An Excerpt From:

DOGHOUSE ROSES
Stories
by Steve Earle

DOGHOUSE ROSES

Pick any means of transportation, public or private, over land, sea, or air. No matter which direction you travel, it takes three hours to get out of L.A. Yeah, I know there are all those folks with a head start for the Grapevine out in Northridge and Tarzana, but hell, to those of us in the trenches, the real Angelenos, those places are only luminescent names on big green signs seemingly suspended in midair above the 101 Freeway. Yeah, yeah, I know all about the good citizens of Encino and Toluca Lake who are always bragging about the convenience of friendly little Burbank Airport, but let’s get real -- they’re not going anywhere anyway.

I’m talking about the other side of the hill -- Downtown, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Venice, and Silver Lake -- the transient heart of the city, the L.A. of Raymond Chandler, Chet Baker, and Tom Waits. A place where folks come to do Great Things -- make movies and records, write screenplays and novels, which they hope will become screenplays someday, because that’s where the money is. And every- fucking-body’s got a “treatment” that they’re working on, including half of the L.A.P.D. Most of these folks only wind up as minor characters in the work of the fortunate few. You’ve seen them -- aging bit players with tough, brown hides, mummified from years of sitting around motel swimming pools waiting for the phone to ring. The drug-ravaged former rock stars in raggedy-ass Porches and Saabs on an unending orbit of the downtown streets. Even the lucky ones only get as far as the Hollywood Hills or maybe Malibu, where they live out their lives with their backs to the world’s widest and deepest ocean, waiting for wildfire to rain down from the canyons above. And should they decide to get out? Well, like I said, it takes three hours, and most people simply don’t have the resolve.

Bobby Charles certainly didn’t. He left L.A. in disgrace, low- riding in the passenger seat of his soon-to-be ex-wife’s BMW. Not that he wanted to go, but this town kicked his ass so thoroughly there was simply no fight left in him. Kim West (she had never taken Bobby’s last name, for professional reasons) had finally given up on her talented but troubled husband of five years, and now she just wanted him out of her town.

When Kim and Bobby met, he was a country-rock singer whose first marriage had already begun to buckle under the stress of constant touring, the distance alone taking a considerable toll. His wife and two kids were back in Nashville, but his real home was a forty-foot Eagle bus he shared with his band and crew. At age thirty- five Bobby was somewhat of a cult figure, the kind of recording artist who, thanks to a loyal following, sold one hundred thousand records per release, although this was barely enough to recoup his recording costs. The critics loved his work, however, and he lent a certain amount of integrity to a record label’s roster. Before Kim came along, he had always considered L.A. a nice place to visit, at best.

Bobby had always avoided strong women like the plague, but something about the diminutive, up-and-coming producer fascinated him. Kim came out from St. Louis to attend the UCLA film school, switching to a business major midway through her second year. She went on to an M.B.A. and a job at a major studio. When a mutual friend introduced the pair at a party after the Grammy Awards, Kim thought Bobby was cute, in a primitive sort of way, like Crocodile Dundee or something. She was bored to tears with dating other “industry” types, who saved all the receipts from dinner and talked shop in bed. Bobby was a little loud, a little reckless, and she knew her mother would hate him.

They left the party together in a rented 5.0 Mustang convertible. They wound up parked somewhere way up Mulholland Drive with Kim’s panties hanging on the rearview mirror, breathlessly gazing down on all those lights. From that moment, L.A. had Bobby Charles by the balls.

Bobby didn’t discover heroin in L.A. Hell, he grew up in San Antonio, Texas, 150 miles from the Mexican border. Despite the much publicized efforts of the U.S. government, brown heroin steadily seeped across the Rio Grande like tainted blood from a gangrenous wound. Bobby first tried it at an impromptu party at a friend’s house when he was fourteen. For years he managed to get away with his off- and-on habit. He always managed to detox in time for this tour or that record, and even if he was dope-sick he never missed a show. By the time he met Kim, though, it was starting to catch up with him. Once Bobby left his family and moved to L.A., cheap, strong dope, guilt, and a long, nasty divorce combined to provide him with all the excuse any addict needs to bottom out.

