Porcupine District

When I was a kid I used to read these comic books written by the guy who made “The Simpsons”. The strip was called “Life in Hell”, about Los Angeles in the 80s. The main character was a talking rabbit named Binky. He had a bastard son named Bongo, born out of “jungle passion”. I always liked that phrasing. Driving around town at sunset often made me feel the same way. All those pretty lights.

When I first started coming to Los Angeles in the teens I found that Hadean comparison unfair. Before the fall, most of the city was merely a concrete mediocrity; some of it was remarkably pleasant; and a few gilded and green pockets, especially up in Malibu and the Hills, were sublime.

But the underbelly of Tinseltown has been bad since its birth. The angels always come with their demons, and once you saw it you couldn’t unsee. It was like donning rose-tinted glasses that glimmered darkly. You would walk out of Gjusta after a $64 brunch of single origin Colombian coffee (oat milk, no sugar), gravlox, octopus escabeche, and a bialy with vegan cream cheese, and step over homeless men who smelled like sin, kick hypodermics out of your way en route to the car. You saw zombies on the Venice boardwalk, homeless encampments festooning underpasses and bridges, the darkness kept at bay from the privileged precincts by a perpetual police presence. The Los Angeles Police Department, doing God’s work and the devil’s too since 1869.

The coronavirus pandemic back in ‘20 made the darkness visible for me. I knew Los Angeles was the last place on earth I wanted to be when shit hit the fan. But women have always complicated my plans. I met Cassie at a party in West Hollywood. She was kind, alarmingly intelligent, and an absolute wildcat in bed. So that was why I found myself on the balcony of her apartment in Marina del Rey that day in July when they shot an LAPD helicopter out of the sky.

Rotor noise often polluted the air above West LA in those days. Rocket propelled grenades did not. Watching that rocket scream into a perfect California sky and blow the tail rotor off, I knew it was over. The chopper spiraled down like a sycamore seed, slicing into a couple of yachts in the harbor. An oil slick scummed the water, shimmering surface rainbows broken by panicked partiers. There was a beautiful woman in a red thong bikini trying to climb a swim ladder covered in blood. She fell into the burning water and disappeared beneath a boat. I turned towards Cassie, her face plastic with fear.

“Are you ready to go now?”

She wouldn’t leave her cats. They meowed all the way to the Dakotas.

I tried to get some of my SEAL friends to sign on to our scheme but they decided to head south to Mexico instead. “It’s warmer there,” Josh said, loading up his Tacoma in Imperial Beach. What sounded like artillery boomed somewhere in Tijuana.

“Too warm,” I replied. “Baja is sucked dry. There ain’t a Sea of Cortez north of La Paz any more. Where are you gonna get water?”

He pointed to the desalinator in the bed of his truck, the SAWs packed in Pelican cases, boxes of explosives, Halligan bars, MRE crates. “We’ll be fine.”

“Vaya con Dios,” I said, and shook his hand.

I had better luck convincing a few Marine buddies. Chris Mullins and his girlfriend Francis, Jake Sawyer, Julian Gonzalez, Paul and Stacy and their kids, Wen Birks. We had been talking about the plan for a while. “Let’s commandeer a boat and di di mau to Hawaii if shit goes down,” they would say. “Start a new society in the Channel Islands.”

I had another idea. I spent a lot of time in the mid-20s working on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. It was the poorest place in the United States, and also one of the most beautiful. I stayed out in Porcupine District in a dry cabin. I danced with the sun, learned enough Lakota to be dangerous, and shot a lot of buffalo. My favorite expression was mitákuye oyás’in: “all are related”, a reflection of the unity of all things. I made the drive up into the Black Hills to see my off-rez Lakota friends as often as I could.

I became close with Peter Not Afraid, an Oglala wičháša wakȟáŋ, a no kidding medicine man, who lived out past Crazy Horse. I called him uncle and he called me nephew.

“The best gifts for an Indian are always tobacco and guns,” he told me, laughing, rolling up a smoke, admiring our growing armory. I listened.

I brought him guns and ammo from my business trips down to Arizona. AR-15s, deer rifles, shotguns, a galaxy of Glocks, crates of 5.56, smoke grenades, cans of 9mm, some heavy calibers to shoot buffalo with.

“Wopila!” he would always say. Thank you.

I bought a Mossberg 590M compact shotgun for myself and mounted an Eotech sight on it. I got as many 20-shell magazines and double aught buckshot as they would let me buy and then paid friends to go buy more.

As things went from bad to worse in DC, I started talking to Peter more seriously. I would wire him money to stock up on necessities for his extended family. When he spoke of “all my relations” I confirmed that included me and mine. I sent schematics and a credit card and asked him to buy an excavator in Rapid City.

“Start digging,” I said.

One day just before we left, I was clearing out one of my storage units downtown. An LAPD Bearcat rumbled down deserted Alameda Street. There were UAVs in the overhead, bullhorns echoing down concrete canyons, black-clad militants skulking in the shadows, hurling Molotov cocktails. As I drove back through Venice I saw dogs that used to be pets snout-deep in the body cavities of corpses on Lincoln Boulevard.

