The Worst Idea Anybody's Had This Century

by Hazard Ann Opinion

I was stunned by a nascent serendipity as my horse broke down last fall just outside the luminously pissant town of Mugwump, Nev. Gadzooks, the Disneyfied yokels had attached little round ears to the very pebbles while doing intellectual leapfrogging over the bumbleweeds of American decline.

But how could I complain, having been raised an altar-bouyed Catholic in the sickly-sticky suburbs of Detroit (where, at midnight, the Pappist poodles went down to the ballfield for a romp on the basepaths of the local baseball zircon.)

I was reminded of all this when I bought a used teddy boy at the gas station just before lighting out to visit that neo-Vandalized cathedral of off-color wellness, the Holistic Happy Hour Bar and Grille, smack dab on the periphery of volatile Vegas. You may remember when Bob Venturi did his paean to peon architecture, extolling the Vegas varnish as dyed-in-the-grain American heartwood. Then again, you may not.

Well, the HHH does just what any weeping critic of our moral muck-around would want to see done during this withering-valued era of over-moneyed infusions into the understructure of the artistic lumpenproled outlook when, at least a hundred miles from the nearest glimpse of a certifiable cultural mind-dwelling, the dependent clause slowly devours its own tail!

Back on the highway, cleaning clods from my steed's hooves, I noticed the warp on the horizon that comes from too much sun through wet laundry steaming on the ex-urban lines. But better, a gaggle of Mugwumpers was rappelling across the face of a local outcropping dressed in brilliant greens and blues, like dreams of a parakeet's paradise (which also brought to mind my malingering Motown childhood, though damned if I know why). Heh, it's things like this, rapid images whacked across the Western waste, that put you back in the visual driver's seat, even when unhorsed.

I was saved by an old geezer with sterling-silver-framed pince nez who mistook me for his brother-in-law, who also, it turns out, can't make his horse work right. I piled into his pickup (or, considering the condition of the same, picked myself up into his pileup) and we dwagged our wumps into the muggy town.

What a revelation! What must once have been a one-horse burg (with its one-horse burghers patrolling the sidewalks and stepping over one horseburgher after another) was now a 300-horse-power sub-metropolis.

Stoplights flicked the eternal Crayola verities of green, yellow, red, and Ronald McReagan was passing out fries under the ubiquitous golden arches that so much call to mind that colossal monostele that swings wide the corral gate to the open plains as you cross the Old Miss at St. Louis (and an Old Miss is a damned sight better than a Miss-missed-by-a-mile any day).

We pulled up into the municipal parking lot, a sad example of auntie-diluvian overwatered concrete in a part deco style. My unholy host, a dealer in forged Mormon documents and crypto-monogrammed hankies, steered me to some grub at the Cattleman's Macho Red Meat Eatery, where one of Paul Bunyan's fingers was on display, a rancid relic in a second empire super-tureen covered with curlicues not unlike the scalloped edges of rail passes in the craft-conscious Finnish Lapp of luxury, Helsinki.

It wasn't until three o'clock in the afternoon, after uncovering the local overpasses and overlooking the underwear salons, that I remembered Buce-phalus, my poor nag, tethered by the side of Rte. 61 with nary an ounce of oats for the past seven hours. With the SPCA all but breathing down my back, I flagged a Greyhound (not nearly as flagged as I felt), headed toward the outskirts, and fell into conversation with a Benedictine monk who had vowed to do his penance in the gaming halls of gamey Vegas but, because of his knotted belt, couldn't kick the habit. How now, brown cowl!

But what's in a name? For instance, the mayor of Mugwump was Luigi Purplefish, a descendant of the French director of counter-intelligence (at a time when any form of thinking countered the low average intelligence of the day) under Louis XIII, Jacques Parppoisson, best known for the knuckle-sandwich affair and the Madame with Three Breasts intrigue.

It's all very well for taxidermists to say "stuff it," but my own consensus-of-one, after a day of rapid acceleration from horseback to busbox in the lee of the rain-sopping Sierra Nevadas, is that you don't get more out of an inn than you put into throwing someone out. Or, to quote Chateaubriand, "Rare, please."

These days, I suppose, it's no more than you can expect. But visit a library and kiss a book before you decide that the vernacular in architecture holds less water than me or ewer have been led to believe. After all, it's only a stone's throw from the place where, brighter than a thousand sons, 500 daughters once married Brigham Young.

Heh.

from Welcomat: After Dark: Hazardous Waste, April 1, 1987