BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s time for a breakdown.

The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.

Update: Listen to GSpot Interview: Nick Belardes - Magic Realism, Bugs and 9/11

B O N I F A C I O The weather was a little windy and the sun was beating its fists onto the desert floor. It was the day before dia de los rascacielos, the name I later heard a man on a bus give for the attacks on the World Trade Center.

I had decided to leave Las Vegas. My girlfriend of six years and I had drifted so far apart that I needed to run away. So I gathered a hundred dollars and a bag of clothes. Everything else I decided I would walk away from because I just wanted to be in California.

The desert city had been pounding me since 1998, when I worked there as a storyboard artist for downtown’s Fremont Street Experience. Around 1999, when my father was still alive, he made the insane statement that I shouldn’t see my children so much. He said it put miles on my car when I drove to see them in Bakersfield.

He was depressed. The circus elephant had left him. A trucker and some stinky woman with orange hair were now living with him. She looked sickened, as if Mimi from the Drew Carey Show had just stepped from the Apocalypse. Her make-up, her demeanor, her skin all seemed run together in some state of desert metamorphosis. She smelled burnt. Even her voice was cracked, charred.

That was the last my father and I spoke. I stopped talking to him and didn’t answer his calls. Parent-child relationships tend to get broken in my family. Fathers stop talking to sons. Sons stop talking to brothers. My father and his father stopped talking and likely his father and so on. It’s far easier to commune with desert spirits than those of shared flesh and blood.

The vault of lights on Fremont Street stood more than four blocks long. There were two million lights in a Milky Way canopy of animated madness. On the screen were Motown dancing cartoons, submarine battles, plane crashes, fiery planet heartbeats and maraca-shaking cacti. Creatively, it was my job to think up these ideas. I sat at my desk and wondered how tourists would like to be entertained while stumbling half-drunk, wasted or strung out on coke after stepping out of the Glitter Gulch or any number of the dozen casinos in the old block. Next door to our office was some guy running a phony business. He advertised that he wanted models. Only, he would try and have sex with girls after he got them into his office. Sometimes mail from sexy models came into our section of the building by accident. I felt bad for those girls. I could only imagine the trouble they would get into by meeting our charlatan neighbor selling the snake oil musk of Las Vegas sin.

Before we moved next door to the charlatan, our offices were in a little room in the Big Red Garage on 4th Street, adjacent to where forklifts filled up their propane tank engines. I think I was high on fumes while drawing down-and-out piano-playing cats, postal trucks running over boogying envelopes and weird futuristic octopi with techno music TVs in their bellies and water-filled tubes for tentacles.

Our offices finally moved down the street across from the Fitzgerald’s Casino, right beneath the metal light arch. It was better, not just because there were no fumes, but because I could get up from my desk and wander to a window where a giant leprechaun statue stared back at me. Once during monsoon season I felt like the leprechaun was watching with me as chairs, signs, cops and orange cones floated down Fremont Street in a flash flood. Not so lucky for them. We smiled as rain clouds burst above the seventy-million-dollar canopy of lights.

Animators would create light shows based on my ideas and drawings. There was Donavon, Jason, Brad and Ken. They were a team of the strangest, most gifted people I have ever met. Donavon was from Michigan. He looked like a biker or a bulldog, though really he was a gentle soul married to a woman I called “Tree.” She often rescued lizards from desert drainage pipes. Donavon once scared an old lady half to death just by riding in a Big Red Garage elevator with her. My favorite animation of his was a big-headed cat named “Tickles.” Jason was from Cheyenne, Oklahoma. He looked frail but was mean-spirited, sarcastic, young. I think it was his first job. He was the primadonna artist of the group but had a great creative energy that was inspirational. Jason could draw and animate the most amazing creatures, people and monsters. He once talked his way into creating his own five-minute animated show about a campy 007 sort of character named Agent Zero. Zero fought robots and a giant laser that nearly sliced his gonads. It had a short run.

