The Dead Guy Road Trip Church
Neil Zawicki
Desert peaks decorated the funeral hall. No one mentioned it, but everyone noticed. As the people shuffled in, the stepmother of the guest of honor stood in a high-dollar business suit, emphatically thanking everyone for coming. His real mother sat quietly in the front row, staring. There was no casket. Instead, there was a stout, wooden altar. Draped across it was a white cloth, on top of which sat a basketball, a pair of diving fins, and a chessboard. John Looked over at Luke and asked, "what are we doing here?
1
The Lusty Lady is in downtown Seattle, on Pike Street. It’s a series of booths along a narrow corridor made of painted plywood. The floor is dull and scuffed, and each booth has a little window that, after feeding it quarters, opens to reveal a room full of naked women lazily dancing to Bon Jovi music. The window only stays open for around 13 seconds, so, naturally, many quarters are required. The Lusty Lady is frequented by bums, drifters, and fish-ripe sailors. Ryan Juke was a good-looking kid from Arizona who spent his college days blasting Doors music and smoking hoot. Tonight, he was a patron of The Lusty Lady. This was due to the fact that he had willingly joined the ranks of the bums, drifters, and fish-ripe sailors. He did this just to say he had done it. He and his companion Luke Schuter were reporting for work on a fishing boat the next morning—the first for Ryan and the second for Luke—and so thought they would hit The Lusty Lady, for no more than the novelty of it. At the moment, Luke was in the same booth as Ryan, which caused one of the women to stop dancing and address the pair.
“Okay guys,” she said, leaning into the tiny window, naked. Her accent was unmistakably southern.
“There can only be one of ya’ll in there, so one of ya’ll has to leave.”
Ryan Juke, being an avid supporter of hedonism, was both unaware and unconcerned with any violations of the stringent rules of conduct at The Lusty Lady. Luke grabbed him, yelling over the din of the music.
“Ryan, we have to leave!” he declared.
“Why?” Ryan shouted, laughing, sifting through a handful of change. Over Ryan’s shoulder, Luke spotted a bouncer approaching the two with a determined glare.
“How many quarters do you have left?” Luke asked.
“None!” Ryan yelled. They left before the bouncer could stop them. On the way out, they witnessed a confrontation in the lobby. A patron was angry about having been thrown out, and he was yelling at the indifferent, heavily tattooed cashier.
“I’m gonna write to my congressman,” the man shouted, “and tell him that I was abused by your facility!”
Ryan Juke and Luke Schuter shuffled past this and out the door, howling with laughter as they rushed across Pike Street.
“We have to get to 4th avenue to catch the last bus,” Schuter said through hilarious tears.
“Why?” Juke asked, rushing along, leaning forward, his arms in the air.
“Because that’s where the bus stop is,” Luke shouted. “Trust me, I remember from last time.”
“Okay, so long as you’re hip!” Juke shouted, sending the two into fits of laughter.
“I’m hip!” Luke yelled. They were both yelling this as they zipped through the deserted 3 a.m. streets of Seattle, the scene of a previous trip by Luke Schuter. Schuter met Juke a few months earlier through John Burg at a party near Arizona State University. It was a Latin dance party, pitched by Puerto Rican students. Juke was rattling around shirtless, holding a bong in one hand, and beer and a cigarette in the other. He was dancing, pumping both fists forward in an alternating fashion, occasionally letting loose with a “Whoooo!”
“Is your
friend okay? I think he’s a little drunk.” Said the hostess. She
was Puerto Rican, with canary yellow capri pants and stiletto heels.
Her hair was big and curly, and she smoked long, skinny cigarettes.
She talked so rapidly, sentences would become singular
words.
“IsyourfriendokayIthinkhesalittledrunk,” became a
common joke among the group, who regarded Ryan Juke with the utmost
esteem for his ability to have fun anywhere.
John Burg is the fullest embodiment of eccentric charm in all of Tempe, Arizona. If ever there was a white shaman, it’s John Burg. He has a laugh that is universally described as “infectious.” He’s climbed on the Matterhorn, after living in the climber’s graveyard near the mountain, eating stolen potatoes from the hotel. All the characters in this story met through John Burg, who studied religions at ASU. On any given night, John Burg could be found in a pair of boxers and a shop apron, greasy, drunk, blasting James Brown while building bikes out of spare parts, or re-finishing an old oak desk. His infectious laugh was a warm waft through the house. He was a consumate activist as well. Having traveled to Haiti to introduce bicycles to the indigenous people as transportation in a country where such a thing makes the difference between starvation and subsistence. He went there with a group out of New York. He came back with three boxes of Cuban cigars. One night, Luke came home at 3 a.m. to the sounds of Leon Redbone. His nasal, ragtime vocal stylings were blaring through the house. Walking into Burg’s room, Luke found him all alone, with a pair of shorts and a tool belt on, doing an impassioned lipsync to the music.
To the group, he was like the removed groundskeeper, showing up only long enough for introductions, leaving the rest to their grandiose adventures.
Luke Schuter describes himself as an adventure journalist. This means that he spends lots of time arranging to go somewhere and have an experience that he can write about. It also means he’s broke—a hapless thug who’s been here and there, and has seen more than a few strange things. Sometimes it’s a terrible mistake. Other times it’s fantastic. But it’s always noteworthy. His most recent jaunt finds him on the balcony of Coyote Cal’s hostel in Erendira, Mexico, in the company of three of his closest friends. How did they converge on this bleach-white veranda, buffeted by the wind, overlooking the vast blue ocean, as dirt buggies roared by? Before we can answer that, we need to understand the string of events that led to that Mexican veranda. Boo Wiles once said, “Every moment is only the update of the story so far.” Boo likes that sort of thing. If you told him he had to get to Panama and all he had to do it in was a kayak, he’d hop in and go. Most of them are like that, which is why they get into such fixes. But if you’re going to seek adventure, you’d better be prepared for adventure to do you on all fronts.
To hear Luke Schuter talk is to listen to a continuous monologue about a place he’s been and the outlandish circumstances under which the adventure took place. Luke Schuter writes the way he talks-with no apologies or pretenses...
