Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Read online

Susanna wanted to say something to break the silence. But she wasn't sure what was the matter, if anything. She was a little disappointed, she had to admit, to see him drinking and smoking. She had nothing against either one, per se. But when Jesse was feeling optimistic, he stuck to a "your body is a temple" mantra—not that this precluded pot or all manner of hallucinogens, of course. But if Jesse was buying relatively pedestrian booze and cigarettes, it could mean he was feeling anxious about the big build this weekend. Or it could mean nothing at all. He was hard to read like that.

  "What'sa matter, babe?" Susanna cooed. She retched a bit at her own choice of words, only after they'd already left her mouth. Having Wayne in the back seat made her more self-conscious of her own forced affectations of maturity she used when interacting with Jesse; having an audience made her feel like a fraud. Maybe she was just that little kid who didn't want to be in the Girl Scouts anymore, only now pretending to be a grown-up.

  "Nothing's the matter," Jesse said. "I'm fine." To prove his point, he turned to face her, locked eyes with her, and smiled with pursed lips.

  "I'm fine." The words reverberated in her head. Maybe he really was fine. Maybe he was just nervous about the work that would await them, once they arrived at the barren patch of land that Jesse hoped to turn into the last bastion of West Coast countercultural optimism.

  What if they got there, and none of Jesse's flaky groupies were there to meet them?

  What if the promise of free drinks, drugs, and sex wasn't enough to get them to commit to a long-haul drive and weeks of manual labor under the hot desert sun? Susanna didn't want to think about the depths of foulness Jesse's mood might plunge into, nor how uncomfortable that ride back home would be.

  Maybe Jesse just didn't like the idea of his engineer brother watching over his affairs, reminding him of the empirical, mechanized, capitalized outside world at a time when he was supposed to be building a place where he could be king.

  Susanna closed her eyes again, and again nestled her head in that ill-fitting crevice that could've really used a pillow. All the sounds around her blurred into signal noise. Once more, she felt herself falling into the abyss.

  Excerpt from the Hollywood Music Journal, May 1970:

  For months, L.A. rocker/guerilla artist Jesse Cole has been talking about building a commune in the Los Angeles high desert to anyone who will listen. He's even taken to having a collections plate—passed around by a roadie in a priest costume—at his shows. Listen to him speak on the issue, and one senses a mounting tension in his demeanor. The Sixties are now officially over, he seems to be saying. Everyone who has latched onto the promise can feel the waves of history shifting once more.

  "It's the media that's done it," he says, punctuating his point with a long drag from his fourth or fifth cigarette of the interview. "The clothes, the lingo, it all meant something more real just a few years ago. Now it's like Halloween or something."

  At this point, I still can't tell if he's wearing his own tasseled leather jacket and bandana as an ironic statement on this pageantry, or if he's as much caught up in it all as everyone else.

  "Altamont, Manson—it's all turned a lot of people off to the promise, especially in L.A." Only he says it like 'the Promise' with a capital 'P'. "The straights have fired back, and it sounds an awful lot like the bullets at Kent State."

  This is Cole's impetus, then, for making a utopia on a plot of worthless land fifty miles outside civilization. A place free from the press, free from the encroaching fascism of police and government, free from the ideological influence of the military-industrial complex. "A place for sense, sexuality, radical thought, and life-through-art," he calls it.

  This is to be Jesse's Xanadu, and he will bring his flock with him to begin to build.

  * * * *

  Susanna watched the desert play out around her and considered how quiet they were all being. Jesse still had barely said a word; for her own part, she didn't feel like saying much now. If she wanted to make idle chatter, she posited whatever thought was on her mind to Wayne, eager as he was to lap up any attention she'd send his way. Despite being the better part of thirty, Susanna suspected he had never gone all the way with a woman—and probably hadn't gone very far at all. It wasn't that Wayne was unforgivably unattractive, nor that his personality was so repellent. He had, at times, a nebbish, earnest charm. But he seemed deathly afraid of others and of life itself. That Susanna, a girl nearly half his age, intimidated him made her feel powerful.

