RATTLESNAKE HEAVEN

CH 1

They say we live in Bangor, California, but I live in Rattlesnake Heaven.


A land so called for its endless hissing engines in high grass and fires that come running, and for serpents, and for all the red cracked rocks that sit up like burning bricks of blood, caked on folded belly hillsides. The beggars-come-nomads-come-meth-addled minds of mystics stare wide eyed at the sight of the burning sun which feels near and heavy on the back of your head.

But there is Heaven on top of this Hell here too, as ancient brittle blue oaks amble and trod through ash-blonde tresses of grass, which lay in nests or plaited, growing greener over a deep clean cool creek of boyhood fantasy, and a lost fawn, a golden wandering unridden horse, ancient mill wells hidden under moss, tall spires of white fairy lanterns, and a stream where wildflowers lace together like doilies and bob over fast water from frozen mountaintops far away. 12 wild turkey eggs sit under a redbud tree, as vultures cast wide shadows, swooning in for a high pine that sounds like a waterfall when its windy.

Here lies Rattlesnake Heaven.

Here lies Heaven in Hell.

Two old preacher men talk on the radio, of angels falling from Heaven to then make Hell. Their belief was that these fallen angels were demons and that these fallen angels were what’s behind all the falling of our late “Great America”. It was these fallen angels that backed the great evils of progress, of which he said was, “progress towards evil”.

A caller comes on the car radio, his voice nervous and friendly. Eager like a beagle smelling the scent of another dog on your leg, he asks, “Hi it’s John, the missionary, Do you remember me? I came in out of that tornado and you set me up with a place for the night?”

The old preacher man does not remember but he awkwardly spouts the word “Yes!! Always happy to help a man of God.” In a manner to imply he was nodding in agreement but in a way that was believable to no one.

The missionary caller, “My wife was a born again, and she was raised a Jew. She loved you guys and she died of pancreatic cancer. She would have thanked you so much for giving me shelter.”

The missionary caller starts to sob mid sentence as if his words are exhausted and shaking as the weight of the loss of his late wife leaves his lips. The call muffles as he tries to collect his tears.


The old men thank the caller and speak over the crying man, their words stampeding over each other at their fear of sadness. 

“Thank you Sir.........but.......we....we......we have to....We have to move on to the next caller.”

How a tear can pull a whole room or nation down.

Me, I can hold my breath when flooded.

What is this strange place I’ve found myself again with my mother, who seems haunted by the ghost of my brother and and bad luck?

Her long silver hair whipping out the car window as a trail of red dust kicks up around us. Vulture Feathers flap from under the rear view mirror.

I say I am at the furthest reach of Rome, which thrusted its javelin upwards and westward until cowboys descended with guns on tribes of mystic first peoples. 

Here, the poorest people have real stories of grandmothers or great grandmothers or great great grandmothers who were prostitutes or worse as Indian women. But some rich folk too, romanticise or fantasise about fictional “nativeness” in their bloodline, giving rise to suspicion to anyone who lays claim. Excluding the land owners who are mostly German and English, fruit picker folk are of mostly Irish descent and got on better with native peoples. Magic people invaded for magic people who fled. Both were forced onto the swampy castaway thickets of Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation. Trail of Tears, Isolated and interned or neglected, starved out, diseased.

Most people don’t know it, but the Choctaw Nation gifted the Irish with food when they were starving, saying they had a shared enemy, the English who had turned to the natives with the same colonial force that previously enslaved the Irish. A monument “Kindred Spirits”, a ring of feathers stands in the Irish countryside attesting this to be true. 

My mother, I think, is the last of it for us, or so people tell me. In her youth, her dark hair lay thick over cheeks like plush seats for her eyes, which are carved like stone, which were focused, tight and downturned. Anthony says we have faces that look like they could be rolled down a mountain and nothing would chip off. A past lover said “old time settler face”. High cheeked, deep eyed, and dusty beautiful women strung up for the pleasures of gold miners. We descend from Johns.