2
The Accidental Wonderland(Jaunt Magazine, Sept 2000)
By Luke Schuter
We had been out at sea for a month, churning and rolling on vicious mountains of liquid that mobbed and pounded the hull of the trawler, Pacific Explorer, causing her to pitch and shudder as other boats loomed in the fog in the form of dim rows of yellow light. Clouds of gulls hovered low around the waterline, feeding on the fish parts that spewed from the overflow shoot, and into the water. Small sharks were loitering as well. They would turn up in the trawl net.
Plenty had already happened since we left Seattle for Dutch Harbor, there was the unplanned rescue of the two stranded Canadian duck hunters and their dog, seasickness and hellish nights spent on twelve-foot seas, the boat bobbing like a cork in the black, foggy night. Already, two crab boats had gone
down, having iced over and tipped, their crew dying in the icy water. No doubt they spent their last moments whacking at the ice with aluminum baseball bats, a common order given by the Captains of these stricken crafts. We saw crewmembers being brutalized, thrown up against lockers by the cock-strong Norwegian sailors that ran the boat. We worshiped Audrey, one of three women on the boat, as a goddess, but joked that as soon as we hit land, she’d be ugly.
We also had time to laugh. Sliding across the galley in our chairs because the boat was rocking like a seesaw. Spending hours in the factory, among conveyors and hoses that poured out seawater, which would occasionally douse an unlucky crewmember, we were busy, wet, tired, goofy, beset by gadgets and fish, talking like The Three Stooges. Emulating the mopish leader, Moe, with his cranked, “knock it off you knuckleheads, roll me a cigarette!” And Curly with his piercing, halting laugh. We kept each other and the rest in stitches. The Three Stooges were alive and well, there in the factory.
We laughed at Tsong, our surly crewmate from Thailand, hopelessly addicted to inhalers, with his hounds-tooth print do-rag on his head that made him look like a mean little Asian pirate. He woke up one morning to find the lamp in our stateroom, once a simple brass fixture on the wall, had been oddly decorated. We had cut up our crewmember manuals, which were orange, and embellished the lamp with torch flames, a smiley face, and had scrawled the greeting, “Shalom” across the front of it. We did it out of boredom, and as a monument to our newfound maritime insanity. When Tsong laid eyes on this thing these two Americans had assembled, he looked at us with a puzzled, thoughtful expression. We looked at him, waiting for his inevitable comment. The silence was broken when he looked back at the lamp and exclaimed, “Happy Halloween!” It was January. We were nearly paralyzed from laughter.
Crewmembers lived in tiny six-person quarters, called staterooms, with bunk beds, and a single, brass-lined porthole. The porthole became our TV, and on our porthole TV we had a selection of three commercial-free channels: “The fog channel,” “The placid ocean channel,” and our favorite, and most watched, “The big waves, crashing into the side of the boat channel.” Of all the staterooms on board, ours
was the only one given a name. Borrowing from Brando in the final seconds of Apocalypse Now, when he whispered, “The Horror, The Horror.” In the galley, crewmembers would plan to “meet later, down in The Horror.” It was a commonly known hotspot on the boat. The Horror. We even had a guest list, if you believe it. Considering where we were, we were having an ironically great time.
Every ten days, the boat would make port and unload its catch. It is known as an offload. This was the end of our second one. Twelve hours spent piling four hundred and fifty tons of frozen fish filet boxes on the dock. I spent the first one catching crane pallets from the deck, in a moderate snowstorm. It was one of the most pure and fantastically brutal things I had ever done. There, in Dutch harbor of all places, working on the dock, in a snow storm, my home a two hundred and fifty foot boat called “The Pacific Explorer,” on the legendary sea charted and named by Vitus Bering, with Alaska on one side, and the Kamchatka Peninsula on the other. It was as tough as I had ever felt. I remember thinking, “this is unreal. Look where I am.” This was as bold as I had been. But the bar was about to be raised.
Sitting in the galley, my hat on the back of my head, freezer suit unzipped, I quietly smoked a camel non-seatbelt, or non filter, and enjoyed the inertia of my short break. There was a new guy sitting next to me, typical of the type found out here in liquid land: overalls, proper boots, longhaired and bearded. He was only on board while he waited for his boat, our sister ship, “The Scout” to come in for an offload. It is possible that he was only there to point me in another direction, and be on his way. We talked a bit about Seattle, about the two lost crab boats, and about what boat caught more fish, and about the steely-eyed Norwegians who call The Bering Sea their home. Then, out of nowhere, he placed a mystery item on the seat next to me. I focused on the object, and identified it as a cute little bud of hash. I looked up at my new friend. He grinned and nodded, and then he got up and left.
Well, now, this puts a whole new spin on things. To begin, I was no longer a fan of hash. I was not interested in hash anymore. To continue, it is the strict policy of The Pacific Explorer and American Seafoods, to forbid any form of drug to be taken out to sea. For good reason, too. I mean, sweet Joseph, its freaky enough out here, there’s no need to complicate matters with psychotropic substances. Finally, I could not, in good conscience, reject this gift so kindly given to me. Besides, Delcan needed to be consulted before I just flippantly tossed this detour away.
Delcan Montgomery was a disgruntled accountant from Chicago. Aspiring artist and avid wanderer. Wool capped, horn-rim spectacled. He was a complete and lucid lunatic. He had come to sea the same as I. Broke, free, happy. To date, we had both earned an untouched $4,000 from working on the Explorer. We had also earned each other's solid friendship. So, when I told him that I had weed, we lit up in short order.
By the time we were both good and high, babbling about our two Norwegian bosses, and laughing like fruit-hatted cowboys, we had been steaming out to sea for an hour. It was 11:30 p.m. when we got word that we were to report to work in 30 minutes to process more fish.
