When I was picking a place to grow old in, I thought a lot about tornadoes, and the news reports I’d seen all the time growing up: rolled cars, mobile homes wrapped around telephone poles and chickens with all their feathers stripped off, clucking in embarrassment. So even though I don’t like California politics, they don’t have tornadoes so I drove out there, using up most of the last of my money on gas, and I planted the trailer in an RV park outside of San Bernadino, put it up on blocks and settled into the divorced-and-retired life, baby.
         They’re probably going to get rid of Social Security but who gives a shit, I’ll be dead then, and in the meantime I’ve got enough for beer, and sure it gets hot, but it’s the desert, you don’t have to worry about fires like those rich dopes in the hills.
         But even with a satellite dish you get bored, so I started hanging out with the neighbors. Some nice people, Mexican families mostly but some white folks too, kind of drop-outs. One guy’s an ex-biker, tattoos and iron crosses and that, and he does ride a bike but I think most of his stories are full of shit. We get into it sometimes over politics, he’s a real right-wing guy, which is fine but you can take it too far.
         I started getting interested in this dude who lived a few miles further out into the desert. He has a house, or a shack, and all around it are these big pieces of rusty metal, taken from old cars mostly, but also stuff from oil rigs and sump pumps, and neon signs and even a couple single-engine airplanes, and he’s gone and welded it all into big robot-looking sculptures, some of them thirty feet high, and painted them all sorts of bright colors that’ve faded and been repainted over the years, so they look sort of futuristic and prehistoric at the same time. Also he’d put all sorts of mirrors in them, so no matter where you are for miles around you get flashes or reflections of flashes everywhere you look.
         All the folks in the park avoided him, even the biker, because the guy threatened to shoot anyone who came on his property, but I figure you only live once, so I headed out there one morning with a case of beer, and long story short, now we’re friends.
         Turns out the inside of Bobby’s house is almost as weird as the outside, he has a whole library of books and magazines and comic books in there, smushed together on shelves and piled up on the floor, just leaving a kind of narrow path from the front door to the toilet and his bed. He can talk all night about philosophy and transhumanism and the ancient Greeks and the decline of the West and that sort of thing. He doesn’t have the Internet, just those books, and he says nothing past 1980 is worth paying attention to anyway.
         He makes a lot of sense sometimes, but he can be frustrating, because he makes up these names for things I don’t understand. So for instance, when he talks about the feminization of the culture he calls it Florabelle, and talks like it’s a person: Florabelle did this in 1950, she did this in 1975. There’s a caveman called Rock-Ego who’s been sleeping since the old days but wakes up now and then and is going to wake up for good someday soon. He has a whole cast of characters: Billy Badman; Miss Kitten; Rod Randomagus; Firesmoke, who’s a hellhound; The Mouse, who nibbles on your stuff while you’re asleep; Whitesoul (posthumanity); and a big-nosed guy whose name I shouldn’t repeat. All of these people, or whatever you want to call them, have intricate life stories and destinies, and the big robot sculptures outside his shack are his representations of them. His pantheon, he says. They were exiles from a different world, he says, one where humans evolved into some sort of perfected things, but the pantheon couldn’t get along with it, so they came here and they all fight with each other instead.
         Plus he’s been working on a book of his own, which he calls a syncretism of a lifetime of reading and learning. He showed me some of it: it’s full of diagrams and cartoons and a lot of dirty sketches. When he’s finished he’s going to pay to have it published. But he’s been working on it for forty years, I don’t suppose he’ll be finishing it any time soon.
         I admit I get a little tired of him, so these days I don’t go over there as much, though I should drop by soon to return these old Hustlers. He’s got other friends now anyways. He must have made it up with my biker pal, because I see him and his biker buddies heading out there most nights these days. In the daytime I can see the sunlight flashing off their bike mirrors and the pantheon’s mirrors, and at night I can hear the rumble of their engines like an earthquake and I can smell their exhaust and burning rubber all the way over here in the park, even though there’s never any breeze in the desert.
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