Hey kids, I'm coming out of my intermittent hermithood to let you know I sent off a possible Gabbo submission to your email, if you want it and it's not too late. Would talk more and attempt something witty and/or loquacious, but am supposed to be getting into a hot car in about 15 minutes for a whirlwind trip up, up over the mountains and back to the burnt landscape I once called home ie. Central California. Yeah.

 
My Rushmore summer is winding down to an end . . .
I'm back from another day making pizzas and grilling burgers at the snack bar and am too tired to put the effort into writing that I'd like.
Yesterday some of my teachers from LaCreole Middle School and the pastor of the Dallas Lutheren Church (who's daughter has been in my classes since kindergarten) stopped by the Freedom Grill on their way back to Oregon after digging the Sturgis Motercycle Ralley. We ate lunch together and somehow had a decent conversation, even though I haven't talked to any of them in years. I don't even remember what we talked about, but I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. oh! I did find out that Mr. Schaffer, my old art teacher, sweats when he eats pepper. To any Dallas kids reading this: also in attendence were Mr. Buckingham (who taught computers) and Mr. Lyle (who I never had, but he acted like he knew me anyway) and Dave Pederson. To Kerianne Pederson: it's doubtful that you are reading this, but just in case, I saw what your dad bought you from mount rushmore, though I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a secret or not, so I won't tell you.
That night we dyed Erin's hair, and she used the leftover dye to temporarially tatoo a lightning bolt to my left arm.
Starting tomorrow everyone starts leaving.

 
Yesterday I went to a bloodmobile
part of me was packaged up into a cooler and what was left wore a neon green bandage back to work.
I felt slightly swaying and sluggish and the forigen kids I work with gasped at my voluntary wound. Christina from Russia asked me, "what did Erin think?" and I looked at her blankly. "Eh-rine," she repeated, clarifying the name and making it soft. It sounds at that moment not like my name at all, but like how I feel waiting for her in the hallway, smelling her shampoo and listening to her hum quietly to herself behind the dorm room door.
But what did she think? About me giving blood?
"Did she say, 'oh, you are a hero?'" Christina asks, as if that's what she would do.
But Erin has been pumped more times than she can remember and fondly recalls visits to blood and plasma donation centers -- according to Erin plasma is more fun to give since they let you watch a movie because it takes longer, and they pay you, and you don't have to wait a month to give again, because plasma regenerates faster. She and her friends at college in Minneapolis used to go in groups.
We were going to go in a group, too. Me, Erin and Felicia, a spritely little girl with a boy's haircut and thin glasses (also a medical student) from Romania, all met mid-afternoon at the bloodmoblie parked close to the Mt. Rushmore Grand View Terrace and sat scrunched together on the seat bulit into the wall of the bus, reading their literature about SARS and AIDS the West Nile Virus. Not far from us other Rushmore employees were lying down with needles stuck in their arms, squeezing minerature toy bloodmobiles to pump the blood from their viens through a tube and into plastic bags hooked to the side of their beds. Erin had been waiting for us for 20 minutes, but let Felicia go first. One of the labcoated attendants brought her into one of two tiny rooms with just a computer and two chairs for the screening process. Then Erin got called into the second room and I was left alone with the brochures I didn't really feel like reading. Feli came out a few minutes later, rejected. "They didn't need my blood type," she told me. But when I went in for the interview no one asked about my blood type, and I found out later that they didn't want her blood because of her nationality. Her home town is Transylvania.

 
It's way too early in the morning, but I don't work until 3:00 pm, so I have time. Tomorrow is the single biggest day of the season at Rushmore. There will be fireworks and live music and lots and lots of security with guns. The last few days not just the memorial, but the entire city has been pretty vacant. Tomorrow it is supposed to explode and there will be so many people coming here that traffic coming up the hill will be at a virtual stand-still.
As I ate in a near-deserted resturant in Keystone today I found that hard to believe. But I guess it's happening right now, people queueing up their cars, etc. etc. As for me I spent the night and early morning with kids from Slovackia, Colombia, Romania and the UK playing cards, discussing Bush and war and then talking about music and serial filmmaking as music videos played in the background. Also, I got quarters today, so I finally did my laundry. Gotta look sharp for the endless lines that are foretold for tomorrow. I'll let you all know how it turns out later. I have too many accents floating around in my head right now to know which voice is my own.

