When I was a kid almost every year we drove out to my grandmothers house in
California for Christmas. All we saw was the Mohave desert, the LA basin and
watched Route 66 being pushed into oblivion by the construction of Interstate 40.
We stopped at all the curio shops whose claim to fame was they all had a 2 headed rattle snake
to entice you in to buy knick-knacks made in Japan.
One year we broke down between Needles and Ludlow.
It was an adventure right out of the movie Family Vacation.
We sat for hours beside the road in the desert on a very windy day among the lava beds.
We were amazed by the amount of broken glass shimmering in the sunshine and
watched long legged coyotes the same color as the sand trot by.
Someone finally stopped and eventually a tow truck showed up around sundown.
We all crammed into the truck and rode the tow with an old desert rat driving into Ludlow.
We waited in the coffee shop while the desert rat, who was also the mechanic, was staring under the hood
of my mothers Dodge POS like he was trying to figure out how to make his retirement
out of this one job. After taking a nap while standing and doing whatever it is desert rat mechanics do.
He came over to the coffee shop just as I was finishing off the greasiest cheeseburger ever made.
It tasted great to me but I was kid and starving.
He said it was the ignition coil and that it would be sometime tomorrow before they could get one from Barstow.
Or… He had a friend out in the hills who had a boneyard and he could check to see if he had one.
My mother kinda had no choice but to say yes. About that time there was a black-out.
Yep! No Power! Dead of night! Middle of the Mohave Desert! No Lights! Darker then sin!
The zombies rose from the sage brush like refugees from a nuclear test gone wrong!
We all fled into the dark of night as the desert rat mechanic fended them off and he was never to be seen again…
Except on the blackest of windy nights in the Mohave his tow truck can be seen trolling for stranded travelers
out on old 66…..

More or less based on a true longer story that's best shared
over a beer in the Baghdad Cafe
because I am never stopping in Ludlow again!
You can decide which parts to believe,
but you’ve been warned!