Behind Enemy Lines

Kern County is considered the most corrupt county in California. It also has one of the highest percentages of registered Republicans. Go figure. This is the home of Real Americans, and you know this because almost every house flies the American flag. All the time. Some of them have been hanging so long they've become almost bleached white by the sun. From a distance, they almost look like the white flag of surrender, which is definitely NOT the look they're going for. But for many, the flag simply is not enough. Some houses fly two flags, or have taken the liberty (the God-Given American Liberty) to erect their own flagpole, so that their flag flies higher than the rest. Others have painted their mailboxes like Old Glory. Or littered their front yards with every patriotic tchotchke Home Depot stocks. These must be Better Americans.

As much as they love their country, they hate the French. I've seen any number of "Boycott France" bumper stickers, which I find amusing since for most of them the closest they'll ever get to anything French is the toast at IHOP. Then again, I doubt they eat there because it is, after all, the International House of Pancakes and probably secretly part of the UN, the pancake batter being delivered by black helicopters in the dead of the night.

And they despise Obama. Fascist Socialist Obama. Socialist Fascist Obama. They clearly have no concept of what either word means, but then Republicans have never let aggressive stupidity stand in the way of, well, anything.

Bakersfield is ranked the 6th most conservative city in the country. Not the state, the entire country. It beats out most of the Bible Belt! Which actually isn't all that surprising - driving around Bako you're as likely to see license plates from Texas, Oklahoma or Tennessee as from California. I guess having fucked up their own states, they've now decided to try and colonize this one. They love their Jesus, and they love their Bible, just not the part where Jesus actually appears - they rock their God Old Testament style, the more wrath and vengeance the better.

This is the type of place where people drive around with ginormous 12 foot wooden crucifixes resting in the bed of their trucks, propped up on the cab, and no one bats an eye. I saw that last week. The truck was plastered with Born Again stickers, the most prominent one saying "Body Piercing Saved My Life" next to a graphic image of a giant nail being driven through the palm of a hand. Well, that has to make driving difficult. Oh - it was Jesus, not the driver.

It's also the type of place where you see pre-teen girls standing on street corners at rush hour holding up signs saying "Abortion Kills Children". Not an adult in sight. I don't know which is the more frightening thought - that a 12 year old girl was out there with that sign on her on volition. Or that perhaps she wouldn't get dinner if she didn't do it. Either possibility sent a chill down my spine.

And finally, this is the type of place where all the men cruising for gay sex online are married.

All the churches I've seen so far have been of the evangelical variety. Most look like strip malls and don't refer to themselves as churches... they are "Worship Centers". Like WalMart Super Centers. I guess you can get your oil changed and and eye exam too. I was raised Christian, but I've lapsed, in no small part because of people like this. The Christianity I knew and loved died on the vine sometime during the Reagan Administration., and in it's place sprouted this pinched and toxic variation. I'll pass, thanks.

So this is how it is here. For someone like me, this is the Ninth Ring of Hell.

Bambi

Saw a house around the corner with a front lawn populated with concrete deer. And both trucks in the driveway were sporting NRA stickers. I have a feeling their appreciation of wildlife begins and ends in the Home Depot Garden Department. I could be wrong.

Labyrinth

Either to relieve the monotony, or out of sadistic pleasure, the developers here have seen fit to design their enclaves to resemble laboratory mazes. Streets zig. They zag. They form lazy S's, they circle back on each other and half of them dead end into cul-de-sacs. For added fun, some streets even change names mid-curve. Once you're here, it's going to take cunning and skill to find a way out. Which is pretty much how I feel about Bakersfield as a whole. On Google maps it's actually quite pretty, like a Celtic knot or the filigree work you find on currency. I'd had to consult the map to try and figure out a route to walk the dogs. Originally I'd just head out the door, thinking this town was laid out like others, with some sort of grid to it. No such luck. I'd become so intimidated by the maze that I'd resorted to walking the dogs to the end of the street and back, and now the dogs were bored.

So I found a route that looped from the house, and that's been our reliable trek every morning.

Until this morning. We walked out the door, and there across the street was a kindly looking elderly woman. Let's call her Gladys. She was walking one of those genetically altered/ hybrid dogs, the tiny ones whose name usually ends with "poo". As sometimes happens, my dogs and hers took an immediate dislike to one another from a distance, barking and snarling across the street. Gladys was already headed in the direction we normally go, so to keep the peace I decided we'd just do our route backwards. So off we went, down the street in the opposite direction. We turned the corner, went up a bit, made a right.

And there was Gladys.

Huh? She had been going in the other direction. And I didn't remember a street on the map connecting our current location to where I imagined she should be by now. No matter. Odd coincidence. But with the dogs barking again, we changed course and headed away from them. Left. Right. Right again. I was now off our course, but pretty sure I knew where we were. Left again. Right.

And there was Gladys.

Gladys knows something I don't. Secret passages, back alleys, something. We headed away from them again. Left. Right. Left. Oops, dead end, double back. Left. Right. Right again. I'm now thoroughly lost and starting to get a little panicked. The houses all look the same and there are no landmarks. I haven't a clue where we are and have no idea how to get home. We turn another corner...

And there was Gladys. I'm beginning to think Gladys isn't so kindly. That she's doing this on purpose. That she's malicious. But then it occurs to me that Gladys is actually ahead of us now, by about half a block. And Gladys knows where she is going. Gladys can lead us home. I need Gladys. It's a calculated risk. Most dog walkers seem to have a somewhat circular route, and since we first encountered her on our street, there a better than even chance she'll end up somewhere nearby, someplace I recognize. So we follow them. Left. Right. Right. Left. Now Gladys is checking over her shoulder. She must think I'm stalking her. I don't care. I want to go home. After a few more twists and turns, we're finally on a street I know, not far from our house. And then Gladys suddenly makes a turn up a driveway and scurries into her house, slamming the door behind her. She's probably calling the cops on me.