 
Chris Dione's Jeep on the way home from Rapid City and the sky is just past dusky. DJ is riding shotgun with a bag of Carmel apple suckers and me and Chris Martin sit in the back seat, which is divided by a fishing pole. The other Chris is driving and holds a glowing cigarette out the rolled-down window, taking periodic deep, staccato puffs. On the stereo is Dashboard Confessional unplugged, and I think back to California where everyone's already burned out and turned against Dashboard but on the recording the whole audience sings along.
But I'm not in California now. Chris bought the CD unashamed at wal-mart tonight and owns up to liking artists like Shakira and Vitamin C as well and he's at least 26 and has a still-fresh Deadhead tattoo.
Outside fastfood buildings pass by, silhouetted in the deep blue-green of the night and I spot the shadows of two fastfood kids hanging out in the parking lot of an unlit Taco John's, the mid-west Mexican chain. My reflection in the car window is super-imposed over them and I notice that my hair is getting longer, growing once again back to California length.
Last night I combed my hair out into an afro for the first time since I've been here at the requests of some of the older employees down the hall. Most of them were impressed, but no one stood up to see. When I sat down next to Erin in the hallway between our rooms later that night I brought a hat with me. She had watched as I combed my hair out to extreme lengths but her face betrayed no surprise or horror, as if she saw right through the gimmick. "It's strange," she said without a twinge of irony or spectacle, "I feel like you're from the '60s," and I pulled my beanie on over my hair. "Why are you doing that," she asked. "I feel silly," I said, and she asked me again, "What for? It doesn't make a difference," and I was disarmed with no hat or hair to hide behind.
This afternoon while she was still at work I hiked out to the forest to write her a letter telling her that instead of meeting with her to talk as I had promised, I was going into Rapid City to watch a zombie movie. After the movie was a trip to the 24-Hour Wal-Mart Super Center and everyone bought CDs and videos but I picked out one smooth, red and orange nectarine, which I paid for, and ate in the store above those glistening white tiles under those soulless white lights.

 
I'm driving Erin's car through the just-fallen night, and she's tired, curled up in the seat next to me, but not yet asleep. A scarf over her face blocks out the light and her hands are mittoned, fuzzy and orange like a muppet. Yesterday it hailed, and today they said it might snow, though it didn't. Yes, it's still June.
In the back seat, Mandi from Kansas, Chris from Arizona and Andrew from Liverpool are discussing the end of the world while on the side of the road vigilant white reflectors streak by in silent patterns. On the radio, country music plays so softly you can hardly hear the twang and I'm thinking about not much in particular. Today was a day of rainbows and train-rides and barbeque and talking during the movie but probably no one cared anyway. And secrets I can only guess about. And snapping pictures. And not snapping pictures because you forgot your camera, but not being sorry because it's the moment that matters anyway and who needs documentation? And mittens and scarves and of course, the end of the world, in the air, and on my notecards and buzzing.
And I am eternally alive, because I have been once.
Erin says she's really happy right now, but all day she fells like crying and doesn't know why. twinged with sadness she says. I say maybe that's the best kind of happy, but she shakes her head and we keep talking. Outside the clouds stretch for miles and light shines down like a waterfall.

