American Flats

Part 1 of an Underground Memoir

Black Rock Desert, Nevada

1.

For two years, during my undergraduate perambulations, I lived in an attic on Sierra Street in Reno, Nevada. This was an excellent find—from an add pinned to a bulletin board in a hipster cafe called Deux Gros Nez--because the rent was cheap, and it was only a few blocks away from campus.

I still have trouble associating the word University with the city of Reno, which probably has something to do with Allen Ginsberg’s wry criticism that Reno, as an entity, was struggling from the “effort to be cosmopolitan.” Not much has changed in that regard.

I once spent the evening with Ginsberg in the University guest house grilling him for stories about Kerouac and Cassady, while he ransacked the kitchen cabinets looking for a spoon. He was there to read poetry to students and highly disappointed in the obligatory fruit-basket—wrapped in cellophane—given him by the English Department. I remember it was raining like a monsoon outside and he kept complaining about his hypoglycemia. He may have thought I was a kind of sacrificial lamb, served up for a righteous screwing, but he was wrong on that account. I was there because I wanted to know if Kerouac was an asshole. He was also mystified by the rave drug Ecstasy which he had recently tried and insisted should instead be called Misery.

I think that evening with Ginsberg was when I realized with some clarity that celebrity doesn’t amount to much. He was a strange little homunculus who wrote some very fine poems and was in a circle of talented people. That was it. At any rate, my attitude about Reno as a college town is unfair to the University because it really was a fine school with top-notch professors, and I regret nothing about the series of personal pratfalls that eventually found me studying there, instead of, say, Stanford. My father wanted me at Stanford.

Fuck Stanford.

My attic room had a small, four-light garrot window that swung out on wrecked hinges and overlooked a strip of gravel called Satchel Alley, with a row of dim little medieval cottages opposite, and the tangled mess of our small backyard, where a mountain of rusting bicycles, brick, and old lumber had been piling up for years. The weeds were four feet tall and growing up through the bicycles and that spectacle of decay was the subject of personal fascination. I photographed this pile of detritus relentlessly. Most of my photographs from that era are now lost because, years later, in one of my occasional manias—which always have to do with reducing the load of shit I pack through the world--I tossed the negatives in a dumpster.

Anyway, the attic had a pitched ceiling, which meant I could only stand up in the middle of it, and furnace vent pipe ran up through the center of the room, a fact which required caution in winter when it was hot enough to melt flesh. Once, after an all-night drive back to Reno from the California coast with my friend Dominic Gerbo, a thing we sometimes did on impulse, and where I drank an entire jug of Carlo Rossi table wine in the passenger’s seat of his VW bus—which we had christened Moby Dick—I barfed on the vent pipe. A scalding red vomit ran down the length of the pipe, coated the furnace panel, and finally pooled on the floor.

The house was not far from the football stadium, where legends were made and knees were destroyed on the gridiron, and whenever the Wolf Pack scored the very excitable ROTC cadre would fire the Fremont Cannon, which caused the birds to rise from the dying and leafless tree in the back yard and fly away in a swirling ball of black confetti. I watched all this from the little garrot window where I sat rolling Drum tobacco into cigarettes on a Zig-Zag rolling machine in front of my little blue typewriter. I would sit there, sometimes all day, drinking hot cinnamon cider, blowing smoke out the window, and trying to write. I thought it was important to suffer on a typewriter the way my heroes had all suffered and so finally I bought one at a pawn shop on Virginia Street, not far from the towering and somewhat disturbing pink clown that fronted the Circus-Circus casino.

The typewriter, even as I remember it with some nostalgia, was truly a menace. Reliable ribbon was nearly impossible to find, and the keys were so hard to push the experience spawned actual nightmares akin to the gun-dreams I would have many years later when I became a cop. In those dreams, which are a universal phenomenon among cops, you pull forever on the trigger of your pistol, and it won’t fire. Something very bad is bearing down but the trigger is either frozen fast or simply clicks without result. This is an invisible plague and likely without a cure, though the world’s foremost expert on school shootings, Dave Grossman, seems to think that breathing exercises are the wide road to salvation. I saw Grossman at a conference once, on the top floor of a casino in Vegas. The desert wind was howling outside and during the entirety of his talk we could feel the entire building sway.