I am in the ruins of a building, standing on a balcony. The building has different levels to it. As I walk through doorways and hallways I see that some sections are only a story tall, others are five or six stories tall and all of them belong to a dilapidated hotel. Judging by what remains of the molding on the walls and ceilings, and the chandeliers hanging from the center of each room, it was once a place for the rich maybe a century ago. Large sections of walls are missing and there is nothing but jumbles of steel rods twisted and caked with broken slabs of concrete. Off in the distance behind a line of waving palm trees, the sky is developing a dark stormy patch of gray and coal black. The funnel of a tornado is forming and I stare at it for a while before moving into the next room. There is a stranger standing in the corner of the room; he looks like a guy who would work with machines; he has dark hair, strong forearms and he’s wiping his hands with a dishcloth. Behind him through the tangled rupture of broken walls, the backdrop of sky is woven through with flashes of rose and turquoise. The colors are swimming into the shape of funnels making up a couple of tornados that grow larger as I watch. The guy wiping his hands doesn’t notice them or else seems unconcerned. “I think we’d better find shelter,” I say as the funnels grow closer and closer. Turning from the guy, I move quickly through a series of rooms and wonder if the hotel has been through an earthquake or fire or bombings and strafing as in war. Twisted silhouettes of girders and shells of rooms with large sections of ceilings, roofs, walls and floors missing, each of them revealing different views of the tornadoes and framed horizon. The whole sky is revolving furiously and beautifully as I wake up, my eyes opening on the cool light of morning slipping between the hotel curtains.
The sun in the part of arizona I was traveling through was so strong it made my eyes half close and all the earth seemed like one enormous field, dry as bone. The sun was bleaching the color out of every surface and shape so my brain had to wrestle to give things form. Anything, bush, cattle, vehicle or human, immediately turned to silhouette against the bright sky. With the combination of heat and light, the air had a frail white quality. The whole sky seemed closer to the road in these parts and I could barely stand the magnesium glimmer of light burning up my lower body. My arms stretched to the steering wheel, I was skimming over the pale gray asphalt and the speedometer was measuring between eighty and ninety miles per hour. The road was so flat in stretches, or there was so little in the landscape to distract the eye, that it was impossible, without looking at the dashboard, to tell when I was speeding. It was a landscape for drifting, where time expands and contracts and vision is replaced by memories; small filmlike bursts of bodies and situations, some months ago, some years ago.
I was headed toward Meteor Crater. It’s a blemish on the earth’s skin where twenty-one thousand years ago a half-billion-ton chunk of iron blew through outer space and slammed into the planet leaving a hole three miles in circumference. The collision has been calculated as having had the force of a multi-megaton bomb, and now, twenty-two thousand years later, some enterprising jerks charge you seven bucks to look at the hole.
*
Four miles from the service road to Meteor Crater, I pulled into the lane of a highway rest stop and coasted up a slight incline to the parking spaces. Dazed tourists in pastel clothes wandered briefly from their cars to the small building housing the toilets. Some stayed inside their cars, windows rolled up tight, air-conditioning blasting the interior. They looked like critters with hair-dos in aquariums and as I passed the line of cars they turned to look with a small panic in their eyes. It was incredibly hot and the air felt like it would burst into flames. Next to the walkway leading to the toilets was a sign: $1,000 FINE FOR DEFACING THE ROCKS, referring to a large group of sandstone boulders maybe eight feet high and fifteen yards long and wide. Maybe they were boulders that flew out of the hole three miles away when the meteor hit because they looked foreign to the landscape, as if lifted straight out of a flintstones special. Nearby was a second sign: POISONOUS SNAKES AND INSECTS INHABIT THIS AREA. On the walkway by the twin-roofed entrances to the toilets, a Native American family was seated before two blankets filled with cheap turquoise trinkets and hunger. The turquoise was actually blue plastic with mineral veins printed on it. A couple of tiny speakers above the doors to the MEN’S and WOMEN’S rooms spit out a steady stream of weather information that hovered in the air in a series of metallic echoes. A pretaped program offering tips on how to avoid dehydration in the concrete streets of large urban centers drifted through the men’s room as the door swung shut behind me. An old white-haired man rubbed his hands under the electric dryer. I chose the second stall and opened my belt, dropped my pants and sat down on the toilet seat. To my right, about waist level on the dividing partition were two large holes peeled through the metal. An eye was peering through one of them. I leaned forward slightly and through the second hole I could see a disembodied hand pulling on a large uncircumcised dick. I bounced my own dick in the palm of my hand so the eye could see it. I waited a few minutes till the sounds of the rest room door opening and closing subsided, then stood up and pulled my pants back up and motioned toward the hole, giving the guy a signal to meet me outside.
I was making like the first man on the moon walking the deep creviced surfaces of the flintstones landscape. I was hoping to spot a rattler or a scorpion – after almost a decade of wandering through the southern and western states I’d never come across a rattler in the wild. Too many rattlesnake roundup jubilees and development moves have been killing them off. From the top of the boulders I also had a clear view of the bathrooms and the pathway. More cars were arriving than departing and families were going back and forth from their cars to the rest rooms. Finally the guy from the first stall stepped into the hot glare of sunlight shielding his eyes with an enormous hand. He was what some would consider a freak: a circus giant in american bloodlines and genealogies, the lumbering object of surprise and fear. Had he been of average size and carrying a machete or gun, no one would have given him a second glance. But to have a massive body and height and the two large hands broad as palm leaves caused kids and even adults to unconsciously move backward or sideways a couple of extra steps as if his height took up horizontal space along the path. His body was well proportioned to his height, slightly muscular like he’d been a farm laborer in his youth, but now he looked like a salesman: cheap cotton short-sleeved shirt and beige car-dealer pants. I found him very sexy because I love difference. An unbearably handsome face bores me unless something beneath its surface is crooked or askew: even a broken nose or one eye slightly higher than the other, or something psychological, something unfamiliar and maybe even suspect.
He looked up toward the boulders from under the roof of his hands, then crossed the pebble garden to begin climbing up. In case there were cops, I pretended not to see him and wandered out of view. State police get lots of overtime pay lurking around interstate rest stops hoping to catch some hungry queer kissing another in the loneliness of the tiled bathrooms. Some cops make it a point to step back from urinals and flash their hard dicks at a suspected queer and then arrest him when he makes a move to show he’s interested. In new jersey, an undercover cop used his eighteen-year-old son who would stand at the urinals five hours at a stretch and display a hard-on to anyone entering the bathroom. In north carolina I read a newspaper story in which the columnist was worried about how the sleaze types, attracted to the highway rest stops because queers supposedly made such easy robbery targets, might accidentally beat up and mug a family man. Funny thing was I’d seen and met family men on their knees in rest stops around the nation. The best part of the article was a map of the state that noted which rest stops had the most homosexual activity – that helped keep me from feeling lonely that day.
We met at the far end of the landscape and both acted shy, but within minutes were in our separate cars heading onto the interstate to look for a side road that would give us cover away from the eyes of the world, a place away from the trooper patrol cars where we could get to know each other. There is no such place in that part of arizona. I was tailing him when he finally pulled onto the service road leading over a small bridge and crossing the interstate in the direction of Meteor Crater. Our cars drifted down a service road in a swirl of dust and pebbles, past a low-set gas station offering free pieces of petrified wood to customers. About a quarter mile farther down the road, a mile from the crater parking lot, he pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped the engine. I pulled up behind him and walked to the passenger side of his
