Tag: Cabazon

I kind of chased my tail in a circle and ended up back where I started while doing some background research for this piece. I was trying to find out the identity of the dusty abandoned steak house that held the garbage bag from the pull quote and had convinced myself that it had to have been The Wagon Wheel from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Paris, Texas. I even found a photo of the interior after it became a dusty abandoned steak house and it more or less looked like the dusty abandoned steak house I remembered.

The only problem is that The Wagon Wheel was demolished in December of 2016 and LaPorsha was pretty sure that we did the whole desert thing in the Summer of 2017. I checked my e-mail and we had become site hosts at the Thousand Palms Oasis in August of 2017. I looked a little closer at the satellite map and remembered the chain link fence and rubble where The Wagon Wheel would have been. It looks like the dusty abandoned steak house in this story is now a brightly painted Mexican Restaurant called Los Victors.

The inside doesn’t look anything like it looked when it was a dusty abandoned steak house with a garbage bag full of desiccated flesh. It actually looks quite a bit like the Burger King which was getting me even more confused but the Burger King is definitely still a Burger King. The chairs in one of the pictures did look a bit familiar, they probably kept those. It would be easier than throwing them out. I decided to just not stick a picture on this one. I’m sure you’ve seen the dinosaurs, everybody’s seen the dinosaurs.

Our first RV was a 38 footer on the Chevy 454 chassis, a real monster. There was never much wrong with it from a mechanical perspective except that it would start running hot from time to time. We were in the desert anyway so everything was hot. Structurally it was a different story. It had a good side and a bad side. On the bad side the covers had fallen off of the storage compartments and taken the siding with it leaving bare plywood. Not that it ever actually mattered, these aren’t the kind of stories where little details like this will matter later.

We had been running hot when we first pulled off the highway into the Thousand Palms truck stop and for a while we got away with parking in the back where all the trucks were. In the beginning we used the little black diesel Mercedes we also had to go up to Joshua Tree and check out spots to rent land to park on but there’s nothing like living in the desert to let you know that you don’t want to live in the desert. Eventually they started noticing that there were a few RVs back there that didn’t move and we had to start moving around and parking on the streets.

Besides the truck stop Thousand Palms intersected with tribal lands enough to have a casino so there was a decent sized homeless population for a town its size. There were a few out of the way spots for camps but we ended up meeting the other RV people as soon as they pulled us all out from where we were hidden in the rows of trucks.

The first RV that we parked by was occupied by a friendly older white trash couple. No matter how many times we told them that we didn’t use meth, or “white” in local slang, they never seemed to get the message. They would offer it to us as exchange when they needed a jump or come by the window when they were having trouble finding some:

“Got any shit?”

One day they were visited by a woman with a car and job, probably a stripper, who needed a spot to hang out and get high. She had an entire litter of Husky puppies with her and LaPorsha was talking about how cute they were and saying she wanted one. The old woman in the RV lowered her voice to ask how much LaPorsha would be willing to pay for one.

You could see the gears turning inside her head. I’m sure if we’d offered a hundred dollars or more she would have made it happen – one way or another. We really didn’t need a dog, much less a potentially stolen one, so we said we weren’t interested. This couple wasn’t around for long. One morning their RV was gone and we never saw them again.

These guys that lived in another one used to cook meth and steal diesel from construction equipment but were getting by on just being the only RV with a working air conditioner. Whoever had gotten a social security check or other come up would buy gas for the AC and share drugs with these guys to have a spot to hang out that was out of the heat. It was like the cheaper version of a room at the Red Roof. They had a tiny television next to the door that constantly played a loop of their only DVD – some obscure hood crime movie from the ‘90s I forget the name of.

We didn’t do the same kind of drugs as everybody else but one of the guys was helping us flush our radiator on our way out of town. We were driving toward Los Angeles for no compelling reason. I mean we needed to go by the DHS Office to renew EBT and that sort of thing but we could have done that without moving the RV at all. Our RV had gotten so hot that we were having trouble starting it and we were grabbing some more water from a building where what looked like a juvenile eagle was watching us from the roof.

“Heat is the enemy of electricity.”

On the freeway things were going fine until LaPorsha’s driver’s seat suddenly turned into a sauna. Steam was rising all around her and it seemed reasonable to assume that it was probably coming from the engine as it was directly under her. I’m not much good with anything motor vehicle related but I was able to pull off the doghouse and use a flashlight to find where a hose had gotten loose, we’d left in the relative cool of night. Reattaching it was easy but there was also the issue of all of the water in the radiator having changed state and dispersed into the atmosphere.

Considering all of the issues that we’d had leaving Thousand Palms, and the surplus of empty space in our vehicle, you might have expected that we would have been carrying another radiator’s worth of the stuff but that wasn’t the case.

We had pulled off in walking distance to a rest stop so I walked down to discover that the water to all of the fixtures and faucets had been shut off as it was no longer in use. By this time the sun was starting to come up. A truck driver with three or four black chihuahuas had pulled onto the shoulder ahead of us and he did have water but only small bottles of this weird zero calorie Concord Grape flavored stuff that wasn’t even carbonated. I wouldn’t have put it in a radiator even if there was enough of it.

