Red Sugar

Cave Music—Comet, Montana

Cave Music—Comet, Montana Jessie lives in a homemade shack of tires and stones and car parts. She rigged a way to catch water running down the mountain— I just want to be off the grid, she says. She’s got a master’s from NYU and grey hair that hasn’t been cut for years, almost a full-grown mustache. She takes me to her studio, filled with peaceful ocean paintings: I’ve been workin on these a while. James makes models of ghost towns for a living: I saw the blue orbs again, they follow me in pictures, I know they’re the manifestation of god, I know from the time I saved a woman and her child in the terrible car crash and the light from the sky showed me where she was, and I bent the car door to get to the baby & the blue fish is everywhere now, alerting me to my next mission. When Hendrix heard the cave music, he said: We plan for our sound to go inside the soul of the person, actually, and see if they can awaken some kind of thing 29 BeattyPGS:Layout 1 2/5/08 8:28 PM Page 29 in their mind, cause there are so many sleeping people. Last night I walked through town and the eerie glow of the Gold Nugget Bar scared me like few things have. Uranus retrograde for the next 6 months says the air is unstable and I’m hanging like a sheet in the wind, feeling lost, the static when no one is speaking your thoughts. Out here, they say, don’t cross any fences. 20 miles from the Continental Divide, you can go to the hot springs in Boulder for primal scream therapy or down into the radon mines for healing the bones. Where do you go when the tiny dog has no answer for you? When the lavender house cannot save you? Calvin says the radon in the mines really heals people, he and his friends emptied a house full of wheelchairs and crutches after people were cured: If you go into the mines and you’re healthy, you’ll get cancer, but if you go in when you have cancer, the radon will balance it and rid your body of it. Everybody knows it’s a big government conspiracy to keep the medical profession going. Melinda in the Patriot bookstore was happy to see me: 30 BeattyPGS:Layout 1 2/5/08 8:28 PM Page 30 It gets so lonely here, I can have a whole day with no customers. She showed me her handmade cards, really lovely, with photographs of wildflowers. She talked about her husband, how he got her to join the militia: At first I didn’t agree with all of it, but after I read a few books, I started to see that we really are being controlled by the Jews owning the banks and all. At the cafe, I love Effie the waitress, how she lets old Carl stay in the shack behind the house in return for fixing things that don’t need fixing, her stillpumped sixty-year-old arms, she never asks, just pours my coffee, says How ya doin honey, I find out she hates her gay son, disowned him, should I hate her now? What song do we want to sing? When Hendrix closed down Woodstock with the national anthem, the world became a better place. Hendrix and his Band of Gypsies— like he said, We play it the way the air is in America today. The air is slightly static, isn’t it? 31 BeattyPGS:Layout 1 2/5/08 8:28 PM Page 31 BeattyPGS:Layout 1 2/5/08 8:28 PM Page 32 ...