Prick & Chuck have taken off from Portland in a WW1 Sopwith Camel fighter plane. How long can it last, how far can it go?
More to the point, how far can they go and last! No spoilers; you’ll have to listen!
Scottish left, pro-Indy, pro-LGBTIQA
Podcasts. Writing. Campaigns.
Please join us- help us create a new, fair media- https://ko-fi.com/ungagged
Where to find Left Ungagged…
Transcript
The Sopwith Camel, a glorious anachronism against the vast American sky, bucked and shuddered, an aerial bathtub defying gravity. Chuck, with the wide-eyed intensity of a man communing with the very spirit of flight (or perhaps just the lingering mescaline), was a terrifyingly enthusiastic pilot. “Feel it, Prick?” he bellowed over the roar of the engine, his face alight. “The freedom! The pure, unadulterated velocity of truth! Las Vegas, my friend! The heart of the beast, where the American Dream goes to… well, to die either as a residency or to figure out ways to cheat the penny falls machine!”
I clutched the Jameson bottle, a rather essential piece of navigation equipment in these trying times. The vast, green expanse of Oregon blurred beneath us, occasionally punctuated by sudden bursts of pure, hallucinatory colour. The pink bats were still very much with me, flitting through the clouds, occasionally joined by shimmering blue vampires carrying tiny banners that read “Vote Finnegan!” I took a long pull from the bottle, followed by a judicious chew of a little white pill. The vampires, mercifully, softened at the edges.
Our refuelling stops were, predictably, exercises in existential dread. Isolated gas stations, clinging to the edge of forgotten highways like desperate, toothless dogs. At one such desolate outpost somewhere in southern Oregon, Chuck, having just ingested a rather alarming quantity of what he called “desert winyan wakan capsules,” began declaiming to a bewildered attendant about his “imprisonment at the pump by capitalism’s chain of money sucking blackholes;” something about the tyranny of hydrocarbon-based economies and repeatedly shouting a slogan he’d seen on a french woman’s t-shirt, “Live without dead time – enjoy without chains!”The gum chewing, freckled stick insect stared and said gazing glaikidly, “You one of them comyoonists? Man, it’s only hard work that makes us free…” and he sat down chewing his tobacco to await another vehicle who might chance upon this God forsaken place today.
It was at these roadside oases that we encountered the true, desperate, almost sobering heart of this broken America. People living in cars, their vehicles stuffed with threadbare possessions, eyes vacant and hollow. Families, or what remained of them, shuffling between towns, their faces etched with a weariness that went beyond mere fatigue. They walked, heads down, sometimes pushing decrepit shopping trolleys, their bodies telling a tale of a society built on neglect and outright robbery, their lives a perpetual search for the next meal, the next odd job, the next moment of simple, quiet dignity.
“See them, Prick?” Chuck would murmur, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, his eyes wide and mournful. “They are capitalism’s dispossessed millions. The dream-weavers, turned to dust by the great corporate grinder! Living on the edge of the enclosures. Many steal and beg of course, not for malice, but for survival and many become inmates, driving a penal economy for billionaires. They are the poets of despair!” He’d then press a wad of campaign cash into their hands, with no flourish, before scrambling back into the cockpit.
Below us, as the Sopwith Camel chugged on towards the arid vastness, lay the sprawling, heartbreaking truth of the American Dream’s inverse. Not the manicured lawns and white picket fences of the suburbs, but vast, tattered archipelagos of canvas’d pallets and corrugated iron – the tent cities of the damned. From this altitude, they looked like open graves, open sores on the landscape of supposed prosperity. Here, in the very heart of the “land of the free,” were souls imprisoned with their nothing. No leg up from a diamond mine in Papa Musk’s portfolio. No inherited property empire like the Don, no trust fund to buy a Yale education, no family capital for a “disruptive” startup. Just zero. Nothing. No hope. Just the endless, grinding struggle to subsist, to beg, to steal a meagre existence, trapped in a visible, sprawling despair that America, in its relentless pursuit of progress, profit, tax savings, oligarchy, simply flew over, pretended wasn’t there, or worse, deemed an acceptable sacrifice.