We left before dawn on a Tuesday. The marine layer draped the city in spectral hues. Los Angeles looked like arctic midnight, the worst light pollution I had ever seen. Gunfire rattled to the south. I touched my 590M under the dash to make sure it was still there, and checked the .45 in the glove box. Cassie was spooked.

“Breathe, babe,” I said, stroking her cashmere cheek. “We may be driving through the valley of the shadow of death, but you’re with some of the baddest motherfuckers in the valley.” She rolled her eyes but smiled a bit too.

There was a trio of cops who had been lynched on the interstate on-ramp, strung up beneath the dead traffic lights. Someone had spray painted PIGS in red on their indigo uniforms. In the Whittier Narrows there was a guy crucified on a light pole, burned out cars crumpled up every mile or so on CA-60 East. I kept my hands glued to the steering wheel. “10 and 2,” I said inside my head, a new mantra. “10 and 2”. I thought about 5s and 25s, sweeping for IEDs, vehicle checkpoints, mirror sweeps under Hiluxes, alien emerald eyes, the ambush at Lashkar Gah, all the old shit. I squeezed the wheel so hard my knuckles turned white and Cassie gently touched my neck.

“Are you ok, baby?”

“I will be once we’re out of this fucking city.”

My antenna started perking hard in Rancho Cucamonga. I put the shotgun on my lap and told Cassie to unholster the Glock. I advised the rest of the convoy over the radio to be alert. We pulled off on the shoulder and turned off our vehicles. A minute later a column of tanks raced west in the opposite lane.

“Vaya con Dios,” I said. “Good fucking luck.”

Once we made it through Cajon Pass I breathed easier. I-15 through Las Vegas was surprisingly clear. The Luxor pyramid had massive hole spiderwebbing its dark glass. Mirages leapt across the blacktop.

We changed drivers outside of Salt Lake. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. The cats would not stop crying.

We turned north when we got to Rawlins. I had roamed around Wyoming a bit in my misspent youth and always thought Carbon County was a weird place. The fall had only made it stranger.

I pulled off to gas up. There were dead animals piled up on the side of the road as if waiting for the knacker man. One big blob of a corpse caught my attention. The anal and esophagal openings had been expanded by flies and carrion. As I approached, something inside the body cavity stirred. I felt a deep primordial dread.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I yelped, startled at my own fear. No one else needed encouragement.

We passed through the desolation of eastern Wyoming in the dark. Gas flares flickered like candles on the plain. I saw the Black Thunder coal mine off in the distance, orange light pouring out of its satanic mills.

We hit Custer close to midnight. The gas station we visited had an array of Tesla charging stations outside. The temperature started to fall.

The Lakota call the Black Hills Pahá Sápa, after the dark color of their flanks, covered with evergreen trees. They say it is the heart at the center of the universe, the middle of all things. When I told Cassie that she fingered the heart-shaped locket on her neck. It contained a cut of blonde hair and a baby tooth, both relics of her infancy, nestled alongside pictures of her parents. I always thought that was weird as shit.

“It’s a family tradition,” she said.

“At least it’ll help the feds clone you again once your body gets processed for Soylent,” I replied. She didn’t like that for some reason.

Peter met us at the gate and ushered us in. He rode in a Gator accompanied by two of his blood nephews, hard-faced rez kids holding assault rifles.

“Aho!” he said. “The 7th Cavalry has arrived to save the day!”

That got a laugh out of the Lakotas in the UTV. Jake and Paul seemed less amused.

“Welcome to the Black Hills,” he said, more sincerely now, shaking my hand. “I'm glad you made it safe.”

In the morning we went out in his truck and inspected the lines. Peter and his people had transformed a hill deep in the national forest into a fortress. The air was sweet and clean. I could only hear birdsong and no helicopters and knew that we had made the right decision.

The sun got higher and hotter as we drove. A badger slithered across the sunken road, low-crawling at a remarkable rate.

“Did you hear about San Francisco?” Peter asked me.

“No,” I said, clutching the grab handle as we bumped along.

“Burned to the ground,” he said. “They went after the Mint.”

I stared at the badger, now angrily eyeing us from the embankment. I wondered if she was alive, if she and her family had made it safely to Alaska the way we used to talk about. I thought about the eucalyptus groves in the Presidio cracking in the heat, bark flaying off in strips, Monterey cypress burning above the Golden Gate. Hot tears leapt unbidden to my eyes. I felt my gorge rise. The enormity of what we were losing finally hit me.

“Matt?”

“Yeah,” I said, remembering how to breathe, coming back to the cab of the truck, the silent pines and the big Dakota sky. “I was just thinking about California.”

He nodded and put his hand on my shoulder for a moment, giving it an avuncular squeeze.

“It sure is a shame what happened,” Peter said, patting down his pockets for a smoke. He motioned for me to pass the lighter, encased in Shoshone beadwork.

“They ain’t making any more San Franciscos.”