  "There it is," she heard him say from the back seat.

  "There what is?" Susanna asked.

  Wayne leaned in toward the front seat and pointed his outstretched arm towards something on the horizon.

  That's when she first saw Devil's Peak.

  It was a mesa, a natural geological formation. A flat-top mountain. Its peak, like all mesas, had been dulled by eons of gradual elemental erosion. This mesa jutted out of the flat earth landscape like something from an Italian woodcutter's fever-dream vision of Hell.

  "Why do they call it Devil's Peak?" Susanna asked. "I mean, it's a mesa, it's got no peak."

  "Exactly," Wayne said with a smirk. "The story goes that the Devil himself took the peak back to Hell with him, and made his throne out of it."

  "Lovely."

  The Jeep continued along the highway towards the mesa. Its intimidating quality faded, and gave way to a rounded, dimensional depiction. It no longer seemed like a haunted supernatural specter, but a mere earthly protuberance in a part of the state full of similar foothills and mountain ranges.

  Susanna watched Jesse toss his cigarette out of the side of the car. For a moment, she imagined it starting a blazing inferno. Jesse spoke at last. "We're here," he said. He pulled the Jeep off the highway, and they bounced along the dry, brittle off-road desert floor. They went on like that for a few minutes, and when at last they came to rest, they were just a few miles from Devil's Peak.

  Susanna jumped down from the Jeep and began to explore:

  Earthen clay lay caked over in chipped adobe, sand-colored stone formations jutting out. These irregular shapes were laid out in a kind of rough grid of ninety-degree angles. It was obviously the work of people, not of nature. But it didn't make any sense—who would have started the foundations of dozens of structures and left them unfinished like this?

  Or maybe they weren't unfinished at all.

  Maybe they were ruins.

  "Bridgetown," Jesse said from behind Susanna. He put his arms around her waist and kissed her neck. She could smell the cigarette tar on his breath. She didn't mind it. It gave her a small thrill.

  "Bridgetown?"

  "Yep."

  "Care to elaborate?"

  Jesse took a breath, and pointed to the building base nearest her. The bottoms of three walls still stood, sort of. "I think that was a store," he said. "You know, like an old-timey general store."

  "So this was a ghost town?"

  "Is a ghost town. It was a town."

  "You know what I meant."

  Jesse smiled, and took her head in his hands, planting another kiss on her. She could tell he was proud of his find.

  "It was called Bridgetown," he continued. "There were mines out here."

  Maybe that building next to them had once been a post office. Or the police department, or a genuine Old West saloon. At any rate, it was now just the wind-weathered suggestion of material ephemera.

  Susanna noticed, in the distance, oil derricks slowly bobbing their hammerheads in rhythm, dotting the horizon.

  "And oil, eventually," Jesse went on. "But by then, this place was long dead." He let out a dry little laugh. "Too bad no one told 'em about it before the mines tapped out."

  "Where's the wood?" Wayne shouted out to Jesse from the other side of the Jeep. Susanna released Jesse, who walked over to Wayne. She watched the two brothers in their first direct interaction for what seemed like the first time in hours.

  Jesse pointed to a tarp that was billowing in the high-
altitude winds. Jesse and Wayne began to untie the corners of the tarp, and peeled it back to reveal a large stockpile of pinewood two-by-fours.

  Susanna looked down at her watch.

  1:45 PM.

  They were the first ones here.

  No one's here.

  Nearly two hours had passed, and it seemed they would be the only ones coming.

  Jesse was quiet again. Susanna could tell he was fuming.

  Was it his flock, whose absence—probably the product of an ongoing drug haze—was tantamount to mutiny?

  Or was it Wayne, whose told-you-so demeanor in the couple of hours since their arrival had only gotten worse?

  Wayne sat next to Susanna on a pile of the two-by-fours.

  "Sorry you're wasting your Saturday," Wayne said, just within earshot of his pacing brother. Susanna glanced at Jesse to gauge his reaction, but Jesse continued his silent routine unabated by his brother's needling.

