{"id":22541,"date":"2011-10-25T16:30:28","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T20:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=22541"},"modified":"2013-01-09T11:30:05","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T16:30:05","slug":"part-ii-the-offer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/10\/25\/part-ii-the-offer\/","title":{"rendered":"Part 2: The Offer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a><\/em>

Steve Lowe and the Mugwump. Photograph by Michael Childers.<\/p><\/div>\n

A story in three parts. Previously: Part 1, The Amanuensis<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I met Steve the first time I stayed at the Lautner Motel, in August of 2000. I was in California to do research for a book about trailer parks, and there was an anarchist trailer park, a place called Slab City, in an abandoned military base about sixty miles south of Desert Hot Springs. I\u2019d brought my girlfriend and wanted to stay somewhere nice to make up for the 120-degree temperatures, so we wound up at the Lautner. It was late when we finally arrived, but almost as soon as we\u2019d gone inside and put our luggage down, Steve knocked on the door. <\/p>\n

He had come to give us the educational spiel he gave to all the guests\u2014about the architect, the Motel, and their places in the history of Modernist architecture. Steve told us that Lautner had built it as a retreat for screenwriters who\u2019d come out to the desert from Hollywood. Each room was a self-contained apartment, based on a shelter Lautner built at Taleisin while studying with Frank Lloyd Wright. All the furniture in the room was vintage, all from Steve\u2019s own collections and from the correct period, even the phones, which had been made in 1947, just like the motel. Steve had a shaved head and a long, not-quite-beak nose. He wore a sort of modified Van Dyke beard, and what was left of his hair was salt and pepper. The skin was taut over his cheekbones, and his warm brown eyes looked at you from inside deep sockets; still, he didn\u2019t look old or tired. He was around my height, six feet, but bigger, maybe 185 pounds. Solid, and powerful. He gave the impression of a tremendous amount of barely controlled energy (later I would learn that he chain-smoked joints rolled from cheap Mexican weed, the kind that still had seeds, in order to get that energy down to a manageable level).\u00a0At the same time, he had a sort of monastic quality, as though he were a member of a desert sect devoted to the ecstatic writings of Saint Teresa of \u00c1vila. Or like Rasputin, if Rasputin were gay and loved William Burroughs and the Beats instead of power and homicide. Often, it\u2019s hard to be in a room with people who have that kind of intensity, but Steve was funny and self-deprecating, which made it seem less overwhelming.<\/p>\n

It quickly became clear that although we had never spoken, Steve and I had been connected for years. This sounds like New Age nonsense, but it\u2019s true. We\u2019d been neighbors in Santa Fe: he owned a compound four doors down and across the street from the old adobe I lived in. Occasionally, I\u2019d go over to buy the extremely potent strain of marijuana grown by one of his tenants. I wrote about art for a local magazine; Steve typeset the magazine and read all of my stories. I went to openings at his gallery, including one for a Burroughs and Haring show he did in 1989. I\u2019d hoped to meet Burroughs, but he was \u201cfeeling poorly,\u201d so neither of them was there. Steve and I knew the same people, went to the same parties, and may have been in the same room together. We had simply somehow failed to meet.<\/p>\n

The next day, we met for dinner. Steve told us stories about living in New York in the seventies, when real estate was so cheap that Gordon Matta-Clark could cut holes in buildings and no one cared, except the people who were interested in his art. Steve lived in SoHo, in a loft so vast that, on Christmas Day, he and his wife (both of them were bi, until they decided they were gay, at which point the relationship fell apart) would fill it with trees discarded by the offices in Midtown, and then roller skate among them. Even the bad things sounded romantic: if they were short on rent, as happened regularly, Steve turned part of the loft into a movie theater, and charged admission for showings of Robert Frank\u2019s Beat film\u00a0Pull My Daisy<\/em>. The price of a square foot in the New York I lived in was already fast approaching $1000. The idea of living without those economic strictures was a fantasy of impossible freedom to me.<\/p>\n

Then there were the Burroughs stories. Most of them were funny and some of them were touching, but all of them were about William\u2019s seemingly boundless capacity for self-involvement, and Steve\u2019s equally boundless capacity for self-sacrifice in fulfilling the great man\u2019s needs, no matter how insane. There was <\/strong>William giving dinner guests ten minutes to eat before announcing that it was \u201ctime to feed the Outside Animal,\u201d and clearing the food away to dump it in a heap in the garden. William calling him at 3:00 AM<\/small> to collect the raccoons trapped in the basement, and then making him drive thirty miles outside of town to release them. (The connection between this ritual and the steady flow of raccoons to the basement was lost on William, who insisted that the \u201cOA\u201d was a mythical beast, appearing from nowhere, taking his offering, and disappearing again.) I learned that Steve, on the night of the opening I\u2019d gone to hoping to see the junkie priest, had taken William to his place north of town. There was a snowstorm that night, he said, and by the time he got home, there were two feet of snow on the ground. Steve got the fire going, though, and things were fine until William remembered that he\u2019d buried opium suppositories somewhere in the yard a couple of years before. He insisted he needed them. While I was drinking free wine at his gallery, and feeling let down, Steve was out in the snowstorm, digging holes. It took him until three in the morning, he said, but he finally found the opium. William slid a pellet in, and promptly fell asleep.<\/p>\n

