J.D.’s Columns

           Deadwood on Five Dollars a Minute (This was written thirty-some years ago and first published by my pal Babs, in her BORDERLINE magazine.)                I live on a windy knoll  in the Salmon River mountains, seven miles up a gravel road from Donnelly, Idaho,      “The City of Helping Hands,”  population 247, but I grew up in Deadwood, South Dakota, and my folks still live there, in the Black Hills. On October 1, 1989, casino gambling, with certain limitations, became legal in Deadwood. What follows is my set of notes from a weekend trip to Deadwood in March 1991. Day One At five in the morning I kiss Caty and Baby-in-Belly, (working title: Little Luna) scrape windshield ice from Bic, the disposable Chrysler station wagon, then shimmy down Highway 55 in the Payette River canyon toward the nearest stoplight, 93 miles south, in B...

                            The Executioner’s Fork  Cambridge, Massachusetts        Five of us lived in three bedrooms, a kitchen and one bathroom of a stout white house near Harvard Square. Charles, the producer of the unfinished film that gnawed at our waking lives shared a room with Beryl, who ate only with chopsticks and spent her days with runes and Tarot cards.      I'd quit a tree-trimmer’s job in California, enrolled in graduate school in Cambridge, then dropped out and returned to California for six months to help Charles as he ran his lens across the new consciousness born in the Haight-Ashbury. In Cambridge my friends from college were dealing Mexican weed and windowpane acid. My room was in a leaded-glass turret with a radiator that sounded like it puked hailstones. There were brown roses on the wallpaper.  By pressing my thumbs on ...

Wyatt and Sylvia   Toole County, Montana      In the last year before school consolidation, before the farm kids were jerked out of the soil and sent to city packing sheds, I taught nine students in one room, way out on the hard red winter wheatfields of northern Montana.       In August I received a list of unfilled positions from Helena and applied by letter from California to School District 19, Toole County. “It’s a dead-end deal,” said Sam Black, the chairman of the school board, when we shook hands on the phone. “One year, then we fold the school and you are dismissed. I won’t lie to you. You are the only one who has called about this. We’ll take the chance if you will. Five thousand dollars and a place to stay for the school year. Plenty of opportunity for weekend work if you can handle equipment.”       There was no school bus. The children were delivered to the white frame building by wind...