New Year's Edition: Slab City
A devolution of my Kerouac dreams
There is something frightening and dystopian and rugged and radical about the desert. This unsettling feeling is something that’s been ingrained in me since my childhood years, when I would sneak downstairs and hide behind the couch while my sister was babysitting me - just to catch a horrifying and nightmare-inducing glimpse of three gunmen on horseback embarking to rampage a town in Once Upon a Time or a series of open fire single action army guns dropping men dead like flies in Blood Meridian-esq movies like Dead Man.
This mixed sensation of disturbing awe came back to me this New Year’s eve in a very special way. I was out in the desert lands with seven others, a clustered conglomerate of some people that I knew like the back of my hand and others that would soon return to strangers. In trying to build out another year of the “best one yet,” we were hoping to attend a desert rave my friend Lilly had heard about in Joshua Tree. Rave in JTree? Down!! Except… turns out that, when asked, everyone who had heard of the rave had heard about it from Lilly and she, in turn, had heard about it from them.
In an attempt to salvage our desert rave desires, we found a link to an art/hippie looking rave/festival in Palm Desert at a place called Bombay Beach. This is all you need to know before I tell you of our journey.
Being tired girls, we knew the night would end early, so we attempted to make up for it by starting so. At around 2 pm on the 31st, we left the magnificent refuge of a Palm Springs Airbnb and settled onto the dusty roads of the CA 111S.
Our first stop was Salvation Mountain, the earthly clay ruminations of a retired military man who - on the whim of an epiphany - went out to the middle of this dry, deserted land in Palm Valley and dedicated 28 years to building out his ultimate plea for forgiveness - a brightly colored mountain stating: “God is Love.” We had vaguely understood it was an Instagram spot but when we got there, I was shocked to see the amount of Barbie and Ken’s amidst the signs practically screaming at us in big block letters: Repent! Unholy sinners! God is light! The dichotomy made me laugh as members of our group took photos with asses out and tongues sticking through pointer and middle fingers (you get the image).
Asking the docent for some more art installation inspo, we were directed to East Jesus [museum] and the House of Dots [arguable art installation]. I’m not sure if we took a wrong turn or ended up on the weird side of town, but on our way out there my car passed by a textbook anarchist cult dwelling. Zooming by, Hannah (our driver) came to a screeching halt as the other three of us silenced at hanging baby dolls plastered to the facade of “you loot, we shoot.” We doubled back.
Red-rusted and dingy fence wirings stuck out, enclosing a community of melted-looking RVs and scattered remains of lost nights. A tattered American flag blew in the wind; hunter dogs howled far too close. Rows of colorful, broken glass bottles lined the perimeter of the enclosure. Half of an almond joy wrapper flapped in the wind, pinned down by a huge sign stating: “If I could have it my way, I’d have them all shot.” Another, larger sign hung from above with the words: I was born to hustle roses down the avenue of the dead.”
I chuckled in a disturbed way, the first of many, as I took in the grim rejection of society. A young girl shrieked in the background, playing with one of the brown mutts which we later learned were called Slab Dogs. Fervently straining to inconspicuously document a group clearly dangerously opposed to the invasiveness of the internet of things, we balked as the eerie creek of a fence wiring turned around a large doll baby with a knife impaled into its forehead. Its dead eyes and limp arms stared us down as the knife pointedly glistened in the setting sun. Rugged is one way to put it.
The House of Dots brought a more developed sense of ruggedness. The East Jesus row of art installations [trash, the material] faded to the left of a long row of RVs and jumbled together structures that made up Dot’s place. Immediately greeting us with a warm, albeit cracked out smile, Dot pointed us towards the innocence of the book room and thrift car. We went to the Taxidermy Dinner room instead. A row of deer (stuffed) sat around a table, adorned with the beads of childhood and plastic jewels of Party City. Their dichotomous meal of meat and legumes sat in front of them in the eternal wait. Bony skeletons hung all around and a strange machine pressed a fake head with blood spillage (fake?) pooling around it. The end of this exhibition featured a disgusting array of medical-grade internal organs and two tied up dolls gently placed on top; a sign of cannibalism or (salvation?).