Our town is “California’s oldest little city” 

Me, I’m not sure if the sun recognises my skin anymore. My goldenness faded in colder places. I came out as bright eyed and American as James Dean. But my mother would always collect or welcome any feather as a gift, grabbing them from under vulture nests in the woods, and grandma would press cacti or aloe on our burns and knew which mushrooms to eat. Abalone shells and hubcaps decorated the fences, and my grandpa and uncle dove deep to find them.

Shoes were what you wore when going to “town”. I was proud of how tough my feet were. I bragged about it. I’d walk down sharp gravel roads in 118 degree weather, holding a grimace at my secret discomfort as I tried to out “cool” the neighbourhood boys.

All the boys were pig-headed rednecks who’d do impish shit like draw crawdads out of their homes with dog food and then catch them and make them fight.

All had mysterious origins, much like myself but I was always “soft” and long haired, which was never to my benefit, while they were thick-necked, scruffy, and sprung like horny stray dogs. Jake’s mom we never met, his sister had a different momma too, and Jeremy had a family we’d never see, even though they lived on the corner. 

There were drugs all around the town if you only looked into the eyes of strangers who live down by the river. I see them on the street walking with spirits which antagonise them with every chemical puff like bees to flowers. Their sunburned faces carved into expressions of perpetual dumbfoundedness, as if in awe of an inherent existence itself.

We found syringes in sandboxes as kids in grade school playgrounds. Oddly enough, I think the boys all went crazy. People have a tendency to do that eventually in that little town. Or get locked up like stray dogs, or die. Seems every week I get asked to donate to a car wash or yard sale so some family of a local male youth could afford burial fees. Likely just as high cheeked and sacred spirited as the rest of us.

We look down into it all now, from up here in Rattlesnake Heaven. Anthony tells me that pit, that valley, was where they used to fight wars or bury their dead. That no one lived there for fear of suffering spirits.

What’s now hot dry planes and dirt fields used to be marshland. The whole valley too. Snow melt and heavy rains would flood the whole place, slowly evaporating in the endless dry summer heat. All but Histum Yani, the world’s smallest mountain range, would be glimmering in sheets of silver water and jade poplar leaves quaking with birds. Histum Yani an island in the middle, housing clans of grizzly bears.

All waters were damned with men after the settlers came. Starving men who needed the work. “Many men died building that dam. Some fell off, others fell in.” Says my mother, as we drive just below the towering concrete above us. 

“In the water?” I ask.

“In the concrete” She says.

In a way, we in the Wild West have our pyramids and the slaves that built them. But I pause to think of the sight of a far green and endless marshland and it’s cool breezes where heat now dances up from dried up ditches, glaring your vision as you try to see across the fields.

Where there now lies a burnt out trailer park, white egrets used to perch on willows. The boarded up shopping mall would be a beaver dam, and otters, bears, bobcats would be sunning themselves there too on high branches.

But that’s too dreamy to be real to me. I only knew the dry summers, but mother lost her house twice in floods, she says. And she lost all her “princess crystal”, but we kept a white vanity mirror that crackled through with jade paint beneath, the flood waters having split the wood.

The rivers carry with them a sense of vengeance at the damming of their flow. “Gateway to the Gold Fields” is painted in gold just beneath the town sign just at the river. Just by the temple to Bok Kai, which is the first Daoist temple outside of China and one of very few temples in America dedicated to a God.

And the Feather and Yuba rivers collide here, forking together. And in all that water sat gold, nuggets of it. All of the dragon’s riches shimmering in clear view.

And so the first cowboys who rode through and likely laid in high grass and slumbered under deep swooning sycamores, thought they found heaven when their unbooted soles kicked up their keys to paradise. 

Soon, all the wayward cowboys and wandered off serfs and beggars of Europe tread through mountains, got snowed in, some even ate their dead to survive the winter, and still built houses posted up and high, stacked Victorians like merengues or Easter cakes on pedestals.

