DESERT RATS
DOWN CARSON pass from San Francisco came the urban woman in a Japanese car filled with Diet Cokes and Western history books, country music filling up every sensual space but the view, which at the moment was beyond the grasp of anything mortal: a vast, high desert stretching east to Utah filled with mountain ranges dropped from the cosmos like rumpled pieces of silk. Dry lake beds appeared like mirages; great swirling circles in chalk. The woman headed into it all awash in melodrama ,singing along with Willie Nelson:
"Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be
cowboys, They'll never stay home and they're
always alone, even with someone they love."
LA VIDA LOCA
SPIDER HAD his melancholy expression, the one that always made Loca forgive him. His sable brown eyes looked so sympathetic and sad that she forgot about the ways he treated her bad, the times he messed up on her with other girls, or went out shooting with his home boys. She was feeling sorry for him even before he had the hallucinations. He was a vato loco, a crazy guy in the East Los Angeles barrios , but it was because he didn't give a fuck about about life. When he was thirteen and got busted by the cops he found out that the person he loved as his mother was actually his grandmother. His mother was Marianna, the sister who looked after him only when she had the inclination and the time.
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