of human smuggling. Migrants don’t pay up front, but instead arrange to have the money ready in Phoenix, where a family member or friend wires the fee, usually via Western Union. As in all black markets reacting to pressure, the big crackdowns in Texas and California have merely upped the take for the gangsters and made life harder for the migrants. The price of passage for the average Mexican has skyrocketed, Larson tells me, from $250 just five years ago to some $1,500 today. If you’re a Brazilian, make that $12,000. If you’re a Middle Eastern terrorist, expect to pay $20,000 – the more distant your origin, the higher the bill. The smuggling gangs – there are ten chief cartels among hundreds of smaller operators, and at least one with connections to the Arrellano-Felix cocaine kings – are family-based, with long arms that stretch from Mexico City to Naco to Phoenix and beyond. At each stage, gang members get paid for each migrant smuggled. The desert coyotes who walk the Huachucas, for example, make $100 per warm body delivered to waiting vans on the back roads of a pickup spot like Ash Canyon. The vans then make the 225-mile trek to Phoenix, where migrants are held, at gunpoint, in a “drop-house” until their “ransom” is paid.

Joe Larson stopped short and listened in the silence of the desert. There was a beep from his equipment: motion sensors planted on Smuggler’s Trail were reading northward movement. One ping. Then another a minute later. Single pings strung out usually signify a scout, tracking ahead to clear the way for a large group.

“On dark nights, I get right in among the group, I mingle,” Larson says of his tactics. “I don’t say a word, and they don’t know who the hell I am. They’re used to getting yelled at when they get caught. If you do that, they get scared and freak out. I just do it real quiet and easy. ‘I am the police. Don’t move. Have a seat. Take off your shoes. Put the shoes in front of you.’” Then Larson will crack his flashlights and call for backup.

The coyotes always try to run, so he takes them down fast and cuffs them. The pollos freeze like deer. They usually have no idea where they are, but sometimes, desperate, they stampede, a chaos of bodies in darkness. Larson once saw a mother with a baby charging through a thicket; the thorns had shredded the child’s face. “It broke my heart,” he said.

This night, though, the sensors went quiet after a few minutes. The scout had turned back. Or perhaps it was an animal, a mountain lion, bear, who knows. Later, towards dawn, long after Larson had finished his shift, sensors picked up the passage of at least 50 people traveling north on Smuggler’s Trail over the ridge into Ash Canyon. Among them was Jose Andres Perez, who would be captured by Border Patrol that morning after his coyote dumped him while he slept. Perez, the naïf, paid $1,000 up front, so his handlers had no reason to carry through with the deal.

Jose Perez is lucky he never made it to Phoenix.

MURDER IN THE VALLEY OF THE SUN

Roselin Rodriguez-Bravo made it, all the way from Guatemala. His reward was a seedy little man named Hector Soria, who stood over the 27-year-old knocking out Bravo’s front teeth with a knife and a screwdriver. Soria threw the bloody teeth to the floor and moved on to Bravo’s feet, stabbing twice with the knife and then in between the toes with the screwdriver. A renegade 20-year-old coyote, Soria kidnapped his victim on the night of September 22, 2003, stealing Bravo from a drop house in the town of Three Points, outside Phoenix. The torturer wanted Bravo to get on the phone and coax from family members a $1,500 ransom – which meant a $1,500 loss for the original smuggler who did the hard work slipping Bravo over the border.

Rival coyotes are constantly raiding each other’s business, stealing cargo for high-pay ransoms. October of 2003 was an especially fruitful month: One group threatened to sever the arm of a 9-year-old girl if not promptly paid. Three other migrants, kidnapped and held for $15,000, were found duct-taped from head to toe. In 2002, nine bodies of illegals – migrants and coyotes, executed for non-payment or in gang warfare – were found scattered across the low desert outside Phoenix, gagged and bound with tape and telephone wire, and then killed with large-bore gun-shots to the back of the head.

Phoenix is target-rich. Cops estimate that over 1,300 drop-houses – overcrowded feces-strewn one- or two-story homes, usually rental properties – dot the city’s palm-lined streets. The result: a mind-blowing 400 percent increase in home invasions and kidnappings during 2003, and a 45 percent increase in homicides, up to 247, making 2003 the deadliest in city history.

Among the top cops assigned to put a lid on this mayhem is Carlos Archuleta, a quiet doughy-faced veteran investigator with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is tasked with cracking the human smuggling trade. A native Spanish speaker, Archuleta usually works out of Mexico City, but his chief at ICE brought him north for the latest big enforcement sweep, code-named “ICE Storm.” Between September and December 2003, the operation busted at least 60 Phoenix drop houses, netting 104 coyotes, 25 indictments, $1.85 million in cash (one coyote alone was carrying $47,000), and hundreds of weapons, including M-4s, AR-15s and Kalashnikovs. The boys at ICE like to think they’re winning this war, but the violence just keeps getting worse, because there’s no end in sight to the immigrant flood – no end, that is, to the demand for passage that coyotes supply and increasingly lay down their lives to control.

It won’t be long until a soccer mom or retiree gets caught in a coyote crossfire. Case-in-point: Archuleta was also one of the investigators on-scene looking into the bloody Interstate 10 shoot-out last November 4 [2003], which was merely the culmination of at least a dozen I-10 corridor hijackings and shootings in the month previous. The November 4 incident started, Archuleta told me, the way all migrant kidnappings start. One group of coyotes snatched another’s load, at gunpoint. Near the town of Marana, the kidnappers commandeered two vehicles that held 24 people, $36,000 worth of humanity. But then the original coyotes got away and called their boss in Phoenix, who dispatched four shooters armed with Chinese-made SKS assault rifles and Tec-9 sub-machineguns. The shooters converged on the hijacked trucks in a grey Dodge minivan, shot up the drivers and the people inside, and ran the vehicles off the road. They themselves were apprehended by Border Patrol agents an hour later, and could face the gas chamber if convicted of the quadruple homicide.

I finally got to meet a coyote up close when Archuleta took me to the ICE detention center in Phoenix, where agents were interrogating a 30-year-old named Juan-Cruz Garcia, who was suspected of murdering his young wife. Garcia claimed the girl had fallen from the 9th story balcony of a hotel in Los Angeles, but a polygraph taken that morning suggested he was lying when asked if he pushed her. Short and fat with thick tousled hair, Garcia swaggered from his cell, which was packed to capacity with snickering dirt-covered men. He had been beaten across the face, the right-eye blackened and swollen shut (not the work of ICE, I was assured), and sat across from Archuleta slouching in his seat, arms crossed, looking petulant, saying very little but quite at ease for a man who just days before had lost – or killed – his wife. He wore a tattoo on his stomach that said “Ma Vida Loca” – a gangbanger. Archuleta softly grilled him in Spanish, demanding the location of his drop-house and the name of the cartel running it. Garcia stuck out a fat lower lip, shrugged, and looked beadily through his swollen eye. “Do we look like pendejos?” said Archuleta, not happy with this act. “We look like fools?” Archuleta repeated.

Garcia admitted to nothing, denied everything, and finally was sent back to his cell, where he would wait to be processed and deported. There was nothing else to do – ICE couldn’t hold him on the evidence. He’d be back in a week or two, the ICE agents told me. “He makes good money up here,” they said.

“Coyotes are like water,” said Carlos Archuleta, a note of resignation in his voice.

THE HAND THAT FEEDS US

By mid-January 2004 – in the days just after Epiphany, January 6, when religious Mexicans visiting family return north in droves – Joe Larson and Tim Havens were getting slammed. One night it was a group of 40 on the crest trail. Night before that a group of 50. A few days later a group of 37 at 6,500 feet, on a bruisingly cold moonless night. “We hit ‘em head on,” said Joe Larson. “I told Tim, ‘I’m just gonna walk straight through ‘em.’” I asked Larson if he ever got discouraged at the seeming futility of his hard work, and I was surprised at the candor of his answer – one of the few border cops to openly decry the rotten mess that is U.S. immigration law.

The mess has mostly to do with the double-dealing that comes naturally to legislators in Congress, who like to appear to act tough on immigration – public opinion demands it – while also sucking up to the big business that demands cheap illegal labor. That includes agriculture, meat-packing, restaurants, hospitals, construction, developers, landscaping, farming – all seeking a meek and compliant labor pool that depresses wages and buoys profits.

Yet the U.S. government annually budgets almost a billion and a half dollars fielding border agents like Larson to keep the evil hard-working aliens out. “Stopping the flow at the border is a small part of the issue,” Joe Larson told me. “Because they all make it through! I’m catching the same guys the next day, the same day, a week later.” Meanwhile, “interior enforcement” – raids on farms and construction sites that employ migrants – has declined by 80 percent since 1998. In 1992, INS fined 1,063 employers for illegal labor violations. By 2001, that number had plummeted to just 78. Joe Larson saw this hypocrisy first-hand in his five years with Border Patrol: “We’re not going in and taking ten thousand aliens from the tomato harvest, because of the huge economic impact. We don’t wanna cause a political uprising – people want their cheap lettuce, man!”

In a sense, the argument could be made that companies employing vast numbers of illegals thrive in collusion – whether they like it or not – with the murderous smuggling gangs supplying their labor. The solution, offers Larson, is a guest worker program: give the migrants visas, let them come in legally – out from the shadows of the Devil’s Path – and let them work for a living wage, with the protections and dignity afforded American citizens.