To be at the banks of this place of Bok Kai, where he strewn gold chains for admirers of his own heart and welcomed them to return to wild and bathe nude and free after slipping their ankles from the cuffs of masters and jailers.

Come and be uncaged, be wild, simply be. 

And like Tilopa, is he so he.

“Do not remember it, he says, and do not imagine what it means, do not go thinking or grasping at the need, do not take yourself about with a lead.”

“You and your river are one in the same. Bathe yourself in me.”

But quickly all the beggars came tumbling down the mountain, rolling over each other to come for the waters. But not for paradise itself but rather just the “keys”. All the jewellery of Bok Kai clutched and pocketed. When they had a taste of the river god himself they sought out themselves to become one.

And all the gold taken made the river god weep, and his tears too salty now for sweet water fish. 

When the gold that glimmered on the top started dwindling quickly, rich men came with steam.

And turned over channels and guts of the deep waters dredging for gold. Shooting jets into banks and hillsides, until the river lay as mud in parts with deep jetties like scars and cuts and bounds of goldless gravel. A river raped of its riches.

And all the steamships that made this town the destination choked on the silt exposed by flat gutted waters. The gateway to the goldfields, the gates of Heaven closed.

The Bok Kai weeps, small trickles in the summer under the dominating sun. His shores leveed for fear of his rage in winter. And the summer rains had stopped, but then the winter rains stormed, as if to pull a Bow with long endless burning bone dry summers and release an arrow as heavy sheets of rain. 

Soon came floods and fires.

“Two fires this week” my mother says aloud, deep in anxiety. 

The fires both edged their way up our mountain. There has been a drought. The forest is dying.

“I could see orange smoke out the kitchen window”, she recalls.

It’s been a rush to cut all the dry grass and clear dead oaks and low limbs away from the house. The place sat sheathed in cardboard, old wood, dry straw and even propane tanks as if my father wanted it all to burn. 

As a payment for this back breaking labor, my mother pulls us into a roadside diner that’s under new management. 

“Jerry’s”, which claims “authentic southernness” to sell stacked high plateaus of waffles and fried chicken and small campy tin buckets of fried okra or fried green tomatoes. The food is mostly deep dried fatty foods of meat or griddle cakes with maple syrup. Dab a bit of your hottest hot sauce, and it’s all the damn flavours of the USA at the same time. 

Just in the booth by our’s, sat more old men. One poured out his seat, jeans unbuttoned with hard working suspenders cutting into his shoulder blades and a red plaid work shirt. He looks as if he were handsome in his youth, broad and corn-fed with kind but darting nervous eyes. He leans over the diner table lecturing the ancient history of Israel to a small old man in the same late cowboy costume. This smaller man seems to have been dehydrated and dried in the heat of farm fields to some husk of his younger self.

“Whatever vision or whatever the fuck he had, he United the people.” He speaks, of a figure so present in local conversation that the word “He” is synonymous with Jesus.

“There were Jews, who read the Tora, and the Tora is Muslim.” He said, wilfully interpreting history as he wishes but speaking with the confidence we find in facts.

“He united them, and you know Christmas and Easter, those are sun worshipping Christian holidays.”

The dried man nods.


The poured man says, “and Judas was a Jew and ya know, these things I’m saying, people don’t teach this stuff to new generations. People have to know.”

The food arrives, a chicken fried steak for Mom; a cheap beef cut pounded flat, battered and fried like we would fry a chicken and then smothered in creamy peppered gravy. Chicken and waffles for me; a Southern dish of battered and fried chicken on top of thick cornmeal waffles with maple syrup. Briefly, the fatty reward of hard working farm food pulls my attention from the man’s rambling. Meat and fat are our only afforded decadence but I’m still eager to figure out what the fuck he’s trying to say.

“And that goes back to what they said at holy trinity, In Alabama.” He says. 