One evening, as the sun bled orange and purple across the vast Californian sky, we touched down near a dusty, nameless truck stop. As I poured myself a generous gin, we stumbled upon a man huddled by a flickering fire, his face gaunt, his eyes holding a haunted intensity. He introduced himself simply as “Earl,” and claimed to be on the run.
“You wanna know about America?” Earl rasped, his voice raw. “Go inside. Not the hotels. Not the fancy bars. Go inside the walls. The prisons-for-profit. It’s a goddamn meat grinder. Yeah… You got your… racism, hatred of the poor, your medical neglect, your solitary for coughin’ too loud. They got no real rules other than control at all costs, man. And from all that misery, profit. They want you in there, and they want you to break. And they do it, by God. They do it.” He spoke of men driven mad by isolation, of casual brutality, of the systematic dehumanization of the incarcerated. His words, coupled with the swirling effects of the gin and the new batch of chewable uppers, painted a truly terrifying picture of America’s underbelly.
Chuck, listening intently, occasionally punctuated Earl’s grim monologue with a guttural “Fascism! It breeds in the dark places!” and a sudden, disquieting fit of evil giggles. He then launched into a passionate, if highly fragmented, sermon about how the prison industrial complex was merely another manifestation of the “Trump corporate boot” stamping on the “luminous human spirit.”
As the night wore on, the combination of flight, the fear, and prodigious chemical consumption began to take its toll. Chuck’s piloting became… creative. We’d swerve violently to avoid phantom squadrons of “corporate drones,” or dive dramatically to follow what he claimed were “spiritual energy currents.” My own perception of the Sopwith Camel’s internal structure began to fluctuate; at one point, the instrument panel seemed to melt into a vibrant, pulsing alien landscape, and the propeller sounded suspiciously like a choir of particularly angry chipmunks. I found myself laughing manically as we skirted a storm and, framed by lightning cracking the dark tempestuous clouds, Chuck wing-walked, shook his fists and yelled curses at Thor…
We descended like a very inebriated brick onto a dusty, cracked asphalt lot, a veritable graveyard of forgotten ambitions. Among the skeletal remains of rusted RVs and sun-bleached sedans, a small, meticulously kept car caught my eye, its windows surprisingly clean. A woman, sharp-eyed and weary, was sitting in the driver’s seat, meticulously mending a worn garment. Chuck immediately engaged. “Sister!” he boomed, “Tell us! Tell us of the injustices! The fascist algorithm that grinds down the soul!”
She fixed him with a look that was both amused and profoundly tired. “Injustices? Honey, where do you want me to start? This whole system’s built on it. You breathe in this ‘free air,’ you still get choked by the same old dust: racism in every dollar, misogyny in every law, anti-LGBT hate woven into the very flag. War on every balance sheet. They talk about the ‘land of opportunity,’ but for folks like me, it’s the land of ‘another brick in the wall.’ Ain’t no ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ when they keep steppin’ on your fingers, trying to pull your feet out from under you. It’s baked in, baby. From the jail cell to the job interview, from the ballot box to the bedroom. It’s designed to keep most of us down, so whitey can go to Mars.” Her voice, low and resonant, carried the weight of generations, a sobering counterpoint to Chuck’s psychedelic optimism and my own gin-soaked reportage.
We finally, miraculously, brought the old bird down in the outskirts of Sacramento. The sun was just peeking over the horizon, painting the urban sprawl in a sickly yellow light. We found a secluded spot near what appeared to be an abandoned industrial park, the Camel looking utterly out of place amidst the graffiti-covered warehouses. Chuck, upon landing, immediately declared himself the “Emperor of the Sacramento Delta” and attempted to negotiate with a particularly stubborn apparition. I merely poured another generous measure of Jameson. Sacramento. One step closer to Las Vegas, which was a couple of steps from Florida… One terrifying, glorious, utterly bewildering step closer to the heart of the dream… or its necrotic, blue rinsed remains.