 
One of my first days off and I’m out with Erin, my next door neighbor from Wisconsin, Kristjan, the tall native Estonian and Silver, one of the Russian Estonians who won’t talk to Erin no matter how much she pries. We go to Horsethief Lake where Kristjan and Silver want to go swimming. It’s an overcast day, and though I’ve brought some shorts to swim in, I doubt that I’ll actually use them. The lake is next to the highway, tucked in between the deep green trees and jutting, rocky cliffs that seem to have burst from the ground in a second and frozen in the Midwestern air.
We made our way up to the jumping point, about 30 feet from the water, 50 feet from the ground, though what it was that we made our way up is hard to say; it was too small and sheer to be a hill, to large to be a bank, and too forested to be just rocks. It was just like the ground climbed toward the sky, then got exhausted and stopped.
The boys jumped into the cold, clear air which changed to colder, clearer water and me and Erin watched them swim gasping to shore. She lounged on the rocks, hoping for some sort of tan and I snapped lazy photographs of what seemed then to be the most photogenic corner of the entire state, if not the world. The highway snaked below us, little yellow lines breaking up the broad black band that wound through the hills and hills and hills. Directly below us, the lake spread out calmly, its full expanse hidden around misty banks of tall pine trees and one fly fisherman. In the distance: mountains. Farther in the distance: clouds, grey and mysterious.
I could have spent the whole afternoon there on that fortunate ledge overlooking the world, but the Estonians were getting cold, and were unable to convince Erin to join them in the water. Hardly anyone tried to convince me, but I didn't care.
So we took off again, this time en route to Keystone, where I bought a lot of cheap post cards. We explored the downtown scene, essentially just one street full of historic looking buildings, wooden walkways and stores full of things no one could possibly need. We posed with Sturgis biker chick shirts and Kristjan looked at the “authentic” bows and arrows they had hanging up on the wall, promising to come back and buy one some day. He said that with a bow and arrow you could do anything, and I was pretty sure I believed him. In the sale rack of one store I found a red shirt that just had a bunch of dinosaurs on the front, and I was convinced that it was the coolest thing I’d seen since we got there, but no one else was very impressed.
We continued down the wooden walkway, the closest thing South Dakota has to a board walk, past a store selling only biker tee-shirts and faux street signs (ie. Parking for Harleys only), an ice cream shop, The Red Garter Saloon, which looked like a kind of cool restaurant fashioned after old western bars, with show girls and everything. Erin was a bit appalled by one of their signs advertising the Red Garter Special, where “you get to keep the garter.” “I don’t think I like what that’s implying,” she said. I laughed. We continued around the corner of the boardwalk, where early 50s rock and roll was playing and we were bordered on one side by a fudge shop and the other side by a store whose windows were pasted over with Sunday comics. No one had any cotton candy, but somehow it seems like some one should have. “Ah, now we are in America,” Kristjan said, calling the oldies rock “country music.” Erin and I objected to his definition, but except for his inaccurate label for our music, it was an America I felt proud of.
On our way back to the car we passed by a large hotel which was under some kind of construction or renovation and I snapped a few pictures of the tourists and construction workers.
We hit up the Presidential Wax Museum next, which did in fact have wax sculptures of every American president. They also had Ben Franklin, Al Gore and some pirate captain who Andrew Jackson was striking a bargain with. Also, one of the historic Florida voting booths, which every bit as confusing as they said on the television at the time.

About two weeks later I’m in the company van on the way to pick up people from Keystone before heading into work. Silver’s been gone for over a week now. He got fed up with the low pay here apparently, and set out for Chicago with another Estonian. Erin still hasn’t recovered from not getting him to really talk to her. A few days from now, while trying to put a new roll of film in my camera, I’ll break, and then expose the roll of film I took that day at the lake and the boardwalk. All that will remain of those photographs will be a dark brown ribbon with little square hole in it, unraveled at the foot of my bed.
And as we round the corner into the historic district someone says “look at that,” and I turn and say “oh lord.” The Red Garter Saloon is in pieces, charred and smoking. Through the open front door I can see out to the sky. Across the street a garbage can has actually been melted open from the heat of the fire that had blazed in the early morning and as we drive slowly down the side of the street not barricade off by orange cones I see what else the blaze left: almost nothing but ashes. The whole corner of the boardwalk is nearly completely gone, and half of the hotel, including the construction site looks melted halfway into the ground. Half a dozen fire trucks surround the site and for some reason the metal frame of an awning has been set carefully to one side of the destruction.
Greg, who is about 36, wears a Teddy Roosevelt moustache and busses tables is sitting behind me. I listen as he mutters a string of relatively un-notable exclamations, all spaced about five seconds apart, like a slash between a metrenome and a news commentator.
I add a few murmers of my own disbelief to his tempo and I glad that before it all went up in smoke I was able to spend a few minutes one sunny afternoon snatching up bits of that American carnival.

