Midnight, and the signs tell us we’re in Sedona. During the day, mesas that change shades of red with every passing minute and motion of even the smallest cloud would scream the city’s name at us, and even though the spacey, leather-skinned ladies who work in the local gem shops might argue that you can feel when you’ve been sucked into this epicenter of spiritual vortexes and you don’t have to see it, I have my doubts. Maybe if one of those polished, fortyish divorcees who smell like good shampoo and have that sheen of devoutness in their eyes were keen on sucking a green twenty-four-year-old into her spiritual vortex for a night, I’d believe it more.
July 1994. Kurt Cobain is four months dead. Ken Griffey Jr. is hitting home runs on SportsCenter every night. O.J. Simpson’s Bronco bucks and weaves atop the hard-baked asphalt of our dreams.
Lasky flips on the radio. “He should be on right now,” he says, swiveling the dial to 101.5. We roll our eyes through ads for Michael D’s Diner, home of “the best dang omelets in Yavapai County,” and Monsoon’s Bar in Flagstaff, where a band called the Grapes will play Friday night. Our friend Stephen Roark’s voice is next, soaring through the static, lighting up the dark.
His name isn’t really Stephen Roark, but he figured if he, Jim Killeen, had to spend the last two-plus years working overnight shifts in a nothing town like Cottonwood for his first DJ gig, he should probably stand out from the other entry-level stiffs.
With what we assume to be dreams of a future morning drive-time slot in Phoenix, Jim Killeen doesn’t cut it as a handle, and we had all finished The Fountainhead back then, so at our urging, Jim smashed two of the characters’ names together like a peanut-butter-and-world-domination sandwich, and now we’re convinced he’ll take over the airwaves before moving on to the continents. We assured him Leonard Peikoff will be proud. Now he shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”
Lasky, finishing up a second bachelor’s degree, this one in fine art, is into ceramics these days. He’s working on a bold undertaking back home — a multi-piece “hair shirt” of fired clay tiles strung together with found vines and hanging over a driftwood log. It’ll be very religious and symbolic, he says, and when it’s done, he’ll trade in the Volvo for his own raku kiln, roll on to the San Francisco Art Institute, and live the Beat life a quick bus ride from Kerouac Alley.
I’m going to be a writer, and all I have to do is write, but I don’t write at my job. I design pages at a horse racing paper, and when I’m not at work I’m busy reading that paper to make enough money in bets to supplement the twenty grand a year I’m getting paid. Or not.
We lit out from Tucson two days ago, me with nothing but clothes and a shaving kit, a couple of pens, a notebook, a one-foot plastic bong, a half-ounce of weed, a lighter and a crate of CDs to stick in Lasky’s trunk. Lasky has even less. Maybe a few T-shirts, some underwear, a camera and a toothbrush.
We both had a week off and came up with a plan to take our tools on the road and see what happened. It was simple and not so simple. We were to drive his car somewhere every day, with no itinerary in mind and spontaneity the only certainty. And we were to work. I would write something every day. He would produce the artwork to go with it. Maybe we’d come back with a book and a vision of a future of fame and riches. Maybe we’d come back with pockets full of red desert dirt.
“And a good evening to you, Cottonwood-Sedona-Flagstaff and surrounding cities. This is Steeeee-phen Roark coming at you on the earliest of Tuesday mornings, 12:07 to be exact, and what a morning it is. Can’t tell you how many stars are out there shining down on all of us, because there are waaaaaay too many to count! Not to mention I’m indoors. Almost forgot that little detail. Here’s ‘Laid’ by James, something we all want to be. … James, that is! You people are sick! One Oh One point five, the Edge Cottonwood.”
We’re laughing at how high his voice sounds and how well he’s “hit the post” — the terminology for timing the DJ’s “talk-up” during the musical intro leading right up to the opening line of the song, which, in this case, is, “This bed is on fire with passion and love.” This, Roark has told us with a sigh of frustration, is the technique his program director has told him he needs to work on the most.
I’ve pulled a poetry book off the shelf of our creekside condo, the one that reminds us of a treehouse and cost too much money for the night but has three bedrooms, one of which Roark will take after work tonight. He’s promised to drive the eighteen clicks, pick up a twelve of Mickey’s and hang with us, check out what we’re up to. Maybe we can explain it to him a little better, he says.
I’m reading a sestina by John Ashbery and an accompanying explanation of how to write one. It seems easy enough to mimic something without having to come up with my own format, so I spend the next three hours figuring out the mathematics of the words – thirty-nine lines in the poem, with six stanzas of six lines apiece, all using the same words to end each line but in a different order in each stanza, and the last three-line stanza using all six words again.