At first it was just a matter of L.A.’s dependable supply of heroin, but pretty soon Bobby discovered speedballs -- deadly intravenous cocktails of heroin and cocaine. It wasn’t long before he had two habits to support. In L.A. time passes in its own surreal fashion -- too subtle to even be detectable to folks who are used to four seasons. So if you asked Bobby, he couldn’t tell you exactly when his habit got to be too much work. He only knew that at some point, in what passed for a moment of clarity, he enrolled in a private methadone program. He woke up early every morning to line up at the clinic with the other “clients” to take communion at the little window -- a plastic cup of the bitter powder dissolved in an orange-flavored liquid, chased by water from the cooler. Bobby was then “free” from the need to run down to Hoover Street to buy heroin twice a day. So he took up smoking crack.

Because he no longer used needles, Bobby told himself and anyone who would listen that he was back on track. He’d get smoked up and rattle on for hours about the “next record.” Kim listened dutifully, but she knew it was only talk. Bobby hadn’t written a song in more than three years. How could he? All of his guitars (along with a few that didn’t belong to him) were in the pawnshop.

Kim knew Bobby was a junkie when she married him. She just didn’t know he was a junkie junkie. At first she saw dope as part of Bobby’s “thing,” his mystique. It made him seem more dangerous, and after all, she was slumming. It stopped being cute when money began to turn up missing from her account. Or when he called her at work, whacked out of his skull and thoroughly convinced that their little craftsman bungalow in Larchmont Village was surrounded by police. Kim, having little or no experience in such matters, immediately called her lawyer and rushed home to find Bobby hiding in the hall closet with a loaded shotgun and a crack pipe. When she opened the door and stood there in tears, Bobby only stared back indignantly.

“What?”

That was the day that Kim decided to bail, but she couldn’t bring herself to simply leave. After all, she really loved the guy; she was just at the end of her rope. She decided that if she could just get Bobby out of L.A., back to Nashville where his friends were, or maybe just as far as Texas where his folks lived, maybe -- well, at least she wouldn’t have to watch him die.

So Kim went to Jeff Shapiro, her boss at the studio, and asked for a leave of absence, which under the circumstances he was more than willing to grant. Shapiro always considered Bobby a hick and beneath Kim anyway. So Kim then canceled her subscription to the Los Angeles Times, notified the home security service that she and Bobby would be out of town indefinitely, serviced the car, and picked up some cash at the bank on the way home.

Bobby never knew what hit him. It took Kim less than half an hour to pack some T-shirts and the few pairs of jeans that still fit Bobby (he’d lost an alarming amount of weight) and a few changes of clothes for herself. She told him it would do them both good to get away for a while. Bobby went through the motions of putting up a fight, but before he knew it he was in the car headed down Beverly Boulevard toward the 101.

They didn’t get far. Junkies can’t go directly from point A to point B like other people, mainly because another hit always lies somewhere in between. First they stopped at the methadone clinic on Beverly and picked up Bobby’s daily dose and a week’s worth of “take- homes” for the road. Kim had already called the doctor in advance and begged for these, because doses “to go” were a privilege and Bobby hadn’t been able to manage a single “clean” urine specimen in six months on the program.

Between the clinic and the freeway, tucked in between the innocuous little bungalows, were at least fifty corners where street kids and soda pop gangsters sold crack cocaine (called “rock” on the West Coast) to the drive-up trade. Kim and Bobby made it as far as the left turn onto Vermont Avenue, just before the 101 on-ramp, then Bobby threatened to get out of the car if Kim didn’t drive him to a nearby spot. Reluctantly, she agreed, telling herself that this would be the last time.

They headed north on Vermont and took a right into a little rundown corner of East Hollywood. Two more rights followed by a quick left brought Bobby and his reluctant chauffeur to a cul-de-sac, cut off from the rest of the world by the freeway viaduct -- a great graffiti-covered concrete monstrosity that bore the rest of the world noisily over the heads of the folks who had to live in this desperate little neighborhood. It was after dark, so anybody out on the street was either selling rock or “plugs” -- little pieces of soap carved up to look like the real thing. Bobby was no stranger to this neighborhood. He ignored the hucksters and had Kim drag the block slowly until he spotted Luis.

“There he is.”

Bobby rolled down the window and whistled; a skinny kid with Mayan features -- long, sloping forehead, almond-shaped eyes, and angular nose -- came running over to the car. He was all of fifteen years old.

“Hey, vato! Where you been, homes?”

Luis wasn’t Bobby’s only source, merely the nearest to the freeway.

“Around. What’s up?”

“I got the grandes, homes. The monkey nuts. Check it out.” Luis reached down into his sock and produced a large prescription medicine bottle, half full of off-white chunks of cooked-up coke, rattling them around like the pebbles inside a pair of maracas. Bobby noticed that Luis was acting strange, a little more wary than usual. He kept glancing nervously, from side to side, over his shoulder as they talked through the passenger-side window of Kim’s BMW.

