I was standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona, etc., and such a fine sight to see, Death Cab For Cutie, slowin' down to take a look at me. Reason tells me to gun it and get out of town without further delay. I don't.
Poker Alice Tritter lives in Winslow just above the 24th Street drainage basin in a house full of cats who have obviously lost their GPS coordinates on the litter box. The fridge shut down a week earlier and Alice has yet to attend to the rot and decay. I stop because I'm told she welcomes guests who smoke cigars and that she rolls her own from a tobacco cultivated in the rocky outcrop behind her Guatemalan guest house. She claims they are Cuban stock from seeds given to her by Fidel Castro in the Sierra Madre in 1954. She was running a bordello for the Cuban revolutionaries and claims to have acted at as a field nurse during the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Who wouldn't want to meet this lady.
I pull up after dark, traverse a rickety pedestrian bridge over an ancient, dry Hopi-built canal and hike up the slope to her guest house where I've arranged a night's stay through a friend who's familiar with peyote and Poker Alice, usually at the same time or in close order.
Alice meets me at the door with a mostly toothless grin and a wet-lipped cigar which she offers and I decline. A plate of tamales, rice and beans is proffered but I'm not that hungry and I wonder if the cat hides I saw pinned to the exterior also inhabit the tamales in carcass format. I do accept the fuzzy little peyote bud she offers and nibble away at the foul tasting hallucinogen.
NEXT: Poker Alice gets prettier and I commune with Carlos Casteneda.
No comments:
Post a Comment