 
I feel the need to comment upon the world event that I have just recently become a part of. I did purchase my copy of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" at 1.15 a.m. on June 21st (today). I had it reserved at Borders but I was able to purchase it wothout standing in the massive crowd because for the first (and probably last) time in my life -- I had an "in". The "in" in question was the fact that my store (Ralphs #135) was selling them at 12.01 a.m.. And guess who happens to work every night as a box boy until 12.00 a.m.. As a store employee I was able to keep my copy along with all my fellow coworkers' locked in the Bookkeeper's Office. In exchange I was charged with a potentially deadly task. My mission (if I chose to accept it) was to move five, light blue plastic tubs containing the precious cargo from the back room to a closet in the front of the store and lock it. The tubs were deceivingly marked "Store Ads for Week of June 22" but I knew that even Muggles can sense a ruse of this nature. I'm glad to say that I did survive.

The line began to form at around 11.00 p.m. although there was one middle aged man who had gotten there at 10.00 p.m.. We saluted him by giving him one of our Ralphs gift bags as a token of our esteem. He was the first in line but others were soon to follow. They were talkitive but tame. Only one 10 year old girl wore a costume. Hemione, of course. At 12.01 a.m. I gave a stumbling call over the P.A.. It was a rousing address: "Attention Ralphs customers! Copies of "'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' are now available. There is a limit of two per customer so please make your way to the long line forming at Checkstand 5 and wait for your turn. Thank you very much and have a good morning". They all came through -- each more upbeat than the last. And it was then that it struck me. This line was huge for 12.00 a.m. at my store. And not far down the road at Borders it was rumoured that the crowd had surpassed 800. But yet there were even more Borders's and Barnes and Nobles's with equally and perhaps larger crowds of excited people waiting for ... ... ... ... a book! It's not a movie or concert tickets. Even those never attract nearly this kind of turnout. It's a book these people want. Even in these days when doomsayers and Nostradami fortell the decline of reason due to the decline in American literacy we see all these people waiting for a book! And this brings me to the scene that restored my faith.

She couldn't have been older than 8 or 9 years old. She was with her Dad but broke away and stood in front of me and stared at me as I put the Book in a plastic bag. She had a blue Harry Potter jacket on. And as I finished wrapping the Book. She stuck out her hands in that outstretched, fingers-down, palms-up way that only a kid can sell. And when I handed it to her she grabbed it and hugged it like she might cradle a kitten or a puppy. Pivoting around with her eyes shut she had a contented look on her face. And she looked back up at me with big cow eyes; smiled and said, "Thank you" in the most genuine tone that I have ever heard those words spoken. I wish I could have said what I meant. But all I said was, "Little lady -- you are very welcome".

A kid who loves a book that much and what lies inside it is what makes my heart smile and believe that things will be all right on this planet of ours. It fills my cold, black heart with a number of powerful emotions for which there is no emoticon potent enough. Literacy is a gift. All of that stuff we learned about when we were kids on "Reading Rainbow" and the like was true. The book itself is so cold and sterile but it can colour our imaginations with imagery and emotion. The Harry Potter books are great though there are many who mourn that people never lined up for Steinbeck or Hemingway like this but that's incidental. The action of reading is self-perpetuating. All the lines to Harry Potter eventually lead to Hemingway and Steinbeck. It's literature, baby. Bludgers and quaffles or grapes of wrath. Reading is worthwhile in itself. It's a gift to be able to engage in this worthy activity. Little words on little pages. It's little things like this that we should be truly grateful for. Now I am. That's the magic.