Brokenhearted in Bakersfield
12 - I SAW THE LIGHTS
Down here at Broken Heart Park
most of us have a little loose change jingling around in our pockets, and the
pump still works, and the last time I checked our electricity was still turned
on. Throw in a beer, and how bad could
things be? I felt my mood improving, or
maybe it was my hangover was abating.
Anyway, that got me nostalgic and reminiscing about past times in
Bakersfield. I may not be as old as I
look, but I remember the Boozie Coop liquor outlet, our local Stiffies Hardware
and the Buff-My-Machine Hot Wax Shoppe.
And I’ll never forget that famous radio jingle for Strafer’s Aerial
Spray crop dusters:
“Cover your face! Cover your face!
Strafer’s is spraying the whole damn place!”
How I miss the sweet odor of fruit fly gas on a warm spring evening. On top of the pleasures of trailer court
living near the urban metropolis of Bakersfield, we can also enjoy $1.50 showers,
brotherly fellowship and a free dinner compliments of the folks at the Knightly
Komfort Kamp only a half-mile down the road.
So to my way of thinking, maybe the good ol’ days ain’t over yet.
Sometimes you can’t appreciate what you have until you lose it, so I guess you
could say I was still appreciating the loss of the hemp growing business I
shared with Chet Baker and Hippie Mary.
It all started with a regular visit to our field of natural growing
fibers. For more than a month Chet and
me had been strapping on six half-gallon water bottles and crawling through the
sluice pipe that runs over to the hemp crop next to the ditch where the septic
tank drains off. Oh sure, we could have
just run through the fields at night like south-of-the-border immigrants
crossing the San Diego Freeway, but the chances of being spotted increase when
you’re right out in the open like that.
Anyhow, Chet and me was busy carrying the water needed to supplement the
compost runoff nourishing our plants, and we was almost to a corner of the
ditch, when I saw strange lights ahead.
I stopped dead in the pipe. Chet prodded
me from behind, “Man, get moving,” he yelled at me. “I don’t wanna be out all night just watering
hemp plants.”
Like most damn idiots, Chet talked too damn loud for his own damn good. Or mine.
I kicked back at his face with my boot and whispered a stern, “Shut up. There’s someone out there. I can see lights ahead.” I kicked back
again. “Just back out real slow, and
keep real quiet.”
We started edging in the opposite direction and was careful not to spill any
water or get caught. “Sorry about
kicking you in the face and yelling at you back there,” I apologized to Chet
good-naturedly after we got back to my trailer, “but I about peed my pants when
I seen them lights.” I advised Chet to
go on home to his old lady and get his face bandaged, that I was determined to
return to the scene of the crime and spy on whoever was skulking around the
hemp crop. Chet surprised me and cried
he wanted to be a spy, too. So I
relented and told Chet he could come, but he’d have to be real quiet this time. Then I opened my cooler and grabbed out a
couple of cans of beer. The first one I
shook real hard and squirted Chet.
“Man, are you crazy or something?” he yelled.
“Listen,” I tried to reason with my clueless business partner, as I sprayed
some beer on myself, “if whoever’s out there catches us spying on them, it’s
gotta look and smell like we was just headed home from the bar, like nothing
unusual was going on, like we wasn’t actually spies,” I gulped down some beer
that hadn’t been sprayed. “Here, take a
swig off this,” I passed Chet the can and popped open a new one for myself.
After chugging the remainder of our beers we was off like drunken ninjas in the
night. We creeped across the interstate
and down into the fields, moving silent and low under the cover of darkness,
until we finally arrived at the sluice pipe and slithered our way through. As we approached our crop we saw the
Sheriff’s car. The parked vehicle’s
trunk was open, brimming with plastic garbage bags.
“Not a bad night’s haul, Perro,” the lanky lawman laughed. “Not bad at all. Boss is gonna be mighty pleased with our
confiscation tonight.”
“Who do you think this shit belongs to, Sheriff?” the Deputy asked.
“Well,” Sheriff Al responded, “you could say we’ve got a whole lot of usual
suspects just across the road, but the way I see it, possession is nine-tenths
of the law, and around here, I’m the law, so I guess it now belongs to me.”
Sheriff Al slammed the trunk shut, “Let’s ride.”
While me and Chet remained hidden in silent witness, Sheriff Al and Deputy
Perro climbed into their patrol car.
Suddenly, up from the interstate, came the roaring and grinding noise of
a badly tuned engine being pushed beyond its capacity. I turned in time to see one headlight coming
straight at us, but before it could run us down there was some squealing of
tires and a crumpling of metal, and as me and Chet hunkered in the narrow ditch
we looked up just in time to see Owen Purty’s rusted heap fly’n over our heads
like an orca on steroids at Ocean World.
Owen shot through the plastic wrap windshield in an ejection that had him
sailing off into a rough landing somewhere down along the gravel side of the
road, while his car just kept on rolling, rolling, rolling through the air
until it landed smack dab in front of the Sheriff’s parked vehicle.
Chet and me raced back to the relative safety of Broken Heart Park. No questions asked, and no answers given.