Wow. We were going to be working in the factory with a severe head change. This was going to be a bright new experience. The factory is a loud, cold, cramped juggernaught of conveyorbelts and skinning machines that rolls and rocks with the raging sea outside. The floor is covered in four inches of seawater, and fish heads float around in it. The smell of cold metal and fish corpses fills every square inch. On the swift conveyors travel fish filets, fish guts, mince pans and egg sacks. Danger is immediate, the air is frozen, and Angry Norwegians shout and curse over the din of piston pops and gear screeches. This had become our environment. We were used to it. At times, we would show up for our shift wearing only jeans, a T-shirt, and rubber boots, in defiance of the cold harsh conditions. The work was so monotonous and mercilessly cold and loud that I would sometimes completely check out, and for a while I would be somewhere else, like in my room as a child, or playing baseball, until I would come back into the present, and become aware that I had been automatically working for better than an hour without ever hearing, seeing or feeling it. It was a strange effect, to be sure. But now our minds were altered. This was altogether different. And in times of portent such as these, only one course of action is logical. We decided that we would just take a shift off. They’ll understand, after all, we were model sailors, always turning to, always in the muck, pulling our weight. We’ve earned it. What we were proposing was nothing short of mutiny, and deep down we knew it. The truth is that we were young, bored, and only out for a good solid adventure, and we wanted to see what was next.
It was quiet. The muffled, ebbing rush of the ocean was the only sound when Wayne, our bunkmate from San Francisco, and one of our immediate group, woke up. He asked what was going on, and we told him. “ We’re taking a shift off.” Delcan explained, in his Chicago slant. “ We’ll come back in six hours.” Here now was my attempt to bring Wayne into the fold, to come in for the big win. “Are you with us?” I asked. His inclusion was confirmed with his resigned and amused, “sure.” This idea was gaining momentum. It was becoming a movement, an insurrection. We needed another dissenter, and we were about to get one. One of the more specific crew members on board was Andy, a thin, pony tailed mural artist from Los Angeles. He was on board with his girlfriend, Kira, who was a professional welder. He wandered in to say hello, completely unaware of the caustic plans being set in motion. I immediately began the recruiting process. “Andy, we’re all not going to work. Just for one shift. Are you with us?”
Andy responded in his whiny voice, “Whoa! Kira just dumped me. Yeah, I’m in.”
Now we had done it. We had managed to develop a humorous notion into an irreversible test of solidarity. The four of us sat on the top bunks, telling horror stories of brutality at sea, just to keep the group focused on the resolution. We laughed, got angry, sang songs, while we waited for our absence to be noticed. No doubt they would come looking for us, and then we would proclaim our mutinous decision. The time was drawing near, and Wayne and Andy started to get nervous. “Are we really going to do this?” Andy asked, sitting up and looking at the door. Before answering, I looked at Delcan, who was already looking at me. We waited a second, and then said, at the same time, “Yeah. We really are.” Then we launched back into our justification rhetoric; stories of the people we all knew, like the guy who suffered a hernia while on board, and was made to scrub stairs until we made port. Stories of legs getting caught in conveyors, and becoming stretched until they were bloody and useless. These were stories of real brutality. This was our evidence of apathy from the sailors in charge. This was our cause. We were crusading. No we weren’t. But it made a great platform from which to rebel. Our rebellion was possibly going to get us beaten senseless, thrown in shackles, kicked off the boat, or killed. We knew this. We also knew that the two of us were now locked in a game of chicken. It was necessary to see it through, not to back down. It was about our faith in each other.
When they started banging on the door, telling us that we were late for our shift, the energy in the room had become critical. We calmly told Ally, our supervisor, that we weren’t going to work. When she heard this, she offered a threat. “Well, then, why don’t I just go and get Inga, and you can tell him.” Our brevity was blazing at this point, and so we replied, “Good, go get Inga.” She did.
This made Wayne and Andy a bit more edgy. Wayne began to reason with us, but we were well beyond that. The door flung open, and there stood Inga, in his factory gear, with the puggish, mustachioed Arve right behind him. Inga bellowed, “What’s this, you’re not going to your shift?” With that, Wayne and Andy were up and off to work quicker than you could say, “drawn and quartered.” But Delcan and I did not have that luxury. We had to answer to our selves. And ourselves were goading us to rock the boat. We were now staring down the visage of complete chaos, total uncertainty for our fate.
“You make me laugh!” Inga said. And then he laughed. “ If you do not go to your shift, then you are a quit!” Delcan stood up, “How am I A Quit, Inga? I’m not quitting, I’m taking a shift off.”
Inga continued, “ If you don’t go to work, you are a quit. You both have five minutes to get your shit together and get up to the wheelhouse, and anything you leave behind, I will personally burn myself.”
Delcan continued to argue until the Captain came down to deal with us. The Captain was accompanied by another brutish Norwegian named Hellsburg. Hellsburg was six-foot-three, with a head of dark curly hair. He wore a pair of orange coveralls.
While I was out in the hallway, still a bit high, dealing with the Captain, Delcan was in the room, waging a battle with Hellsburg, who kept turning out the lights as Delcan, under protest, gathered his things. The Captain gave Delcan the choice of getting off the boat, or being put in shackles. This threat was real. We weren’t in the United States. We weren’t in ANY country, for that matter. The only law out here was the Captain. He even said it: “ Under My Law. I’m the law out here.”
The next place we found ourselves was the wheelhouse, the drivers seat, nerve center of the boat. It was past midnight, the seas were around six-foot, and it was twenty below outside as they made preparations to send us, via the skiff, to the Scout, which was visible as a row of lights in the blackness outside. The lights would vanish, and then reappear in the swells. In the dim light of the wheelhouse, our faces were glowing green from the instruments as radio cross talk burst out in the form of curt, almost unintelligible directives. Plans were being made for the midnight delivery of the both of us, on to the Scout, and back to Dutch Harbor. Outside, we were thrown into a small boat and summarily soaked in ice-cold seawater. Next, we rolled over five-foot swells toward the Scout, flipping the bird and singing at the top of our voices. Beatle's songs, for that matter.
The skiff ride nearly killed us, although we didn't know it at the time. These mean-eyed Norwegians had no reason not to shove us overboard, but when you're young and adventurous, the reality of a situation never sets in. This is good for later reference, but not every kid survives these stunts.
