Jesus and Jameson
Visiting the anarcho-libertarian community of East Jesus
Last weekend we took two hundred costumed people into the Arizona desert to meet a naked man selling books.[1] He was happy we came. Profitable weekend, he said. Sold a lot of vintage Playboys. That was in Quartzsite.[2]
We had arrived by way of East Jesus, a cul-de-sac of dirt and desert near Slab City and Salvation Mountain. It’s an art commune of sorts. A seesaw made from a bus axle. A tower made of glass and toy guns. A wall of painted TVs. Half-buried VW bugs, motor homes without motors, piles of debris sorted into smaller piles of debris, toilets with toilets, pipes with pipes. You won’t get much cell service here. The GPS will lead you into the dunes.
And the owners pack heat. They said they would’ve shot us, thinking we were tweakers. But earlier in the evening someone in our group [3], realizing our destination, called ahead. He was ex-husband to the proprietor, a woman who motored around the site on a scavenged scooter, drunk. She gave us Jameson and a tour of her tomato plants, which she grew inside a rusting geodesic dome. There were painted skulls in the trees. It would be menacing were it not for the more whimsical folk art. East Jesus is Bartertown, crossed with Etsy.
This is where California’s sidewalk ends. You think: the people who live here asked themselves a different question. Not what you want to be, but who. Or how. It’s not romance, but it’s not despair. In the evenings they aim down a barrel at the naked firing range.
When you leave, you’re sniffing distance from The Salton Sea, a fetid mistake of a man-made lake that grows saltier by the year. The fish have died. Sand covers neighborhoods of roads, no houses along them. This was supposed to be the French Riviera of the west; now it’s an alluvial plain of eternal stench.
The booms you hear are laser-guided rockets detonating on Al Brutus, a fake Afghan insurgent village of steel huts and terrorist dummies, standing alongThe Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range. Bombing is forbidden after 9pm, so any explosions in the darkness are either meth labs or metal scavengers in rusted pickups driving over unexploded ordinance.
Further south there are methane fires glowing on the horizon. Further east, orange cyclones of sand. It’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The small pool at the hotel you are going to promises to be cool.
When you pull into the parking lot, there’s a clown standing in it.
1. Aka, Sweet Pie, aka, Paul Winer, coiner of the phrase “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke”.
2. And this was Rental Car Rally.
3. One of the founders of SantaCon, I was told.