“What’s up, kid? Five-O been through?”

“Naw, just some guys. Don’t worry ’bout it, homes. What you need?”

“How much for all of it?”

Luis looked down at the bottle, rattled it some more, as if he was weighing it and doing the math in his head at a pace that belied his sixth-grade education.

“How ’bout two yards?”

“Come on with it.” Bobby handed Luis a wad of twenties, took the bottle, and turned to Kim. “Let’s roll.”

They made a U-turn in the cul-de-sac and headed back toward Vermont and the 101. Kim couldn’t wait to get out of the neighborhood, and Bobby had to tell her to slow down a little. About halfway up the street they met a customized Chevy van rolling toward the cul-de-sac with its lights off and the sliding cargo door locked open. Bobby looked in his side mirror just in time to see little Luis break and run as the van’s headlights suddenly came on, freezing Luis in the middle of the street. Kim jumped as the van came alive with gunfire, the muzzle flash of at least three weapons visible through the open door. The last time Bobby saw Luis, he was lying face down in the street as the van circled like a great, hulking predator over a fresh kill -- then it sped off, passing Kim and Bobby as if they weren’t even there.

Kim drove on, her heart pounding in her throat while Bobby navigated.

“Next right. Now left. OK, one more left and we’re out of Indian Country.”

Kim turned left back onto Vermont. When she stopped at the light before the 101 on-ramp, she looked over at Bobby for the first time during the ordeal. He was cutting up one of the big rocks with his Buck knife, using the leather-covered console for a cutting board. His own car had hundreds of tiny slices in the upholstery by the time the police confiscated it last fall. Kim started to say something but caught herself. Why bother? This is the last time. I’ll just have it re-covered and it’ll be just like new. Jesus fucking Christ, I just witnessed a murder! A fucking murder! OK, it’s over. Just drive.

She turned left across traffic and onto the 101 headed east.

“Get all the way over to the left lane, unless you want to end up in Downey or someplace.”

She complied, but it irritated her to take directions from someone who had lived in L.A. all of two years. How does he know these places? But she knew the answer. Bobby could show locals parts of this town they never knew existed. Dope does that. It creates its own parallel geography, dark, scary places hidden from the real world behind a facade of palm trees and stucco. If you aren’t looking, you won’t see it -- and you probably don’t need to. Most of the folks on the freeway that night were simply following well-worn grooves in the asphalt to and from work or school or wherever. They only knew where to get on the freeway and where to get off. They had no idea where they really were, what kind of places and lives they were passing through or over.

Bobby did. It was an obsession with him. He roamed the freeways at night, exiting here and there just for the hell of it, to have a look around. He could tell you about the different styles of street signs and lights in the old L.A. neighborhoods. Each neighborhood had its own look -- one for Hollywood, another for the Crenshaw District, and so on. He even knew a fair amount of L.A.’s checkered history, the scandals and secrets that had shaped it. Sometimes Kim was actually jealous, as if the sprawling city was a great glittering whore with whom Bobby had been unfaithful. It never pays to know this town too well.

Bobby licked his finger so that one of the pieces of the cut- up rock would adhere to it, then he stuck it in the end of his “straight shooter,” a glass tube, three inches long with a piece of copper scouring pad stuffed in one end. Street addicts prefer this type of pipe for its easy-to-conceal size. Bobby liked it because he could drive and smoke without being too obvious. He turned up the flame on his disposable lighter and the rock crackled and sputtered as it melted into the copper. He inhaled slowly, deeply, and then expelled the dense white smoke out through his nose in a sort of visible and audible sigh. Kim fought back a gag, more of a Pavlovian reaction than anything else, but she just cracked her window and said nothing. In fact, nobody said anything for what seemed like an eternity. In real time only about fifteen minutes had elapsed, just about the time it took to reach the 10, before Kim had to ask, “So what the fuck was that all about?”

Bobby was suddenly forced to deal with the image of Luis, lying in the dead-end street. “I don’t know. I guess he owed them money or somethin’.”

Bobby’s matter-of-factness bothered Kim more than anything else. His tone suggested he’d seen things like this before, which made her more than a little uncomfortable.

Bobby put another piece of rock on his pipe and hit it again. “Drag. He was a good kid. Hey, get off at the next exit. I need some smokes.”

Kim complied, bitching just a little under her breath. This was their second stop and they weren’t even close to being out of L.A. yet. She pulled into a 7-Eleven. Bobby hopped out, stopping halfway to the door and coming around to her side of the car.

