High
Desert Elegy by Michael G. Vail
Reviewed by John Krieg
There
is something about the desert. No other
environment on planet Earth is more cleansing and clarifying. No less a figure than Jesus Christ went out in
the desert for 40 days and 40 nights to get his mind right before His ill-fated
journey to Jerusalem. Mere mortals need
more time, say the 40 years that author Michael G. Vail has spent visiting and
eventually living in California’s Mohave Desert adjacent to Joshua Tree
National Park. Locals call it the “high
desert.” Like the unusual and gawky Joshua
Tree itself, this area is just plain unique and different. As is High Desert Elegy.
This
collection of 23 short stories and 12 poems has been written by a man who has
obviously lived a lot of life. He
realizes that what the desert and the human condition have most in common is
the ability to endure if either is to survive.
Vail sets the tone for this harsh stark environment in the very first
paragraph of his very first story of the same title as the overall book’s
title:
On
the Sunday that Maria committed suicide, the morning sun gradually ascended
into the cloudless azure sky, its blinding light filling the dining room’s wide
picture windows. Sprawling across a
prominent ridge top, the handsome house overlooked the little town of Last
Chance. It huddled in the middle of the
valley floor, surrounded by a vast expanse of desolation and creosote bushes (p. 1).
Many
of the stories are set in the late sixties and early seventies; what many of us
boomers consider to be the golden age of rock n’ roll. The author graduated high school in 1970 with
the scars left by the social upheavals of the Robert F. Kennedy and Martin
Luther King assassinations still festering in the national psyche while
opposition to the Vietnam “conflict” was still raging, and some of his pieces speak
of the tenor of those times. Consider that
what was to become the boomer generation thought that they had the blueprint
for a better world resting in their hands with the success of Woodstock in August
of 1969, only to have it laid riven at Altamont in December of that same year. Idealism and cynicism vied for the soul of the
youth of America, and after the Kent State shootings in May of 1970 cynicism seemed
to win out while the corruption of the Nixon Administration drove the last nail
in idealism’s coffin.
There
are ample gritty slices of life available here, not the standard fare of the rude,
crude, and lewd too often available from Bukowski wannabes, but instead, nuanced
conflicted character sketches portrayed with a poet’s sensitivity. Vail provides the pictures’ outline, and the
reader can fill in the colors, or lack thereof.
In
Happy Land, set in June of 1970, a teenage girl’s family
falls on hard times just as she is about to begin college forcing her to land a
job at an amusement park’s resort hotel where she becomes embroiled in scheme
to clean rooms for trysts between prostitutes and their john’s whereby she is
given cash with no questions asked for her services and her silence. But her naivety
and sense of morality well up inside of her causing her to question her part in
the whole sordid affair.
I
didn’t think much about the immorality of the shenanigans that were going on until
a week later. I entered a room right
after the hooker and her john had left.
Setting in plain sight on a nightstand next to the unmade bed and its
dirty sheets was a brown leather wallet.
I picked it up, intending to turn it in at lost and found. But first I rifled through its contents. My curiosity had gotten the best of me. Perhaps there was something in the wallet that
would give me a clue as to what kind of man paid for sex with a stranger…
The
next thing I found made me wish I hadn’t looked in the wallet. It was a family portrait, obviously snapped
by a professional photographer. Smiling
at the camera was Eddy. At his side sat
a strikingly beautiful young woman with long, curly red hair and, between them,
a darling little towheaded boy, perhaps five years old.
Why
would someone with all of this sneak off to meet a prostitute? I couldn’t get my head around it (p. 84).
One
of life’s most dependable truth’s is that when most people reach adulthood, or
at least sexual maturity, very few of them change after that. This point is hammered home in the book’s longest
and most convoluted story entitled: Too Many Empty Hearts. A man who is cheating on his wife becomes
involved in the murder of a woman that he is having casual sex with when her
new boyfriend, a short-tempered biker type, confronts the two of them at her
apartment, and in a fit of rage stabs her to death. The biker runs off and gets away to Mexico
while the unlucky man is seen running from her apartment in an effort to seek
help, but instead is charged with the murder.
Just when it looks like he will be convicted his fast-thinking attorney
digs up some photographs that tie the biker and the woman together at least to
the point of instilling that all-important shadow of a doubt in minds of the
jurors, and he is set free. On November 15th
he assures his wife, who stood by him through the whole ordeal, that he
would remain true blue from here on out.
But a leopard famously doesn’t change its spots, and while standing in
the unemployment line on December 1st he meets an attractive woman
and nobly assists her through the induction process.
After
he explained the process and gotten her into the correct line, they went their
separate ways. But an hour later, they
happened to run into one another again as both left the building.
“Let’s
get a drink,” he said. “To celebrate the
impending arrival of your first check.”
“Why
not? Now that I’m unemployed, I don’t
have any place I need to be.”…
“Should
we get another round?” he said.
She
studied his face.
“My
place isn’t far from here,” she said.” “Why
don’t we go there?”
He
looked into her eyes.
“I
like that idea,” he said (p. 141).
There
it was; motive and opportunity all tied up in a tidy little bow. A leopard doesn’t change its spots.
In
real life Vail divides his time between California’s coastal communities and
the high desert, but his stories seem more centered in and descriptive of the desert. There are rock strewn hillsides, cactuses, wide
open spaces, blistering heat, frigid cold nights, rattlesnakes, and surrealistically,
in October of 2016, Sir Paul McCartney holds an impromptu concert in a local’s
bar in Pioneertown.Zany and eccentric
and oftentimes lyrical High Desert
Elegy is a fast-reading romp across the arc of a well-lived life, and
Michael G. Vail didn’t miss much of it in his observations which he generously
shares with his readers. In all, an exhilarating
and wild ride down a high desert highway with no end to the horizon.
And
then there’s the poetry:
Then
the
Howling
stopped
As
quickly as
It
started
And
the desert
Fell
too lonely
Once
again (p. 169).
There
is something about the desert, that’s for sure, and this book celebrates it and
the fact that nothing could ever completely explain it. That’s the best part.
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