  She watched Jesse dig his right Chuck Taylor's toe in the sand for a moment. He went back to work hauling lumber himself, dropping more two-by-fours with a mad clatter into piles outside the tent. He no longer appeared to be counting out how much wood went where. He was just stewing.

  "I feel really bad," she said after him. No reply.

  She'd never seen him so evidently vulnerable. Embarrassment didn't suit him; he was supposed to be the paragon of cool. Conversely, she could tell that Wayne was relishing the moment with a petty joy. The sting he'd known from long-smarting locker room punches and verbal fire bombs was going the other way in the wind, for a change.

  Susanna looked out to the highway. It receded towards the vanishing point of the desert horizon, but was obscured by heat waves dancing on the surface before it could ever quite reach it.

  Something smudgy arose from the heat waves.

  The smudge grew larger, its colors more pronounced.

  A red-and-blue Volkswagen Type II bus.

  Susanna recognized it from the parking lots of Jesse's shows in the dive bars of Hollywood. It was always there, every time he played. A mark of loyalty.

  "Jesse," she said. "Look!"

  All three of them turned to the bus.

  Jesse began walking towards it, then sprinted into a run.

  He waved it down, laughing.

  The bus came to a halt, kicking up a cloud of dust. Its doors swung open, its side hatch slid back, and a dozen of the shepherd's most faithful sheep emerged from within the Teutonic tin can of a vehicle.

  Jesse's shoulders were confident, his chest out, a swing in his step. He greeted his followers with laughs and sincere, full embraces. These people—well, maybe "friends" wasn't exactly the right word for them, but they made him feel whole.

  Susanna couldn't help but smile. She snuck a peek at Wayne, sitting beside her. He was quiet. So much for his little victory. Now the elder brother was stuck out here, babysitting a bunch of perpetually late, drugged-out hippies, for God knows how long. Susanna started to laugh.

  "What's so funny?" Wayne asked, pointed.

  "Nothing, nothing. Just the look on your face."

  A couple of the girls from the bus gazed upon Jesse with doe eyes, stuck in coquettish postures. Susanna wanted it not to bother her, but she was human after all. It was the one facet of his popularity amongst this crowd that put her on edge. But it wasn't his fault. He had his values and he was upfront about them. And Susanna believed him when he said she was his girl.

  "Come on," Susanna told Wayne, giving him a little punch on the shoulder. "Let's introduce ourselves. No point in sitting on a pile of wood the whole weekend."

  She got up and began walking towards the crowd. Wayne followed, a reluctant pause preceding any action on his part.

  The fifteen people now at the campsite got to work. They dug foundations, hammered A-frames together, and helped one another prop them up to assemble self-standing structures. But they weren't alone. As the afternoon wore on, more and more cars and trucks showed up. The gang formed a kind of crescent-shaped parking lot around the nascent collection of building frames. All told, there were fifty-five people at the site, by the time the shadows grew long and the desert heat of the day cooled into the desert chill of the night.

  By eight o'clock, work was over, and play was about to begin.

  The summer sun had dropped beneath the horizon, and the hiss-crack of beer cans popping open broke out over the fuzz of bong rips and AM radio. It was a choir of nightmare music for the church ladies back home.

  Susanna was busying herself making small chat with some of the guests, trying hard to recall some of their names—to no avail—when Jesse took her by the hand and led her away from the main group of revelers.

  "Where are we going?" she asked.

  "Let me surprise you."

  He led her down a winding path in the brush. "Keep an eye out for snakes."

  "Great."

  "I carved out this path a week before. I wanted to show you something spectacular."

  "Well, you've got my attention."

  They were hiking towards Devil's Peak.

  It was too dark for the mesa to be visible by anything other than the cutout of its familiar silhouette in the night sky. A mesa-shaped void of no-star where elsewhere there was star.

  Jesse stopped in front of her, and she nearly tripped over him.

  "What is it?"

  "I think—this way," he said. "Yeah, this way."

  He turned to his right, grabbing her by the arm, excited. He was moving faster now.