“Need anything?”

She shook her head, mildly irritated at the afterthought. Then again, when she had stopped at the grocery store that afternoon to buy all the stuff she needed for the road -- gum, cigarettes, and such -- it never occurred to her to pick up a carton for Bobby. She watched him through the glass wall of the convenience store, standing in line with an armload of junk food. It wasn’t long ago that she would have done anything for Bobby. She packed his bags when he went on the road, shopped for his clothes, even cooked occasionally, something she’d never done for anyone, including herself. Their house was filled with gifts she had bought for his birthday, Christmas, Father’s Day, anniversaries, along with some she bought for no specific occasion. There were maps (one of Bobby’s passions before he lost interest in everything but dope), books, guitars, computers, and recording equipment -- most of which was in the pawnshop now. Bobby bought her stuff too -- jewelry, art, even the BMW that now carried him from town -- but Kim’s favorite gifts were the roses.

Doghouse roses, Bobby called them. You know. Those single roses they sell at the checkout in convenience stores. They come wrapped in cellophane, with the little plastic bulb of water at the base of the stem. Men buy them for their significant others when they stay out too late or forget an anniversary or a birthday. Bobby bought literally hundreds of them over the years, as he limped home from one misadventure or another, and Kim had saved every one. They were all over the house, pressed between the pages of every big book - - Bibles, atlases, dictionaries. She had often asked herself, Why? Each rose represented a disappointment, a broken promise, and a sleepless night. Why commemorate them? The passenger-side door suddenly opened and Bobby plopped down next to her with a sack full of provisions. Sticking out of the top, in between a motorcycle magazine and a Slim Jim, was a yellow rose.

Kim burst into tears. She was still recovering from the incident in the cul-de-sac, and the very idea of another rose was a little more than she could take. To make matters worse, Bobby offered the gift as a child would, trusting the flower to somehow intercede on his behalf and make everything all right.

And maybe it was a child she saw when she finally reached out and accepted the rose, wrapping her arms around Bobby and cradling his head against her breast. Her soft reassuring tone and the words that came out of her mouth seemed almost comically mismatched. “Goddamn, baby. We could have been killed back there.”

Bobby said nothing. He knew she was right, and he already felt the familiar first pangs of guilt. It took a lot of dope just to overcome the ever-increasing weight of the accumulated guilt he dragged with him through every single day. Guilt had become second nature to him. He was guilty of leaving his family. He was guilty of letting down his band and his fans. He was guilty of subjecting Kim to all of his junkie shit.

But all that would have to wait because right now, being held close and cursed at in near whispers, like a kid who had just narrowly escaped being hit by a speeding car, was as good as it got for Bobby. There was a time when this moment would have ended in the nearest motel or the back seat of the car, with the smell of sex and the relief of forgiveness in the air. And for a little while, Bobby would behave more like an adult and Kim less like a mother, and new plans and promises were made. Neither Bobby nor Kim minded that most of these were never kept. It was the illusion of healing that they lived for, the precious few breathless intervals after they made love when they weren’t at cross-purposes.

No, no, no. Not this time. Kim suddenly summoned up all of her will and simply stopped crying, dabbing the mascara from her face and, less successfully, from Bobby’s white T-shirt with tissue from the BMW’s convenient dispenser. Bobby, electing not to push his luck, opened a twenty-ounce Dr. Pepper and lit a Marlboro. His eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond the windshield, visible only from his perspective. His voice cracked a little as he spoke.

“I love you.”

Kim carefully placed the rose on the dashboard, like an offering to whatever god governed dysfunctional relationships.

“I love you, too.”

She backed out of the parking space and headed for the feeder road.

By now it’s after eleven and the traffic is light, by L.A. standards. It’s one of those spooky nights, entirely too quiet for a city of nine million, when mercury vapor lights throw ghostly shadows on the ground fog and the car exhaust, creating an eerie yellow glow. Spectral palm trees, their roots shackled by acres of concrete, seem to stand on tiptoes straining to keep their heads above the noxious layer at street level. The names on the big green highway signs appear suddenly and slightly out of focus -- Covina, Pomona, Ontario, and on and on, and looking up through the sunroof, there still aren’t any stars. Only a sort of fallout created by man-made light impacting the opaque canopy above and shattering, diffusing into colors not found in nature before falling back to earth in defeat. L.A. is one big motherfucker. Most would-be escapees become overwhelmed with the immensity of the task and turn around, but not Kim. She just kept driving on -- past Riverside, past Redlands -- until she could feel the momentum building, as if they were finally escaping the city’s considerable gravity.