We finally make it home and the cops never arrive. And I vow never to leave the house without my phone, because it has GPS.

Missing Persons

Somedays, just to cope, I try and imagine I'm just in the Witness Protection Program. And in reality, it's not that far off the mark. Almost no one knows we're here. Either out of shame or embarrassment, we've simply decided not to spread the word. My parents know, of course, and the handful of friends who would actually miss us. A lot of my friends are now scattered around the country and the globe, and there didn't seem to be any compelling reason to let them know, since we stay in touch exclusively online.

Professionally, it's more a charade out of necessity. The handful of clients I've been able to maintain would pull the plug in heartbeat if they new I wasn't nearby. But the beauty of it is that no one has requested a face-to-face meeting in over a year. They e-mail me projects, and I upload the work a few days later. As far as their concerned, I'm still toiling away in the Hollywood Hills.

And no one misses me, because I stopped socializing with them years ago. I work in entertainment advertising, the hellish marriage of two of the sleaziest professions on earth. A greater collection of hacks and liars you're unlikely to find. I used to be quite social, mostly for political reasons. You never knew when you might find yourself on the wrong side of a palace coup or the semi-regular creative purges. Or more likely, when the partners cratered the agency out of ego and greed. In situations like these, it was important to "know people". And I "knew people". A lot of people. Fat lot of good it did me.

The same people who happily let you pick up the tab for dinner or drinks one week, would feign complete ignorance of you a few weeks later when your agency unexpectedly filed Chapter 11. "Will he know what's this is regarding?" Um, yeah..... I'm out of work and he told me to call him. "I'll give you his voicemail..." Dicks. So I stopped voluntarily hanging with these douchebags a long time ago. Life is too short. And e-mail allows you to maintain a veneer of friendship with people you loathe. One or two "heys" a month is really all it takes to keep the relationship on life support. And you can always up the ante by inviting them out for dinner or drinks when you know they're going to be out of town or otherwise unavailable. "Hey you.... I haven't seen you in FOREVER. How about we get together for dinner on Thursday? My treat! What? It's Yom Kippur? Damn.... some other time I guess."

And so the charade continues. I have this fantasy that things will turn around and we'll be able to move back to LA and pretend this unfortunate move never happened. Like that season on "Dallas" that ended up just being a dream. But each new day in Bako seems to make that a dimmer and dimmer prospect.

Day 20

There may come a day when this will all stop seeming like a hostage drama.

Today is not that day.

We're now into October, and in Bako that can mean only one thing... inflatable Halloween decorations.

Go West

"Oh you don't want to live there - that's a bad part of town." We were in a property management office looking at rental listings and a map of Bako. And the woman behind the counter was vaguely pointing to the east side of town. Listen honey, you're going to have to be a bit more specific, because we aren't from here and it all looks bad to me. But it ends up she was being specific. Bakersfield is almost perfectly bisected by Highway 99, and everything east of it was considered East Bakersfield.

East Bakersfield is bad.

Now every town and city has areas that are considered "bad", little pockets of mayhem that you can usually avoid. But not here. They've written off half the entire city.

With that new information, we cast our gaze west and soon found three listings that we thought would make a good start. Rents are so cheap here that we thought we might splurge and rent a house with a pool. It was mid-August and 106 and the heat may have clouded our judgement.

They're very trusting here, a luxury I guess you can afford when everyone is armed. You check out the keys to the various listings and have a couple of hours in which to return them. If they tried that in LA, every rental home would be stripped of it's fixtures and copper wire in a matter of days. So armed with three sets of keys, we headed out.

Contestant Number 1 was a smallish house, but it had a beautiful backyard and pool. When we showed up we were surprised to find the homeowner inside waiting for a handyman to replace the shattered window from the previous night's break-in. Hmmmm. Clearly we were still too far east. Check please!

Contestant Number 2 was a real contender. It was a duplex, not a house. And it had no pool and a smallish backyard. But it was HUGE. Two thousand square feet of the best 1978 had to offer. Dark wood, cottage cheese ceilings, tile counters and a wet bar. A wet bar! Screw the pool. To survive Bako I think the bar would prove to be a bigger asset. It was so "Mad Men". If "Mad Men" took place in Bakersfield. In the 70's. All the appliances were "vintage", meaning the microwave probably leaked more radiation than Chernobyl. But we loved it. We're a little strange that way.

Contestant Number 3 was in the middle of nowhere. And that's saying something here. We drove west until the housing developments gave way to abandoned oil fields and weed patches. And kept driving. Finally after several miles it appeared on the horizon like a mirage... Bella Terra. Or was it Terra Bella? Bella Vista? Vista Terra? Who the fuck knows. Anyhow, there it was. Fate had not been kind to little Vista Whatever. The recession had caught it mid-development and many of the lots were vacant. Of the houses that had been built, half looked like they were in foreclosure. There was no landscaping to speak of, except for the occasional tumbleweed. On the sales brochures, that's probably listed as "drought tolerant landscaping". The house we looked at was even bigger than the last, but with the oddest of layouts. All kinds of strange nooks and alcoves. In the model homes, these were probably filled with stylish writing tables and fainting couches. In reality, they were more likely stacked high with boxes from the Home Shopping Network. It did have a pool, surrounded by a security fence. That looked relaxing. Floating on a raft in a minimum security prison. No trees or greenery of any kind, just the pool, the fence and concrete. The whole thing creeped us out and we quickly left.

We decided to cut our losses. We chose Curtain Number 2.

This Just In...

"A Kern County woman discovered a smily face in a green bell pepper..."

That was this morning's breaking news.