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Motel Nirvana
Melanie McGrath
Now available in ebook format. ‘Motel Nirvana’ is Melanie McGrath’s first published book.A book about the New Age movement and its American heartland. It concerns the author's travels around the south-western United States of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, and her encounters with some of that region's most unusual communities and individuals.‘Motel Nirvana’ won the 1996 John Llewellyn Rhys ‘Mail on Sunday’ prize for the best new British writer under 35.
MELANIE McGRATH
Motel Nirvana
Dreaming of the New Age in the American Desert
Dedication (#ulink_3030a41c-be64-50f2-80a7-c0c8aa8f32bc)
For Paul and my mother, Margaret
Epigraph (#ulink_f70545eb-7ab1-5909-a2ca-640089d3fe94)
‘What do I know of life?
What of myself?
I know not even my own
work past or present;
Dim ever-shifting guesses
of it spread before me,
Of newer better worlds,
their mighty parturition
Mocking, perplexing me.’
WALT WHITMAN,
‘On the Last Thoughts
of Columbus’
Contents
Cover (#u887e23f2-83b6-5fea-992d-f92f29c11822)
Title Page (#u6c8f08d6-ec4a-5631-b287-6c0da15e83c2)
Dedication (#ua3cf8abc-6cfc-54c5-8f11-919bdfc957c6)
Epigraph (#u7d6dbf46-ac8f-55f1-8e5e-00cc21d7f598)
Prophets (#uec7f4ae2-8a63-509e-abbb-3629e90c2acf)
Heading West (#u15371aaa-c1a3-54d4-b508-00362ec73970)
Getting Off (#uad8b4b58-9e02-527a-9116-25aad71ed1cc)
There’s a Seeker Born Every Minute (#u64de7fde-8133-5fb2-8d88-869f0f6c4169)
Highway 666 (#litres_trial_promo)
Postcard Home (#litres_trial_promo)
God’s Country (#litres_trial_promo)
The Grander Purpose (#litres_trial_promo)
Two Cities (#litres_trial_promo)
Standing People (#litres_trial_promo)
The Death Cult (#litres_trial_promo)
La Jornada (#litres_trial_promo)
The Firm (#litres_trial_promo)
Motels (#litres_trial_promo)
Love Junky (#litres_trial_promo)
Driving (#litres_trial_promo)
White Light, Greenbacks and Redskins (#litres_trial_promo)
Prozac Dreaming (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prophets (#ulink_1c31eb9a-9e22-567b-be1d-27fd6fc3a855)
‘Eat your way to consciousness’
Advert in Magical Blend magazine
DAY ONE
One afternoon in late April last year, sitting on a bed in the second cheapest motel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, staring at the TV and waiting for something important to happen. A welcome-pamphlet lies open on the floor, turned to the page on altitude sickness and a small gold box with its wrapper printed ‘The Ark Bookstore, Romero St,’ squats by the remote control and digs into a toenail. Outside the high, empty air of a north New Mexico spring loiters in the parking lot and, beyond the lot, an idle slipstream of traffic waits for the lights on Cerillos Road before heading south into a thousand thousand square miles of New Mexico desert.
On one of the network channels Geraldo Rivera is quizzing a panel of prepubescent urban terrorists, closing for the commercial break with a hook: ‘What kind of society are we living in today? We’ll be right back with the answer.’ A web of contradictory signals baffles the screen, then surrenders to a Lexus ad. In among the static lies the insubstantial reflection of a woman with hair cut short as Irish moss. The inconstant lines about the mouth and the restive expression of the lips are set in, but the eyes, same dirty blue as the screen, appear unsettled, no more than holes. Those eyes I followed in the rear-view mirror half the way across the state of Texas. They seemed to me more solid then. Perhaps it was just that the light was different.
The border between Texas and New Mexico happens to be where the American West truly begins. All but the southern tip of western Texas belongs to the great plain lands, in geography as well as in spirit. The region still seems raw and new, without past or future, defined only by its current usage. For hundreds of miles across the Texas Panhandle only the monstrous panorama of derricks pumping crude disturbs the tepid sky. Beneath them lies the rich green Texan turf, metaphor for Texan style – brash, resilient, thrusting. In western Texas the air bears the odours of cattle shit and oil and the distant horizon appears as a glittering mineral line levitating just above the highway.