In the meantime, caught in the middle are the border cops like Larson and Carlos Archuleta – good people fighting a losing battle – and migrants like Juan Andres Perez. After getting busted in Ash Canyon last December, Perez was fingerprinted and quickly deported. A few days later, Border Patrol caught him again making the crossing into the Huachucas.

-30-

By Christopher Ketcham

Prologue

The boats Eric carried taught me the first lesson of the desert, which was the key lesson, the only one: Find water, follow it. An ancient wisdom, but to an Easterner accustomed to the milk of maples and the shade of the hemlock and the generous cloud that kept the streams flowing and the reservoirs filled and the thirst of the cities at bay, the question of whether there would be water was new, unbelievable.

So find the roads that lead to water, because the gas is going to run out, the sun will run you down, the heat will wring out your eyes and suck the marrow from your bones. Find the path on the water, may it cause you trouble. It did Eric: the trouble of the river was the trouble of the man. Eric now is made of all that he was and more that he wasn’t. My family watches the flickering Super 8 film that we shot of our trip down the river, the one trip we would take together – the waves boil up, crash, crown him. I drink afterwards, watch the film again alone. I don’t believe in karma, or God, or the afterlife, but for a long while I thought he was watching me.

I come back often, like this, to the Green River in daydreams, the river as I knew it in 1988, when I was 15 years old and discovering the West and Eric was still alive and captain of his unlucky crew of three. Sometimes I wonder how I made it out of the canyons not ending up a cripple, one-legged, the limb gone at the tibia from gangrene or whatever happens to limbs when you break them cruelly in the wilderness and for a long while there is no help. I think of how we rowed and rowed in the new moon’s darkness, racing against the leg, Eric waking from the bow, and I not saying a word. I think of the long days of June on the river, always the river, us like the loneliest, most primitive men. Or so my 15-year-old mind recorded it that way, romantically.

I remember how when we beached at the one or two outposts along the way, in Indian villages, in towns that consisted of a bridge and no Coke machine and no telephone, I looked at myself in a bathroom mirror astonished at the burnt brown wild-haired boy staring back, who had muscles that weren’t there in New York, who had no idea what date or day it was. And then I knew I wanted to live forever naked on a boat in the desert under the canyons, finding the hanging gardens of the cottonwoods where we could sleep in the sand, and in the mornings, fearful and hopeful, finding the path down the broken steps of the whitewater. And I think of Eric, who by the end of the trip was not my step-brother but a brother simply, who took care of me and cursed me for it, who was the wise man and guide and Bly of our ship, who adored the water and was in the end its victim. By tragedy he had soon become, in daydreams, an unreal figure, someone I never knew, who I wish I’d known, to run a river again, if we’d only had the chance.

CHAPTER 1: GO WEST

What good are forty freedoms without a blank space on the map?

– Aldo Leopold

The American desert seen for the first time in an Econoline roaring down I-80, with the radio playing Zappa, the windows open, the van shaking like it will fall apart, the boats we carried wanting to inflate and go, out of the night and into the sun, into the free light of the American West – the desert, so spare and bright and big, should be first seen when you are young enough not to know you’re on an adventure, and old enough to make a mess of things. And by adventure I mean when you get very hurt or very lost, when you apprehend that you could die, here, now. Much later, of course, you might scale Denali or make a silly attempt at heroism, with expensive gear, but none of it compares to that first leap into mortality, when you did it not knowing the map.

Eric knew the way: I-80 east across the high red desert of southern Wyoming with its hoodoos and dunes and buttes of red and amber, then south to the put-in at Dutch John, Utah, where the Green River waited at Flaming Gorge Dam.

Eric chose the Green for probably simpler reasons than I’ll venture. Perhaps because it was there. Or because it fell into canyons that only the few had seen. Or perhaps because its captains and fools and big-hearted river-rats pretty much invented the art of modern whitewater rafting, having learned first from the Green how to face a boat into rapids and survive to enjoy it. Or perhaps because the Green River was one of the epic drainages of the American West, a river of the beaver trade, a wintering water for rustlers and gunmen, a compass point for the conquistadors, and it told a story as wild and tragic and bountiful as the West, a story that in its final pages marked the end of the classic era of continental discovery.

Or let’s say it was because the Green was the last of the great American rivers Eric had yet to run. So there was no choice, really.

Eric envisioned a whole month in the wild, half of June and half of July, the high heat months, 20 miles a day down 500 miles of the Green across Utah to its confluence with the Colorado River. Only one other mate would join our crew, Eric’s oldest friend, Rob Morris, who was pensive and quiet and whose stillness threw Eric into screaming fits, making them somehow a good match. In retrospect, the whole thing seemed so foolish, dubious at best, so rife with peril – two men and a boy in a fifteen-foot boat, alone, unsupported, floating some of the remotest country in the U.S. – that I wonder if my parents, sick of me being stoned, kicked out of school, failing class, hadn’t finally given up. Perhaps they felt Eric would make a man of me, whatever that means. Brother by the re-marriage of my father and his mother, Eric like me was an Easterner, a New Yorker – he was from Manhattan, I was from Brooklyn – a kid of the city who early on went West and was driven to distraction with lust for wilderness. At 17 he bought a backpack, hitchhiked the U.S., climbed the Rockies, got sick of walking, discovered boats to be easier on the feet and infinitely more dangerous for the body. At 21, he ran his first river, the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, knowing almost nothing about whitewater. Eric promptly flipped the raft, lost the meat not battened down, heroically saved the beer in the aft, clinging as the boat crashed among the boulders. When he called his mother from the canyon bottom, at the crumb of civilization called Phantom Ranch, she asked if the water was cold. “Mom, I’m too scared to be cold.” Scared and drugged by it, having fallen into the abyss of the canyons to come up kicking. And I think already Eric had an inkling that maybe rivers were not meant to be run at all, nor the canyons they carved to be seen by human eyes.

Eric had always vaguely terrified me, but I also held him in awe, for he had traveled the world and brought home the trophies to show for it. When he was 21 and living in the basement of my father’s house with two Italian girls on a single futon, he showed me a pistol he said he’d smuggled out of Germany. It was a semiautomatic, compact, shapely. One day I went running after him down our Brooklyn street, calling out for some reason, and he turned and opened fire with the pistol, squeezing off four rounds, aiming right at my chest, and then whipped around and kept walking, like nothing had happened. I fell to the concrete, 11 years old and terrified, my whole body keening, wondering how he could have missed at that distance. Later he confessed the pistol was full of blanks.

So that was Eric: slightly crazy, possibly sinister, consistently haremed and definitely the brother I never had. To my mind, Eric shooting a pistol at me was a sign of affection.

So, too, was the Eric with his van seismic at a hundred miles an hour screaming something about the Green River being “gone soon,” the “last of the wild rivers,” and “people like us are fucking it up by just existing.” In 1988, the Green was not the last of the wild rivers, nor was it under threat of drying up. As for “people like us,” I thought that we, Eric and Rob and I running the river, carrying only what we needed, were the good guys. Eric, however, was racing against the imminent collapse of the planet. And we were all complicit.

The trip began with the kind of foolishness you’d expect of a fifteen-year-old pot-head. On June 20th, 1988, Rob Morris and I flew into Salt Lake City expecting to find Eric waiting with the Econoline, but a phone call to New York revealed that his van was stuck somewhere in the Colorado high country, fuel pump fried, and Eric himself was hitchhiking in a pair of sandals and boxer shorts, with only a wallet and keys and hat, rolling from town to town looking for the right part for his van, until he ended up in Denver, 400 miles from his van, half-naked but with the blessed fuel-pump in hand.

Sitting around the airport for a day or two was not a problem; I had brought lots of drugs. I had several ounces of marijuana, an ounce of psychedelic mushrooms, baggies of hashish, several tabs of acid, and my favorite pipe and rolling papers, all of which I stuffed in the pockets of my Boy Scout shorts when we got off the plane. With the drugs in them, the pants bulged obscenely, like little protruding mounds of flesh. Rob, who was paranoid, kept whispering that I was going to get caught if I didn’t show a little care in my smuggling.

I looked at the swollen pockets and shrugged.

“And I can smell the dope coming off you. This is ridiculous.”

That was true. The sweet-sour tang wreathed me when I walked.

“Let’s go check out Salt Lake.”

“Leave the drugs!”

“Nah!”

“Chris!”

“I’m not leaving ‘em in some locker to be sniffed out by dogs. All that other crap we can lose.”

Rob shook his head in disgust and we grabbed a cab, telling the driver to take us to the action, to the city center, to where the Mormons hung out. Salt Lake was my first experience of a big American city outside of New York, and it was an awful thing to behold, because it didn’t look or feel like a city. I remember it being highways and wide empty desolate streets with empty homes that all looked alike. No one walked on the sidewalks and there was no noise in the air, no voices, no radios, no footfalls, and the traffic was only a distant hum, like a pumped-in background music. Maybe the people had fled the ugliness of the place. Or maybe people weren’t meant to walk abroad in such a frightening and strange civilization. Maybe they lived in underground tunnels. Maybe walking was illegal, because a cop in his cruiser soon rolled up and floodlighted us like two bone-headed deer.

“Well there,” he stood with the light blasting. The cop had a funny way of speaking that swallowed words and spat them from the side of the mouth. All we heard was mush-mouthed gibberish.

“Uh,” Rob and I looked at each other. “Sorry.”