3
That was eight years ago. And by now, Melco Shank and Luke Schuter were well along in forming the magazine. The idea came after a sailing trip, on which the two became great friends. Melco Shank looks like a combat helicopter pilot, or John Lennon, both of which are Quixotic images, common among the generation. Shank comes from an upscale family and holds two degrees: one in religious studies and one in international management. These qualify him to start a religion, and for a while he did.
“I’ve formed the church of Look Up,” he declared one day in Tucson. At meetings of the Church of Look Up, they would all lie on their backs and…look up. It worked wonders for meeting women, or so they thought.
“The first time I ever saw Ryan Juke was on a ski trip in Jr. High,” Melco tells us. “He was being sent home for stealing a pack of cigarettes.”
The Church of Look Up didn’t go far, but the real church was all around. They didn’t know it yet,
but Ryan Juke was its unwitting avatar. Instead of a religion, Melco Shank and Luke Schuter formed Jaunt Magazine, which took much preparation to launch. The two had never published anything before, and had to learn it all as they went. It involved late nights with software, writing, editing, meeting with printers, and trial and error. The idea alone attracted curious potential backers. Luke had done a story for a local paper on the yachting scene in Arizona, which introduced him to Rick Johnson. Rick and his father had invented insulated building blocks, and when they finally sold the company, they found themselves wealthy.
Rick spent his time with gin and tonics, racing high-end sailboats in California. He had a house on a lake in suburban Arizona. The dock was crowded with sailboats.
He liked Luke, and always invited him to crew aboard his boat. When he invited Luke the first time, he placed a brandy snifter in his hand. it was embossed with the the name of the boat, “Team Gravity.”
“Look here, " Rick instructed, thurning the glass to reveal the other side. It read, “To the Campaign.”
It was truly swank practice to have matching brandy snifters and a serious racing boat on the coast—a giant leap from Luke and the boys' grassroots jaunting. This was big league, and they dug the magazine even before it was printed. So, when Rick invited the boys over for dinner to discuss funding, they were thrilled. Melco came up from Tucson for the liason.
Naturally, Luke and Melco had a meeting before dinner. They held the meeting in the swimming pool. It was actually a pool at an apartment complex near the Tempe neighborhood, with which it was standard practice to hop the fence for an evening of poolside planning. They were shoestring tycoons.
The two stood chest-deep in the water, sipping rum and coke.
"We'll show him the business plan, but make sure we retain creative control," Melco said, staring up at the sky, slowly rotating.
"I think an investment would be better than a business loan, "Luke replied, blowing bubbles on the surface of the water.
"Right," said Melco. "He can underwrite the finances."
As they were talking, a young blond woman appeared. She was wearing a bikini, and as she waded into the shallow end, she introduced herself.
"Boys," she said, "it's after five o'clock. It's too late to be discussing business."
"You're right," Luke said. "But we're meeting in half an hour with the millionaire."
"Really, who's the millionaire?" she aked, settling into the water with a refreshed shiver.
"He's our dinner host tonight," Melco offered, keeping the enigma alive. Luke continued:
"What do you think sounds better," he asked, "jaunt, the adventure journal, or jaunt, the journal of the crackerjack adventurer?"
"I like the second one," she replied. "My name's Andrea."
Since they were on their way to dinner at the millionaire's house, the pair thought it neighborly to invite Andrea along. She accepted the invitation, and dashed off to change for the occasion. She returned wearing a sun dress. Only a sun dress.
Rick was duly surprised when they arrived.
"Rick, this is Andrea," Luke declared. "she'll be joining us for dinner." Rick welcomed the trio in with a wide grin. Tis was merger time; deals were going to be made, and Andrea was a perfect witness to the momentous proceedings.
Following dinner, the activities moved onto the patio, where numbers were discussed over gin and tonic. Rick sat smoking his cigarette, bathed in sunset light, the breeze moving his permanently mussed hair.
"Well, we'll need to find out how we can hit the market running," he said, using business speak which further excited Luke and Melco. It was winning the lottery. It was Christmas. This beer-fueled pipe dream of magazine publishing had caught the ear of a no-lie, face-out genuine financial heavy. And he was drinking. He was having a good ol' time with the whole thing.
"Ill bet you get $10,000 out of Rick,"said his wife, Dorthea, who sat happily as her husband played with his toys and paid for all the best food, etc. They sat and watched as rick took Andrea for a spin on his sunfish, a two-person sailboat. Luke and Melco hopped in the canoe and rowed out.
"Ten thousand," Melco said, rowing casually.
"I think he's in," Luke said.
"We're in," replied Melco. Their excitement couldn't be contained, and they broke into song.
They sang The Beatle's, "When I'm sixty-four,"and before long, while belting out the song, they had stopped rowing in favor of holding the oars level and rocking with the tune. The realization that they were no longer rowing was hysterical, and for three minutes, they lay there, laughing that kind of teary-eyed laugh that causes worry about one's safety for lack of oxygen.
The euphoria was unprecedented, and not even the cleverest of chemists could ever re-produce it. The prize was in sight, they would get their magazine.
Later, Andrea joined them in the canoe, and in an attempt to prove that a canoe could not be sunk, they managed to sink the canoe. A bad roll filled it with water, sending all three swimming. They dragged the stricken craft ashore and stood, soaking wet.
Andrea spent the rest of the evening doing dives into the pool, as Rick, Luke and Melco performed a round of "when I'm sixty-four." It was pure dreamland harmony.
andrea continued to be a random presence in Melco's life. He has a knack for picking the weird ones, with no hope for a future. Still, he pursues them with over-born optimism, and endless speculation. It's fun for him. This would prove a distraction later as well.
Rick was their best PR man, but they never saw a penny. In the end, it was up to them.
Later in the year, Delcan Montgomery flew out from Chicago to participate in the pre-magazine era, and to meet this new Melco character, which brought the trio to the Hotel Congress in Downtown Tucson.