Ken was the only local. He was from nearby Boulder City, just outside of the Hoover Dam. Las Vegas was his home. He knew every secret of the city, from the underground tunnels to the best drugstore burger and how to best get to the Nevada Test Site and Area 51. My girlfriend and I lived with him for a while in downtown Las Vegas on Third and Gas Street. A friend of his lived two houses down. She later moved to Bakersfield to be a TV reporter. But before she moved, Ken lived with her. He kept strange dead creatures in jars of formaldehyde on a shelf in their living room.

We lived in a true Las Vegas arts district. I walked to work. Ken was part of the arts collective who occupied a nearby warehouse. They rebelled against the Fremont Street Experience when it was first built around 1996 because they believed it raped the city of millions of dollars in city park funds. He showed me video of a group of artists having a picnic and playing Frisbee beneath the canopy of lights. “Well, it is technically a city park,” he said.

Ken had a vicious, maniacal laugh, messy light brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He often wore a maroon shirt that we would make him go home and change when it reeked of cat pee. A vegetarian, he piled plates of vegetables at the buffets where we got to eat for free. He mixed them all together and squirted ranch dressing on top. If this was his Land of the Lost, he was a sleestack in this desert town the way he tore through and devoured those plates.

Brad worked as an intern. Just out of the Air Force he was obsessed with animation. He could stay awake for days at a time honing his craft. His dedication to learning ended up making him the most successful of the bunch. He later moved to Florida to learn Maya animation software and worked on Star Wars films and other Hollywood blockbusters.

Our boss Cindy was moody. But she was the most fun because she let us play Action Quake for hours on end during work days. I was always the assassin with the rail gun as we’d all sit in darkness, wearing headphones, screaming at each other while the body counts went up. In her spare time she was an interior designer and raced cars. Every Easter she would host an egg-painting contest and cook real rabbit that I wouldn’t eat. She later bought an old school in Chester, Nebraska with her Vancouver-born punk rock husband. They converted it into a school of arts. On Halloween they throw pumpkins like heads that smash into the concrete two stories below. She never knew we broke bottles with darts right in the office. True art riot.

After I created concepts for the largest video screen on Earth I would stand out on the street next to the art team as they tested the shows. Were the concepts fitting to a vault of lights? Were the animations viewable? Technical glitches anywhere? We would wander up and down Fremont Street with the drunks, gamblers, transvestites, prostitutes and homeless. I watched them more than the light shows. Yet we’d look up and watch the animations spin in arcs and down the vaulted street. And on the street itself the drunks with their beer footballs would stumble in their own arcs, dizzy under the lights.

A prostitute walked up to me one day after work. I was standing just outside the Lady Luck Casino, waiting for a ride. It was the same place I once saw a three-foot-tall Charlie Chaplin. “Are you the Superman I’ve been looking for?” she said while walking up to me. I remember she had blonde hair, glasses. She carried a small duffle bag. She later became a running joke with the animation team. The phrase was secretly plastered on billboards in animated towns and on dancing Stevie Wonder envelopes. While the drunks on the street never knew, our antics gave us more energy to be the strange bad boy artists of the downtown Vegas casino scene.

I had gotten that job in the mad city of lights because I had gone a bit mad myself while working on a novel in an isolated house in Northeastern Ohio. Ruins of the Erie Canal ran through the backyard. I could see a cemetery on an Indian mound from where I wrote in a sewing room on the home’s second floor. I was with my girlfriend. But then her mother got sick in Florida. So she left and I felt as abandoned as the house.

I talked to the park rangers. They fed me eggplants from their garden. I thought I saw shadows, ghosts, demons springing from the mounds; exploding stars at midnight. Snapping turtles seemed to stare at me as I took walks. Grasshoppers lunged like locust. I wanted out, so I walked three miles along the canal towpath to a library in Peninsula along the Ohio River. I used the Internet on their computer to find the job opening in Las Vegas. Just weeks later I was in a safety meeting led by a man with lots of gold chains. He looked like a Mafioso. He said he once knew Elvis and then reminded everyone that “We takes care of our own.” He swung a fire extinguisher around like a club.