“Sorry?! Curfew been haid six fine old buzz chimp-pang the zoo! Even the zoo!”

A curfew! I figured out that much. This was horrible. A curfew, and all these drugs on me. I was suddenly pouring sweat.

The old cop shook his head. “Boys Salt Lake no I.D.?”

“Well,” Rob said, and then foolishly launched into the tale of Eric’s desert breakdown in the Econoline (skeptical look from cop), how we had flown in from New York (losing him), how we were to boat the canyons of the Green River (that was quite enough) –

“Now them I.D.s?

But we had no I.D.s. They were back at the airport in our bags. The only thing in my pockets were the goddamn drugs, which started to feel very heavy – like a long prison term.

“Smother jeezus,” the officer said. “But! Takin’ them pity ‘cause good Salt Lake! Hey nah?”

“Absolutely,” said Rob and motioned to me to start walking.

The officer was aghast. “Where going you hell’s bells?” He whipped out two yellow pieces of paper and waved them: youth identity cards to be filed at the police station. “Got ID ya!” He peered with his great bastard lamp first at Rob, scribbling a description of clothes and hair and eyes and ethnicity – half-Jewish, half-Filipino, Rob was a New York original – noting his social security number and address back in NYC and what time it was and where he’d found us and what our reasoning was for being out on the street.

Then he turned to me. Stopped. Peered. His face twisted up. “What them shorts there?” My blood froze and I went hot all over and glanced down at the bulging Boy Scout shorts and I could smell the two fat weed bags reacting to the hot flashes: a long sweet stenching breath of marijuana filled the air. God, it was all coming to an end –

“Tan,” the officer said a second later, scribbling, having asked only the color of the shorts.

Rob and I fled back to the airport. I was soaked in sweat and trembling and felt like throwing up.

“Throw up then,” Rob muttered. “I told you not to bring the drugs.” He admitted, though, that the event was worth capturing and embellishing to be passed along to Eric, who finally showed up in the hot dawn, hairy-chested in his sandals and boxer shorts, and with barely a hello. Eric was not amused.

“This trip is starting fucking great! You know, I was doing fine without the drug cartel in my truck. Little stash of weed! Little acid! Under the radar? Know the concept, Chris? Don’t you realize these Mormons are sick and dangerous people? You think you can just walk around here without drawing attention?”

But after a minute, Eric said, “So roll a joint already.” We sparked the joint and the wind whipped the smoke out the window, and dawn broke over the desert, and my eyes burst at the sight. Soon there were no cities, no houses, no habitations, no highway, a road dwindling to two lanes and then to dirt. Then the only road was water.

Our raft was a Maravia, 15’ long and 7’ wide, pliable to beat against rock, the same craft that had flipped in the Grand Canyon, with an oar station at its middle, storage front and aft, seating in the soupy bottom or on the tubes with ropes and rings to hold onto. In ammo cans and watertight bags we carried bread, ham, cheese and chocolate that wouldn’t endure in the sun – our last pleasures of civilization – and cans of tuna and beans and rice and nuts and beer that could last forever – except the beer, Eric drank gargantuan amounts of beer – plus life jackets, big-brimmed straw hats, river maps, first aid kit, tent, sleeping bags, grill and pan and gas stove, plus Eric’s red Prijon T-Canyon kayak, all ten feet of it torpedo-like strapped to the stern, the baby on the mother’s back. Eric loved his kayak.

We carried river books. I brought Huck Finn, and Rob brought Heart of Darkness, and Eric brought a muddy and stained paperback called Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, by someone named John Wesley Powell, who would come to be the ghost on our boat, the fourth man. When the mazy rapids went still and the June desert days drew out hot and long and cloudless, Powell’s story captivated Eric at the bow. For 119 years earlier, in 1869 and again in 1871, it was John Powell, a one-armed geologist from Ohio, who came west to chart the waters of the high desert and catalogue in almost river-eaten logs the famine and mutiny and camaraderie of the first explorers on the Green and Colorado Rivers. When Powell set out from Expedition Island in the railroad stop-over of Green River, Wyoming, he entered a region of the Southwest that was then one of the last forbidding question marks on U.S. maps, an unknown as big as Texas. John Fremont, who explored portions of Wyoming’s upper Green in 1843, noted that “no trappers have been found bold enough” to run the river southward, “a voyage with so certain a prospect of a fatal termination.”

A thousand miles later, where the Colorado River dies today in man-made Lake Mead, Powell emerged sun-blackened, half-starved, bruised by whitewater, surviving on spoiled flour and short one of his boats and three of his men, who were killed by Indians. Powell’s journey, remarkably, was not pecuniary, not for conquest, not an extension of government (Washington provided him almost no funding). His purpose was simply to know, to unveil the desert, and like Adam in the nude, he pointed to rock and rapid and bequeathed for posterity the names of the region. From Powell, we have Flaming Gorge and Echo Park and Son-of-a-Bitch Rapid, Desolation and Gray Canyons, Stillwater Canyon and Labyrinth Canyon and Cataract Canyon, Glen Canyon, and the Grand Canyon.

On May 24, 1869, under the sunshine of a crowd that mostly thought he had lost his mind, Powell put in with nine men and four boats. On June 22nd,1988, Eric and Rob and I found the river 30 miles below Expedition Island, under the shadow of Flaming Gorge Dam, which had flooded the spectacular canyons of Flaming Gorge in the 1960s. No one saw us off. The current gathered us to its fast lane, the sun blazed, the water was crystalline and cold as winter, and you could read the pebbles at its bottom. Quickly came our first rapid, in high-walled Red Canyon, arriving with a distant bubbling whisper, and Eric said, “Told you twice now. Put on your life jacket.” The river went faster, you felt it tugging in the stomach, a tongue of water between boulders took us in, we splashed through a single wave, suddenly soaked, and then rollercoastered a minute. And that was my first rapid. A great ape arrogance came over me. I stopped gripping the ropes on the boat and turned to Eric. “That was easy.”

“Don’t ever say that.” Then he said nothing more to me for the rest of the day.

We camped that first night in the wide yellow-grassy bottomlands of Browns Park, surrounded by distant high-tiered ledges of rock. A few houses stood in the park, where people lived year round. This was once rustler country, protected by mountains, mild-weathered in winter, sweet-watered, and strategically situated at the corners where Wyoming, Utah and Colorado met and jurisdictions blurred. Lawmen for many years were afraid to enter Browns Park. Butch Cassidy and his cadres holed up here – that “wild bunch at Browns Park,” a name that stuck – and it wasn’t until 1900 that the last rustlers were either gunned down or chased out.

On the second day I smoked weed and lazed and watched the blue sky and the water, which now by the action and turbulence had gone so brown with silt that it had no bottom and suddenly looked very deep and dangerous. When the sun went out behind a cloud, the river assumed the aspect of a living thing and it made me sit up. That afternoon, the landscape turned solemn and weird: the rock became the color of blood – oxidated from several thousand years of iron wash – the walls rose up 2,000 feet, as if clicked on, and the river plunged into a vertical crevice in the distance, a “great stone mouth drinking,” as an early trapper wrote. Powell named this the Gates of Lodore; he worried at the unknown beyond. A sound of rushing came from Lodore, and the Gates, Powell wrote, had become to his crew “a black portal to a region of doom…the old mountaineers tell us that it cannot be run.”

I remember the rushing; I remember the great stone mouth as it drank us. The whitewater comes suddenly, as suddenly as falling down a stairs, though portended in the quiet air by the hooves of a distant stampede, an approaching jet-liner – the gradient falling now at 20 feet per mile. The raft explodes in a wave that nettles the eyes; we leap like a cat getting kicked. We see for a moment from the top of a wave the sky and rock and the calamity of more rapids below: everywhere there is rushing, roaring, the echoing of it, the walls tightening in (a roaring that at night in Lodore never stops – it floods the ears, it could drive you crazy). Then the eyes are again latticed with water, pillars toppling, filling our ship with diamonds, light, whispers, explosions, blindness, Eric crying, “Don’t fucking stand there, stupid – bail!” and I bailing but feeling more like a pinball with a bucket. I looked at him tearing at the waves with his long thin arms and thinner oars, and on his face there was a smile, white and toothy and a little power-maddened, as if he was churning the river to his will, which made me feel better. Behind us, the canyon rims closed over and cut the sky into a shaft. Here for the first time I knew there was no turning back.

Seventeen years later, I went to find the place where we put in; this seemed extremely important. I flew into Salt Lake City and followed the tracks: I-80 east into Wyoming, with its trucks howling, then to the town of Green River and Expedition Island, where eight desert rabbits ran away in the brush; then a road with no other traffic, south to Dutch John, where I ran out of gas and limped to the pump. It was winter and foully cold but snow patches lit the fur of the pinyon trees and the yellow marching hills of the sage-grass, and I could see the Uinta Mountains in the distance, jagged and snow-packed, feeding their waters to the Green. I came to the spillway under the high white arc-light of Flaming Gorge Dam, where the dam settles like perfect teeth in the mouth of Red Canyon and the narrow river races. And with a thunder-clap I saw us under the shadow of the dam, blowing up the boat, decanting the van, Eric screaming orders, marshalling his troops and gear. But night was coming on at zero degrees and the vision was swept downstream in the cold. Still, I whooped at the discovery, I called out, I marked the spot with a snow angel, I splashed the freezing water on my face.