The dried man knods again, eagerly. You see, we are eager people and they love the South here, because all the poor folk are “Okies”, migrant farm workers who came in from Oklahoma on “tin lizzies”, (broke down old farm fords loaded up with luggage until they sold it all off the keep from starving). Hungry for work and hungry still.

Once glimpsed into by the great Dorothea Lange, who caught them sad faced and earnest with starving children in cardboard shanty-towns by the river. 

The river is still for beggars and runaways who think the “South” in its totality is some holy land to all the wayward okies, who flip through old album photographs of long bearded men on bayous. I remember a distant grandfather named Zephaniah, so called Zephaniah from the Bible who said;

“The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”

“The Indians are the Jews of America.” Says the poured man as his calloused thumb tugs at the taught suspenders. The snap of the band on his chest jolted me back to their attention.


What a strange idea, I thought.

I know it’s strange what he says, but you see, I’ve heard this all before. It’s what the church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) believe, but I saw him drinking coffee, so he’s either a Jack Mormon (one who bends the rules with caffeine and alcohol (or other) or he just piece-meals it all together as he sees fit.

That’s what people do here, they oscillate between divine teachings, trying to make some sense of all this suffering. Grandma was Pentecostal, the neighbours were 7th Day Adventist, Jehovah’s witnesses are strange because they all look sad (my childhood self thought it was because they can’t celebrate birthdays), and the Baptist’s and Lutherans are the most common and passing for WASPS, and the Catholics who have the tallest building in town and must all be rich because I know they’re here but I don’t know one personally, and the Mexican farm workers have their churches scattered in old malls and corner stores, and the Mormons who have a penchant for drinking milk with every meal, and think crazy shit, like that black people were cursed with melanin for not siding with either Lucifer or Jesus. 

Crazy shit.

Well the Mormon’s, they have this other weird post-colonial and manifest-destinational belief that the Indians are the real Jews, or new Jews or whatever they would need to believe to imply that there could be a possibility of late Christian saints in America. The Indians, are some unknown background characters in these stories, supporting roles drafted up by Mormon founder, Joseph Smith. As if the natives never had any divinity themselves, with which I’m certain there’s plenty.

So the poured man continues to the dried man. “You see Christ is not his last name, Christ is a title. He is the “anointed” one. Look, you seem like a well read man, I’m just trying to be proper and explain it as I see it.”

The men continue, the dried man seems to throw himself like kindling into the fire of the large man’s burning diner sermon. 


We throw cash down on the meal. The numbers are bigger than I remember but they’re worth way less now. Covid 19 was recent and so America is undergoing inflation. A gallon of milk and a gallon of gas is $7.00, which seems to be a phrase I hear repeated by women regularly. A depression is impending if not already underway. The gold is being mined from workmen’s wages now, which lags sorely behind the price of all things. 

The men continue in a booth as we walk out, likely both continuing until their wives call them home or for feeding time for cattle. I’m not sure what this man was trying to say but he was damn near hell bent on showing someone a revelation whether they wanted one or not.

A thought drifts in like the dust from our tires as we drive to our old house in this pit...................All things of value here are valued on faith alone. We had gold here before, glittering like necklace chains all down the rivers, creeks, and streams from the mountains. But somehow when it was all taken, all wealth went away.

The dollar is just like some bible page, recalling some worth in its print, alluding to some divine unarguable fact of the weight of gold and God’s word that this is value, that we must behold it.

These bible pages attesting to unseen gold is what gets slipped into our fingers after solid days of dusty back breaking labor, but somehow we work hungry.

I sometimes think my folk go to church because there’s free air conditioning mainly, but then they’re happy to hear that there is some escape from all this endless working. In death is heaven, and so when all these aching elderly church goers and their restrained and soft toned children creaked like willows in a flooding bank, quaking by the rushing waters of the Holy Ghost, did I just think they all wished to die. 

Grandma dreamed of heaven daily.

The drive is long as the car weaves past red hills of dirt, through boughs of smoke clouds and grey forest; some dried, some charred, some burning, some painted bright magenta with aerial flame retardant. It is grim but as vivid as paintings. 

