. . . not Alderaan but rather somewhere Oklahoma!  WTF? 

Sometimes life parallels a Tom Waits song which is simple and good but not pretty . . .

It’s two a.m. on Sunday, and I’m too tired to sleep.  A dozen semis are parked in the gravel lot, their engines belching diesel fumes from chrome smoke stacks, mixing with the dusty air and muted amber glow from an oil refinery across the street - a strangely beautiful cluster of lights, thousands of them, like a polluted milky way.  The air is humid and eerie, tinged with peculiar vibrations as if electrified - a post nuclear sensation.
 

Earlier I stopped by the Tin Dog Saloon in Tulsa to see my cosmic friends.  I then headed west on Lucinda, hoping to make it all the way home.  But I was smoky eyed and tired, so I found my way to this decrepit motel along Rt. 66 on the west side of Tulsa.
 
Over there in Tulsa, across the river, it’s clean and pretty.  To Tulsans this oil refinery doesn’t exist except for the phosphorescent glow across the river at night and the faint stench of petroleum when the wind blows from the west.
       
The sign out front of this motel was once an eye-catching neon sign, but it now reads “American Motel . . . Free Cable T.V.” in cracked plastic.  It’s the kind of place that used to be grand in the 1950s before the interstate system killed the iconic American highways and all the motels and diners they supported; back when people vacationed in streamlined, jet-like Pontiacs and Cadillacs . . . works of automobile art by today’s standards.
 
I maneuvered around a hooker in the parking lot and then rolled to a stop in front of the illuminated “vacancy” sign at the front office.  I climbed off and then tapped on the bullet proof window.  I could hear the night attendant snoring through the speak hole, so I knocked louder until she finally slipped a room key through the money hatch. 

I’m paranoid about bed bugs so I grabbed my bed roll and headed to my room.  I never thought about bed bugs when I was young, but after excessive media exposure I worry perhaps more than I should.  Hell, if NBA players pick up bed bugs from five star hotels, we are all screwed.  Anyway, I unrolled my army blanket onto the cigarette burned bedspread, glancing upward at the ubiquitous cheap hotel pastel print of a Mexican donkey carrying a basketful of flowers, an obvious waste of money.  The plain, cigarette-stained wall would look nicer.    

There is no possibility of sleep, at least not anytime soon, because I can hear the hooker singing a vaguely familiar song in the parking lot.  It could be this song.  Or perhaps it should be:     

“Down by the Riverside motel
It's 10 below and falling
By a 99 cent store
She closed her eyes and started swaying
But it's so hard to dance that way
When it's cold and there's no music
Well your old hometown is so far away
But inside your head there's a record that's playing
A song called
Hold on, hold on
You really got to hold on
Take my hand I'm standing right here
And just hold on”

               -from “Hold on” by Tom Waits

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPnOEiehONQ

Kris Kristofferson sang “I’m wide awake and feeling mortal”, which pretty much sums it up tonight.  And childhood memories are coaxed into consciousness by this this old motel, these people, the refinery, the trucks in the parking lot. 

Memories . . .

 . . . of growing up in a Texas border town where the oil refineries picketed this side of the Rio Grande in strategic fashion, so the prevailing winds would blow their oily spew and stink across the border, over the Juarez slums,  trapped there, hemmed in by the mountains.   

 . . . of the time when I was clean, thinking with certainty that babies were made by their parents’ kisses, which is what my Mother told me.  I believed this for a long time until one summer, after the fifth grade had ended, I started going cross country with my Uncle Joe, a long haul trucker.  Sometimes we stayed in places like this motel, along some remote highway or in a small town.  Sometimes he’d ask me to sleep on the floor where I’d awaken to the sound of a banging headboard, muffled screams and naked bodies faintly illuminated by the light filtering through the crack between window curtains.  Those women in my uncle’s bed, like the woman outside.  And sometimes in my uncle’s truck too, where he ask me to stay up front while they retired to the sleeper, giggling as they zipped the fabric door closed. 



My brother, uncle Joe and me

. . . of the time on a remote Texas highway when a highway patrolman hauled my uncle off to jail for speeding.  He had too many tickets I guess.  He told me to climb into the sleeper and keep quiet . . . that it was illegal for children to ride in trucks.  They took him away, and I was locked in the truck for several hours.  I worried they’d never bring him back.  But eventually he came back.  And then we rolled down the road all the way to Mobile, Alabama, where I remember seeing aquatic graveyards full of the rotting hulks of old freighters anchored in the oily harbor.           

 . . . of my uncle and his Kenworth truck.  He’d chain-smoke cigarettes and every once in a while ask me to retrieve the drive-in tray under the seat and roll a joint with cigarette paper.  He never wore a shirt and preferred flip flops, cutoff jeans, mirrored aviator sunglasses, and a gabled brim trucker’s cap. 

. . . of truck stops and trucks – Peterbuilts, Macks, Kenworths, Internationals, Fords - their diesel engines always running.  And of bleary-eyed truckers, unclean except for their faces, stumbling out of their sleepers at midnight to take a piss.  And hookers stumbling out of there too.

My uncle was my hero back then.  And I remember the overwhelming desire to become a trucker someday, just like him.  But something happened.  I’m not sure if it was the loneliness of the road, or his troubled childhood, or pills, or drugs or mental illness.  But one day he started acting very strange and violent, as if possessed by the devil.  No one knows what happened outside of the small inner circle of my family, who doesn’t talk about controversial matters.  It was so bad that my uncle lost his job, and the family had the police escort him to the state mental hospital.  When he finally came home, he was a numb vestige of the hero I once knew.  And he’s been like that for twenty years - unrecognizable.   

Uncle Joe
Van Buren, Arkansas

I’m finally tired, so I’ll close this with the thought that perhaps innocence evaporates in phases.  Needless to say those road trips with my uncle were phase one of several of the lessening of innocence in my life.  And I think I’m still going.