Then I stood awhile near the boat-ramp, with frozen hands, waiting for the shades to form again. On a wooden post was a warning about the river and how it drowns people, and I thought of Eric and what it must have been like, how they say it’s painless, and suddenly I saw my father and step-mother and sister and myself, almost my whole family, in tall white surf off Long Island on a summer’s day. I remembered how the surf turned on us that day: it pulled and it hit and knocked us down, I saw my father’s face growing pale as he fought, and I saw my sister growing panicked as she watched my father’s face, and I saw my step-mother getting pulled away, and I called out but no one could hear me above the waves, and then the current changed, like a smile, and spat us all bobbing back to land.

It got cold again. The swift central current spun a big-hipped eddy that beckoned continually where the boat-ramp touched the water. I watched a single moment of water in the eddy, following it through the motion of its hydraulics until the moment in water-time reached its arm into the central stream and was gone downriver where the canyon bent beyond sight. I remembered that riding the river, you felt entirely still. The land passed away; the river remained.

-end of chapter 1-

When New York Press editor Alex Zaitchik asked me to help write the paper’s 2005 list of the “Most Loathsome New Yorkers,” I took to the task gladly and also asked that my byline be attached to each of my votes. But one of our fellow contributors apparently freaked out at the idea of the writers naming their own names — which seemed strange, given, after all, that naming was the whole point of the exercise. Anyway, some of my Loathsome entries ran, some were dumped, but none ran under my byline. I correct that below, with a slant toward Brooklyn’s most loathsome. Enjoy, and sing out if you have any to add (god almighty, there are enough choices in NYC)…

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Tax-Dollar Waste, Non-Entity

Picture Ron Jeremy without the dick, Buddy Hackett without the laughs, and you have Brooklyn B.P. Marty Markowitz. Why this porcine oaf with the eerie resemblance to your insane grinning uncle continues to occupy Borough Hall is beyond reason. Once upon a time, when the Board of Estimate ruled graft and contracts in New York, the five borough presidents had power. But today it’s a no-show job. The bad news with Markowitz is that he shows up, and so do his 116 employees, his $4.7 million budget, and his four SUVs equipped with police sirens. Not content with doing nothing, Markowitz finds time to advocate for the downtrodden, such as Ikea, Home Depot and developer Bruce Ratner in their noble quest to cannibalize mom-and-pop neighborhoods. Markowitz is also known for racing around the city in HOV lanes with police lights flashing, en route to handing out a plaque. Markowitz was up for re-election last year and, true to form, voters put him back at the grindstone. Instead, he should have saved the citizens the trouble and us taxpayers millions of dollars and fired himself, fired his employees and turned Borough Hall into a methadone clinic. At least then we’d have reputable people hanging around the place.

-30-

Barbara Corcoran, Megarealtor, Suburbanizer

The Corcoran Group, whose agents get Botox injections and put steamy photos on their business cards, has done more than any other realtor in town to fetishize and thus gentrify once affordable and polyglot neighborhoods. According to the company’s website, Barbara Corcoran’s mega-realty had “over $5 billion in closed sales volume in 2003,” and according to CNN, Corcoran herself is “the most sought after broker” in the city. Of course, Corcoran’s success has opened the doors of the city to a thousand locust-like imitators, as they swarm into the next “hot, hip hood” to drive out blacks, Puerto Ricans, pensioners, old people, struggling families, squatters and anyone else who can’t step up to the Darwinian contest of market rates. “The Corcoran Group is the Wal-Mart of real estate,” says a local Brooklyn broker who didn’t want her name used. “Corcoran goes into a cheap neighborhood and brings in a developer to rip apart the organic fabric.” The Corcoran website states that Barbara founded the company at a “key moment in New York City real estate history” – the 1970s – “just as the city went from being a market predominantly composed of rentals to one of individual ownership.” Sound familiar? Yep, it’s the ethic of the “ownership society,” which pits the propertied against everyone else – the very same sociopathic drive with which the Republican Party of George W. Bush hopes to herd the poor to the fringes of American society.

-30-

District Attorney Charles “Joe” Hynes, Brooklyn’s Top Elected Criminal

Is this guy a jerk-off or what? The most powerful man in Brooklyn prosecutes political enemies on bullshit charges, talentless cronies balloon his staff, and almost every year he bursts his budget. His office is the top-heaviest in the city with six-figure “executive assistants” who apparently do nothing but kick money upstairs to Hynes’ campaign coffers. In fact, Hynes is the only of the city’s five DAs who extorts campaign contributions from staff. He also runs his campaign headquarters out of his offices, which is illegal. He took a bag of $12,000 in cash – also illegal – in his failed run for governor in 1998, but his staff prosecutors – those vaunted executive assistants – claimed not to know that taking sacs of cash is a crime. Three of Hynes’ children have been on the payrolls of various local politicos, though Hynes promised to bring a “wrecking ball” to the cronyism and patronage in Brooklyn that rots civic life. According to the Daily News, homicide is down 10 percent city-wide, but in Brownsville, it’s up 156 percent; in Bensonhurst, it’s up 400 percent. While Brooklyn burns, Joe Hynes plays with his pud and we foot the bill.

-30-

Max Boot, War Pundit, Laptop Bombardier

Though a resident of leafy suburban Larchmont, in Westchester, where manly intellectuals like him go to become child molesters, the grim and terrible Max Boot, author of “Savage Wars of Peace” and neocon par excellence, arrives to his offices at the Wall Street Journal decked in leather bomber, riding crop, and knee-high shit-kickers. We know this from his WSJ commentaries, including his now-infamous channeling of Dr. Strangelove via George Patton that complained of not enough American lives being lost in the invasion of Afghanistan. “President Bush promised that this would not be another bloodless, push-button war, but that is precisely what it has been,” Boot intoned (this from a pale-faced wonk). “Our bombing campaign reveals great technical and logistical prowess, but it does not show that we have the determination to stick a bayonet in the guts of our enemy….” Whatever. Writing more recently in the New York Times, the lunatic Boot enthused on the American occupation of the Philippines that teed off the last “American century” and ended in the deaths of 200,000 civilians. “It was a long, hard, bloody slog,” he writes, also describing, sources say, sex with his Larchmont wife. We hope Boot is contented with the line of Iraq War corpses that can be traced to him and his fellow neocons’ door.

-30-

Lawrence A. Kudlow, War Economist, Madman

Like Boot a blood-thirsty psychopath who believes himself sane, the one-time top Bear Stearns/ING economist and co-propagandist on CNBC’s Kudlow & Cramer wrote cheerily of the economic benefits of the impending disaster in Iraq. “The shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand points,” promised the vampire, who by day doubles as CEO of his eponymous midtown consulting firm while also writing a column for National Review. “We will know that our businesses will stay open, that our families will be safe, and that our future will be unlimited.” So…our businesses stayed open…because we…invaded Iraq….Um. Okay – fucking sicko. The real record since the war – pace Kudlow the Impaler – has been millions of jobs lost and a slumping economy. Oh, not to mention the moral nightmare of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and what will likely be a decades-long occupation blowing billions upon billions of dollars better spent on a space program for sending people like Kudlow to another planet on which to play his homicidal version of Monopoly. There’s also that rather future-limiting thing that’s been happening to American soldiers, known as death, as in 2,500 of them (as of June 2006 — but why stop at 2,500?!). Kudlow’s grade-A asshole status is further confirmed by his being an avid golfer.

-30-

Bill O’Reilly, Cable Television Freak, Ostensible Talk Show Host

O’Reilly is the classic lace-curtain Irish boor – mottled, thin-skinned, wistful, bloated and delusional — and a whining Miss Nancy to boot. As loathsome as he is, his personality would be a desperately pitiable object if he wasn’t the kind of behind-the-scenes suck-up demagogue who will one day be Commissariat of Information and Media Punishment in George Bush’s Emergency Third Term (watch, it’ll happen). Here’s a guy whose only answer to challenge is to throw girly tantrums, who screams down Al Franken when Franken busts him for lying about winning the super-prestigious Peabody Award, who cuts his guests’ mics when they disagree with him, who calls his fellow Americans “traitors,” “unpatriotic” and “dangerous” when they refuse to support a semi-imbecilic and totally criminal administration – all this, mind you, in the righteous confines of O’Reilly’s “no spin zone,” one of the boldest bogosities in the history of tv news marketing. When O’Reilly suggests to us for Valentine’s Day to go out and buy each other copies of his lousily written, poorly researched, mendacious tracts, we sadly know he’s looking for the love his drunken abusive daddy never provided to the one and only male daughter in the family.

-30-

William B. Harrison, Jr., CEO of JP Morgan Chase & Co.

If you trust your money in Chase’s vaults, you already should hate this guy for doing nothing since his appointment in 2001 to fix his company’s usurious rape of low income depositors: the ATM fees ($1.50 on a $20 withdrawal?); the near-nil savings account rates; the minimum balance fees on checking accounts; and every other fiduciary duty-turned-scam in which poor people with nothing much to save are the most common prey – their meager monies meant rather for the enrichment of the privileged few who invest in or run America’s No. 2 bank. Lately, Bill Harrison’s loathsomeness as CEO of a loathsome enterprise has hit a new high, as I noted in NY Press in 2005: JP Morgan continues to extend huge credit sums to predatory lenders that then use JP’s line to furnish cash “payday” loans to the working poor – generosity tempered, of course, by annual interest rates that can approach 1,000 percent. So-called “payday” lenders find an especially fruitful clientele in youthful soldiers, according to a report in Bloomberg News. Thus have payday lenders over the past decade taken root like poison mushrooms in the fecund soil of the “private sector” around military bases nationwide. None of this could have ever come to pass without the largesse of assholes like William Harrison and his ilk, which includes, to be fair, the heads of Wachovia Corp., Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co., all of whom have snatched a piece of the $6 billion-dollar-a-year payday lending industry – but none so effectively or extensively as JP Morgan.

