Near Fantastica .com - March 2007 Manifesto

March 2007

Pink Neon Mountains

Dear San Diego,

When does it stop? This spinning, this dizzying universe of paper stars hung with untenable twine? The week that I arrived I spent most of my time across the street drinking. Not only was there my divorce to contend with, but also the fact that my brother's arm had been ripped off by the front end of an exploding Volkswagen.

That first month I spent my days pipelining highballs and beer, my nights sleeping with anyone I could talk into it, and my mornings puking my guts out on the railroad tracks behind the furniture store before clamouring up the fire escape and crawling across the living room floor to the couch. Across a thin, two lane highway my salvation stood like a black and pink neon cavalry, home to faceless, nameless transients, mountaineers and bushmen, strippers, bikers, and a cast of homegrown degenerates, two of whom were gifted a momentary spark of genius that resulted in the transformation of an old Pentecostal church into a strip club.

Not long after opening its doors, Bikini Mountain became a haven for bikers, many of whom lived in the area on properties littered with rusted machinery, maniacally guarded by a variety of vicious dogs and gangs of dirt covered, greasy haired children, all with steadfast penchants for hunting rifles and dirt bikes. In fact, heading east down Highway 9 is not entirely unlike driving into a heavily wooded, mountainous version of The Road Warrior. That said, it's always surprised me that they've never tried to buy Bikini Mountain being that they spend so much time there, or even attempted to shake down Bill and Buck, its owners. Maybe it's because they have something to do with bringing in the dancers. Maybe it's because the rest of the town is so normal and antiquated and some of them actually have respect for that and those that have lived in this area for generations, many of whom settled here while building and working the railroad - some before the turn of the century. I have no clue, nor did I care when I first arrived. To me the location of the bar was fortuitous, and at the time that's all that mattered.

I have checked the mail every morning for the last eight days to see if the papers have arrived. And each time I discover that they haven't I close the mailbox and look up, my eyes wandering across the highway to that now familiar black walled box, its pink neon emblem humming faintly, invitingly, its beaten and heavy wooden doors occasionally opening to reveal its tenebrous insides.

I look up, my eyes wandering across the highway, because I have since forgotten from which direction to this place I originally came.