By contrast, all but the most northerly region of New Mexico is old and frail, a jumble of crepey rock and thinning, age-stained soil. Heading west, beyond Amarillo, TX, brittled turf gives out to bunch grass and yucca. The first blue mesas bubble the plain at Clovis, on the New Mexico border. All across eastern New Mexico the range stretches out vast and undulant to the curve of the earth, still open in places and the soil baked dun with red swatches between, like shortbread fingers laid out on a plate of ripened beef. This is where the magical palette of the south-west begins. Further west still the rivers dry up into arroyos, sagebrush replaces bunch grass and the tarry, fecund aroma of creosote bush competes with the smell of sage.
New Mexico towns are less ambitious than Texan towns; poorer too, by and large. Many consist in nothing more than a few mobile homes, a gas station and a single, neglected store selling liquor and animal feed. Maybe there will be a small polymall, laid out in horseshoe shape around a parking lot, with a Philips 76, a Bashas, a frozen yoghurt kiosk and a Radio Shack. Unlike the Panhandle, though, New Mexico is well-travelled. Along every main highway plantations of fast food joints and rest areas and cheap motels have sprung up. Every so often you drive by a WalMart or some other hyperstore strapped to the plain like a torah.
The southwest, and more specifically New Mexico state, is the place all America goes to find itself, just as it found itself in California thirty years before. Empty, yet historically rich, materially poor (forty-seventh poorest state in the Union) and thus apparently spiritually uncompromised, New Mexico has found itself become the baptismal font of secular and humanist America. Santa Fe, the City of the Holy Faith, is its focal point. Visitors and settlers congregate in Santa Fe to indulge in that peculiarly American pastime – working on the self. The deeper America’s spiritual crisis gets, the more spiritual self-improvement is deemed necessary and the more money and visitors fetch up in Santa Fe.
A greater number of American people believe in extra-sensory perception than believe in the existence of hell. Rolfing, rebirthing and psychic surgery are now more widely practised than rhinoplasty or liposuction. And even though most Americans would like to think of themselves as Christians, there are more alien abductions reported every year than sightings of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. I read as much in an article, and found it easy to believe. In fact, on the strength of the article’s two assertions – more people believe in esp than in hell, and more Americans are abducted by aliens than are visited by the Virgin Mary – I took a plane to Texas and bought a wretched car and drove seven hundred miles to Santa Fe. There was something about the New Age that fitted into the American story, somewhere, or so I thought. And that, in brief, is why I am sitting watching TV in a cheap motel and waiting for something important to happen. I have with me a copy of The Aquarian Conspiracy, as yet unread, a gold card box, a guidebook to New Mexico and a hunch that whatever I find will tell me something about what is happening at the end of the century in which America finally became too big for itself.
Inside the gold box is a collection of cards and an instruction booklet. The booklet invites its reader to pick a card at random from the God Insight Box and connect to the eternal unity through the principle of synchronicity. Baking soda brings teeth up whiter than any ordinary toothpaste, adds a woman on the network channel. I close my eyes and pick a card:
As Above, So Below.
As Within, So Without.
Everything I see
is a Reflection of Me.
A rose bush taps on the window outside, sending an iridescent hummingbird spinning briefly above it before disappearing from view. Already the sluggish heat of the afternoon has passed, and in its place breathes an easy wind. The sky’s so cataracted with dust-filled clouds I can no longer see the sun. Maybe there will be some rain, but most likely it will not rain again until late July or August, when the late summer thunderstorms begin. I am considering naming the tin-can Chevy ‘Caboose’ from part of a line in a country song. Sums up a distant kind of affection, that word, and I don’t like to get too sentimental about cars. Sentimentality is something I avoid.
In the bathroom swigging Pepto-Bismol from the bottle it occurs to me that the insight card has got it wrong. It’s just not true that everything I see is a reflection of me, only the way I see it. The ghoul-face with its inconstant mouth grins modestly back from the bathroom tiles in cubist manner.
Back on the network Geraldo is being shown how to kick box by a Crips girl. I lean over for the remote, sending the gold box sliding off the bed and ejecting a ‘Don’t worry, Be Happy’ card with a smiley face printed around the text. The moment I see that smiley face I know I want my money back.
‘Hello, this is The Ark bookstore?’ says a man’s voice in uncertain tone.
‘I’m calling from a pay phone,’ I reply. I don’t know why I say this, but I often do, even when I’m not. ‘I came in earlier and bought a God Insight Box?’
‘Uh, huh,’ acknowledges the voice.
‘I’d like to change it.’
No answer.
‘I don’t know, it’s something about the insights. They don’t feel very deep to me. I thought they’d be deeper.’