-30-

Steven Roth, CEO of Vornado Realty Trust

Under the captaincy of Mr. Roth, multi-billion dollar real estate developer Vornado Realty Trust has been the first in the city to propose a Wal-Mart superstore for one of its Queens sites. To Mr. Roth I’d like to answer with the simple facts of the obscenity that is Wal-Mart and what the coming of Wal-Mart likely means for the communities that Mr. Roth hopes to “develop.” After a decade of predations in Iowa, Wal-Mart’s presence has led to the closure or bankruptcy of 555 grocery stores, 298 hardware stores, 293 building supply stores, 161 variety stores, 158 women’s apparel stores, 153 shoe stores, 116 drugstores, and 111 men’s and boys’ apparel stores. Wal-Mart sales clerks nationwide averaged $8.23 an hour in 2001. That’s $13,861 a year – $800 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. Wal-Mart employees in Georgia were six times more likely to rely on state-provided health care for their children than were employees of any other large company. In California, Wal-Mart workers are so heavily dependent on public assistance programs that their employment at Wal-Mart cost state tax-payers $86 million annually. An investigation by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce found that “Wal-Mart’s rock bottom wages and benefits cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year in basic housing, medical, childcare, and energy needs that the retailer fails to properly cover for its employees.” All else being equal, U.S. counties where new Wal-Mart stores were built between 1987 and 1998 experienced higher poverty rates than other U.S. counties. So thanks, Mr. Roth. Thanks a fucking lot.

-30-

…and if anyone should see these two loathsome fuckers, call the ASPCA…posthaste!

By Christopher Ketcham

(Note: Merchant mariners who fought in World War II were never honestly recognized or remunerated for the terrors they endured from the wolf-pack u-boats of the German navy. In Brooklyn I’ve spent a little time, several years, in bars where old Liberty ship mariners used to drink. Below is a true story, pieced together and much embellished or perhaps too little embellished, of a father who discovers his son’s death and of the son in the Atlantic after his ship has gone down.)

Captain Joe threw himself against the walls, he dervished into night-stand and liquor rack and writing table and he smacked a great oil lantern to the ground and for some reason it went out when the oil spilled, now the place stinking of oil and blackness and he spinning and screaming and spinning and falling down exhausted, he lay against the wall in a corner of the little room for a long while, and outside the braver of the crew, who perhaps had no respect, stood in a line in the corridor to the door listening, saying nothing, worried now for the man who would lead them home through the wolf-pack. Lt. Appleman, who knew, who had seen it through his own glasses, quietly and furiously told them to move away.

There was a shadow on the ship then.

The oil fire lay over the water hurling its yellow limbs down into the water, then dousing out, reengaging. Fists of white and yellow fell, meteors that blew out. All Sigmund could see was the yellow bubbling above him and below the darkness that fed from the light, sucking it in, at once illuminated and dashing all light in its mushy feeding shapes. A shark sped past him, gaining on blood somewhere, and Sig felt the air going out of him. He breast-stroked, felt himself rising, the water boiling above him, frozen beneath him…breath out….more air gone, swim faster. Die now, don’t die. The history of the planet, he thought, the sun and the sea, water and fire. Three sharks rammed him: blind for the bodies of the crew of the Tarkington…God, they are crass, they are devils, they should wait. Suddenly, mud-darkness, cool and without shape, without light, the burbling, babbling thousand suns gone. And he thought of all the people who had drowned, though to think of every death took less than one-twentieth of a second, because he selfishly hated them for dying, that he would be like them, but they for a hung twentieth of a second all drowned, lining up, drowning, and seeing himself line up, drowning, the dead, drowning, and he waking up not catching his breath, feeling sick, wanting to throw up, feeling the sun much too hot, after a sunburn on Coney Island, his mother putting yogurt on his cheeks.

A current had caught him fast away from the fire, or the fire had swum away, or he dolphining had swum under it faster than it could burn, for now he was free of it and vomiting water, seizing air with his tongue and he could feel the sea was thick and heavy and viscous and felt like gauze, like blood feels in the mouth. He looked at his hands: black as tar. He began to hyperventilate: burnt, I’ve been burnt, my hands, my body, die, I will die.

– Joseph! Joseph!

And no one answered, and there was no echo, he was in a warehouse by the sea, it was Brooklyn, the mice scattered, it was summer, winter, the ice scanned the rock of the pier for weaknesses. A project for school: erosion. The waves moved into the stone and made the stone, man-carved and ugly, silly, practical – the waves made by their destruction a beauty of the staunch built thing, which was finally eroded and was no more and then no one could say it was beautiful.

– Joe!

The waves hooked and beveled, and the sea steamed from the heat of the fire, fog blew in white pennants. Sig came to rest on the wreck, also burnt and black, of a rowboat that had held men upon whom the fire on the water came without warning, swallowing the flesh but leaving the wood alive. Sig thought he saw blast prints in the boat, which was not sinking yet but seemed to fill with an oily jet like a desert spring, subtle and kind, something to drink from, which he did, then vomited. Sig hung here with right arm snug around the wood, like a leaf.

– Joe?

And no one answering and in the darkness the oil tide carried him but the fire burned in the other direction and the great ship in its yellow light sunk at last with all hands. Sig watched this but thought he was seeing the circus at five years old. And he remembered he was seeing the ship go down, and he started screaming:

– Marty! Marty! Marty! Marty! Marty! Marty! Marty!

And screaming he took a drink, he pulled the oil murk with a breast stroke, remembering to keep moving, the frozen water worked its tongue smoothly up his calve, shivers pulled in like ten birds waiting. He saw Brooklyn, where the first dead man in history washed up when he was six years old and he and the ten grasses that lay down in Rockaway when he lay on the beach in Breezy Point. And the ten birds poisonous as mildew and the fluid from the new shock absorbers in the 1940 Fords.

– Daddy! he cried out. Joe!

A ship appeared after a while, wearing rays of light on its bow. The SS Hunt hid north of the battle and now it was running cemetery duty, pulling men from the frozen sea.

By Christopher Ketcham

“I meant no harm. I most truly did not. But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got. I biggered my factory. I biggered my roads. I biggered my wagons. I biggered the loads. And I biggered my money, which everyone needs.”
— “The Lorax,” Dr. Seuss

Emerging in May on my 33rd birthday from heat, aloneness, sun, air, light, rock, and the warm smooth starry night of southeastern Utah, I fly home to New York via Phoenix and then Las Vegas, canyon-jumping in little planes. Unused to human company, artificial noise, confined spaces, the barking of loudspeakers, the masses of fake tits boarding the plane for Vegas, I come into Phoenix and wait on many lines in a semi-moronic state. Yesterday, I climbed the Fiery Furnace in Arches National Park. The Furnace, so named not for its heat but for the crimson it glows in the setting sun, is a maze of fins and slots and pinnacles carved of the melodious red sandstone — sculptures of 200 million years of work by wind and rain. A labyrinth of silence and immensity, its washes are gardens: dunes glued by the spreading roots of pinyon pine and by the wild green hair of Mormon tea and by cliffrose smelling of honey.Then there’s Phoenix and Las Vegas. Whereas it might be said that every stone and tree and slot and dune in the Fiery Furnace has a purpose — what that is, who knows, who cares — and was meant to be, the twin metropolises of the southwest thrive where no city was meant to be, where God told the traveler not to stop (there is no water here, fool, only rock) and humanity in its inexhaustible hubris instead founded Babylon. By some estimates, Phoenix and Las Vegas each swallow the desert at an acre an hour in a marvel of unsustainable growth. Phoenix especially: a city so gripped by the slow suicide of the development monomania that in the midst of the worst-ever drought in the recorded history of the West, as ancient aquifers suck dry, officials hand out fines for not watering the lawn. Brown grass is bad for a real estate bubble.

I first got to know Phoenix on Christmas Day, 2003. There was no sun in the city that morning, which made the desert palms look fake, like a movie set. My friend Christine Nucci, with whom I was staying, was leaving town forever, packing big black suitcases in her little apartment. Her 74-year-old mother was helping. Her boyfriend, Brian Mahoney, sat in a metal stacking chair and said in his Brooklyn accent, “I don’t know. Don’t feel so good. Dizzy. Real dizzy.” On Thanksgiving, three weeks earlier, he nearly died from a sudden affliction, diabetes, that caused a blood clot in his left leg, which had to be opened up and carved out, with skin grafted back on in raw red squares. He’d been in the hospital until a few days ago. Now Christine stared off the balcony at the sunless desert, chain-smoking. “Can you believe this? I live here for fuckin’ six years, I don’t see a cloud, and Christmas Day complete overcast. What a town. What a mess.” Then she burst into frantic activity.