  They went down into a ditch, having to balance against one another as they progressed into the crevasse.

  Jesse flicked on his Zippo lighter, casting just enough light to illuminate a decaying old wooden board against the mouth of an opening in the earth.

  "Is this a mineshaft?" Susanna asked.

  Jesse handed the Zippo to Susanna. "Hold this. Keep it burning."

  She did so, as Jesse loosened the board of rotting wood from its moorings and set it aside.

  "Okay, let's go."

  She followed him into the shaft, without question. She was too curious to turn back.

  The passageway was only barely big enough for them to make their way through. It was narrow and short.

  "Some mine this was," she said. "You can't even get a cart out through this opening."

  "I think it's a service entry. Or an emergency exit."

  Susanna kept her hands along the walls to guide her and keep her balance. The texture was chipped, sharp even. And sort of glassy, which she wasn't expecting. It didn't feel like rock.

  They proceeded along a steady downward gradient. She was putting her weight on the balls of her feet, and while she wasn't exactly in danger of tumbling forward, she wouldn't trust her stability if she had to go running full bore ahead.

  "Look straight ahead," Jesse said.

  "I can't see anything. It's pitch black."

  "Wait a sec, let me move out of the way."

  Jesse squatted and pressed up against the wall. With him out of the way, Susanna could finally make out an inkling of why he'd brought her down here. It made her gasp:

  Half-there dots on her retinas danced as she made out that the corridor was not, in fact, pitch-black. An otherworldly violet light shimmered at the end of the hall, before it curved out of sight.

  "What…what is that? Where is that coming from?"

  "Come on, let's keep moving."

  Jesse led her on further. With each step, she could make out more and more. At last, the end of the tunnel was in sight. Susanna could see now that the narrow shaft opened up into a much larger chamber.

  Jesse looked back at her, a loving grin spread wide across his features. He was bathed in the purple light. He took a step out beyond the tunnel, into the cavern beyond, and beckoned Susanna forth once more.

  "Holy shit," she muttered.

  They were standing in a mammoth cavern of glimmering stalactites, like rock candy formed over a millennia of natural precision engineering.r />
  It was, without hyperbole, the single biggest place Susanna had ever been.

  An ethereal glow filled the farthest recesses of the space. A waterfall was audible somewhere in the distance, though Susanna couldn't imagine where all that water could be coming from. She looked around herself and saw they were standing on a patch of moist earth at the bottom of the cavern, which was easily several hundred feet tall. Around this little atoll upon which they stood, a pool of water cast shimmering light on the walls.

  The purple light and bouncing reflections were caught in a misty, foggy atmosphere that made the ceiling difficult to make out. Susanna could see that hundreds of feet above them, a spindly bridge of rock crossed the abyss.

  Everything seemed blacklit, neon in its psychedelic hyper-presence.

  "This is impossible," Susanna said. "How can a mountain be hollow?"

  "I don't know how," Jesse said. "But feel that in the air," Jesse said. "That electric charge?"

  Susanna looked down at her arms. Sure enough, the little light-colored hairs on her arms stood up on their ends.

  There was a low hum to this place, too, one which made her recall being a little girl on the Disneyland steam ship, and feeling the engines pulse beneath her feet.

  "This place is special," Jesse said. "I don't know what it is. I don't know why it is. But what we're building here—in the ruins of the old town, in the mountain's shadow…"

  "Yes?"

  "It's a calling. I know it. I'm making something great." He swallowed, then corrected himself: "We're making something great." He took her hands in his, brought himself in close to her. "You're as much a part of this experience as I am."

  "I haven't done anything," she protested. "I'm just tagging along."

  "Oh no," Jesse said. "That's not true at all. You have a very special role here." He put one arm around her waist, hugged her body as tight as he could, and began swaying from side to side in a little mock dance.

  "Oh yeah? What's that?"

  "You're my muse."

  She laughed. "Your muse?"

  "Yes." He put his hand around her head, his thumb gently grazing her ear, and ran his fingers through her hair. "If I can breathe life back into this land, I want it to be with you by my side."