If you want an escape from this hell, and for just enough coins in your pocket for tithes you can sit in a pew and ponder “God’s great escape”. Heaven unfolds quickly into the minds of dusty burned necked villagers perhaps as campy luminous scenes like some Las Vegas sideshow that crescendos with angels with trumpet in hand, like showgirls in can-can formation.

But higher up the hill, there’s Pentecostals, and Quakers, and Mennonites, who strip the landscape to the soil, and who’s women wear small bonnets and bake the best tasting things with magnificent amounts of butter and keep their heads bowed near men. For these people, I must present myself with shame as decency.

Bangor has an old white church that goes without a denomination, it sits for hire for weddings or funerals. It too, like much of the homes, are for sale. 

There’s more too, new age, mystic type people who are wealthy and European. They position themselves in secrecy from above in all things. They live in the only and last village above us before all our wildfire chaparral becomes dense firs and mountain pine, wild nature fully.

They dress modestly and elegantly as if from another era, a background character in a silent film, or perhaps someone who watches orchestras. They sit watching our town from above. 

The car starts to weave more gently as roads straighten with flatter lands. 

These people, who mastered the art of glamour use glamour as verb.

On the road, the valley, the pit, the old town unfolds itself into a great expanse of emptiness.

I saw one woman of this mystic theosophical group, with platinum blonde hair set in finger waves in a white beaded dress and a fur stole, walk into a restaurant once. She shimmered her beaded flapper tasseled purse at me to catch my eye. I the one time teenage dishwasher who peaked out behind dirty dish racks witnessing a foreign unknown elegance.

These birds were caged. They can not say can’t. They should not say shouldn’t. Classical was the only music they played. And all of them previously; opera singers, pianists, classicists, nuclear physicists, harpists, actors, many actors.

They worshipped William Shakespeare, William Blake, and Walt Whitman, amongst many others and to the extent of their holy number 44, as prophetic angels of history.

Strange galas and dinners where bejewelled guests attended an ageing guru in gilded gay interiors. In a palace who’s location to me is still unknown but close by in the mountains above.

We turn down our old gravel street. The memory of all the wayward boys and children fishing crawdads out the ditches and throwing sticks into each others bike spokes hits me. My brother who would race me barefoot down the hot gravel road, his memory, or ghost or the same.

Here lies the place of the dead.

There it sat

3161 Dugout Street, Marysville, California

She was a miserable bitch, that house. 

If it had a face it would be bruised, with teeth broken but eyes mean. A battered woman. Meaning to say, I have to rely on a woman’s face in misery to tell you how a sentient inanimate material form can thrust so much emotion.

“Tractors came and ripped up all the back.” My mother says as she gestures to the tire cuts and tractor tears to a garden where childhood birthday parties were once held.

“The big red rose, the wild lilac, the grapes, all gone and ripped up.”

The garden was my gift to my mother. She loves nature but spent many days indoors with curtains closed lately. 

I’d say she lost the house, but really it was taken. People take from us, that always seemed to be the plot; banks, credit cards, lawyers, police or sometimes they take us ourselves, to prison sometimes, our lives historically, but mostly just to work. They take us to work. 

I wonder if the curse is because we were once beggars who took gold from sacred waters, and so we lay splayed out or arms pinned with all things taken. We descend from Johns.

The working poor they call us. The “working part” is imparted to imply that we don’t deserve our poverty. That we are “working” on it. It is meant to denote a bit of compassion, but I know many people who gave up on finding work long ago, but wildness is now forbidden.

The bank took our house.

I saw it stripped bare of our belongings. 

Stark. 

She sat naked like a sick woman in hospital. Somehow the few trees remaining from being scraped by tractors acted as curtains to conceal her misery.

I thought that I could cry, but I couldn’t.

I could sing, I could sing out sadness loudly but my god was part of me wishing that house would catch fire and die, to be tilled over and planted with a field of wildflowers

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!