Desperado rock and roll songs were written there by whichever dope burnout was still awake or alive. They all went up there and got naked, ate acid, howled at the moon, and then killed themselves. It's some kind of bent spiritual rule; at Joshua Tree, everything goes. And it had gotten weirder.
When Robin and I pulled the rebuilt little Triumph into the lot at Heartbreak Hotel, we knew we were near the Twilight Zone. For one thing, the light in the sky was different.
It was a deep blood sunset and the puny clouds were sailing across the sky fast, fast. There was only one other car, a seldom seen Von
Tripp Porsche (the one with the P-38 engine, too), with a few bullet holes and a light coat of road dust. The license plate said "REBEL." It didn't exactly take Einstein to figure out whose car it might be.
We checked in the hotel with this geezer who had an Adam's apple out to here.
He made a big fuss over Robin.
Our room was clean and spare. King-size bed, a dresser, two night tables, two chairs, and a picture of a cow with five legs. I thought I was seeing things, but we counted them. I told you this place was weird. There were plenty of fluffy towels in the bathroom, and one of those old shower heads that would be like Niagara Falls. Oddly, the tile floor wasn't cold. I liked that. I went back out into the room and gave my honey a great big old hug. I don't mind telling you, we were feeling pretty spiny back then. That was before we knew what was going on.
I pulled open the curtains. One wall was a glass sliding door which looked out on a small swimming pool which was empty. There were a few chairs around it in the deepening dusk. There was somebody in one of them. Smoking a cigarette. I looked at Robin, she looked at me. We took a big breath, pulled up our socks, and went out to our destiny.
Los Angeles County Paramedic unit #5837 took the two automobile accident victims from their disabled vehicle to the emergency department of Our Lady of Light Hospital in North Hollywood on Van Ness. The time was 3:34 A.M. One victim was identified as Robin Lamoureaux, 51, a Caucasian female who had a possible punctured spleen, broken clavicle and scapula, possible rib damage, compound fractures of the right femur. Her blood pressure was 80/50. She was secured to a gurney after first aid was completed, and placed in the mobile unit. The second victim was an unidentified male Caucasian, approximate age 35, who exhibited no vital signs upon our arrival at the scene of the accident Whereupon we performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with no visible results.
Whereupon we performed cardiovascular electro-shock. The victim responded with a measurable heartbeat. The victim had apparent kidney damage, chest cavity damage with probable lung involvement, lacerations about the torso and left arm. Further, both his right and left femurs were fractured, along with the right tibia. He was secured to a gurney after first aid was completed and placed in the mobile unit, Time in transit from Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Croft to the emergency department of Our Lady of Light Hospital was 6 minutes and 39 seconds.
I should have suspected this was going to be different from anything I had ever done or imagined. But I was so stoked with the possibilities of it au, I never really got it. Dean turned out to be just about the most incredible human being I had ever met. Robin thought so, too.
When we walked out of our room, up by the empty pool that evening, it was damn near dark. Just a thread of crimson snaked along Joshua Tree's horizon. But it was enough to see Dean's face. He hadn't changed, yet he'd changed completely.
He had grown into the years in a way that research doctors should take a break from cancer and study this. It's more important. Because, somehow (and don't think I'm nuts until you see his movie Hells Gate, okay?) Jimmy Dean had finally conquered time. He'd turned the pain and sadness in his life to a kind of glory. He'd gone from a suffering kid and BANG, here he was with Bogart eyes, between 35 and 55, I guess-who could tell?-and a face that still held both sadness and joy in it, a punim that was still so hot it would give a corpse a railer.
He flipped his cigarette butt out into the desert darkness and got up, stiffly. "Hi," was all he said with that little grin that broke your heart. In my whole life, I never identified with a person so quick or was so shook about it. Robin was blown away, too, I could tell.
We sat out there under a billion trillion stars until dawn. It was like swimming in a river of light as we talked about being alive, about being kids, being rebels, being nowhere, being driven, being talented, being famous, about being dead. I think all three of us-I know I did-said things that night we had never said to a living soul before.
We talked until the three of us became one person. And that one person became a force. It didn't even look like the network could stop it. Because out there in the magic, three lost artists found an ammo dump, a hundred-ton tank named
Crusaders in Low, and they found each other. This is too rare and I can't really talk about all the things that happened that night. Mostly because I still don't understand them. Like the part where Jimmy said we hadn't been completely wrong when we thought he was "dead." Is this weird or what?
When we came back to earth, we drove to L.A. The network Was skinning it back into overdrive for us. Everything was geared around our show. Like if one of their half-hour pilots came in looking good, it was "where do we put this in relationship to Crusaders'?" We had calls from every agency in town; our clients want to help, they want to be involved, they'll do anything. It was like we had woke up one morning and become Steve Spielberg or something. In that way, Andy Warhol is right. Even though I wouldn't let him paint my garage.
There was only one little problem. The network over the last ten years had sort of flamed out. It was a combination of bad luck, mismanagement, and the generic stupidity that goes with a business that keeps on thinking its customers are mostly brain-damaged children. The network had developed some real shit. Nutty s Buddies, The Orgone Exchange, Hell on Mars, Camp Waminatanisna, and that bondage show, I forgot the name of it. Stuff like these plus that series on the insurance business, and then, the Roller-ball League collapses on them; Bo, they were sucking canal water.
So, last year-hell, you read about it-that Okie corporate raider, Lefty Armbruster, came in with the cavalry and took over the place. Heads rolled (how Buddy Wickwire ever survived is a major miracle), deals were amputated, and budgets were gone over with a fine-tooth chain saw. Overnight, everything got cheap.
And our little problem was that the numbers dorks in Production had told us "no way." They'd done boards, projections, computer models, the whole nine yards. The bottom line was that evidently the United States Government hadn't printed enough money since the Second Continental Congress to pay for our show. Which was not only a problem for us. See, now, in the public's mind, the entire future of the network was tied into it. Everybody was calling Crusaders In Love the end of darkness or the saving stroke or the long-awaited dawn, or I don't know what-all.
Which put the numbers guys in kind of a bad place. Which only made us feel tougher. Which only made the situation harder.
Lefty Armbruster even looked like a corporate raider. He wore a two thousand-dollar English suit, shaved his head, and had an eyepatch of blue velvet. He wore snakeskin boots, and his little gold cufflinks had the name of his take-over company, "666," on them in diamonds. The guy was heat, no question. He drove to the meeting at Reed Savage's house on Tower Drive on his motorcycle, a black BMW 1000. Whew.
"Boys, I'll tell ya," he started. "We can do this one of two ways. The first is the smart way: we take and whittle this overblown battlewagon down to destroyer size, lean and mean, and then, the network will make your series."