When that job ended I taught graphics, writing and marketing at an art school. Some of my students were dancers or ran porn sites. By September 10, 2001 I was ready to leave. I called Bonifacio. “I’m coming to Bakersfield,” I said. “I have to get away from this town. It killed my father and it has almost killed me. Besides, the desert is too hot and I can’t do anything but dream of a girl.”

“I’m sorry about your father. How has it almost killed you, my brother?” he asked. That’s how his voice always was—just sort of polite and caring. I noticed he ignored my statement about the girl. Maybe that’s because there was a distant moan in his voice. It might have been imaginary, hidden, as if he had enough visions of his own.

“In 1999 I was bit by a black widow,” I said. “I hallucinated for days. I dreamt about a girl—the one who haunts me now. The girl in the dream was in Africa, somewhere—I don’t know where—on the plains. She had an abortion performed on her by doctors of the CDC: the Center for Disease Control. They were dressed in white lab coats. The horizon was soaked in a heavy orange dusk that settled like a coat of rust.”

“So poetic. Such a horror.”

“A monstrous white animal-like fetus was placed on her chest. I was on Morphine—heavy doses of that and Phenobarbital, antibiotics and Valium as the doctors thought I was about to die. I was on a gurney a few days before the dream. I thrashed about. I lunged at people. I begged my girlfriend when I was awake to kill me, and goddam her, she wouldn’t. And now that we aren’t together, she haunts me.”

“I would say ‘thank God’ if I believed in any God,” Bonifacio whispered. I could barely hear him.

“I know you would, brother. It’s ok.”

“Yes, go on…”

“Well the doctors were about to give me the anti-venom. They say they only give the anti-venom to those they think are about to pass.”

“You were about to die?”

“They almost gave it to me.”

“I never knew.”

“Not many people did. And the irony of it is that my father was himself bit by a poisonous spider only ten years prior. I wasn’t there, but from what I understand, he was about to die himself before a miracle of God saved him. Can you believe it? His liver was almost gone. And all of these dreams.”

“I can’t believe it. But what is it that you’re running from?”

“I’m running toward happiness, Bonifacio.”

“We all want to run there. So come here—I’ll take care of you. There is a girl too. You mentioned her. She is the tall one? Such a beautiful girl. With the bright green eyes, right?”

“Yes. We’re not together, yet we live under the same roof. I love her, but I need to leave because she is really a ghost that haunts me now.”

“That’s not healthy. Here at the University my ex is here and I am filled with pain every time I see her. It is difficult. She is like a ghost too.”

Read more of “Thick White Crust”:

Part One: H A U N T
Part Two: B O N I F A C I O
Part Three: S E P T E M B E R
Part Four: L E G A C Y
Part Five: G R E A T  G R A N D M O T H E R ‘ S  B U L L E T
Part Six: N O N - M I G R A N T S
Part Seven: D I A  d e  L O S  R A S C A C I E L O S
Part Eight: T H E  G A T H E R I N G
Part Nine: W H I T E F L I E S  A N D  W I D O W S

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N.L. BELARDES is a journalist, blogger and videographer. He writes several media blogs, including Noveltown’s Paperback Writer and Nick 2.0 (Formerly on ABC23). His work has appeared on the homepage of CNN.com and other news sites all over America. You can purchase Lords: Part One, which describes the infamous Lords of Bakersfield. They still creep the city long after they and a 1977 Central California dust storm ravaged the area. N.L. welcomes humorous notes and news tips to his MySpace or Twitter.

Tags: 3D Animation, 9/11, animators, artists, author, California Writer, casino, Character Studio Max, Chicano fiction, day of the dead, Death, dia de los muertos, Fremont Street Experience, Las Vegas, Latino, magic realism, Maya, N.L. Belardes, September 11, SoftImage, sugar skulls

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 12:13 am and is filed under Art, Birth, Childhood, Death, Dreams, Family, Heaven, Hell, Literature, Nightmares, Pop Culture, Spirituality, Transcendence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.