I should, perhaps, have noticed that Steve\u2019s stories about Burroughs were more than a little ominous, but I did not.\u00a0I\u2019d had a\u00a0photo of the man hanging above my desk for almost ten years. The picture was taken around the time he appeared in\u00a0Drugstore Cowboy<\/em>, so he was in his seventies, at least. He wore a suit and tie and a fedora, the same outfit he\u2019d been wearing since the Beat era and probably before. The photo had been with me through seven moves in four states. Which was strange, in a way, because I never liked Burroughs\u2019s writing much. I thought\u00a0Naked Lunch<\/em> was as great and important as people said, and maybe\u00a0Junky<\/em>; much of the rest was\u2014like the casually misogynistic, boys-only culture that often surrounded him\u2014something I had to overlook in order to be a fan. Being like Burroughs wasn\u2019t something I aspired to, but he was still a fetish object: the gentleman outlaw. He didn\u2019t get fat and sad or turn into a hippie, like the other Beats. He didn\u2019t die young, like the punks. Instead, he never quit using and never really changed or compromised, and so became more compelling and believable the longer he was around. By the time my photo was taken, his voice, a Midwestern drawl that got more cracked as he got older, made \u201clanguage is a virus from outer space\u201d sound not just true, but profound.<\/p>\n

Steve and I decided that the photo was one of his coincidences, a benediction on our hitherto unknown connection. Steve was a big believer in signs. I liked to think I wasn\u2019t. But when Steve called in 2004, to ask if I wanted to come work at the Beat Hotel, I listened.<\/p>\n

SINCE MY FIRST TRIP TO Desert Hot Springs, things had not gone well. I hadn\u2019t made much progress on my book. I spent a great deal of time writing, rewriting and, more often, not writing, a chapter about why UFOs land in trailer parks (answer: the Cold War). I was also broke, my freelance jobs mostly dried up and my tiny advance long since spent. I had panic attacks while making the transfer from the J\/M\/Z to the F train, something I did at least twice a day.\u00a0And I had seen signs of my own.\u00a0On lower Broadway, I picked up a pay phone and felt an awful scrabbling, crawling sensation: a giant cockroach had been curled up in the empty earpiece, and skittered into my ear, across my face, into my hair. A week later, a rat, diseased, fur gone in patches, charged me in the snack food aisle at the local Gristedes. The city itself was rejecting me.<\/p>\n

One of the few weeks I had been happy during that time was when Steve and I drove across the country\u00a0together.\u00a0The Beat, at that point, was sufficiently set up to look good in photo shoots\u2014there\u2019d been a few magazine articles\u2014but nowhere near ready for guests. We had brought some of the things necessary to get the place ready:\u00a0a truckload of vintage furniture and art, plus the mugwump. This last\u00a0was a prop from David Cronenberg\u2019s much unloved adaptation of\u00a0Naked Lunch<\/em>. It had grey-green skin and giant, sad eyes set in an immense, wrinkled head\u2014a combination of lizard, human, and space alien\u2014and it was wearing a leather collar with a chain that ran to the manacles on its wrists and ankles. There was some debate about where the mugwump should ride. It was latex and fairly delicate, so we were reluctant to leave it in the back, in the heat. We decided it should ride up front, between the two of us. But it was also over six feet tall, mostly humanoid, and realistic enough that we didn\u2019t really want to have it next to us, especially as Steve was chain-smoking joints for pretty much the entire ride. Eventually we settled the issue by moving it back and forth, depending on whether Steve was more anxious about the heat or getting stopped by the police. The whole trip was stressful, of course, especially when I was bitten by a brown recluse spider while sleeping through an orgy at William\u2019s old compound in Lawrenceville. But it seemed like an adventure, a good story to tell later on, and it was a huge relief to be out of the city, back in the desert, working on a project that was not my own, a project where every day was not another opportunity to fail.<\/p>\n

So when Steve called, he\u00a0wasn\u2019t just offering me a job at the Beat Hotel; he was offering a new life. There wasn\u2019t much money, he said, only a weekly stipend of $200, plus a cut of the still theoretical profits. But there was a caretaker\u2019s house, with its own swimming pool, and lemon, orange, and grapefruit trees in the backyard. I\u2019d have a company car, a gold 1979 Camaro with the firebird decal on the hood, to drive around the desert in Southern California, home to one of the world\u2019s great collections of trailer parks. I would work at the hotel for about four hours a day, he said, and the rest of the time would be my own, to stare at the San Jacinto Mountains and write. Steve promised to help with that, too. \u201cIf I can break William\u2019s block, I can break yours,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I told him I would take the job\u2014for four months, at first, long enough to get the Hotel running.<\/p>\n

Mark Van de Walle\u2019s first book, a cultural history of trailer parks in America, will be published by Ig Press in September.<\/em><\/p>\n

Next: Part 3, The Departure.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A story in three parts. Previously: Part 1, The Amanuensis. I met Steve the first time I stayed at the Lautner Motel, in August of 2000. I was in California to do research for a book about trailer parks, and there was an anarchist trailer park, a place called Slab City, in an abandoned military […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":255,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[4527,4550,4532,4553,3491,4555,995,4551,4531,4537,4554,4557,395,4549,4556,914,4558,4559,4552,3741],"class_list":["post-22541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-beat-hotel","tag-david-cronenberg","tag-desert-hot-springs","tag-drugstore-cowboy","tag-frank-lloyd-wright","tag-gordon-matta-clark","tag-hollywood","tag-junky","tag-keith-haring","tag-naked-lunch","tag-pull-my-daisy","tag-rasputin","tag-robert-frank","tag-san-jacinto","tag-santa-fe","tag-soho","tag-st-teresa-of-avila","tag-taleisin","tag-trailer-park","tag-william-burroughs"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPart 2: The Offer by Mark Van de Walle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 25, 2011 \u2013 A story in three parts. 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