4
Under The Fake star of the Empire(Jaunt Magazine, November, 2001)
By Luke Schuter
This is the hotel where John Dillinger was finally apprehended. He set fire to the building in order to prolong his capture. There are photographs. With this, perhaps we might think the tone of our trip had been set. And in the end, there was a kind of relationship, because in the end, we took pictures too.
But the real tone of our trip was to be set for us by a common street lunatic, who said to us as we passed, “Hey! You know that guy in there with that picture in the church of Scientology? And they killed six hundred million queer nigger COPS!
His forehead was covered in a Moorish tattoo pattern, and he was sitting on a bench, yelling these things as we made our way past. What was he trying to tell us? From his perspective, and in the calm still of crazy, he could very well have been simply asking us for the time.
Melco led us to a tight little box of local culture that serves Mexican food and Lattes. Disturbing artwork was positioned on each wall. Outside, a road crew was cutting through the street with a giant circular saw. The sound was deafening.
We had lunch, and were on our way to Sierra Vista to meet with Johanna, a local business woman from whom we were to gather information on the finer points of the magazine business. We had with us a car-to-car radio system, and as we passed through the southern Arizona chaparral, a region that Melco relentlessly used the radio system to refer to as “Steinbeck Country,” the weather was turning cold and stormy. Soon we were under low and unstable clouds, digging for warmer clothing. The walk to the physician’s doorstep was quick and shivery.
The physician was our host in Sierra Vista. He and his wife enjoy the color and culture of southern Arizona. This is a region that still creaks with the newness of the now old west. The physician loves it. Get some booze in him, and he’ll proclaim his candidacy for mayor of Tombstone, the town too tough to die. His wife, a local artist and poet, prepared for us an ample country dinner, complete with plenty of wine and mixed drinks.
The physician sat at the head of the table, portly with pride and bearded. He quietly sipped his wine as the guests took their positions at the large, stout wood table. I sat near the physician, and Melco sat across from me. Delcan, our accountant and photographer from Chicago, sat next to Melco. He sat like an eager gremlin on his best behavior.
Opposite the long table was the physician’s wife. She was poised, gracious, and straightforward, offering everyone more food and drink. Between her and myself was Johanna. She was Dutch. Straight from Holland. Here in the old west, at dinner with the physician, his wife, Melco Shank, our orange-coated, horn-rimmed accountant/photographer, and myself. Johanna was grand, loud and domineering. She tried to control every conversation. In her attempt to curry favor with the three of us, she betrayed her desperation for acceptance, her zeal for the almighty dollar.
Dinner was well lit, well provisioned, and perfectly arranged for all of us to listen to Johanna, who thought of herself as some sort of Midas Touch guru that the three of us could not live without. At one point she turned to Delcan and said, “ Do you know what Chicago needs? More baseball fields.” And here was Delcan, dressed more for hunting with Sonic Youth than for dealing with an over-fed money hungry Dutchy with gold blinders strapped to her horse head. Delcan, being from Chicago, tried to respond politely and with decorum, but just could not. “Well, actually, no…ah…what are you talking about?” he said, bristling with indignation.
The game was up; we had her dead to rights. She was in the big tank now. We don’t know what prompted her to make such a self-defeating proclamation as “Chicago needs baseball fields,” but we now knew she was packed with pure corned beef. The smell wafted from her hands and boots. We also knew she was trying to exact three thousand dollars from us. And she might well have if A: we had three thousand dollars. And B: we were as dumb as paint.
We didn’t and we weren’t. What was certain was that all of us, including the physician, had managed to kill three bottles of wine and several mixed drinks. It was time to send our wayward Johanna on her way and get down to brass tacks. We managed to put together a business plan that night, while occupying the “drinking veranda” while in the shadow of the local “drug blimp,” a device used to photograph the influx of illegal substances into the empire. We were safe; we were among the blimps, north of suspicion, in the center of the empire.
In the morning, barely able to focus, we resumed. The car ride to Bisbee was short and quiet. We traveled through sprawling prairie land, dotted with small cacti, under post snowstorm skies. Delcan was snapping pictures out the window along the way, as Melco and myself settled in to enjoy the ride. This is the land where Wyatt Earp once rode. This was once part of Mexico, until the empire purchased it.
After arriving in Bisbee, a town rich with subculture economics and early century architecture that clings to the very rock, Melco and I both had a shot of whiskey, and were back on track. Delcan breezed into the bar and began to take pictures of everything. Even in the freak land of Bisbee, Delcan stood out. In a crowd, he took on a sort of aura that removed him from any other motion. He was his own kinetic system. He was the force that was happening to the surroundings. He was the exception.
We hit the street, jarred to action by the whiskey, and started up a very steep, very long staircase. This led us to an isolated hilltop, which accommodated a garage made of corrugated tin. Gangland graffiti blazed from every inch of the structure, back dropped by the giant west, with its sky and cliffs. The odd silence lent itself to the surreal B-movie quality of the scene. The three of us cast long shadows on the dirt. It was here we met Alexandra, our guide to bigger business. Alexandra had thick, shiny, curly hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and two dogs, Zoe and Neb. She was all road. Faded this and worn-in that. Delcan fell in love. After all, she was an angel.
When we told her about our plans to produce a magazine that would chronicle the raw, true side of travel and adventure, and she listened carefully. She had the type of head that just digs anything worth trying. But angels like Alexandra are not easily reached; they are only breezing through.
Later, down on the main street, she made a donation to our cause. Melco and myself witnessed this as we looked up from the narrow Bisbee street. There, framed by old brick buildings and antique awnings, Alexandra discreetly handed Delcan a rolled up paper bag as he prattled on about how easy it is to “do your thing in the center of the empire.”
Once we were back on the road, we opened the bag she had given us. There they were. A little dried out, still intact, and unmistakably orange. Our evening was planned.
After a little preparation back at the physicians’ estate, we made our way into the Huachuca Mountains, an Apache word for Thunder. We made camp in a small valley. The area was thick with knee high yellow grass and juniper trees. The nearby ridges gave our location a sort of amphitheater quality.
