Chapter Four
My rig was a '63 Ford Econoline van, the type with the engine mounted between the driver's and passenger's seats and the driver's face inches from the windshield as he cranked on the horizontal bus-driver-style wheel. Shaped like a brick, painted white with a faded LUCKY GOLDEN MEAT CO logo in Wild West-style gold leaf, drawings of chickens and pig, displayed in various stiff unnatural Chinese angles, and a bunch of Chinese characters on the sides. It accelerated wearily and made scary clanking noises while cornering, but police didn't notice the thing and I could haul large amounts of gear and assistants to my shows. Best of all, I got it from a Phishhead for a quarter-ounce of midgrade barrio Nibley, and all it needed was a new distributor cap.
The van wasn't just about delivering pizzas and CENSORED various female specimens in every proffered CENSORED. Sometimes I hauled along the Vacuum-Operated Richard Nixon Robot, a sort of parody of a Disney Animatronic robot I had rigged up using hundreds of vacuum solenoids yanked from various junked cars at the Ecology Auto Wrecking lot in Santa Fe Springs (I'd learned something from the construction of the World War One Santa project). The whole setup was powered by vacuum (or "Suck Power" as my crude-tongued bandmate Swede would have it) from the Econoline's engine via a network of hissing rubber hoses snaking out of the Vacuum Nixon's left foot and into the engine compartment. The setup could be controlled by a system of switches on the dashboard, or from a random-impulse generator triggered up from an electromechanical pinball-machine cam device, augmented by a 4K mechanical-relay memory device out of an F-102, purchased cheap from the Air Force salvage yard out in Chino. On the random setting, the Nixon (which featured a very realistic rubber mask for a face and a period-authentic late-60s dark blue suit) would often seem almost human in its (or his) movements; when set in the van's passenger seat, he would sometimes whip his head around and wave spastically at occupants of other cars, who would then cringe in horror as he punched himself in the side of the head and then bit his own hand like an epileptic schnauzer. As with all my work during my Artist Period, I had one eye on somehow making a buck and/or promoting some CENSORED with the thing (any other goals seemed somehow phony for an artist of my caliber), so I always looked for an open door-o-opportunity into which to jam the Vacuum Nixon's foot.
One morning I hit the road with Swede to hit the Pick-N-Pull junkyard in Wilmington and score some more starter solenoids for the Randy Kraft & the Dead Marines "drum kit" and I didn't feel like disconnecting the tangle of vacuum hoses from the Nixon, which we left in the passenger seat while Swede perched on a barstool in the back, among the car parts and assorted crap. Swede was the bass player/roadie of the band. About halfway there, the van's fuel pump gave out and I had to pull over and jimmy up a field-expedient fuel system to get us to the yard. Swede wasn't all too happy about having to manually pour gas into the carburetor, but I figured we could just grab another fuel pump out of any 6-cylinder Ford on the Pick-N-Pull yard and a mere 15 minutes sniffing gas from an open jug was a small price to pay for the overall efficiency of the scheme.
"Holy Jesus! Watch where you're spilling that gas!" Swede squawked as a pothole sloshed a healthy pint of Regular Unleaded out of the smile-faced red plastic Kool-Ade jug onto the Econoline's exposed engine (the between-the-seats location made this type of van popular with surfers, who could sit on "the Warm Seat" on the drive home from the beach), sending up a blinding cloud of gasoline vapor from the hot exhaust manifold. The Vacuum Nixon flashed a palsied peace sign, its jaws clattering rapidly. The speaker in the Nixon's head was blaring out a lo-fi speech, complete with dramatic pauses and applause, about elections in Saigon. Swede tried to steady himself on the wobbly barstool that served as the van's remaining passenger seat, trying to pour a steady trickle of gas from the Kool-Ade jug into the tiny cooking funnel duct- taped to the carburetor's fuel intake. The van jolted and swerved its way down the 57, barely under control, with particularly violent bumps accented by showers of sparks from the under-dash wiring or from the muffler dragging on the highway. The van had already stalled several times due to fuel starvation, gasping and jerking, angry drivers fist-shaking, screaming obscenities as they roared by on both sides, my van having forced them to piss away several precious seconds in their race to The Goal. A dozen gas-filled wine bottles and peanut-butter jars jittered around in the back of the van among the bald tires, fishing tackle, odd- shaped chunks of rotting plywood, stacks of wet newspapers, soup bones, and other scavenged loot that I had accumulated in my travels. I enjoyed the experience, crowing with delight as the cars screamed past us and into the hydrocarbon-scented future. "Why don't you get a damn gas tank for this thing?" Swede demanded as the sludge-coated 170 motor backfired into his face, making him spill a dollop of gas through one of the holes in the floorboards. "And move Nixon somewhere else... can't he stay at home? Does he get lonely? Swede was kind of a whiner, and a silky-boy as well, with his fashionably-ripped Iskendarian Cams T-shirt and oh-so-vintage Converse high-tops.