Kim loved to drive and she loved her car. Bobby had given it to her for her birthday. After receiving a large advance from his publisher, he just walked into the BMW dealer and wrote a personal check for $58,000. Then he parked it in Kim’s space at the studio with a big red bow taped to the grill. The car, bred for the autobahn, had seldom been turned loose on the highway, and Kim could feel the powerful engine writhe under the hood when she stepped on the accelerator. She asked Bobby to light her a cigarette and he did, firing up another for himself at the same time. For a while she actually forgot why they were on the road that night. Remembering how much she loved the car reminded her of how much she had once loved Bobby, which made her more than a little uncomfortable -- but not for long. About the time they blew by San Bernardino, Bobby put another rock up on the pipe, filling the car with thick, white smoke, which reminded Kim how much she hated cocaine.

She had never had a problem coexisting with Bobby’s heroin habit. Smack, by itself, made Bobby relaxed and talkative, not to mention affectionate. As long as he had heroin, he stayed home, going out only long enough to cop. Somehow unable to hold her husband responsible for his actions, Kim blamed cocaine, and she loathed it with every cell in her body. She wasn’t alone. Even the L.A.P.D. agreed with her. Heroin didn’t seem to breed the level of violence that permeated the more competitive coke trade. Coke addicts were edgier, more dangerous, and the young criminals that trafficked in it were colder and harder. Forget about little Luis. He was just a runner. I’m talking about the cats in the van. Crack, cocaine’s cheap, smokable form, was big business and it was taking the streets by storm. People were willing to kill or be killed for the right street corner. The cops were so busy dealing with the new menace that the older, more levelheaded heroin dealers were enjoying a period of relative peace. Driving through the heroin spots was almost like a visit to the corner liquor store. Kim would even ride along sometimes, making small talk with the spot boss while Bobby transacted business at the other window.

Then one morning Bobby was at a friend’s house getting high while Kim was at work. Somebody suggested running to a nearby spot for a rock. Bobby had always turned up his nose at crack, but for some reason he decided one hit couldn’t hurt.

Bobby began staying awake for days at a time, ripping and running from the bank to the spot, back to the house, to the pawnshop, and back to the spot again. Kim didn’t know the details, but she knew something was wrong. She began to worry enough to consult a friend who was in recovery. He suggested an intervention, but Kim couldn’t go through with it. She felt like that would be a betrayal. Eventually she simply began to shut down. To slowly but surely stop loving Bobby, in self-defense.

Interstate 10 stretched out in a great black ribbon trimmed in iridescent white, pulling the BMW along through the night as it threaded through the hills toward the high desert ahead. The air began to gradually clear as they climbed, and Kim rolled down the windows and opened the sunroof, purging the crack smoke from the car. Just keep driving. The lights of Palm Springs appeared off to their right, twinkling through the heat waves. The sign said “banning/morongo indian res. -- next exit.” Now we’re getting somewhere. Then Bobby shattered the groove.

“Baby, let’s run out to Joshua Tree.”

“Goddamn it, Bobby, no. No fucking way. We’re almost out of here, please!”

But she knew that that’s exactly where they would go.

Joshua Tree National Park lies 140 miles east of downtown L.A., 794,000 acres straddling the high Mojave and the lower Colorado deserts. Named for the large multibranched cacti that dominate its landscape, the park is bordered by Interstate 10 on the southwest, just as the “southern route” back east makes its last dash for the Arizona border. The Mojave half of the park, ranging from about 3,000 to 5,200 feet at the top of Quail Mountain, is one of the most beautiful places on earth by anyone’s standards. But to Bobby Charles, it was sacred.

Not that Bobby was particularly outdoorsy or anything. If anything he was entirely too comfortable with big cities. When he was a kid back in Texas, he hunted and fished with his dad. But as soon as he picked up the guitar, everything else took a back seat. Music was such a powerful force in his life that even heroin couldn’t compete, at first. Music kept him constantly moving, first to Houston, and then back and forth across the country, finally landing him in Nashville three months short of his twentieth birthday. Bobby’s first addiction was motion itself. He fell in love and got married, but he never settled down, growing more restless with every day he spent within the confines of Nashville’s city limits. “High Lonesome” he called the affliction, after the heart-rending tenor of Bill Monroe. Music allowed him to escape to the road, returning to Nashville only long enough to make records and father children. The big Eagle bus carried him to places like New York, New Orleans, Chicago, or back to Texas to show off for the home folks. Bobby would play poker and watch movies with the band until they drifted, one by one, off to their bunks. Then he’d ride in the jumpseat, up front with the driver, watching the Eagle suck asphalt up under its wheels, spewing it out the back in the form of distance. When the sun came up he’d retreat to the stateroom in the back and sleep like a baby, lulled by the low, throaty hum of the big diesel only inches below his bunk. A growing following overseas allowed him to see London, Amsterdam, Dublin, even Sydney, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Bobby got to know some of those cities intimately, but more and more he was most comfortable in the more ambiguous space between destinations -- the road itself.