We divided up our gift, and each of us enjoyed an ample handful of psilicyben. Remember John Dillinger? Remember how he set fire to the hotel and how pictures were taken? This is where our pictures were taken in our hour of desperate and hilarious madness.
The mushrooms came on gradually, during a short walk up the trail. At first it was a little light. Some laughter, babbling, unnecessary focus on rocks and leaves. But when the full ride took effect, the sights and sounds were not of this world.
The tip off came in the form of a lone mountain biker, who seemed to appear out of nowhere. He startled Delcan right off the trail, and prompted Melco to wave and shout, “Hey there!” as he rode by. I stood and watched him pass in silence, studying his head for signs of affiliation with the nearby army base. He in turn watched me with a look of tense apprehension on his face. He was out of sight as quickly as he came.
He was completely oblivious to the fact that he was our ambient messenger from reality. A final reminder that there is a planet, and there is a society, and soon all three of us would return to it. But for now, there was an incredibly fascinating cloud in the sky. It was lower than the other, darker clouds, and seemed to exist just to entertain us. The wind stretched and twisted the thin little clump of water vapor. It couldn’t have been more than sixty-three feet above our heads, and began to turn colors like teal green and maybe purple, but not quite. It was sort of becoming every shape and color at once.
Next, a herd of fleeing white-tailed deer startled us. Melco wanted photos, and so turned to Delcan and shouted, “Shoot ‘em!” This threw Delcan into a stunned fear, until he connected with the message, realizing Melco was talking of cameras, not rifles. Too late now.
By now, the heaviest part of our trip was approaching with the ferocity of a steamship. We sat right down on the trail, howling through a world that was colorful, liquid and scary. From my perspective, Melco Shank's head was perfectly defined against a backdrop that was cartoon in nature, and sliding in all directions. Delcans' laughter took on an elastic quality that seemed to start where it finished, and finish where it started. I remember moving down the trail, shouting, “We’ve got to get a fire going before the rams get to us!” I looked over my shoulder to see Melco and Delcan interacting with the cartoon landscape. Their voices were blending and re-arranging to create a sort of delay flanging effect. It looked from my point of view that I was leaving the scene of some terrible event, which meant no good to anyone or anything.
Soon we were back in camp. I was lying on my back, looking up at the clouds as they were forming into swirling shapes and crystalline clumps. Stray noises and wind-related sounds were following their motion. Delcan appeared standing over me. His bright orange jacket and bald head were stark against the vivid purple-blue sky as he starred at me through his horn-rimmed glasses. I remember saying, "Look at your head! I wish I had a camera!”
“You do!” he shouted, and then vanished and reappeared with a Nikon sm 4000. I snapped a few photos of him from the ground up, and he in return.
We were all settled in and things got quiet. The wind stopped twisting itself; the clouds spiraled silently above me. Delcan was standing up, looking over his shoulder. Melco rolled over and began investigating the trunk of a small bush. Just when everything was as quiet as it could possibly get, Melco broke it up with one statement.
“We’re trippin,” he declared.
The three of us, not regulars in these parts, had settled in for the introspection segment of our experience.
I was having episodes of fear, apprehension. What did I expect to find out? Are there really queer-nigger cops? Of course not. Were the mushrooms laced?
I sat up.
Instantly I was in a world enveloped by the repeating whoosh of my having sat up. I blurted out, “These are mushrooms!” To which Delcan replied, “Where!?”
“No, no.” I said. “ What we’ve eaten. Mushrooms?”
Melco rolled over, “Yes, these are mushrooms, and they last for four hours.”
I was satisfied with that. Of course they’re mushrooms. But Melco and I were ready to wrap it up.
Delcan had become madder than mad. He was purple. His jacket was orange. He was squatting over the fire and flapping his arms while he shrieked and whooped. He was the lunatic muse stoking the engine fires. And he was hard to miss as the sun was setting, creating a feel of impending end.
It was later that the effects of the mushrooms took a welcome exit. I remember looking over my shoulder at the sunset. I felt a light breeze on my face. It was a real breeze. I looked at Melco Shank. He was a real person. The hills beyond him looked real also, no longer that vivid-quick version of screaming yellow. We smiled.
The trip was over and we were okay. We had come out the other side and were, as Melco put it, “at a place now.”
I was happy to be able to notice things like the sky, the fire, all looking normally. By now, the drug blimp was rising into the air to monitor the fringes of the empire, and our camp had taken on the placid atmosphere of a cowboy trail song, cool and dusty, beneath a massive night sky. Delcan looked up to notice a star above us. The star was moving. He deduced that it was not a star, but a satellite. To this, he made a proclamation:
“Man, we don’t even have stars anymore, what the fuck are we doing? We have Fake stars!”
5
Boo Wiles showed up after the first issue of the magazine, which had on the cover a photo of Schuter’s grandfather, at age 16 in 1937, doing a handstand on a motorcycle while wearing a dress. This got the attention of Boo Wiles, and the two met shortly thereafter. There was a party on the night Boo arrived. He showed up just in time to meet Ryan, who had put on his roommate’s red, A-line dress. He had a pack of smokes in the small pocket located right on the front of the dress, and he was casually waving goodbye as he turned to walk home. Because of this, to Boo Wiles, Ryan Juke is a legend. And Boo Wiles isn’t wrong. Boo has the head of an engineer and the heart of a poet. He’ll tell you exaclty what he thinks and you’ll buy it, every time. He’s tall, lanky, and soft spoken, and there is nothing on earth that he wouldn’t love to try. His main focus is off-road racing, which is a bad read of his true persona. He’s a thinking man’s gear head, and his sense of grandure only offsets his stunning technical abilities. Luke and Boo hit it off immediately.
In the headiest days, Jaunt magazine was a high-speed, out-there reportage of authentically ill-planned hops. Melco threw parties at his Tempe home - built int he late 1920's - each one with its own brand of amped-up clownery. The centerpiece was always the magazine, and everyone made plans for the next cover while newcomers pitched story ideas that ranged from riding the Trans-Siberian railway to replacing bottle of rare wine, which could only be purchased in Budapest. Every one had copped on; they were ready to be deployed.
