Travels with Leslie

Naked

Poster Note: I didn’t write this. This was written by a person by the name of Leslie Meek, whom I met on CompuServe in 1993. She was there looking for answers to the breakup of her recent relationship while traveling the US looking for herself. We became great friends but we lost contact in the late 1990s.

She wrote Travels with Leslie (not complete) and posted it on a Bulletin Board System (BBS) run by her employer, Doug Quirmbach, the owner of Crackpot of California*, and was also published in a few e-magazines. I asked and was given permission to post/publish them back then. So I believe it’s ok for me to publish them here.

I hope, by publishing them here, people will have a renewed interest in her and her stories, and maybe by an off chance, we will reconnect again. I miss her dearly.

On a side note, Leslie studied journalism at California State University Northridge, and she worked as an investigative journalist before taking up a job as a traveling salesperson with Crackpot of California, which sold silk flowers door to door. You may say some of the insights and nuances in her writing came from that journalism training. She is extremely intelligent and very compassionate, but as we all know, intelligence can’t solve heartaches.

*Although the name of the company Leslie worked for is called Crackpot of California. The company was based out of Warrensburg, Missouri which, incidentally, has an official historic dog named Old Drum.

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Sunday, August 27, 1993

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA -- Las Vegas is just like buttermilk.  Either you love it or you hate it.

No one, it seems, can maintain a blase attitude while visiting this plastic, soulless city of obsessions.  The glaring neon lights burn as a 24-hour reminder of the city's false promises and its founders ultimate arrogance.  Those who turned on the switches for the first and last time did so assuming they could deceive a human being's innate ability to distinguish the nighttime from the day.

The illusion works for thousands of people who walk its casino lined streets at all hours of the day, looking for something for nothing. If they paused to consider who paid the electric bills, they wouldn't be here.  But they are here, hoping they will leave with more than they came with from a city that takes more than it gives.

I drove down Las Vegas Boulevard with a well-nourished attitude problem.  I was tired.  I was hungary.  I was lonely.  I watched the people on the "strip" ablaze with fantasy gone riot and forced back pictures of the long, solitary drive from Corpus Christi.  I was overwhelmed with the feeling that, somehow, I had left reality behind, stranded in the desert.  I thought back.

I had watched through my windshield as the sun set over the rusty orange sand and yucca plants and jagged outcroppings of on-touched stones.  From my speeding van, it seemed the cactus trees were holding up two hairy arms toward the sky and pleading with me to stop.  Granted, the neck is a bit too long and the head non-existent, but otherwise the trees look remarkably human.  With the setting sun behind them, they stand as authority figures over the desert floor.  But they seem to become more patient and approachable when the light dims.

At dusk, I pulled off the highway onto one of the million little sandy trails that scar the desert.  I bumped along through nowhere until the highway behind me was just a tiny string of silent lights.  I turned off the engine and took off my Nikes.  Leaning back in the seat, I took my first real breath of air since my trip began.

"Silence" is an unfit word to describe what surrounded me.   The desert whispers to those who listen.  It hums for those who dream.  I knew only that I was exactly where I belonged at that moment in time.  I thought about my friend, Jennifer, sitting in front of a computer screen somewhere, searching for a word that made some sense, and wished she were with me.  She belonged there as well, just at that moment in time.

When night falls almost all of the desert's creatures, both large and small, respond to their instinctive alarm clock and venture out onto the sand.  This is their time to eat, to play and sometimes to die around the watching cactus.  They do this without thought.  They wouldn't change any of it -- even dying -- because this is the way it is meant to be.  Those who survive return to their crevices, holes and bushes to sleep during the day; none of them with even the slightest expectation of another night.

As I watched the desert come awake outside, I began to understand the difference between being alone and being lonely.  This evening would be all that mattered to creatures blessed with not having to know why things were as they were.  Some would find another of their kind and copulate with no less passion than we do, yet part happily and unchanged.  They do not fall in love, because love is not theirs to give or to take.  Love is a gift given all of them as part of a plan none of them would dream of designing or changing.  They have only to share it and live it.    

I realized that I was just another animal put here as part of the same plan.  As a human being, I differed from them only in thinking I could somehow change the plan.  My loneliness was a byproduct of this arrogance.  I had to be alone in the desert to understand that.

I belonged there, just at that moment in time.        

I opened the door and waited quietly.  A packrat appeared from nowhere and tentatively studied a bush some 20 feet away from me. He circled it, then, satisfied, skipped off into the darkness.   Soon, the area around me was teeming with animals living their moments.

I took off the rest of my clothes, grabbed my purse and some blankets, and wandered out into the night.  I did not watch my feet as I made my way between the scrubs.  I had nothing to fear from creatures that crawl.  Jeni wouldn't fear them either.  We would call them by their genus, Crotalus, and understand one another.  Most of mankind refers to them as rattlesnakes and watch their feet when they walk in the desert.  Our fearlessness stems from playing with snakes instead of dolls when we were little girls and living with boys instead of men when we grew older.   We've learned.

In the desert, they rattle first.

I stopped when it was whispered I do so and bunched up one of the blankets.  I impaled it on the needles at the base of a tall cactus tree.  I spread out another blanket and sat down.  Leaning back against the cactus, I listened and watched and felt.  A gentle gust of wind swept by, swirling around my thighs, tickling and cooling me.  It fluffed my hair, gently carrying strands and wrapping them about the thorns above me. The sand underneath me gave way for my comfort each time I moved.  There was no competition among the crickets that serenaded me and no jealously within the owl that watched.

Hours later I was zooming along the highway, nibbling on what was left of an apple.

Heaving up and down over the bumps the highway was built on, I was filled with a new sense of determination about where I was going and what I was going to do.  The cactus trees seemed to get smaller and smaller; massive, four-legged structures carrying power lines into the city seemed to grow even larger.  The van strained up a hill then, suddenly, bathed in impossible light below, Las Vegas began lying to me. A metropolis stuck in the middle of nowhere, it was a geographical obscenity.