"I keep telling you, dude, the gas tank is fine," I admonished Swede as the gas dripped from his long, 1971-junky-style hair and into his eyes, "It's the fuel pump that's busted. And we'll have a new one as soon as we get to Wilmington. They're five bucks at Pick-N-Pull, bro!" I found myself slipping into Californian dude/bro-speak when I spent any amount of time with Swede. He grumbled incomprehensibly, but I figured the experience would be valuable for him. Swede groaned, flicking ashes from his joint into a puddle of gas by his feet. The Nixon trembled all over, then suddenly lashed out, knocking the jugful of gas into Ned's crotch. "...take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire." The Nixon lurched forward, slamming its rubber face into the windshield, then back, again and again, as the van began sneezing into a stall. I scrambled to open a jar of gas to refill the jug.
After our gasoline-soaked jaunt unmarred by any explosions or serious burns, we arrived intact at the junkyard. Swede headed over to the Import section to grab a dozen or so Japanese solenoids (bitter experience having taught us that solenoids pulled from Detroit or European products tended to crap out halfway through a typical Randy Kraft & the Dead Marines gig) while I plucked a ratchet, screwdriver and a 7/16" socket out of the toolbox and proceeded to extract the fuel pump from a '77 Mercury Monarch.
Heading out to the parking lot with our greasy load of automotive swag, I dropped the parts off at the van while Swede stopped by the Taco Zapateca roach-coach near the yard's entrance (junkyard roach-coaches always have the best food) and picked up some tacos de lengua with sides of pickled radishes and a couple bottles of Jarritos tamarindo soda. I alternated bites of beef-tongue tacos with turns of the wrench on the fuel pump, hot sauce mingling with gasoline and oil sludge. Once finished, we smoked a job-well-done joint of Canadian Government-issue Chemotherapy-Grade marijuana and headed back down to Orange County.
"Hey, can we stop at my girlfriend's house?" asked Swede. "She just distilled a fresh batch of banana gin and I want to try some."
Banana gin? What the hell? Had the world gone insane? "Did you just say she made some banana gin? Like, am I hearing you correctly, dude?" As I've already mentioned, I lapse into a thick Valley Girl/Jeff Spicoli California-dude accent when among another native son for any length of time.
"You're hearin' me right, brah! She got a recipe from somewhere and made gallons of the stuff. Only you have to let it ferment for a few weeks before you distill it. I've been, you know, waiting for it to be ready." I had to experience bathtub banana gin for myself, so I set a course for Cerritos.
Once we got to Jessica's place, an apartment in a decaying complex full of screaming aficionados of domestic violence, I found that technically she had made banana brandy, not banana gin. She was a perky one: "You guys have to have a drink of my gin right away!" She'd read someplace that the cheapestfruit-based alcoholic beverage you could possibly make could be made from bananas. She bought about fifty pounds of low-grade bananas, mashed them up and mixed them with hot sugar water. Adding wine yeast, she fermented the mix to get the max non-distilled alcohol level. Then she rigged up a stovetop distiller, which was a teakettle hooked up to a bunch of copper coils and started running the mash through it. Sure enough, after a few passes through the distiller, she had a credibly alcoholic beverage, tasting like sour, rotting bananas with a shudder-inducing bitter aftertaste. Blobs of congealed yeast clung to the sides of a glass filled with the vile drink. No wonder banana-based booze had never caught on. I downed a couple of swigs and burped up a few bubbles of stuff that smelled like a tire fire in a banana plantation. She was very, very proud of her project, even prouder than she'd been after getting promoted to assistant manager at the flower shop around the corner.