When Bobby moved to L.A. to live with Kim, he was in love with a beautiful, fascinating woman as well as infatuated with his new surroundings and life was good. He spent his days getting high and exploring, getting the lay of the land. One day he took a ride out to the desert on his motorcycle while Kim was at work. He was on a pilgrimage of sorts, in search of the Joshua Tree Inn. The tiny motel, on Highway 62 along the park’s northern border, was a holy place in country-rock circles because Gram Parsons, credited by many with founding the movement, died there. The talented singer and songwriter had used the place as a desert hideout for several years, even extracting a promise from his road manager to cremate his body somewhere in the Joshua Tree country when his time came. When Gram expired in Room 8 from a little too much of everything one cool clear desert night in 1973, his compatriot kept his promise, stealing Gram’s body from a loading dock at the L.A. airport and spiriting it away to the desert in a borrowed hearse. He then burned the body, for which he was later prosecuted and fined. Musicians in Bobby’s circles prized this story, telling and retelling it whenever they met on the road, weaving it in with the songs Gram left behind and eventually creating a legend.

On his first trip to the desert, Bobby had hoped to spend the night in the inn, but by 1990 it had been converted into a home for autistic children, so he bought camping gear for his more and more frequent trips to the desert. At first Kim would go with him, and it became their weekend getaway. They’d ride in the park on Bobby’s bike, Kim in back hanging on for dear life, her arms wrapped tightly around Bobby’s waist. Bobby ran the bike hard because the tighter she clung to him the better he liked it. When the moon was full, the desert seemed to emit a light of its own from every rock and plant, the only dark spots being the man-made surfaces, asphalt and pitch. They’d ride well past dark. When they finally made camp, they would lie on their backs on air mattresses for hours and marvel at how close the stars seemed. Bobby would point out the planets and constellations and nebulae visible through his binoculars. Sometimes they made love under all those stars, never even bothering to pitch the fancy tent strapped to the back of the bike. They’d wake before sunrise when the desert received its meager ration of moisture in the form of a heavy dew, leaving their hair damp and driving them, shivering, deeper into Bobby’s sleeping bag. Then the sun would come up, bounding over the mountains, and they’d wake suddenly to find the sleeping bag soaked nearly through from the inside out with their own sweat.

After a while Kim stopped making the trips out to the desert. She got busier at the studio making movies, and Bobby got busier on the streets, slowly killing himself. Once again he set himself in motion, albeit in circles, breaking out of his rapidly deteriorating orbit only when High Lonesome caught up with him and drove him east, into the desert. The Joshua Tree trips became his only respite from the junkie grind; only now, they were desperate, lonely sojourns. Eventually he was incapable of riding a motorcycle, or camping for that matter, so he would drive aimlessly in and around the park, sleeping in his car by the roadside if at all. Sometimes he would run out of coke and drive back to L.A. to cop. After purchasing what he needed, he’d turn around and head right back to the desert, sometimes passing within a mile of his house on the way to the freeway. On three occasions he fell asleep at the wheel, totaling three different vehicles -- two of his own and one rental -- but by some miracle he walked away from each accident with only cuts and bruises.

Somebody was trying to tell Bobby Charles something, but he wasn’t listening. Friends and family back in Texas and Tennessee had all but given up on ever reaching him again. They heard the rumors that filtered back from the coast, and the news was never good. Bobby’s L.A. friends saw him almost as infrequently and usually only as he passed them going the other direction on a busy Hollywood street, oblivious to everyone and everything around him.

Only Kim could occasionally penetrate the cone of silence that surrounded him, and even her voice grew fainter everyday. In time Kim simply stopped trying, but Bobby didn’t notice. By then he heard only the din of his own spirit dying, slowly and painfully. As usual, Bobby looked to the desert for answers. Somehow he felt that something ...

Copyright 2001 by Steve Earle.