Her mother, Eleanor, stood a moment more on the balcony and watched the deflated sky and the sprawl and the highway and the empty lanes. No traffic jams yet. A black boy with a new toy gun sprayed the quadrangle yard on which the apartments opened, blasting the green lawn, which was falsely green, watered absurdly. This was a desert, after all. The boy played alone, realized it, stopped spraying the bullets, and stood there looking as if the fight had been suddenly hoovered out the top of his little head. Then in a weeping willow, the birds chattered, sounding like pieces of pottery clicking. The willow, like the lawn, was an alien form, grown here against the will of the land. No one awoke or spoke in the apartments, except the boy. “It just doesn’t look like Christmas at all,” Eleanor said to Brian, who shifted weight from leg to leg, and shuffled when he walked. His face was sallow and thin. When he almost died, he told me, “There were all these people in the operating room and I wanted to scream out and tell ’em what was happening, but you know that feeling when you’re powerless, you’re paralyzed, you open your mouth but nothin’ comes out?”

Eleanor Frick-Nucci spoke to her four-year-old grandson over a cellphone and said, “Merry Christmas, darling.” She stared at the palm trees that lined the false lake where no one was walking. The connection was bad, and she had to yell. Later she said, “On Christmas Eve, I usually stay at my son’s house, in Florida, and I’m there to watch the kids open their gifts. It’s nice.” Then she said, “My son married into a big Italian family. They have a feast, everyone gathers. They have lobster tails and crab meat and all sorts of good things. They do this for a whole day.”

Eleanor and Christine and Brian hated Phoenix. “If this is America, America is a fuckin’ dump. What a sick, sick, sick place,” Christine said, waving her arm, by which, apparently, she meant everything in sight. “Gawd, I can’t wait to get back to Montague Street. Eat good food. Live good life. I don’t even know where to get food around here. Six years, and there’s nothing good to eat. Ha, ha, I’ll be back in Brooklyn before you, buddy, eating a big cold-cut sandwich at Lassen & Hennings on Montague Street.”

On Christmas Eve we tried to find food. Nucci was desperately hungry, and so was Brian, who waited at the motel, sick. Eleanor sat in the back seat falling asleep in the warm sun. First we went to a glorified box called Swenson’s, which closed at exactly three p.m. It happened to be one minute after three. Nucci threw up her hands and cursed. We drove in the maze of malls and road and got lost. Nucci suddenly grabbed my arm: “Turn here!” We pulled up to a sandwich place in a strip mall. A server was stacking outdoor tables and told us cheerily, “Uhp. Just closed.”

“You bastids!” cried Nucci, smashing the dash with her palm. She scanned the horizon like a wounded animal. “Bastids! Whole town of bastids! Just keep driving, Chris. We’ll find something. Or maybe we won’t. Maybe we won’t find anything at all. Maybe we’ll starve to death in this car driving around in circles. This is what happens when you leave Brooklyn,” she said. “Gawd, I just wanna get out of here alive. Get Brian better. Poor guy. I can’t believe the priest was gonna be called. Good grief, they told me he was a goner. Never leave Brooklyn, Chris.” To pass the time, I asked about her students at Arizona State University. “My students? Redneck idiots. These people are going to be teachers next year and they don’t know that Phoenix has water problems. I had one girl ask me, ‘Oh, you’re from Brooklyn! What does a Jew look like?’ Savages. God help Phoenix.”

As we drove in circles, Christine started talking about prehistoric disasters, about the Hohokam Indians who once farmed Phoenix, irrigating the desert. They called it the Valley of the Sun. For a thousand years in the Valley of the Sun they built canals and watered the sand and thrived in balance with the land, a sort of Arizona Maya. Then, around the year 1400, the Hohokam disappeared. No one knows why.

“Hohokam means ‘the people who have gone away,'” Christine said. She shrugged and pointed with her chin at the stripmalls on an endless loop out the window, the throwaway homes, the highways now clogging, the empty streets where no one was walking on Christmas Day. She was reacting, in effect, to the waste and anomie and profligacy of the quintessential American habitat made all the more sinful and strange planted in the scarcity of the desert. “Six years ago when I first came here, I thought there was hope for this place,” she tells me. “Not anymore. I watched the county government knock down hundred-year-old cactus to pave cheap tract homes. One guy was clearing his land by shooting at a cactus and it fell and killed him. God help Phoenix.”

Now from the plane leaving the city I looked down over the martian peaks of the Superstition Wilderness, which until recently stood remote from the sprawl. The Superstitions are deadly in summer, volcanic and hoodooed, red as rust, with gardens of mesquite and saguaro and arroyos that rush briefly in summer monsoon. In the distance, crawling toward the crags, a smear of lime-green: golf courses that should never be and cannot remain. They feed a golf community, homes with more green smears, sprinkled lawns, dogs in fern yards. Sewers extend along roads that lead nowhere, waiting for the people to come. From this wide vantage as night falls, one can’t help but see the fool’s gold hope in the city’s mighty twinkling. Geographically, Phoenix now spreads farther and wider than even the gorged sprawl of Los Angeles.

The “Growth Lobby,” as Nucci called it, insures this is nowhere near an end. The bankers, mortgage lenders, construction companies, developers, speculators, the real estate agents and the pourers of concrete stack the legislatures and the local community groups, which abdicate land-use planning in favor of growth and more growth. Local governments insure low- or zero-impact costs, which saddles the taxpayer with the water and sewer and electric lines, the schools, the funding of fire and police departments. The result is a systemic starvation of social services. In Phoenix, fire departments in their off-time offer cheap car-washes; the firemen stand outside the firehouses with signs begging motorists. Low-wage linear slums blight the cityscape, gangs thrive, crime explodes, income inequalities widen apace. The rich disappear into the next big development on the fringe, seeking the last open spaces. Meanwhile, there is drought and more drought, seven years and counting, and Phoenix in 2003 was the only major Western city to not impose mandatory water-use restrictions. Instead, desperate Arizona water managers, in the grip of the same old madness (grow or die!), now envision using “treated effluent” — shit and piss water chemically cleaned up for drinking and bathing. (I say cut out the middle-man and have the good citizens piss in each other’s mouths.)

Weather will fortunately call a halt to this tragedy. The American West may be entering a prolonged drought cycle unlike any seen in recent history. According to the New York Times, researchers who have studied tree rings and ocean temperatures for drought patterns over the last 800 years are finding evidence “that the relatively wet weather across much of the West during the 20th century was a fluke.” The Times cited experts predicting that energy production from Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam, feeding the air conditioners and slot machines of Phoenix and Las Vegas, will come to a halt by 2007 if conditions remain unchanged and the waters recede and Glen Canyon becomes again a canyon. In words that should ring like funeral bells, the Times concludes that “the development of the modern urbanized West — one of the biggest growth spurts in the nation’s history — may have been based on a colossal miscalculation.” That miscalculation is perhaps paradigmatic in Phoenix, but the monster is being replicated everywhere throughout the desert (as for example, in Las Vegas, in 2005 America’s fastest growing city). As a respected urban planning magazine describes it, the pattern is typified by “disregard for a water ethic, fragmented local government that is subservient to corporate planning, lack of public space, failure to account for conservation, disregard of zoning for natural disasters, dispersed land-use, dictatorship of the automobile, and acceptance of racial and economic inequality.”

In 2001, Arizona environmentalists made a hearty effort to right the course, with a ballot referendum called the Citizens Growth Management Initiative. CGMI, or Proposition 202, would have instituted the basic infrastructure of rational land use planning — community review and impact studies, public meetings and public votes — but it was resoundingly defeated following a $4 million ad campaign, a Growth Lobby tour-de-force, that predicted economic and social disaster but was largely a mosh of half-truths and outright lies. One television spot showed a family stranded in their desert home using a Port-o-San, a bratty child crying up to hollow-eyed parents, “It’s not fair.” Other tricksters purchased the URL www.yeson202.com to post anti-202 propaganda. A $50,000 study from the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, Bank One and Bank of America doomed the state to a loss of 1.2 million jobs over 12 years if the initiative passed. Within a week, the chamber admitted its ballyhooed press release was way off — that in fact a potential 210,000 new jobs might not materialize.

The corrections made little difference, for the damage in the public mind was done. Early polls showed CGMI had the support of roughly 70 percent of voters, then it dropped to 62 percent, and by the time the ballots were counted, the numbers had reversed: 70 percent of Arizonans had voted against CGMI. Newspapers said the flip-flop was “unprecedented” in Arizona polling history.

Oh well. My piss awaits their thirst. A generous offer. Not good enough, however. The grow-or-die maniacs want a piece of sweet and holy places like the Fiery Furnace, too. As I write these words, an energy exploration company is building a derrick on land just outside Arches National Park, looking for cheap natural gas. The derrick will extend 14,000 feet into the earth, and will likely rise a hundred feet into the air, if not higher. It will be visible from many vantages in Arches. In the silence of the Fiery Furnace, you might even be able to hear its labors, the sound of industry carried on the wind.

By Christopher Ketcham

SCENE: Said the rat-faced drunk in the strip club: “You know, if I wasn’t lucky enough to be a human being, say, if I was a Bonobo monkey, I’d be trying to screw you up the ass right now.”

He paused. I looked at him trying to smile.

“Yeah, I’d be trying to fuck you in the ass right now, in the middle of the floor,” he continued. “How the hell would you like it if I was sittin’ here trying to fuck you in the ass? I’m sittin’ here and I just — I just try to bend your ass over — fuck ya? How the hell would you like that?”