We hear “Low” by Cracker four times during the course of Roark’s repeating playlist, Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” three more times, and “Run Around” by Blues Traveler and “Mr. Jones” by the Counting Crows twice apiece. He hasn’t said much during breaks other than the song and artist, the time and name of the station, but at 3:50, ten minutes before he’s done, as I’m struggling with the twenty-eighth line and yawning and thinking I might need a shower before long and Lasky is tracing farm animals onto paper, coloring them in, and etching out the lyrics to the Pink Floyd songs “Dogs” and “Pigs” behind them, we hear it.
“I’m almost done with this one, folks, but here’s a shout out to Lasky and Dinard, getting after it somewhere near Oak Creek Canyon — writing, painting, doing whatever it takes. You know, folks, we’ve all got dreams. Some of us want to be radio stars. Some of us want to be authors and artists. I think we all want to carve out our names in the hillsides of the world somehow. I know I do. And I’m telling you, all we have to do is do it. Here’s to Lasky and Dinard, out there tonight. Doing it.”
We watched dogs that looked like sheep running in a pack along a dirt road near Canyon De Chelly, and we threw a baseball around the campsite by Bluewater Lake in western New Mexico. We drove up through Farmington and stopped to buy Roark a T-shirt when we saw the bakery in Telluride called Baked in Telluride. We touched the Four Corners, wound through John Ford country and hustle down Interstate 17 by dinnertime of Day 7, “Black Hole Sun” blasting through the woofers.
He meets us at the same creekside cabin, cheaper a week later past the Fourth. He’s got three large pieces of luggage with him, but we don’t ask why because it’s just the usual. Roark is always carrying things. At outdoor concerts, he’s the guy who remembers the binoculars and also brings the paddles and balls, beer cozies, camping chairs and sunscreen. At house parties he has the latest board game that commands the room until dawn. I can only imagine what he’ll pull out later tonight, but later tonight isn’t on my mind at the moment, and he’s quiet and methodical as he sets the bags in the corner near the front door.
Tomorrow we’re going out to find something, we tell him. I’ve spent the last three days writing a three-act play chronicling one long, tumultuous night in San Francisco in which a college student arrives at his long-distance girlfriend’s apartment and barely has time to climb the steps before her phone rings with the news that her younger brother has suffered a massive epileptic seizure and died. I’ve called the piece “Even to Odd” and dedicated it to little Frances Bean Cobain.
Lasky hasn’t decided what he wants to do for the artwork, but something will jump out at us tomorrow.
It jumped out at us when we saw the Steal Your Face sticker on the Dead River sign next to the field of purple wildflowers. It jumped out at us when Lasky found old, worn, colored leather strips on the ground next to a dumpster near Durango. It’ll appear tomorrow and we’ll nod once again at the magic we’re touching out here on the road. Roark’s eyes ignite. “I know the perfect place,” he says. “Let’s do it.”
Roark suggests we buy a Kansas City Royals cap emblazoned with an interlocking “KC,” the ideal metaphorical monogram for today’s muse. K-Mart doesn’t have it, so we make do with a Chicago Cubs hat with at least the necessary second initial, the crimson “C,” that stands out with a white border on royal blue.
Roark leads us into a tiny mining town called Jerome, a dusty hillside leftover of the Old West. We escape from the sun that cooks our arms and legs and the sand beneath our shoes, darting into a real saloon for a cold beer.
An hour later, we’re walking down Main Street and Roark catches a glimpse of something down one of the few side streets in the town and summons us with his right hand. He points, two driveways down, to a big vacant two-story house, probably built in the early 1900s, with long-ago-busted-out windows and a rotting front door covered by a seven-foot rusted corrugated iron sheet that’s about to fall from the rope that tied it to a crooked wooden cross. The house was once red and looks half-pink — half-alive.
We’re trudging up the sagebrush-strewn path and Roark’s already in the front hallway, having slipped behind the cloak of iron. “You know what those fuckers told me the other night?” Roark says. “No requests. No songs outside the programmed playlist. From now on, it’s all automated.”
“That’s all a DJ does these days?” I ask.
“Apparently.”
Before we can discuss this further, Roark rushes to the edge of what might have been the second-floor master bedroom, telling Lasky to go outside and shoot him from below. Lasky takes a picture of Roark standing on the sill, looking up at leaves from a hanging mesquite tree.
Lasky keeps taking direction as Roark floats through the house with Baryshnikov steps from corner to dilapidated corner. The shutter clicks: a close-up of Roark, shirtless and in shorts, trying to climb through an attic door, a splayed-out, Christ-like image of him hanging from a cracking rafter, a ground-up shot as he stands in a doorway, his six-foot-five frame almost filling the void around him, and a plaintive kneeling pose before one of the only windows that still has glass. A brilliant halo beaming on him as he bends, caught between two windows back to rare daylight. Only the “C” and three fingers are visible as he ponders the one opening in a stack of timeworn balsa-wood blinds.
And back out front, looking straight at the camera, standing in front of the slats of wood that try like hell to hang onto the front of a crumbling garage, it’s our friend Jim Killeen, who has taken off his sunglasses for the first time all day and stares into the lens, tears trickling from his blue eyes.
***
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