I’ve been sitting in this chair, typing, for so long I can’t remember the last time I could feel my ass.  Totally numb.  Maybe it got pissed off and left.  Nobody’s talking.  My Apple Watch has been chirping and buzzing and whining and bitching for hours now, giving my dire warnings about needing to stand the fuck up in order to avoid death by pulmonary embolism.  Alas.  Occupational hazard, I suppose.  Never mind.

I’ve been reading a lot of local history recently…it’s surprisingly violent.  Lots of gun fights, stagecoach robberies, showdowns…it was the Wild West.

Last night I was reading about this town a couple of dozen miles up the hills from where my ass is presently, seemingly, glued to this chair, called Copperopolis.  And on this day in 1883, there was badassery.

Dig, if you will, the picture, dear reader: the air hangs thick with the promise of gold dust and low-grade desperation, a uniquely Californian scent.  And somewhere in this sunblasted landscape, a man of letters, a gentleman of the road, is preparing his final act. There were plenty of roadside thugs waiting to bludgeon a driver for a his pocket watch (hell, there are even more of them now…California’s a shithole).  No.  This is Charles Boles, or maybe Bolton, or maybe some other name entirely, but known to the pants-wetting couriers of Wells Fargo as Black Bart.  A childhood role model of mine, he always seemed to understand that crime, true crime, is performance art.  Yes, he was a stagecoach bandit, but he was also an author, a character of his own meticulous creation.  Dapper, they said.  Never fired a shot, they said.  They said he wielded politeness like a weapon and poetry like a business card.  He robbed people with panache…just by being that badass.

Imagine it, man…the grinding wheels of the stagecoach, the exhausted breath of the horses, the sudden, theatrical appearance of a man in a flour-sack mask.  He’s not brandishing a cannon; he’s projecting an aura.  An aura that says, I am infinitely more interesting than you, and I’ll be taking your money now.  He robbed 28 of these things.  Twenty-eight.  All without so much of a hint of the violence that defined his contemporaries.  He was an artist working in the medium of highway robbery.

And like any good writer, he couldn’t resist leaving a note.  After this final smash-up, he left behind a fragment of his particular brand of doggerel, a little literary fuck you to the establishment he routinely plundered: “Here I lay waiting in ambush to make that goddamn coach a smash…”

The thing that finally brought that curtain down on our poet, bandit wasn’t something like a dropped pistol or a careless fingerprint.  It was a laundry mark (a tiny, coded symbol used back then) on the handkerchief he wrote his poem on.  Ultimately, this most prolific stagecoach robber was undone by his dry cleaning.

They caught him, of course.  Sent him away.  He did his six years, walked out of prison a free man, and then – poof.  Vanished.  He dissolved back into the American ether, leaving behind nothing but a string of perfectly executed robberies and a handful of terrible poems.  He became a ghost, a myth, a character who wrote himself out of his own story at the perfect moment.  I dunno…I thought it was cool.

N.P.: “Hell in the Hollow” – Gravel N’ Bones