I didn’t answer. I was scared of him. Days before, the man explained, he had found his five-year-old daughter watching a Nature special on the Bonobo monkeys, and it made him sick. The Bonobo, for those who don’t know, is a West African primate that has sex practically all the time, whenever and with whomever it can. Bonobos know no gender or incest boundaries when it comes to the dirty deed: mothers and fathers pair with their children, as do sisters with brothers, sisters with sisters and brothers with brothers. They are a matriarchal society, and observers note with some interest that there is absolutely no violence among them. They are the only non-aggressive primate group, as well as the only animal that masturbates for pleasure.

“You know Bonobo moms have sex with their kids right after they’re born?” said Bonobo, silly with drink. He grimaced across the stage at the Baby Doll Lounge. The Baby Doll, before it was forced out of business by the puritans running New York today, was a gaunt, homely rectangle off White and Church streets in Tribeca. It had a minimally stocked liquor shelf, red ceilings, black walls, and warped funny mirrors along the dancers’ stage, which was staple-carpeted unevenly, as if the soused Bonobo had set them up. A girl in dyed-red hair, with a forty-year-old face and the perky body of a 17-year-old, nibbled her fingers over the tatty carpeting. The age difference made me think of some R. Crumb twist on Frankenstein: old head that knows the moves on a new body that can do them.

“I find my kid watching this stuff on Channel 13,” continues Bonobo. “Graphic stuff. And my little daughter’s watching these monkeys bang away at each other.”

“Bonobo’s a funny word,” I said.

“Fucking Bonobo.”

I started thinking up variations. “Bonobable” for something honorable and good; “to bonobe,” to have sex, a variation on “to bone”; “bonobalicious,” the superlative of bonobable.

“When I saw that, I felt like killing those Bonobos,” said Bonobo. A stripper approached at his dollar beck, poking her packed bra at his forehead. “No, baby, I wanna go downtown.”

“Why?”

“They’re repulsive. They’re really repulsive. They’re everything we’re not,” he said. “What really bothers me is my five-year-old is watching this stuff. It’s just disgusting. Nature. Nature is disgusting.”

SCENE: the safaried men, in jungle khakis, on elephants, the Hannibal men with cheek-scars – one with pussing eyes and a raging fever being carried in a stretcher. Still others, jawing a meager ration with eyes cocked at dripping leaves; rain-dread and malarial yellow-eye; slave-men lowing, tea being set in the mosques of netted tents at night. The drizzling of fires going out, gew-gaws of stars, the rhapsodic sounding and thumping of a beast somewhere afar. Bloody sacks humped on flat rocks – the porters clicking with the cricket, knowing something is afoot, at the least that a long night is falling.

He imagined this as she lap-danced. Her breasts were enormous, soft and fake. She could still squeeze milk from them, which he had not thought possible after such a knifing. “How kin ya still gi’ milk?” he asked.

“I just give birth four months,” she said.

The Bonobo Hunt would last months, he decided after the lap dance. First, sickness among the men, and spawning mutiny, and loathing for the natives, and abuse. “Where are the Bonobo?” asked the strapping hook-nosed men with green teeth and faces burnt.

Went the drums: “Wedonobonobo wedonobonobo wedonobonobo.” Civilized men who are really in nature, who have no repair but wits and sweat, end up hating nature. First of all, nature is indifferent. We die, it goes on. Wand of cycles the Romantic pulls from felt hat: triad of banalities – sea, sex and sun, for example.

Nature is quite boring, actually, repetitious, modulated by a hugely organized caprice, the weather, which men take to be Providence – which viewed from the fireplace with the bed-bug lady lover seems the honeymoon suite. Nature is really something awful, giant stomach, very intestinal. This writer remembers when he broke his leg in the wilderness, on the Green River, which feeds the Colorado, in a desert canyon with no option but down-river to Lake Powell. He remembers the laughter of the canyons when, balancing on an oar to take a dump, he fell in the warm turd, and just lay there for awhile, ‘cause it was warm and his leg was getting cold.

Then, a fist of town out of mud: they see it many miles away, with its strings of smoke over the hills. They proceed carefully, knowing the region is full of tribal enmities, hatred of the white man, and many small bugs. One such bug, a few unfortunates in the party learn, lays its eggs in human flesh: a type of spider, they learn, after the newborns hatched from Messr. Barnabus’ calf. The bite innocuous at first: a splotchy fret of red surrounding two bloody, squinting eyes where the teeth delved. Barnabus, organizer and most impassioned of the Hunt, put it aside and told no one, as none of the symptoms of heavy poisoning followed. And told no one when the bite swelled; he swathed it in bandages; for the pain, he shot a cylinder of morphine daily. And still told no one; and feared, for reasons he knew not, to remove the bandages. For the wrap seemed to grow, to bulge outward a little bit daily, and the pain itched up his leg into his spine, gave him headaches, hot flashes. Nights he dreamed of many legs hauling on his tongue, and he awoke thinking they were ants. Which did not bother him, mind you, Barnabus being a tough guy, of generous muscle.

Till one day, at break in a cool valley stream, under the jungle shade, he removed the bandages. The flesh around the wound had grown very soft, pale as chiffon, almost transparent; but the wrack the wound had put on his spine prevented him bending over for closer inspection. He called to a porter. “You,” he said in the native tongue, “take a look at this, will you?” The porter came up, looked at the leg, and backed off with fear in his eyes. “You give birth,” he said.

Feeling the cool, the bandages removed, the eggs had begun to hatch. The flesh crawled a moment. Then his leg exploded in pain; the flesh around the midpoint of the calf began to ripple, like a calm sea; it shuddered, lay still.

Messr. Barnabus got angry. “What the hell is going on?” He stood up. Suddenly, the flesh popped, and out came a flicking leg.

The porters got excited, but kept their distance. “Bwana giving birth,” they shouted.

SCENE: half-naked woman in rags with a pair of bent glasses hanging off her putty-shaped nose, running amok among the Bonobo hoards, who are screeching and oooing, alternately screwing each other and looking coy. The woman, a college professor who teaches women’s studies and anthropology, finds a small garrison of the wretched beasts fingering a solemn mother about to give birth; the tiny, mucusey head pumps forth from her fat yam-colored cunt. Nearby, a brace of young, frail Bonobo sit stupidly on a log. The woman begins to give orders. She has perfected the means of command, a Morse-Twat Code: she effects it by falling on hands and knees, raking the sky with her hindquarters, and dipping a dildo in her vagina, and by varying depths, speed changes, and angles of entry she communicates to the massing Bonobo the threat peering out of the jungle. “It is Man! He is coming to destroy your happiness!” cries the Dildo, now slamming most eloquently in her anus. “He would destroy all Nature if he could. You! Commandeer that trunk! You! Get off her, and arm yourself with this twig! You! Raise your thumbnail! Defend yourselves against Man!”

By this time, the Bonobos are muttering and drooling with interest. They understand the orders, the threat, their imminent destruction, but find much more compelling this silvery bar winking with sunlight out of her bonobable ass. “It is bonobalicious!” says one, as a Troubadour hacks his arm off.

“We must bonobe her,” says another, moving to mount the young anthropologist when an elephant gun shears him in half. “Take her to Bonobalopolous,” cries a third, but as this fair city was in the midst of being overrun, the anthropologist suddenly found herself the object of affection of several dozen very randy Bonobo males. It had not been her plan.

In fact, so whacked was her plan that invading Man, bristling with machetes and shotguns and bloody to the gills with slaughter, saw this impromptu orgy – and joined in. Man and Bonobo boffed side by side, even taking turns with courteous bows. Once the men had finished, they slaughtered every last child of the ancient tribe, and the bonobos were no more.

SCENE: They were finished. The money lay on the table: two hundred-dollar bills, sweat-heavy and crumpled on a plastic poker table in a corner of the room. He looked at her closely, affecting the engaged eyes of a man in love.

“Yeah, alright,” she said.

“Shh,” he said, fearing the fat black man outside the door. “Could I…just look at your teeth a second?”

“My teeth are fake. Fuck off.”

He pulled out a fifty.

“Okay, look at my teeth.”

Three, five, seven, ten – he counted ten caps. They were porcelain white, toilet white he suddenly thought. Your teeth are toilet white. How many hours did it take in the chair to make those teeth. How much money. He looked closer at the gums: they were red, almost bleeding. The cap-edges dug into the sensitive gum.

“Your gums are bleeding,” he said finally.

“Yup,” she said.

*****

By Christopher Ketcham

Recent events in the career of our outdoorsman vice-president recall an encounter I had with the VP several years ago. It was during the short-lived Dick Cheney presidency on Saturday July 29, 2002. On the dawn of the day of the Cheney ascendancy, the day on which at an unknown hour George Bush would be explored for ass polyps and sedated into a babbling stupor and power would be briefly transferred to Mr. Cheney for the sake of “national security,” I was passed out very drunk lying on a pile of sand and rubble at the edge of a broken-down pier off Buttermilk Channel, which is part of Lower New York Bay. Buttermilk Channel was so named for the cows that 250 years ago used to cross the mud-flats at low-tide, trundling their teats along the channel floor.

A fisherman came to the shore, a large narrow-eyed balding man in gaiters. At that point, I was busy trying to drag a steamer trunk floating in the surf up the rubble bank and into the street by the pier. “Hey, man, morning,” I said cheerily, “you give me a hand here a sec?” The man said nothing. He looked at me like I was a dog-fish: you know how the ugly and inedible dog-fish barks when it gets beached?

