Pretend
you're embarking on an American road trip, escaping the dull routine,
fleeing the law, chasing a dream, heading West. As an AirBnB virgin,
I've only my internal catalogue of good ole USA road trip movies from
which to base my expectations, and most of those escapes from suburban,
workday toil which either end back home with a renewed-lease-on-life or end by
slaughter. Still, let's pretend we're getting away from it all. To
the place where buses don't run. Forget Wi-Fi. Remember air, crisp and
indifferent, as it bears overhead and caresses you lovingly to fall finally asleep upon a
bouncing queen-sized bed. Envision corridors moodily lit in this temple,
Spanish bibles about. Here you are both sacred and anonymous, beloved
and different, a part and apart for as long as you'd wish to stay. This
is Lupe's AirBnB, her 5-star experience.
I-70 through Nebraska,
over long hours like the land so damn long I have to drive. The sign for
Colorado is wooden, brown and literally Colorful. With this, it seems, the mere
onset of statehood brings beauty. The sun has been drawing to a close,
taking with it all the day's drive, the restlessness and boredom, other towns' talk
radio, gasoline, yawning, burned CDs, and that one, Oh My God,
overturned 18-wheeler, its consequential traffic. Other people
are home now. To my left, seriously, this rainbow appears in the south
plains, while, above me, sun-dying clouds crumble amberly, a vast bluish
sky stretches outward to my right. Before night falls, I enter Ovid,
Colorado, quiet and oblivious to Lupe's advertised vacancy. In Ovid,
nothing's open. Nothing moves. Then Sedgwick, Main Street, R.D.'s, the
inn, Cha Cha's Family Restaurant, await me 8 miles farther down road.
One thing
I love about this town, not simply put, as a synecdoche for one thing I love about this state so far, is its signage: this delicate,
adorable four-foot cross street sign. It's on 1st and Main, but only
about four feet tall, the street names themselves only about ten inches
long. Wooden and clearly hand-crafted. It looks like it belongs at
summer camp. This is the stuff that Republican politicians' rhetoric
reaches for. Lupe's small business is quartered in the back of the
stately brick building kitty-corner to the Main Street sign. Built in
1922 as a bank, now filled by antiques both personal and collective, its
current owner and AirBnB privateer, Lupe, has owned this building for
15 years. Banks, small banks like this once was here in Sedgwick, really
just couldn't hack it nowadays-- what with the big banks finding their
ways to meddle, frustrating just the simplest intentions by all their
transaction fees and confusing charges and pages and pages of paperwork.
A small bank just holds people's money, uses that money to give out
loans, while making sure people can still withdraw from their own
amounts. But they're the ones who get hit worst when the economy tanks.
Then again, it was built in the 20s, and who knows how much more lawless
those stockbrokers and Congressmen were than they are today. Along
with the news of Lupe's assistant, who handles the AirBnB and is now out
pregnant, I consider what dim accountability of history haunts this
grand, main room, so infinitely decorated with antiques, yet warm cozy,
with couches, and for hunters the coffee table has stacked a few
pamphlets of hunting trails, and think one day I need to sit down and
really figure this whole thing out while she slides over the guest book
and pen, Lupe.
Besides a pregnancy, I am informed, there
were some people in from Chicago who ran the place briefly, a change in management of the
cafè, which Lupe no longer runs, this AirBnB thing, of course, and the
legalization of pot. Lupe has learned about all that stuff, started to about
five years back, which fact explains all those textbooks pharmaceutical and
psychological that rest upon the second floor's bathrooms' bookcase. She
is a former teacher. To me, she is speaking quickly and with a
friendliness on all topics, the building and the day's events and her
personal history all. Tonight, there's a birthday party going on at the
bar across the street, all are welcome and there's probably food. She
taught. The pot is overpriced but the people come in scores. Those folks
from Chicago nearly ran off her hunting clients. They smoked indoors,
at her dinner table. The cafè's closed Tuesdays. They come, they smoke,
no big deal. But her? No, she doesn't. She's just like this. She never
smokes. She was a teacher.
Lupe speaks about her Sedgwick
Antique Inn as if the two had been married these last fifteen years. I
feel like an old friend catching up on all her hardships and
frustrations, laughing along at her life. Beneath all her talk is an
obvious, underlying love.
After inscribing in her guest
book, I shower, say good night, sneak down to the kitchenette for tea and biscuits, and go about exploring the town on my two feet. The town of
Sedgwick as I know it disappears within minutes. I am guided by the
light of stars. It's a tranquil, tranquil wild. Glorious fields just
barely fenced in lay opposite the old high school football field; sadly
it slouches like moss back into nature again. Under the cold moon, I
take this night in, and piss, because who cares, and darkly stumble upon a
friendly family of horses.
"I don't know," I say, "in the
20s, when tobacco was really starting to boom, I think I heard this in a
documentary or from my drug dealer or something, they got all their
money to get the feds to ban pot. Like, the Constitution's written on
hemp--" (coughs) "It's a modern thing. Like AirBnB, but..." One of the
horses, the mother I guess, hesistantly sniffs my outstretched
hand. All four of us are quite still. "I think--well, things could just
get done. Like the New Deal--that was monumental change on a national
political level." My voice, just above a whisper. "Not that that's a
good example, the same thing with the banks."
The mother horse
sniffs gruffly. "There's no bank here. No real one. Some nerd in Silicon
Valley is getting all the money." I zip up my pants with my left hand.