We left quickly for an underwater room featuring oceanic playthings with missing eyes and reattached limbs and glued-on human parts. Picasso, but more beastial. The book and thrift cars offered more solace, leaving us with only a little dust and cobwebs hanging in our throats and clothes. A setting sun called us out to East Jesus, but before we went, we ended with the bone room. Flinching at the sounds of cats walking on the caving tin roof, we smelled the rotting scent of real, arid bones of hopefully-not humans assembled into various animals; real and imaginative. Rows and rows of tusks and elbows and fingers lined the walls and floors. A full body thing (unsure of thingness) hung on one side of the wall. I blanched, but felt my eyes glued to the array. Eventually, a dead sparrow perched inside a ceramic bowl forced me out of there as the stench and sight nearly made me gag. Like a procession, my seven friends and I held hands and marched out of there, willing our future nightmares to go to hell. Dot grinned, proud of her job.
East Jesus felt more tame as a lane of trash art (not art that sucks but art that is made of trash) hung around the fringes of a white brick road. An elephant made of retired car parts caught my eye, the trunk a flailing tire and tusks portions of a broken up wheel. Two of us sat in a car going to the moon, with space allusions and the true coloring of our Milky Way. A large fixture alluding to a hatred of dolphins splayed out into the road, and Greta said she stood with it. “Dolphins were genetically engineered by Stalin to destroy freedom.” Dolphin farts are the reason for climate change. Dolphins are violence. (It said)
The TV installation was the fan favorite; a stacked display of old timey TV sets featuring “turn me on,” “get off the couch,” “delusions of a propagandeur,” “buy, buy, buy” and “blah, blah, blah.” “Be like TV” it said and sadly, I think most are.
The sun set and the gentle nomads settled into what we now know is called Slab City kicked us out. Abby and Seventeen (yup, 17) were their names. They had a pile of trash, their words, waiting for them to be turned into a new piece for the exhibition. They were staking out here for the winter in an attempt to avoid the embittering winters nomads invariably endure.
We bump back out of questionably-art land, mapped by the diligent instructions drawled out by Dot. That’s how we got to Ponderosa - a bar - for the first time that night. The meeting is brief, as the junked up junkies, strange rap floating above ungodly billows of smoke and boatloads of Slab dogs prompt us to follow a recommendation to The Range, an outdoor music venue built out by the residents of Slab City.
At this point, I should probably describe this place. Slab City to me is like the epitome of American counterculture; the Beats movement comes to mind. The pale tan facade of the American Southwest stands luminous here, speckled only by the trailers and trucks of Slabbers. The residents of Slab City are your classic case of libertarian-gone-too-far. Trailers, trash, and talismans of anti-government intervention litter the city (if you can even call it that). They identify as snowbirds - the token slogan for the nomads that dip into the warmer climates during the winter months - and artists and squatters and survivalists. Each Slabber has a story that has forced their hand to shun social order and regulation. Rather than attempting to scrape up pieces of an unwanted, broken life, they found themselves trying to inhabit an abandoned former military base, sweltering under the unforgiving sun of southern California’s Colorado Desert. This is actually where the name comes from, as the concrete slabs from the base served as the building blocks for what some now call “the last free place.”
The irony of it vividly bleeds through as anarchist signs and symbols of peace lie amidst dusty trooper tires and barrack mouldings. This enclave of anarchy is the purest form that I have ever encountered: no law enforcement, no property, no taxation, no running water or official electricity distribution system, and definitely no overhead administration. People come and go as they please, finding an empty plot of land to squat. Some have become more permanent residents, not by choice I later learned, and these have a more established home base with RVs decorated with the insides of landfills.
At first glance, Slab City looks like a giant pile of trash. To most, it still is even after many glances. To me, it felt like the beginning of an end. It felt like losing your best friend or your dog getting run over. As it turns out, the ideals I held so close to me in this past year of travel were achievable; but at Slab City, I realized I didn’t want them.
They were squashed under the washed out desert expanse, struggling to break through the drab smiles of the nomads-in-resident.
I spiralled then. I spun through the mountains of books on the freedoms of bumming and rainbow colors of societal unrestraint. The pale blue butterflies of survivalism flew past me, dying against the grate of comfort and access. Moths in my brain hitched themselves to the light of my latest months of full societal immersion. I couldn’t - wouldn’t - shake them. I had wanted this life.
Not really, no.
But, yes I had.
The adventures of Huckleberry and Tom Sawyer dropped me offshore and I felt like I’d have to swim across an ocean to get back on track. I’m not really a good swimmer anymore, I realised.
