A Savage Journey to the Heart of the IMCista Dream : AZ IMC

Fearand Loathing in Portland: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the IMCista Dream

Chapter III - World Debut at Arizone IMC
April April 27, 2005

Driving Through Monterrey Too Stoned to Appreciate It-Saving the Troll Woman - The Cars Blows Up and We're Stuck WIth the Arsenal

We passed through the town of Monterrey. John Steinbeck had made
it famous in his novel Cannery Row. My favorite part of that book was
when the towns people discovered that the local medical examiner had
done a sloppy autopsy on a departed man of letters. They just about
lynched him. They take their poets seriously in Monterrey, or at
least, they used to.

Then we cruised past Monterrey Bay, one of the great beautiful
places of the American landscape. Due to having had smoked a huge
quantity of weed over the last several exits, we thought the bay was
just a fantastic hallucination. One of the side effects of being
exhaustively wrecked on acid and grass is that the hallucinations can
be so intense that you don't realize that what you are looking at is real.

"Wow this is great weed man, these are some of the sweetest
hallucinations I've ever had."

We cruised right on through, thinking the blue water breaking on
rocks was just a sign of excellent drugs. But the next thing we knew,
we were looking at the grim compounds of the long abandonded Fort Ord.

"Wow man, am I bumming out?"
"No dude, that's the Fort man. Fort Ord. Or what's left of it
nowadays."
"Oh, OK. So what were all those beautiful rocks and shit?"
"They were rocks man. Rocks and sea. That was Carmel-By-the-Sea.
We're past it now."

As we swung into Santa Cruz we saw a Jolly Roger flapping in the
breeze over a wild looking dude on a bicycle. He was pulling one of
those trailers that people use to lug their kids around in. He had a
pile of stuff in the trailer - sleeping bag, various kitchen utensils.
Not a bad little set up, actually.

We had checked Indymedia at an internet cafe along the highway,
and we knew we were right on time for an antiwar demonstration that
would be taking place. We asked the guy on the bike where the rally
was, and he said that was where he was headed.

We rounded a bend and saw a crowd of maybe fourty people gathered
around in a circle. It looked like they were kicking a soccer ball. We
heard a lot of yelling, something about Israel and Palestine. Then we
realized the crowd was in the process of kicking the shit out of this
middle aged woman.

Eric ran into the crowd and pulled out his .38.

"All right you fuckers. This is loaded. Lay off or I'll blow your
fucking heads off."

Needless to say, the crowd dissapated very rapidly. As it turned
out, the woman they were kicking the shit out of was a left wing
journalist who often posted on indymedia and in various left wing
periodicals. I had seen some of her work online. She disagreed with
the usual indymedia line on the Palestine-Israel situation. She was
avidly pro-Israel, and frankly I find her posts to be pretty
obnoxious. No wonder they were kicking the shit out of her.

But no one deserves a beating, especially for expressing their
opinion. And certainly not a relatively frail woman, frail, at least,
as opposed to some of those rats who were beating her ass.

She realized that the crowd had dispersed, and I thought she was
going to thank Eric. But instead, she sunk her teeth into his leg. He
howled like a wolf with his leg in a bear trap.

"Let go of my leg," he screamed, pointing the gun at her. "Let go
of my leg or I'm blowing your brains out."

She leg go, and Eric ran back into the car.

"Fuck Santa Cruz. Let's get the hell out of here."

I agreed one hundred percent. We whipped around and onto the
freeway toward San Francisco.

"Shit man I was helping that broad. Why did she attack me?"

"Hey you know, no good deed goes unpunished."

"Yeah, right. Murphy's Second Law."

We just kept cruising past San Francisco and lit a bowl of
hash. The lacerations on Eric's leg were starting to scab over by the
time we approached the Oregon border. He started fiddling with his
Magnum apprehensively.

"Eric man what's the matter?"

"I'm a little worried about the clown."

"What are you talking about? What clown, man?"

"The clown in Portland. There's this clown who drives around
Portland in this like weird clown car."

"Oh, yeah, that guy. Hey -- he's just a clown."

"You never know about clowns man. They're identity is
concealed, right? Maybe he's some kind of agent or something."

"Eric, the guy is just a freakin' clown. It's his thing. Don't
worry about the FUCKING CLOWN!"

Eric seemed to take my point, and he settled down. I knew I'd
have to watch him pretty carefully when we got into town. He didn't
always deal with people in just the correct way. I remember one time a
couple of guys nearly killed him in a bar in Leesburg for a chance
remark he made about Robert E. Lee.

The only reason I can put up with Eric is that when I first started
hanging out with him, he was the lesser of evils. It was November of
2000 and we were at the Democratic Party Headquarters in Daytona
Beach, Florida. There was this guy from New Jersey hanging around the
campaign getting in fights with reporters. He had this box cutter that
kept falling out of his pocket, and he had been drinking. For some
reason he took a liking to Eric and myself, and when the other
reporters realized they needed to get rid of the guy, they looked to
us to figure out a way to get him out. So we ended up going drinking
with the guy. He was a loose cannon that already had the fuse lit, and
by the time we parted company, Eric seemed like a relatively
predictable upstanding citizen in comparison.

All of a sudden we heard a loud bang and smoke started pouring out of the rear end. The car lurched; all of the other cars gave us a wide berth. Eric started looking around for patrol cars, and I realized that the car was
dead. I knew something like that was going to happen. It must have
been the Orgon border jinxing us.

The big problem was that the trunk was completely full of Eric's
equipment. He never went anywhere without a full complement of gear to
cope with the possibility of terrorist attack, and, in particular,
chemical or biological attack. His pride and joy was a variety of
elite, state-of-the-art Chemtech Pro model gas masks with HEPA
filtered dual-chambers. They had space technology vapor barrier Lexan
viewing ports and a customizable fit that made them fit like a pair of
hot pants on a Vegas stripper. They were weightless and available in
15 designer colors, of which Eric owns about six. His favorite,
though, was the one in Army issue olive drab. I have to admit, that
color imparts a sort of classic WWI realism to a product manufactured
in recent months. He even had antique lettering that reprinted
authentic WWI instructions - an extra that had cost him a pretty penny
and an extended argument with the sales manager, who insisted that
Eric take delivery of the mask with the standard instructions, and
take delivery of the custom instructions in a seperate shipment. It
was up to Eric to wrap the antique WWI instructions onto the canister.
No doubt about it, Eric was a little fanatical about these matters.

He also had this weird laser gun that analyzed the ambient air. ERic
claims that he can tell if there are any chemical or biological
warfare agents suspended in the air. But my biggest concern was how we
were going to get all this crap through Greyhound....