Counting the steps up and down: Up it is six and then a plateau, then eighteen more. I have arrived at the Armadillo bar. Three TVs have a sports show Around The Horn. A social poker game on my left, some casual talk about WMD deception.
Liz arrives and we talk about her sons visiting Europe or, as her email says, “zigzagging between Denmark and London.” I flash back to a strange dream last night where I was at a train or subway stop. This time I was not trapped atop the train or confused by mysterious transfers from point A to Z then an escalator, maybe a boat or ferry to an empty station. Just a regular subway with layers and layers going deeper and deeper underground in a journey that appears to have some internal logic. Down to the train to some destination I forget where. There was this head on a plank, singing baritone, a well-rounded voice singing familiar melodies. Train stations attract these freaks, genuine as well as cons, who have open hands and desperation. On carts, legless. Getting on the train, like in South Korea, blind, stumbling through the train, bumping into crowded passengers, playing beaten-up accordions and moaning close to tune. Train stations attract them. They are banned from train stations in North Korea.
Train Man looked like a train and maybe a little like Captain Beefheart. He had a banded top hat like a smokestack and tuxedo tails that extended on a wheeled plank behind him. His voice was plaintive and engaging, but nobody could look at him. He was just too far beyond hope to beg, even at a train station, just a singing head, a tux, and a plank.
And some screw-mounted ball-bearing wheels.
The TV flashed to Mount Rushmore. Liz asked if I’d ever been there. Yes, I remember, it was just like it looked in North By Northwest. There were binoculars you’d put a dime in and see the sculpted rocks for about a minute. Getting there was all the fun.
We got there in an old Ford. Sister Bubbles and Sister Ruth rode with me in the back seat while my brother watched the farm. On the way, we went to Minnesota and saw some distant relative who had tuberculosis. His daughters entertained us after the grownups went to bed by telling us ghostly stories of the wire-killer. He murdered his victims, cut them apart, and then wired their limbs back together like they were dime store marionettes. I did not sleep that night, lest he might creep up on me. They didn't do things like that in Ohio.
As the journey into darkness continued, we listened to The Weavers on the radio, singing Irene good night, Irene, Irene good night, good night Irene, good night Irene, I'll see you in my dreams. We stayed at Triple-A certified motels carefully selected by my mother from a well-thumbed pulp booklet. When we got into The Badlands, my mother said it was “a desert.” I’d seen enough desert movies by then that I realized I was supposed to be thirsty. Little drops of water excruciatingly squeezed from a nearly empty canteen. I drank so much water that we had to stop for me to pee alongside the road. It was just dirt, not endless little grains of sand like in King Solomon's Mines. When they got tired of stopping, they made me pee into my Dad’s empty Prince Albert tobacco cans, which would overflow before I could stop. Eventually, we made it out of The Badlands.
After Mount Rushmore, we saw the beginnings of the Chief Crazy Horse Memorial, which still isn’t finished.
When I left the Armadillo tonight, I went out the back way. There are seventeen steps down and then a plateau, then seven steps down to earth. It equals twenty-four, like blackbirds in a pie, just like the total ascending, twice as many steps as in a 12-step recovery. I don't remember anything about the trip back from Mount Rushmore. Maybe that's good.
7:57:19 PM 
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