My spiral continued in the blaze of the bonfire at The Range. This picture does it justice but let me set the stage (literally). Wooden boards were shackled together with flimsy nails and bolstered from behind by even flimsier crates; the backboard. The splintered panels of the stage shot up, with some sort of multigenerational paint attempting to seal away the wear of trash. Lines of benches faced eagerly towards the backdrop; the audience sat there. A bar offering free drinks - never, really - stood to one side, fighting a droopy straw roof. A large bonfire sizzled and, like flies, the New Year's Evers started dropping around it. They buzzed around, seemingly knowing each other. They did.
Sofi [childhood best friend] and Greta and I stood around the fire in an attempt to gather what was happening. The stage had yet to welcome hosts and the benches sat in open arms. A 45ish year old man got to talking with us in one of the only instances in which a male of this age was not leering or actively questioning us. Cool. He described his entry into the Slab, a chance encounter with a couple of Slabbers drinking ‘round a fire that caused him to quit his job and haul ass to this place he has now called home for fifteen consecutive winters. His blue flannel shrugged with his shoulders as he described the unparalleled sense of community he felt in this place: unbeatable, he said. Another guy wearing eyeglasses many sizes too small for his face and a droopy backpack then walked up to us. “Hey, Terri,” flannel guy said. “Hey,” Terri sighed. Terri deserves his own paragraph.
No one else was fazed by Terri. We spoke, briefly, and then ditched him to listen to the classics by Pink Gorilla - resident band - jammed out by - shocker - the lead singer, who sported a pink Mohawk, and an assortment of geriatric guitarists and percussionists. I was fazed, though. He might be one of the most memorable people I have ever met in my life.
Terri is the autistic, socially awkward of Forrest Gump bred with the hobo lifestyle of Jack Kerouac and sprinkled with the flavors of Neal Cassady. He did not once make eye contact with me as we spoke; his eyes still sear in my brain. He blinked rapidly with every question and loved answering them as much as I love walnuts (I’m allergic). For some reason, I found this endearing. I was mainly interested in his stories, though. He described his life living here, right down in Slab City, for a couple of years before going out to be a hobo (his words). He then spent years bumming it - thumbing, jumping trains, sleeping on railroad sides and mountain tops, taking Greyhounds, dumpster diving, house hopping. JACK KEROUAC, IS THAT YOU? There’s a catch, though. You see, Terri is a tall, black man.
Terri is a tall, black man. While Kerouac and his Dharma buddies could hitch around no prob, then come calling on mommy for a few months to feed them while they meditated, Terri never could. Terri melted in deserts, waiting for a ride. He shivered in mountains in bouts of bad luck. He jumped more trains than the Dharma Bums combined. Probably. When he wanted to settle back down, his mommy didn’t come through. Instead, he and his little backpack called upon their real family: the people of Slab City.
The waves of Zeppelin crashed over me as I girated my body in an emulation of my friends. We kicked our legs and shook our bums and whipped our hair back and forth. The smiles on our faces were bright. They illuminated the brown shades of the city. My smile was a betrayal. My heart pulsated with adrenaline that I thought was pure happiness and excitement to be with my friends. Really, though, it held something grayer. It held the awe I had of Terri, shaded by the umbrella of my dissipating nomadic ideals. As the day and night had worn on, even meeting the closest thing to an idol I would ever have could not lift me from this [rightfully] pessimistic humour.
I don’t want to live off-grid.
I don’t want to decorate a trailer with trash and seek shelter in the deserty plains of Southern California to avoid frostbite.
I don’t want to avoid walking at night in fear of Slab Dogs starving at the end of the month as a result of food stamps being low.
I, just, don’t, want, this, life. Anymore.
Side note:
I love hypocrites. Really, they’re so funny. The clan-esque tribe of the city became its worst nightmare in the blink of an eye. Government intervention, NO! They cry. Food stamps? YES, they plead. I know screw law and order and all that stuff. But who pays for those food stamps? Certainly not this tax evading group of heathens. But should they deserve them? Of course, how else will they survive? They claim.
I giggle.
Hunger descends upon us around 8 pm and we head over to the only food joint in ‘town.’ This place is really more on-grid than off-grid, I start to think. That is, until my group of eight overwhelms the burger shop owner so much that he gratefully accepts our invitation to help. So, half of the group jumps over the broken stairs to the kitchen and begins expertly chopping onions, grilling burgers, and serving other customers before themselves.
