The True History of Wall Drugs

[mallorys_camera]

Trimmed my flist. If I took you off and you have strong feelings about it, let me know. One thing though -- I am often politically incorrect and occasionally tactless. Neither is meant maliciously. But I'll be god damned if I'm going to censor myself either in entries or in comments, so if you have a stick up your ass and are looking to take offense so you can puff your little self-righteous feathers, please just drop me, 'kay?

Thanks!

Meanwhile...

I worry because I’ve stopped keeping track of the towns the circus plays. The last one I really remember clearly is Wall and only because Wall is the home of Wall Drugs, that ghastly, yet strangely fascinating roadside attraction heralded on painted wooden signs – not billboards! – in every state of the union. Wall Drug signs are the descendents of those Burma Shave road markers, kind of the way birds are the descendents of dinosaurs.

Robin and I made up a complicated Stephen King scenario about Wall Drugs:

It’s 1934, the height of the Depression, and Dorothy Hustead is quietly going mad. See that pharmacy her pharmacist husband bought in the middle of the Dakota Badlands is a big bust, and she doesn’t know what to do about it. The town – Wall – is named for a strange topographical feature, a sharply eroded ridge that in Indian legend subdivides the lands of the living from the lands of the mostly dead. The place is a desert, parched and dry, and the highway that runs through it is mostly deserted.

The pharmacy has one steady customer at least – an old Indian woman who comes in on a weekly basis for the mercury she uses to treat her tertiary syphilis. The old Indian woman tells Dorothy that that the Devil lives in Lead (a town close to Deadwood,) and advises Dorothy to come up with some incentive so that the Devil will draw up a new business plan –

“You mean she sells the Devil her soul?” Robin asks.

“No, no – the Devil is out of the soul business,” I say. “The Devil has quite enough souls. In fact the Devil is bored with souls. It’s like when you collect beanie babies or Cabbage Patch Dolls – you start out being very excited but eventually enough is enough.”

“So what does she give the Devil instead?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s not important. It’s what they call a McGuffin –“

“A Mc-What?”

“Never mind, never mind, we can fill that part in later –“

The Devil laughs when Dorothy timidly suggests her end of the bargain. “Why, you don’t need my help for that! All you have to do to bring customers is offer them free ice water! I’ll tell you what I’ll do though. I’ll throw in this spell –“

The spell turns human beings into kitsch.

“Of course not every human being who walks into Wall Drugs turns into kitsch,” I say. “The ones that do have to have a particular character flaw –“

“What character flaw?” Robin demands.

“I don’t know, it’s not important –“

“Not important?” says Robin in disgust. “Of course it’s important! It’s probably the most important thing in the whole story. The problem with you as a writer is you leave out all the good parts –“

“No, the problem with me as a writer is I don’t write,” I say softly.

But anyway. That was Wall, that was a week ago and I really can’t remember much else.