


(Note: Leslie's adventures will be serialized in future issues.)

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TRAVELS WITH LESLIE
  by Leslie Meek
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Adventure Continues,
Part 5, (XIII, XIV)
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Travels With Leslie
August 28, 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
founder's 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 hungry. 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, yucca plants, and jagged out croppings of un-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 pack rat 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. Then bunched up one
of the blankets and 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.

                               *  *  *

August 28, 1993


  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA -- I wonder if Eve would pick another apple
if she had it all to do over again.

  After I had left paradise hours before, I thought I was prepared
to go through with what I learned from the past to be a mistake.

  All of my new-found determination left me when I started fighting
the traffic on the strip. That's when the attitude problem ripened. I
struggled with the traffic for another block or so and then turned into
the parking lot of Caesar's Palace. I parked the van and took out my
laptop, the video camera, my smaller suitcase and my "escape" basket.
The basket is one of those wicker carrying cases crammed full of stuff
like books, poems, letters from friends back home, computer disks and
old diaries. I open it up when I want to run away from today.

  I put the computer inside the basket and locked up my van.

  The giant hotel and casino loomed in front of me. It was an
imposing building, all lit up in an impossible turquoise-blue color. I
lugged my baggage to the front of the place and asked the guy standing
there in uniform for a taxi. He raised his hand, snapped his finger,
and wham -- a taxi zoomed up and squeaked to a halt beside me. I was
impressed.

  The driver opened up the trunk and started loading the baggage.
He paid particular attention to the camcorder case. I stood there and
watched him. He reached for the escape basket.

  "No, I'll take it up front with me, if that's ok," I said.

  He opened up the back door and tossed the basket in. He stared
at it as I ducked into the back seat. He closed the door behind me
and walked around to his door and jumped in.

  "Downtown, please," I ordered.

  "Oh, you want the bus station."

  "Nope. Fremont street. Motels there below the Nugget."

  The driver stumped on the gas and we were off. He blended into
the traffic with a vengeance. It gave me an inner-sense of joy watching
him play out my resentments against the other drivers on Las Vegas Blvd.
Besides becoming quickly bored with whatever lane he was in, the driver
couldn't tolerate silence.

  "Fight with the boyfriend, huh?" he said, into the mirror. When I
didn't answer he said, "Usually, luggage means the airport. You here on
business or pleasure?"

  "Little of both, I guess."

  "Oh, I see." He was doing a bad job of hiding a smirk.

  As he zig-zagged over lines and between cars, I leaned back in
the seat and tried to relax. The people outside were all anxiously
casino hopping, hoping that the odds would be better next door. I
watched them and realized that I was really very much in the same boat.
I had come to "Sin City," as it is called by some, for different
reasons -- but I was still repeating the same mistake and expecting
something different to come of it.

  "I bet I could guess what your, ah . . . business is."

  I glanced at the driver and noticed that he had dropped all
pretense of concealing his thoughts. So I returned to mine. I wondered
about Eve and tried to remember if there was anyone else with an extra
rib that crashed into her life. Maybe Adam was enough. Maybe she
learned.

  "The video camera part of your business?" The driver asked, chuckling.

  "Well, kinda'. I . . . ."

  "Wow . . . . And what's in that basket of tricks there?" He looked
back at me, leering.

  "You've heard of Crotalus cerastes?" I asked.

  "Ah, no . . . sounds pretty kinky, though."

  "Long, thin. It's got little tiny horns on it. Works the same way
the sidewinder missile does. In fact, cerastes were around first."

  "Wow. I don't think I get you. But, I can call in and take the
rest of the night off if . . . ."

  "The missile senses the infra-red heat from a plane's engine.
Crotalus cerastes senses infra-red heat too -- from living things. We
all give off heat," I continued, pointing to a single level motel off
of Fremont Street.

  He pulled in and stopped in front of the lobby.

  "Yeah, I'll say. I'm pretty hot right now, if you don't mind me
saying. I'm not a `Palace' guy, but I have some bucks. Maybe we . . . ."

  "It works perfectly in the dark. It's got a little pit in it's
head, right underneath it's little horns, that tells it where the heat
is," I said.

  "Cool."

  "That's why they call them pit vipers."

  "What the hell?" He spun around in his seat and glared at the basket.

  "Cerastes kinda' moves sideways in the desert sand, so they call
'em sidewinders. That's where they got the name of the missile."

  "A Rattlesnake! Jesus!"

  The driver hit a switch that unlocked the trunk and leaped out of
the taxi. He made the trip back to the trunk a lot faster than one
would have expected from a man his age. By the time I got out, he had
my luggage on the pavement and his hand outstretched for the fare.

  I know I wasn't doing a good job of holding back my smirk as I
stood there, staring at the back door of the taxi. I had left the door
open for him. The basket was on the seat. He followed my gaze.

  "Now, wait a minute, lady. No way. What do you . . . Jesus."

  I picked up my suitcase and camcorder and started toward the lobby.

  "Lady, what the hell? You haven't got everything. Come back!"

  I set my stuff down in front of the door and turned around,
folding my arms across my chest expectantly. I just couldn't resist
the temptation to buy some more moments. Opportunities like this do
not appear often in my little life story of mice and men.

  "No way. No, lady. Nope." The driver was standing maybe fifty feet
from his taxi, carrying on a very intense conversation with himself.

  I walked back . . . slowly . . . and ducked into the taxi for the
basket. The meter read $9 and some change. I hugged the basket close
to my chest and started toward him with a ten-dollar bill. When he
gestured me away, I walked back and dropped it on his seat. Neither one
of us would have considered a large tip appropriate.

  "I just love it when you call me a lady," I told him, as he
crabbed back to his taxi.

  I checked into a room with two twin beds and two of the same
oil paintings on four of the same walls. I tossed my suit case on the
bed furthest from the window and picked up the phone.

  "Thank you for calling the Mirage Hotel and Casino, may I help you?"

  "Do you have a James Clark registered," I asked.

  "Yes, we do. Would you like us to connect you?"

  "No, thank you."

  I yanked the cord out of the phone and got out my laptop. I plugged
the line into the computer, and waited while it booted up. Once I got
Telemate blinking on the little screen, I chose The Night Exchange
Bulletin Board and hit the enter key.

  While my laptop dialed my favorite BBS, I walked over to the window
and pulled the drapes. The bright neon lights outside were now out of
sight and soon, hopefully, they would be out of mind.

  I don't think much of buttermilk.

                               {DREAM}

  (Get the next issue of DREAM FORGE to follow the continuing saga.)

Copyright 1995 Leslie Meek, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Leslie has been searching and in her travels relates to us what she
has found so far. Warrensburg, Missouri is where the travels have
begun and there is no telling where her search will end -- if ever.
Perhaps leaving was her fist step to realizing -- she was *there* and
already knew. She's eager to hear from her readers and can be reached
via: U'NI-net's Writer's Conference and regularly logs onto  Crackpot
Connection (816-747-2525). She likes to chat, if you catch her online
-- tell her Rick said, "Hi!"
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