Chapter 3

Once a thriving resort town in the heart of the Mojave Desert, the lake which attracted tourists had chased them away. A terrible natural event occurred. The fish died, their corpses covering beaches once filled with shading umbrellas and bodies wearing tight cloth and pinking under the hot sun. The town smelled of rot then. It smelled of desolation when I arrived.

People stopped midway through the desert to stay at the last resort hotel remaining functional or more often at the Last Chance Sinclair Station, passing through even quicker. Mostly retired folks who staked their claims and lost but somehow kept going on living occupied the town permanently. Younger folks, averaging mid thirties, abandoned cities to be alone and forgotten. They worked the passing trade or, ironically, the only industry that thrived. The saline compound that destroyed the fish ended up a profitable chemical and a factory processed it and sold it. Profitable yes, but not exuberantly. The plant employed no more than a hundred people. A group of environmental researchers stayed a few months to a year at a time, but they numbered four or five.

One advantage of having researchers, their research paid for by government through the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the scientists needed cell phones. A tower had been built by the state.

Leah's Eatery, a diner on the edge of the resort area had served locals since the heyday of the town. It continued its mission. The clientele like the town mostly consisted of old men, an occasional old woman, and the researchers who worked a couple blocks away. I had purposefully skipped the resort hotel restaurant to eat there. I sought information.

You see, I had a friend, a mentor really, a curmudgeon I befriended at the University. Claude, like a lot of the men who moved to the resort town, sought refuge from abundance of humanity. Unlike most of the other hermits though, Claude was a brilliant poet. He taught a workshop at the University to afford living, poetry providing no sustenance. He began each session with one of his terse poems, each poem generating the particular conversation he wanted. The diversity of style and content from poem to poem allowed the diversity of discussion. And yet they all shared economic density of expression: few words evoking powerful and mostly dark images.

I clung to him like a barnacle. It amused him and he allowed himself to be my mentor. His thick Sharpie savaged my work and made me great, or at least successful.

Always he grumbled about LA, the worst place for his hermit nature. His dream, his Rock Candy Mountain, had a basis in reality. To be freed of financial necessities, meaning no longer having to live in the city to sustain his and his wife's existence, his wife being a lovely woman, albeit rail thin, whose sweet disposition contrasted starkly with his crustiness, a load of money had to drop from the skies.

"My father hates my choice of profession," Claude explained to me. "He thinks I'm a fool. He's right of course. But he never accused me of being a sponge. I never asked for anything from him except when my darling Cassandra miscarried and nearly died. He planned on paying the hospital bills for our child since it would be his grandchild, and when it became stillborn, he still provided. He's a bootstrap kind of guy, working his way up the ladder to head of sales, and he appreciates my similar attitude even without his ambition. Anyway, he's dying. And when Cassandra and I visited, he reminded me of an old argument we had when I confronted him with my passion. He had told me he'd support me over his dead body. This time he winked."