The rest of us sit down and make friends with three annual New Years Slab city goers. They looked like normies, which is why most of the group began talking to them. Eli, Nickan and I forget his name but his Spotify is BrainStatic (he released a track about Slab City, actually - listen at your own risk)… anyways, losing train of thought but they all end up being classic Berkeley or Berkeley-tangential folk. Eli goes to UCLA Law now and works for children in crisis. BrainStatic works in data science or finance or some similarly soul-sucking endeavor. Nickan works in policy and was one of the leading pollers (passion project with friends, she said) on the sentiment surrounding the Luigi Mangione case. She was my favorite.
After nearly an hour of cheffing up in the kitchen, the group recombines and does a temperature check (on the thumb scale). We force our newfound friends in and democratically, to their chagrin as they were prior Communist Club Presidents, we decide to head back to dance a bit more at The Range. But it’s dark. And silent. Even the slab dogs retreated.
In our hour of absence, the theft horn had blared somewhere in town and the squatters had scrambled to shoo(t?) the looters. We left silently.
Back to Ponderosa (the original bar) was the consensus. When we got there, junkytown was still evident, though the increased mass of people - especially normies - calmed most of us prudes down.
As soon as eight young, beautiful women descended upon that bar, the masses herded. One guy pretend bumped into me and looked down at me expectantly. I know this trick. I let out a fluttery whoops and he scuttles to me in an attempt to pinch hold. Not this time.
Unfortunately for me, his two friends were successful with my companions and I was stuck. They were from LA and had been here seven years ago; best New Years celebration ever, they said. We wanted to go back to relive that, they hoped. Their LA-boyness jarred me and I retreated to the broken-toothed, wide-smiled hookahers to my left. My LA boy looked forlornly towards me but was soon calmed by my beautiful bangs and patchy pants blond friend.
I eventually found Nickan and we sat in a conspiratory mood. I felt kind of bad at first because I misgendered her like twenty-five million times. As a trans female, I get that all the time, she assured me. I’m all the time, I guess. We linked arms and wandered around the tiny little shack. We saw a violently obese and even more violently drugged out woman pass out on the stage steps before us. We pet a most-likely-flea-ridden black and white spotted cat. We danced to Badfish sung by a drag queen in a neon yellow dress and stunningly out of tune voice. Nickan listed out like all of the Bulgarian politicians from the last election. So impressed! And, we eventually parted ways as the competing desires of our groups unwillingly dragged me to our next destination: hot springs.
It’s 11:15. Some members of the group wanted to go to Bombay Beach (our original plan that we had found in hopes of replicating Lilly’s fake JTree rave event). Others wanted to hot spring it up. A tiff occurred. But, it was quickly quashed by the warm hot waters of the springs and the little willy of one of our friends from Ponderosa. He and his wife were living in Lithuania as expats teaching English and they had recommended this hot spring to us. The stars, they had promised, the stars at midnight are unforgettable. The stars really were amazing. Even more amazing was how the silent judgement and audible (though not directed) laughter of eight girls upon the sight of a naked man with a small penis was healing. Ten minutes of this peace brought us back to our senses and into attack mode. It was 11:28 and our destination was 30 minutes away. We needed to make it to Bombay beach before midnight.
When we told our Ponderosa and Range friends we were planning to go to Bombay Beach, they scoffed in our faces. Those were rich people. They owned entire trailers, rather than living from RVs or trucks. Many of them lived there year round. Most fronted the $5k for an AC system to survive the 129 degree summer heat. The full time residents of Slab City were better than that. They had no money nor desire to spend the $5k. They braved it; heroically.
We saw all of this as we zipped through the streets (real streets!) of Bombay. Trailers glistened with lights and the signs of formal electrical distribution systems blinked around us. Fences blocked out community members in an attempt to place value on a private space (Slab city had small wired fences that people condemned for being exclusionary). I think we might have even passed a stop sign at some point.
In any case, at 11:57 we were running in the sand. Yes, it is a beach as the name implies. We were sprinting through the grainy remains of shells and oceanic stone towards the horde of people about a quarter of a mile away.
The clock struck midnight with a boom and suddenly, we were running towards a light-up sky. Fireworks smashed all around into thousands of tiny lights. We ran. It felt like the most exhilarating and exhausting movie as we continued to sprint down our imaginary runway towards a light and a vision that made us feel high. Were we on shrooms? No, actually. Nor acid nor cocaine nor addy. But we were high.
Those lights and firecrackers fumes filled our brains and we became limp. Our jaws dropped and we eventually stopped running. We were standing, standing in the middle of a desert surrounded by lights. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Literally all around us were explosions of fireworks. Red and yellow and green and purple and crackles and sparks and sprinkles and shatters. The overstimulation of it all made my jaw drop, and for half an hour I let the desert air dry out my insides as I took it all in.