‘Oh,’ says the voice. ‘Okey doke. No problem. Just swing by.’
A thin young woman sits cross-legged at the entrance of The Ark flicking through a picture postcard book of celestial beings. Next to her stands a man, about twenty, turning a gold loop around in his ear.
‘Angels?’ I ask as an opening gambit, pointing towards the book.
The man nods.
‘Uh-huh, I did a thesis. Healing studies,’ replies the young woman, returning to her pictures. The man reads my confusion and says ‘Cool,’ as both a confirmation and an expression of general amiability.
‘The thing about healing’, I volunteer, responding to the signal, ‘is it never seems to end. I mean, I never met anyone who was actually healed.’
‘Yeah, right,’ replies the woman, ‘I think I read a book about that.’ She tips her head to one side and gazes at me with an arch little smile.
‘English?’
I nod.
‘I went to Avebury once …’
The man with the gold hoop, who is oscillating awkwardly in and out of this conversation, introduces his friend as Nancy and himself as Walker, ‘ex-pro-surfer, ex-Angelino, currently member of Mobillus Trip’.
‘That a band?’ I ask. Walker, who does not seem at first acquaintance to be a man of great intellectual fluidity, glances down at his friend for reassurance, but, seeing she has already returned to her picture book, he takes stock and thinks for a few seconds, twirling the loop in its tunnel.
‘Hard-core funk rap psychedelic, with some West Coast hip-hop influences, uh, but we’re kinda dropping those.’
The skinny woman shakes her hair, looks up, ignoring the conversational diversion; ‘I had this dissertation to do on crop circles? I went to Avebury? And it was cool? I saw these things, like black butterflies hovering above the stones? And, like, I just knew that they were in touch with my higher self? It was like through the third eye?’ She taps her forehead.
I recall a newspaper article I had read some time before which had speculated that some of the stones would be removed to make way for a new road and relaid on a green site outside the town.
‘Wow.’ She wrinkles her brow. ‘You know, the Goddess is real strong there, I don’t think they would be allowed to do that. In Avebury, the Goddess is all over the place.’
‘Perhaps I was mistaken.’ I begin a retreat towards the centre of the store.
‘Hey,’ says the woman, tearing a corner from the book and scribbling something on it, ‘Here’s our number. Call.’
In a large aviary opposite the astrology section are stationed a dozen half-bald canary birds perched mute on dowelling rods. A series of Tibetan wind chimes moves in draughts, and behind a blonde wood counter at the back a woman wearing unbleached drawstring pants fiddles with a volume knob to adjust the level of whale song in the background. Another woman with a birthmark sits cross-legged on the floor behind the counter polishing a didgeridoo with a can of Pledge, but there is no sign of the man I might have spoken to on the telephone. A spirit of unease prowls around The Ark, due in part to its interior décor – an emulation of a home improvement catalogue circa 1972, with softly padded armchairs and cushions reeking of patchouli grouped around an Afghan rug – and in part to some ambience more mysterious. The customers, wary as beaten dogs, cling to the sides of the room, making occasional nervous sorties out from palmistry to crystals across a no man’s land of bean-bags. I make for the woman with the unbleached pants, and am attempting a precise explanation as to why the insights in the gold box are a little short of satisfactory, when my stomach gives an unexpected, vertiginous heave and sends a fragment of taco chip topspinning out onto the stripped wood floor.
‘Altitude sickness,’ I shrug.
The cashier shakes her head.
‘I don’t think we can change that Insight Box, now, ma’am,’ she says, as if the taco chip had automatically divested me of all consumer rights, ‘because you’ve already benefited from the Insights. You wouldn’t take a bottle of Tylenol back after your headache was all gone,’ she smiles indulgently, ‘I can recommend a few things for the altitude sickness, though.’ Altitude sickness is pronounced “Altitude sickness” and finished off with a small cough.
Ten minutes later I’ve agreed to purchase an African fetish (vegetarian camel tail-hair), two shards of crystal quartz in different good karma colours, four sticks of Bophuthatswana sandal-wood incense, a Hopi dream-catcher, a subliminal Higher Consciousness tape and a book promising to reveal what my personal task will be ‘in the glorious New Age, as we rapidly approach the “End Times” and the start of a new awakening for all of humankind’.
‘Where are you headed?’ asks the cashier, counting up the value of my purchases.
‘Los Angeles?’ I have no idea.
‘Oh, I went once,’ leaning forward and curling her hand around her mouth, ‘The entire city smelt of faeces.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s a long drive anyway,’ I reply, disheartened.