I figured what I had actually said was “Ey ma’ awning oo eeve m’a han hersec?” I wanted to make contact; but I needed to enunciate. So I stared out to sea for a moment the way the man was staring out to sea. Profoundly. I concentrated. “Ketch th’ good fish here?” I finally said.

“Not much,” the man said. He was a grim dude.

“Dick Che’y’s president t’day, y’know?” I said, and proceeded to tell him about the polyps and how the sand-niggers would use this moment of weakness to hit us all over the country. I thought this was hilarious and belly-laughed and went into a coughing fit, the guttural seeing-stars kind.

The man said nothing. I kept tugging at the steamer and staring out to sea, then staring at the fisherman, who would alternately fade into a blur and then seem to shed a preternatural light. “Poison fish in th’ bay,” I said. “Pol’ooshin. You eat ‘em?” The man grunted and went about casting his line.

I got back to work; I pulled at the trunk like a weakened monkey and got my shoes squishy-wet in the oily water. “Diiiiick. Cheney,” I said.

“Jesus,” the man said. He shook his head.

I was having a hard time with that trunk. It was huge and heavy and waterlogged and felt like it was full of rocks. But it was a beauty, an art-piece, with false-gold clasps and carven whales on its sides. I hauled the trunk a few inches over the shattered masonry, making a godawful clatter, and every so often I looked up at the fisherman with tears in my eyes (I was very happy about the trunk).

Having at last gotten it out of the surf, I sat down and after two minutes of silence and the sea lapping, I turned to the man and said, “We split the treasure, whattaya say?”

“Jesus,” the man muttered.

I gave the trunk a real go; put my weight into it, both hands on the leather strap. “C’mon, DICK,” I barked. “’his steamer trunk ‘s coming wi’ ME!” I dragged and heaved and cursed, and got it halfway up the rocky bank, my feet slipping, but the wet strap broke and I flew backwards into sharp jutting rocks and yowled in pain.

“Oh! Gimme a fuckin’ break, will ya?” the fisherman now cried out, casting at me a hateful snarled look. “Jesus! Je-sus! Take your steamer trunk and shove it up your ass!”

“But I can’t carry ‘his ‘hing alone, man,” I cried. “I can’t do it!” And now the guy moved off a little ways along the pier, enough distance to make it clear that there were miles between us.

So this is how it would be with Dick Cheney president. A lonely and savage world: every man for himself. No pity for us poor drunkards. Not even a little hand for a steamer trunk full of treasure. Not even some friendly banter.

The Dick Cheney Presidency went badly after that. The sun rose high and white; fear and confusion behind the wheel of my car. Had a six-minute drive home, but I knew the police would get me this soused – straight to jail. Kept stalling out in intersections, the car jumping then drifting; very bright blurry streets, like heavy rain in klieg lights. Paranoia. Dick is just the kind of guy to get my license plate and call the cops with his cellphone and make a TIPS report, he left here drunk, officer, he had seaweed on his leg. That put the fear in me – he would do it, Dick would. I parked the car in a quiet lane and hid in the backseat like a sick cat and passed out. Woke up four hours later, refreshed, and went back to get the trunk. Dick Cheney was gone. I pulled that bastard trunk up to the road and opened it. And Dick, you know what I found among the sea-garbage and the stones? You won’t believe it: A fish-head. A rotten little fish-head with its mouth open.

(Originally published in “Notes from Sept. 11: Poems and Stories,” by Christopher Ketcham)

-30-

By Christopher Ketcham

Petra and I left “Why We Fight,” the Eugene Jarecki film, in tears. It’s because we are ashamed, I offered. The shame that comes to any thinking American who realizes what is perpetrated in his name, on his behalf, for his benefit, across the planet. Dead bodies in a dusty street, mothers looking for children in rubble – as many as 100,000 Iraqis killed by the hand of the occupation in Iraq. The real question of “Why We Fight” is why we, citizens, do not fight the beast we see clearly before us in the shape of the government that we continually re-elect, that kills people for profit.

There was no shock in the facts of the film. We knew about Eisenhower’s warning of the perils of a “military-industrial complex” unanchored from the democracy, a phrase Ike had originally written as “military-industrial-congressional complex” – homegrown axis of evil – but which he edited, probably for reasons of dishonest decorum, in delivering that prophetic farewell address of 1961:

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel—”

There the problems start. An alert and knowledgeable citizenry? This we knew too.

We knew that our Congress was a bevy of bought whores, every one of them in some manner or another purchased by a massive armaments industry funded to the tune of $400 billion a year, 52 percent of federal spending, a vast homicidal loopback machine that helps keep the economy chugging and incumbents in office, keeps America dominant, prosperous, stepping on other nation’s faces. We knew that systemically, in the large order of American affairs, our society has been brutalized and sickened by the influence of the military-industrial-congressional complex. We knew that the tragedy of Iraq is symptom and not cause: it is the direct result of a society that is diseased with militarism and burdened by an entire infrastructure built for war. Which is to say, a society built for murder, a psychopathic society.

I think we were crying, however, not because we were sad for the victims in other countries but because we still believed in American exceptionalism – in short, we were, like true Americans, navel-gazing. We believed that America as a proud people was better than the fat, addicted, indulgent, lazy, stupid, amoral, sheepish, intolerant, wishful, prudish, uncultured, uninstructed, and incurious creature it had become. Of all the western democracies, near dead last in voter turn-out, last in health care, last in education, highest in homicide and suicide rates, mortality, STDs among juveniles, youth pregnancy, abortion and divorce. Americans, in keeping with their degenerate morals, wreak one-quarter of the damage to the planetary ecosphere every day with their stupid indulgence. Such a population of overgrown infants deserves a government built for mania overseas, the natural extension of a child on a rampage.

We hope, we want to hope that it was not always thus. I read Henry Miller’s “Air-Conditioned Nightmare,” a travelogue of Miller’s ten thousand miles criss-crossing the fair fields and deserts and mountains of the great country. The book was written in five years from 1939 to 1945. Here’s what Miller has to say of his native land after being chased out of France by Nazism: “We are accustomed to think of ourselves as an emancipated people; we say that we are democratic, liberty-loving, free of prejudice and hatred….Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under [the] delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?” In the 61 years since Miller published those words in acid, what has changed? Superabundant loot? Check. Reckless plundering? Check, a hundred times over. The demagogues and newspaper men and agitators and religious quacks mobilized us for the war in Iraq; we fell into the trap like blindered hogs. We are told by our mendacious government that Iran is now a problem, an imminent threat, a danger. And a majority of Americans believe it. George W. Bush asserts that he is free to violate the 4th Amendment, commit high crimes and treason against the sacrosanct laws of the country. He believes that a “state of war” – a figment of war – provides him extralegal powers of governance. The purchased Congress doesn’t much bridle at this extraordinary criminality. Instead, we are told by our lawmakers to trust the White House, which has for its only manufacture of consequence a steady stream of well-wrought lies designed, as in all American affairs, along the lines of product placement. So what has changed? I read Upton Sinclair, “The Jungle,” 1906: “…you understood that you were environed by hostile powers that were trying to get your money, and who used all the virtues to bait their traps with…the great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country – from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.”

I read more Henry Miller, 1945: “Most of the young men of talent whom I have met in this country give one the impression of being somewhat demented,” he observes. “Why shouldn’t they? They are living amidst spiritual gorillas, living with food and drink maniacs, success mongers, gadget innovators, publicity hounds.” An exact description of my filthy home town, New York City, circa 2006. Nothing changes. We are a people whose nature is writ in mud. Only the mud remains.

Self-loathing, shame, a wanting to hide one’s face – that’s what it’s like to be a thinking American today (and, apparently, in 1945, too). From self-hatred, and hatred and contempt for my country, comes a disappointment bordering on suicidal depression – the aftershocks of realization that the exceptionalist dream is just that.

Severe neurosis, with signs of psychotic tendency – like the nation itself.

My father, who I increasingly come to believe is a Black Panther disguised as a white man and traffic engineer, suggests an alternative in turning this malevolent energy outward: young men of my generation, he counsels, should train as snipers and systematically assassinate the captains of the defense industry and the elected officials who abet the predations of this industry. He goes a step further to the nuclear option: a small atomic device detonated on Capitol Hill while Congress is in full session, the cabinet in attendance too, as the country’s president delivers the state of the union. “That’ll get the message across,” my father, who is 66 years old and growing wilder at heart by the hour, tells me. It’s just talk and a lovely image – the swine of government, every one of them, burnt to a crisp – the kind of crazed “solution” that Americans, trained to accept psychopathology as a political means, like to revel in (coin-opposites of the great Islamist enemy?). But the system is larger than its figureheads. Industry prevails, not politicians.

Hence the wanting to hysterically weep after seeing “Why We Fight,” for this is the tragic subtext of the film: America as the Founders envisioned it, as we citizens idealize it, is over. It’s finished. It’s gotten too big. Too many interests have gotten their greasy little hands on the treasure and they will not let go until the treasure’s all gone. Our system of governance is broken. Or perhaps it’s working perfectly, in the sense that an out-of-control locomotive in all its roaring and grinding of gears is working perfectly, at peak performance, as it approaches a cliff.

“Go West, young man, they used to say,” Henry Miller wrote of his beloved America. “Today we have to say: Shoot yourself, young man, there is no hope for you.”

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