People around us cheered and hollered while others ran away from their own devices, followed by loud bangs. At some point we all linked hands and I looked at Sofi and Hannah and Nora and Heather (where are the others?) and nonexistent tears streamed down our faces. Is this joy? Hannah flinched with every bang. Sofi shrieked in delight. Nora and Heather clung to each other in companionship, I suppose. I stood with my jaw on the floor.
The group eventually came together behind some portapotties (god, those rich fucks) to begin our last segment of the night: the Sub Club. The Sub Club is an underground rave venue on the same beach. Pink, blue and yellow pastel lights popped out of the sand to signal its presence. The occasional bump of a beat seeped through, but the silence around us after the show was overwhelming. Should we go dance?
Dozens of people in fur coats stood by the entrance as we shoved our way through. Club-girl style, we grasped hands and slithered through the crowds of fur. Finding a space right next to the DJ (!), we grouped around and forced our circle slowly wider. I pressed against a Cruella de Vil coat as the mystical techno beats washed over me. A brown bear coat pulled my arm to get through. Seriously, what is with the fur coats!!
At this point, team is tired. Team is having fun, but team is nearly done. With their heads bopping, six of team slowly retreated inwardly. Sofi and I opened our arms wide and fell into the sea of fur.
The music was phenomenal. It was better than phenomenal, it was ecstatic. Or as close as you can get. The DJ played around with allusions to RÜFÜS DU SOL and Diplo. I recognised some lilts of Vintage Culture and the unrecognisable bass of Lars Huismann. It felt like bliss in a dusty sort of way. It also was starting to feel like I was in Russia, what with all the fur coats (!!). Turns out it’s a very Burning Man type of thing and this happened to be a Burning Man type of event.
The clock struck 1:15 am and team decided to leave. The slodge back to the car was really a trance. The slodge back to the house (1.5 hours away) felt like a trip. My car listened to Mt. Joy and Noah Kahan, minus me. I listened to the weird pump of my blood in my brain and the tight grip around my heart.
…
What do I want? I’ll never know.
Something about the end of that night slightly restored my sense of off-gridness. Maybe I have to approach it like glamping. Maybe, just maybe, I can’t bring myself to become one of the 2,000 people that turns Slab City from a town of 150 during the summer to over 2k in the winter. But, maybe, I can become one of the trailer park girls hanging out near Bombay. Maybe I’ll be the rich scum the Slabbers condemn, only I’ll hide it on Range & Ponderosa nights.
Honestly, though, I probably won’t. I have a job and a life and societal constraints. For some reason, those constraints choke me a little less than the silent days and gun-blazing communities of the Slab. They don’t make my heart beat as fast, definitely, but they also don’t stop it so suddenly I fear I may spontaneously die. Also, this off-grid still felt on-grid enough to dissuade me.
Kerouac once said he loves the ones who are “mad to live” [like my title]. Terri felt like that. But so does Lilly. And so do I. I guess it’s not exclusive to one kind of place or one kind of community. I guess it’s all around. And I guess you don’t have to be a Slabber to find it.
This is the beginning of an end for me. I’ll never stop travelling and I’ll never stop bumming. I will stop dreaming though; I’ll stop dreaming of the full time bum life for at least some time now. It’s something I feel I need to put behind me. The Dharma Bums and Slabbers and the likes never do. But they also kill themselves in the process of trying to hang on to that dream.
Sometimes, just sometimes, that dream is a nightmare you have convinced yourself is worth living it. If you make it.
And you know what, to answer the question of my Salvation Mountain artist predecessor, no, God is not Love, life is. And I risk running into the Hallmark philosophical territory of the Goldfinch in saying this (sorry, didn’t like it, please hate on me if you must but give it another read and you’ll see why). But, honestly, I don’t care.
I believe that freedom in life is more than moving to an abandoned ex-Marine training base and posting up signs that the government is evil whilst living on the food stamps provided by… the government. Freedom in life is more than the Pink Gorilla singing at The Range every Tuesday while people get drunk around the bonfire and complain about normal society. Freedom in life is definitely more than the primitive existence of the squatters of Slab City who eventually put up wire fences to keep others out.
Freedom in life is - I honestly don’t know but I know it’s not this. It will never be this.
So, thanks Slab City for shattering that dream and my condolences to you. I wish there was another way.
That’s all. I hope this meant something to anyone. If not, happy New Year anyways.
Dreams aren’t always meant to last,
Vicky