Meetings were held at bars, which is always a sign of hubris. But the beauty of the thing is that hubris was celebrated with the jaunt society. The entire idea was intended as a charicature, meant to lampoon the classic, pith-helmeted swagger masters of old. And if there is any kinship to those leather coated blow-hards, it can be found in the braggardly thump of today’s young travelers.
Heated debates would erupt between Luke and Melco, most of which were filled with excited laughter –each one animatedly beseeching one another. Bit once in a while, the two would get mean, their egos swelling up, nearly coming to blows.
Luke and Melco were discussing the nature of the next issue at Long Wong’s. They shared pitchers with Boo Wiles, who looked on with amusement as the two raised and lowered their voices, gulping their beers.
“We should star sending people abroad to get stories,” Luke suggested. “We can charge their round trip ticket, and the beer and ramen is up to them.” Melco countered.
“Why can’t we just write essays?,” he said. “I think it should be more like Atlantic Monthly.”
“We’re not Atlantic Monthly,” Boo muttered.
“That’s not what we’re doing,” Luke replied. “If we’re gonna be ‘Jaunty,’ we need to send people into the field.”
“Where would they go?” Melco asked.
“Into the great big world,” Luke said, becoming riled.
“I think a jaunt can be taken within a person’s head,” Melco countered, smugly.
Luke was becoming impatient, as he is known to do under these circumstances. Boo looked on.
“Besides, “ Melco continued, I don’t think we should run so many adventure stories.”
This was odd, because Jaunt –as the name implies –is an adventure magazine. Luke retorted.
“Well, we should get people into the field, or we’re bullshit.” Boo sat up, and made a suggestion.
“You should send me to South America,” he said. “I’ll fly in to Lima, Peru, and take busses and boats down to brazil, and I’ll end up at an overgrown American city in the middle of the jungle, called Fordlandia.”
When he pitched the idea, his tickets were as good as bought, and even Melco had to nod approval. He knew he needed to pitch it before they sobered up. But the tension between Luke and Melco had not subsided. Melco decided to pursue the debate with Luke, saying, “It’s not such a good thing to act so grandly. We should be more serious.”
Luke suggested that readers would see right through any attempt at false importance, and that they were best off taking a tounge-in-cheek tone.
“You know Melco, “ Luke said, “a point can be made without directly addressing the point.”
“Really,” Melco replied.
“Readers are smarter than you think,” Luke said. Melco shot back.
“Well, I disagree, and you’re wrong anyway.”
Luke stood up, lifted his beer mug, and whipped it at the wall. It shattered with a bang behind Melco’s head. Luke turned and walked home, out of general principle.
Melco and Boo sat stunned. Then they laughed. Then they howled and exalted the stunt as “fine form.” And it was. It was the most honest response Luke was capable of at the moment. And it had a slapstick quality to it, which may have given way to the theme of the Boo Wiles going away party two weeks later.
It was like a transformation. A complete lapse into big-headed delerium. It was perfect. They threw the party at Melco’s and each member of the jaunt Group dressed as 1920s adventurers. They had khaki pants and black sweaters. They smoked out of briar wood pipes. But the most important part of the evening was the artificial mustache requirement.
At Boo’s suggestion, the main event of the evening was to be a machete wielding contest. They laid out a course, hanging grapefruit in the trees with zip-ties. The object was to sprint through the back yard – lit by tiki torches – and hack at the fruit for time. Each guest participated. Some were disqualified for not wearing their mustache (a stringent regulation while on the course).
When Boo ran the course in under 23 seconds, it set the precedent. And it was fitting that the official attorney of Jaunt Magazine was the one disqualified for lack of mustache. He’d actually clocked in at 21.5 seconds, trumping Boo, but it was a legal loophole that did him in.
Next, Luke Schuter stood on the line, machete quivering eagerly.
START!
He ran like a fiend, hacking fruit like the wind, using back hand and up and under moves not seen since Errol Flynn swung from the yardarms, slicing the Spaniards with his cutlass. It was impressive. He cocked in at 21 seconds. Had Boo been deposed?
The judges returned from the course, conferring furtively. They walked up to a panting, grinning Luke, and presented him with an unscathed fruit. In his zeal, he’d missed an entire target. He was out. Boo was the champeen.
Luke was not finished. He lobbied wildly for a re-run of the course. And after little response from the crowd, ,he won his plea.
The crowd watched as he ran it again. Some cheered. Boo leaned against a post, enjoying a cleanly sliced grapefruit, with a casual look of security on his face. Luke clocked in at 23.7 seconds. The match was over, and Boo had won the day.
The event was dreamlike. It was a true read of the spirit if the magazine, and Boo’s departure for Peru the next day lent it credence.
As a climax, John Burg showed up late, clothed in a flowered dress and cowboy hat, on a low-rider bicycle. He jingled the handlebar bell, and the entire crowd cheered.
“Now then,” he said, leaping off the bike, which coasted to a crash. He was speaking in a loud, zany British Nobleman accent. “See here, we all know…” (He bent over, and broke wind for punctuation) “that old Boo wiles will soon DEPART!” (He looked quickly over his shoulder, and then back again, goose stepping toward the porch) “for FordlaaanDIA!”
The crowd whooped, and stray giggles burst from the women. He continued.
“And furthermore!” (He bent over, leaping finally to a hands-on-hips stance) “we should all regard this expedition with the utmost of pip and cheer WHAT!”
There was a round of applause from the crowd, and Boo Wiles took a golf club and began to dance like Fred Astair. John whipped around, and back again.
“We all knowwww……..that Boo is a goody good old chap!”
at this moment, some strangers wandered into the back yard, having heard there was a party. It was a pack of frat kids, each with a six-pack of honey brown in their hands. When they were presented with the image of Burg in his dress and Boo in his fake mustache, doing somersaults while Burg prattled on – the crowd giggling – they stopped. Then one of them spoke.
“Hmm, crazy people,” he said. They departed immediately.