"Once the federal law changes, and the big banks can get it on it, we
won't see any capital that can make a serious difference in our lives." I
concede that they indeed seemed to live in a state of nature, but
figure it best not to use any form of the word brute. The little pony
says, "Yeah, that's why it's cash only."
"Food is natural," the father horse says. In my pocket are two candy bars.
"I
don't even think the banks will change it though, not the real war.
Sure, the big bank money matters, but it's not New Deal money, slow
wheels of justice money, how all that all is."
These horses are staring at my blankly. The dad's just looking at his faintly whipping tail.
"Okay,
like," I'm hearing myself say, "start with prisons. Upwards of $50
billion annually. Half those guys in there for drugs, then you got all
the salaries of all the prosecutors. Something like 97% of drug charges
end in plea deal." There's no way these horses can't smell my piss. "And uh-uh-uh-uh, generations of policement taught to fight the war on drugs,
you got uh, a mammoth pharmaceutical industry, you got people who
cannot even meet in a room and agree--"
"You saw our sign?" The father horse puffs.
"Yes, sir."
"And you saw everyone on Main Street tonight, laughing and waving."
"Over at R.D.'s. Yelp said it was open till 2 a.m."
"You saw us tonight, just walking around? Lupe tell you how safe it in this town, this little 140-person community?"
Me
and the horse and the other horse and me and the moonlight all kind of
locked eyes on each other for a while. "Now that, I assure you
stranger..." Are his big buck teeth going to bite off my fingers? "Will
change."
Each morning by nine a.m. sharp, Sedgwick
Alternative Relief opens its doors at 107 Main Street. This snug
pastoral town wouldn't be so American if it didn't have an enormous
phallic contradiction directly in its center. I size up
the big green cross with my hands then stand next to the Main street
sign and figure even if you chopped down the main street sign and cloned
it, it would not match the diameter the the enorgous green cross. It's
literally the biggest thing in town. On Monday, today, remember we're Westward fleeing
fugitives now, people are already hanging around early, waiting to
score, directly across the street from Lupe's Antique Inn. There's
Stephen. And his dog. No one here, citizen or visitor, looks like a
"drug addict," they're Mid-Westerners.
By the fourth or
fifth time I go in, I ask Collin, which is not his name, the guy looking
sleep-deprived or something, the real tough questions, the ones which
are needed when you're back at home, restless, brooding darkly on a
four-star review.
S.A.R. is fairly busy. Collin gives
me a quick tour, recites it. He looks tired. The meaning of "street
price" has never seemed clearer. I ask him by beginning to mumble, "How
helpful (you are, Collin. And how not inexpensive--meaning overpriced,
or in my experience just street price plus tax--is this pot. Collin, I wonder, should I tell you
that Lupe already warned me about this place, that the pot was overpriced, that they're bringing in like a grand a day just by charging a $5 cover-- so that maybe you'll hook me up with some discount? Should I tell any such things?)"
"If you're a fan of the Diesel," he is saying. "I'd recommend this."
"How about this Mr. Jebbles?"
"They're all seventeen dollars a gram."
"Long time listener, first time caller. You know what I mean?"
"Please don't touch anything with that hand."
"So I'm driving to California, right? They got these agricultural checkpoints for no foreign fruit."
"Seriously, man, I didn't realize you had chocolate all over your fingers."
"Oh
yeah. So I'm gonna say to the guy, 'You're on I-15, you know, right?
Lot of people are coming in from Vegas. Do they make jokes like about,
"Hey, are you checking for cantaloupe cause we came from where you can
elope?"' God, it's hot down there."
"Stop touching your face, please. Please."
"Hot
here too. Getting hotter. That corn belt's heading north, cause of
global warming. We'll be invading Canada soon enough believe you me.
That's gonna be the next border war."
"Did you just not feel that melted glob of chocolate fall directly into your underpants?"
"I'll take the Diesel, good sir."
And
I cross the main street for the last time, head into Lupe's smock
shack, admire the new lava lamp--origins unknown! Then one door down
into Cha Cha' cafè, sipping honestly-less-than-spectacular coffee, I
really consider what Collin said about this crazy war on drugs of ours. I
mean, wasn't this dispensary doing great for the town? "For the town
government," he'd replied. It was clear to him, an employee of the dispensary, that the incredibly small number of townfolk may find the enterprise and its customers easily unlikable. Still, he'd conceded, good for its government, if not for its people.
I
pay for my coffee. The girl behind the counter is the granddaughter, only helping out here at Cha Cha's. She can be heard
through the keys of the eating room's piano. Let's call her Diana.
Please, legalized drugs, build this girl a school. She asks straight off
about the book I'm reading and shows me hers, this thick, luminescent YAL called
"Inkdeath," so when I pay for coffee I ask her about the town down the
road, where the school is. "Isn't Ovid, like, an old name?"
"Yeah." She draws.
"Greek or..."
"Roman."
"The blind poet."
"That's Homer."
"He promoted his horse."
"Caligula."
"The epithetic--"
"Pius Aeneas."
And I don't dare mention the coffee's no good.
Then
I head into Lupe's inn once more and lie on her big, queen spring-mattress bed. The air is still crisp. Where is the void
that is my very heart it lies in a town called Segwick. What I want is
escape. What they need is a gas station, a gas station/convenient store.
They're the first stop like this in the northeast corner of Colorado
for god's sake. What these people want is you, o humble, o curious, o
impersonal and kind consumer. Leave your electronics, and come sleep in
the bed just down the hall from Lupe. Seeking pleasure? This place has
it all. It's the perfect escape! All the comforts but none of the
trappings of a real home.
5 Stars