Swede felt it politically wise to show great enthusiasm for the drink. "Hey, this is some smooth stuff, sweetheart! Gimme a refill!" I politely refused her offer to top off my glass, claiming that such fine liqueur should be savored, not guzzled in a crude, oafish manner.
After a few minutes sitting at the kitchen table while Swede knocked back several glasses of Jessica's Banana Gin and we discussed matters of great import, I started to feel very relaxed. Not just mellow, but downright melted, like my hands and feet weighed about five times normal and I just wanted to hold really, really still. "Say, Jess, what else did you put in this stuff? I mean, besides the bananas?"
She giggled. "I put my, like, secret ingredient in it. From the flower shop. It makes it hella good!" She opened the fridge and pulled out a bag full of what appeared to be little balls on sticks. On closer inspection, I realized they were dried poppy pods. Opium poppy pods. Jessica's Banana Gin had a kick all right- enough opium to sedate an entire Chinese province. "At work, we sell them for flower arrangements and I found out they can get you high!"
No shit. I turned to Swede. "Uh, dude? You might want to, like, moderate your consumption of this stuff..." Too late. He blew a couple of spit bubbles and then toppled forward, very slowly, ending with his face against the table and his eyes rolled up in his head. He drooled and mumbled. I checked for a heartbeat, just to make sure we didn't have an OD on our hands, and he seemed fine, just unconscious.
"What a lightweight, eh?" I said, toasting his snoozing form with my glass. I brought out my stash. "Care for a dube?" She did. I patted my pockets for rolling papers but I had none. "Got any papes, Jessica?" She did not. I figured we could just pack a nice pipe bowl, but her mind was locked on a genuine, honest-to-god joint, preferably a mid-70s monstrosity out of a Cheech and Chong movie. It made sense to me. "Let's take the van down to the head shop- we can get a sixer of Sierra Nevada on the way back." I had a powerful craving for some hippie beer. "Not that your banana gin isn't the bee's nuts," I hastened to add, "but beer goes with a dube like guns go with Texas."
But that plan was blasted to hell the moment she saw the Vacuum Nixon in the passenger seat. "Holy shit!" she squealed, her flip-flop sandals skidding to a bewildered halt on the sidewalk. "What the hell is that?" Jessica wasn't the brightest bulb in the old marquee, but she caught the humor behind a mechanical, vacuum-driven replica of the former president. I started up the engine to provide a good vacuum and ran the Nixon through its paces. I showed her the manual mode, which permitted me to control the Nixon's movements from a switch panel on the dash, and the automatic mode, which caused random flailings. She was delighted. Then she had an idea- I could almost see the comic-strip light-bulb over her head. "Wait here- I need to go get something!" She turned and ran back to the apartment. Her bare legs flashed in the sun and her long bleached-brown hair shimmered behind her in an extremely 60s flower-child manner, reminding me of those stick-on non-slip daisies folks used to stick in shower stalls back in The Day. Sparkly and simple and without cynicism, but steeped in a true California stoner sensibility.
She returned in a few minutes with a brown paper bag. Climbing into the van, she whipped out a glossy red CENSORED from the bag. It looked translucent, like a Gummi Bear, and seemed CENSORED CENSORED EXTREMELY CENSORED AND CENSORED YET EVEN MORE. “Nixon needs a CENSORED!” she shouted gleefully, waving it. The CENSORED flopped around. It had CENSORED and CENSORED. The deluxe model. “It’s mean to not give him one!”
Well, sure. I hadn’t thought of it, but what right did I have to deprive Tricky Dick of that crucial implement? I could probably rig up a vacuum device to make it go from CENSORED to CENSORED, maybe even CENSORED some sort of CENSORED.