Luke later presented Boo with a gift. It was a pelican case filled with emergency adventure gear. Burg named it “The go box.” They stenciled JAUNT across the front. Luke treated it like an awards ceremony, listing the contents, which included:
One lensatic compass
One signaling mirror
One small knife
20 feet of chord
Choptsticks
one profalactic
23 tablets of high-yield pain medication
three pieces of hard candy
One penlight
13 pesos
etc, etc.
It was the peak of the Jaunt Magazine era. Everyone came in for the big win. People they’d never met showed up and gulped wine, donning mustaches and wielding machetes. Even Melco Shank rounded out the evening by changing into a speedo and some cowboy boots with striped knee socks. In the following weeks, emails arrived from South America. it’s the modern equivalent of the telegram, and with each new message, Boo’s oddysey took shape as an epic adventure, filled with peril, froth and grandiose questing. The mission seemed to change almost daily, and his dispatches suggested a descent into madness. They started out normally:
JAUNT FIELD REPORT: Lima, Peru, 1/12/2001
13:37: Arrived Lima Peru at 5:43 a.m. Procured taxi to clubhouse of the South American Explorers club. Taxi driver rang bell, woke caretaker. Clubhouse hours are as follows: 9:30-17:00. Caretaker notably perturbed. Offered no assistance. Walked one block over, rented small room at Hostel. Boogers on wall by bed. Otherwise nice. Have made decision to pursue Fordlandia story..believe there is much to be had there. Ivestigating Brazillian visa problems. Expect to be in Lima until 1?14. Will communicate again tommorow.
Later, however, the tone changed.
JAUNT FIELD REPORT: LIMA, PERU 1/16/2001
Seriously hung over in Lima. Last night, I went to the corner café for dinner and ended up drinking several rounds with three Peruvian police officers. They were out of uniform, but showed me their badges and the .38 pistols tucked into their wastebands. Very nice: kept wanting me to speak English so they could learn it. I was supposed to meet them this morning for a soccer match, but that never materialized.
Other dispatches arrived, most only updates of travel arrangements: barges, aircraft with corpses in the cargo hold. Toward the end of the trip, each email was it’s own special gem, with little or no foothold in reality.
JAUNT FIELD REPORT: TORQUEJUNTA, BRAZIL, 2/14/2001
Tell the boys back at Hondo that after eating a barge load of beans, I am 100% back on track, and ready to deliver the grand slam…tell them that. I would scare you by divulging more of the parameters of the story, but that would be mean-spirited. Just one question..why have you sent that infernal Boo Wiles to follow me? Are you planning on letting him tell the tale of my misadventures? If so you are a deceitful gypsy. And to think they let you run a magazine.
Tell them that,
Boo Wiles
P.S. Fuck the double nickle.
Meanwhile, as Boo was wading hip-deep through mud-filled jungle situations, sending madhouse communiques from outposts, Luke and Melco were relegated to domestic duties. The magazine needed promotion, as well as revenue. In the spirit of the thing itself, they hopped a Greyhound bus on a convention tour, with the intent of gathering sponsors and putting Jaunt on the map. It was a far separation from the jungle, but they managed to make it count none the less. And in the end, as usual, it made a good story.
Sideshow Utah: a short story (Jaunt Magazine, Spring 2001)
By Luke Schuter
“They all talk real slick! They all get together and they talk real slick!”
It is 6 a.m. in Salt Lake City, and a black man in an expensive coat is shouting to an empty Temple Square.
“And they came down with all those niggers from Ohio!”
The word Ohio was exaggerated.
Melco Shank and I are here to take part in the Outdoor Retailers trade show at the Salt Palace. We avoided the $200 fee by signing up as journalists, and then pushing Jaunt Magazine on the unsuspecting glad-handers inside. Six hours earlier, we were in Las Vegas, trying unsuccessfully to become drunk. This fits. Las Vegas is the most pure presentation of the low end of America. Come on in. Do what you like. More, more, more.
Everyone in Las Vegas feels important just for being there, ,including us, which we acknowledge and deplore in the same sentence. We spent five hours on the strip, ,mucking through this glitter-glue dimension of fake money, cheap sex and mixed drinks.
It seems odd that Las Vegas has made an attempt at more of a family image in recent years, which is illustrated by the Baskin-Robbins next to the topless bar. It’s like a tacky, drug-addled relative, who no matter how hard she tries, just can’t seem to wear the right thing, or cover up her tattoos.
So, it was odd to roll into salt lake – a town noted for its veiled, rather than obvious wierdness, and be greeted by a traditionally crazy man shouting about slick-talkers from Ohio. A black man, for that matter, not half a block from the Temple, with its Angel Moroni shining brighter than the lady Luck Hotel and Casino.
The show went as planned. Seven hours of shaking hands and passing out business cards and media kits. The problem with trade shows is that everyone there is drunk on love, thrilled to talk to anybody. Calling the people you talked to a few days later is a little like “the morning after.”
Next, it was on to the taverns. Bars in Utah are not “walk ins.” One has to be a member to drink, and this requires a fee. Members may bring “guests,’ however.
Once we were made “guests” at Murphy’s bar in Temple Square, we were allowed to order. Before long, more trade show warriors wandered in. We all sat in this dark den, sharing drinks and jokes, carefully fielding questions from a mean-eyed local who looked like he might start throwing knuckles at any moment.
Later, we all spilled over to the Marriot Hotel Lounge, where we bought more rounds of limp Utah liquor and prattled on to a trio from Alabama, in town for the show as well. The leader’s name was Lee, and he looked it. All that was missing was a dusty gray coat, and a sword.
I remember buying him a Bailey’s and coke, and then saying, “Now listen here, Lee, let’s not slap each other’s asses. We’re publishers of adventure journalism and you sell adventure products. We’ll send you our magazine, and then we’ll talk.”
In my heightened state, I was attempting to relate to Lee, to speak good ol’ boy. He responded by flashing a cheese-ball tin star, which I told him had no jurisdiction in Utah, and that it was probably fake anyway.