I did eventually get thirsty enough to drink some. It tasted like obscure new forms of cancer.

We had to try to hitchhike to the next exit to get more water. A cop pulled off to tell us that we couldn’t hitchhike but she’d drive us there. The next exit was the Cabazon Dinosaurs. Apparently the Dinosaurs were built to help bring business to the then-demolished Wagon Wheel Restaurant that wasn’t the dusty abandoned steak house. I don’t know if this is still the case but at the time they had been bought by some Christians that turned the insides of them into a Creationist Museum about how dinosaurs never actually existed.

It’s actually possible that in 2017 the Dinosaurs were no longer even owned by Creationists because I didn’t even go inside this time. I had looked inside in 2012 at the tail end of the Trapped in Reality tour. I know whoever owns them now paints them up for different holidays and stuff. In 2017 I fell asleep under the stomach of the apatosaurus as it was the only place with shade and some possibly unrelated Christians gave me a bag of food. Doritos, Gatorade – that sort of thing.

I found some of the cardboard covered plastic cubes that vegetable oil comes in digging through the Burger King dumpster so we had something to carry water with and just needed to find a ride the three or four miles back to the RV. The manager of the Burger King said that he would take us if we were still there when he closed that night and that sounded better than trying to hitchhike again.

We did notice one other RV in the upper parking lot by the gas station so we decided to see if anybody was home and ask if they knew an RV mechanic. When I approached the window a pot bellied white man with dreadlocks dressed only in basketball shorts was startled out of his nap when his six or seven pit bulls all started barking furiously. He tried to quiet them down by repeatedly yelling “dudes!” at them. It wasn’t particularly effective.

He didn’t know an RV mechanic. I got the impression his didn’t run at all and the owners of the parking lot didn’t care enough to make him leave.

It was really hot and we had a lot of time to kill so I started poking around the dusty abandoned steak house. I can’t remember what the sign said the name had been before it had gone out of business, it isn’t the name anymore. Apparently the building was built in 2001. It’s hard to imagine a year where business was booming enough at the Cabazon Dinosaurs that somebody decided it would be a good idea to build a second sit down family restaurant but apparently there was one and it was 2001.

The door in back turned out to be unlocked when I tried to open it. There were a bunch of lizards hanging out in the doorway that had all apparently had the same idea as me about using a dusty abandoned steak house to get out of the sun. I’m usually pretty on it with the herpetology stuff but I don’t know what kind they were. A few of them were pretty big – about as long as a chihuahua but nowhere near as bulky.

I went to get LaPorsha so we could try to take a nap in there or at least spend some time out of the sun. It was really dusty to the point that it made it hard to breathe. There was a table that looked like the spot that other people who had killed time or squatted in the dusty abandoned steak house had killed time at: beer cans and empty liquor bottles. Sitting on a chair was a black trash bag full of the titular weird dried out slabs of some kind of flesh.

They kind of looked like this brown fibrous stuff that comes off of palm trees but the moment my fingers touched it I knew it was Animal Kingdom. I really couldn’t begin to guess what that stuff was or why somebody had dumped a garbage bag full of it in this place. My mind went to deer and then I couldn’t help but think human and I was pretty much sure I didn’t feel like touching it, having my fingerprints on it or being anywhere near it.

The walls were mirrors for a lot of the space. The dust was thick on everything. I found.. I don’t remember what – tablecloths, aprons, curtains, some kind of relatively clean textile we could lay down to sleep on. Just barely bearable. The lizards weren’t coming around, they stayed by the back door ready for a raid. The light caught the dust in the air and looked unwelcoming. We slept.

The light from the windows began to darken, it was inching toward evening. We dusted off, collected ourselves, avoided the bag of god-knows-what and returned to Burger King. It was almost time for the manager to close but he had done a 180 personality wise. He mocked us for expecting him to keep his word – called us fools, idiots, crazy. He clearly felt guilty that he was reneging on his promise and attempting to put the fault on us to soothe his ego. We told him to just go.

One of his workers was worried about us and wanted to get us back safely. She lived all the way in Perris but had to drive the two hours to Cabazon for a minimum wage fast food job. She had never taken hitchhikers before and was worried we might hurt her but still decided to take us. She was praying the entire way. A rosary made from glass beads cut to look like crystals hung from her rear view mirror.

We got back to our RV and I refilled the water. It was dark again, cool night to fight the heat. We drove until it got hot and weird again. Pulled off into a field by an Auto Zone in Beaumont. I can’t remember what I had to buy there but I feel like it was vaguely cylindrical and someone helped me install it. What I can remember is the smell of synthetic oil and rubber inside this Auto Zone – they all have it but this one was stronger than usual.

Once we were able to drive again we decided not to try to make the full trip to Los Angeles. We parked behind a mini-mall in Banning and got a bus instead.

Banning – we’d be coming back to a whole lot of Bullshit in Banning.