Jessica was at the Nixon, fiddling with his pants. She got the zipper down and worked the CENSORED into the mechanism where his legs hinged off the backbone. I’d welded a metal brace in just the right spot, and the CENSORED wedged into place perfectly. There was Nixon, sitting in my van’s passenger seat with a CENSORED CENSORED MIGHTY CENSORED STUFF HERE from his dark-blue wool pants. A disturbing sight, to be sure, but a thought-provoking one as well. Maybe I could do a show in which the Nixon CENSORED some symbol of innocence, like Frosty the Snowman or the Pillsbury Doughboy. Hmmmm… that idea had potential…
She looked at me funny. “Hey, do you think we could take the van someplace more, um, private?” She had one hand wrapped around the Nixon’s new CENSORED and was giving it a little CENSORED. Oh, man. “I was thinking, you know…”
I knew. My visions of the newly-minted manhood of the Vaccum Nixon getting some action could be realized right before my eyes. An extremely complicated morality logic puzzle whirled around out in my head, concepts of honor and betrayal spinning like souped-up slot-machine reels. Eventually they came up cherries, straight across. Sure, she was my bandmate’s girlfriend, but if I didn’t actually touch her and we happened to try a little Nixon-Jessica experiment, what harm could that do? Sure, it was hardly even a gray area! I jabbed the key into the ignition and lit the fire in the Econoline’s engine.
We needed privacy, but the van's engine had to be running in order to produce the vacuum source necessary to run the Nixon. I thought of pulling it into my garage and running a hose from the tailpipe outside, but it would get too hot and loud with the engine roaring indoors- not much vacuum was produced at idle; I'd have to keep the engine racing at about 2,500 RPM to keep the ideal 20+ inches of steady vacuum necessary to operate the tangle of vacuum motors, solenoids and switches working. Below about five inches mercury the Nixon slowed to a creaky government-employee pace.
I remembered a huge, empty parking lot at a shopping-mall construction site in Orange. Plenty of pallets and parked tanker trucks to shield us from curious eyes, and big enough that nobody would hear the racing van engine. I merged the van onto the 57 East and gunned the thing up to its maximum cruising speed of 71 MPH. Jessica was still fascinated by the Nixon and his freshly installed gear, adjusting it a bit and secretly CENSORED OH YOU BETTER BELIEVE THIS IS CENSORED when she thought I wasn't looking. I looked at the vacuum gauge. 23 inches. Flipping the master switch on the Nixon's control panel, I turned some knobs to set him on the RANDOM mode.
It always took a few seconds for the vacuum to build up in the lines and the switches to start distributing the vacuum signal. The Nixon hissed and twitched a bit; one eye snapped open and the eyeball jittered left-to-right. Jessica jerked back in shock and stared. I hit the Soundtrack switch and started the recording of the 1972 Inaugural Address, playing from the speaker in the Nixon’s head: “…rrrrrRRR… and because our strengths are so great, we can approach our weaknesses with vigor…” I hadn’t really worked out the jaw motions so well- his face was just a $19.95 rubber mask- so his mouth just clacked open and closed randomly as he spoke. After a moment, his jaw stuck in the open position while the speech continued. I felt around under the driver’s seat and found the tire iron. Reaching over with the tire iron, I whacked the Nixon on the back of the head to free up his jaw. Jessica went “Eep!” at that, but it fixed the problem. Now the vacuum lines had charged up completely and he was fully operational. While the ’72 Inaugural (or was it the ’68? I could never keep them straight in my mind) droned on, the Nixon went through his usual quivers and strange hand motions that he’d do when I had him on the RANDOM setting. Of course, with the gleaming Gummi-red CENSORED CENSORED pruriently from his CENSORED, the strange motions took on a far more disturbing aspect than ever before. I wondered why I’d never thought to eqip him with CENSORED… it seemed to add so much to the Nixon’s effectiveness as a statement on the American Way Of Life.
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Murilee Arraiac