“Back in Hawaii in the ‘60s, Doctors drove ambulances, and the ambulances were Pontiacs”
— The Minister Mechanic
You have to slow down when you enter the Minister’s compound. The road’s full of potholes, and, if you’re not careful, Alice, Jimi, and Jerry go flying off the dash, falling forgotten beneath the passenger seat. The driveway’s lined with rusting cars, and, off to either side, cattle pastures stretch off into the hills that ring the town of Petaluma, California, cupping the farm country in a suspiciously-shaped bowl (more to come) and giving Petaluma its name — a transliteration of “Land of the Rolling Hills,” according to the Minister; “Hill Backside,” according to Wiki. At the entrance to the property, there’s a DO NOT ENTER sign and a tattered old American flag. You knock, it is opened to you, and you enter.
The Minister’s waiting there to greet you, in between tasks, wearing Crocs and an eyepatch. He’s big, gentle, and rough, a self-identified survivalist. At his side, Sparky, his tiny, one-eyed dog who always goes missing. You’ve got cash for the rental, as specified on Craigslist. He shows you around — here’s his trailer, here’s yours, there are a few other people renting or parking RVs on the property, here’s the propane, here’s the outhouse — and then he’s off to his next task, muttering about the drought, weaving between gutted vending machines, ancient ambulances and firetrucks, and hundreds of recycled fire extinguishers. You settle in and do your thing, wondering what on earth his thing is.
Then, after a few weeks in the rolling hills, you get to sit down with the Minister. You hear his story. Here it is, reproduced with his permission.
The Minister’s lived on these five acres his whole life, and his family has for five generations. It’s always been like this, he says, and his other grandfather also had a similar place up in the hills around Petaluma. (When you ask if it’s fair to call his spot a “junkyard,” he says that to him the word isn’t derogatory, but that to others it might be.) He’s a mechanic, he loves gadgets, he can take anything apart then put it back together. Something in the German blood and their cars, he says, explaining how his last name’s German. His property seems to be littered with random old things, but when you move an old broken sign for trailer decor, he says not to move anything without asking, he knows where everything is, it all has a use, and if something goes missing he goes crazy trying to find it. So you don’t move anything else.
What’s his favorite place he’s visited? He makes a joke about Reno being a good time. Other than that, he says, in all honesty his property has plenty to keep him occupied for the rest of his days, there are always things to do, it’s endlessly interesting. Out here, he says, with the changing seasons and the wind and the rain, there is always something to look forward to, you’re a part of all the natural cycles and changes. He mentions stepping outside into a puddle, how you’re forced to deal with it, whether you like it or not. Asphalt and lawns don’t change, he says, stressed people have to get away for the weekend to enjoy what he gets year-round.
Does he watch the news? Not in over a year. It’s irrelevant to his life out here. He doesn’t get involved in any political stuff, but he was a volunteer fireman, donated tomatoes, and had a limo business. Anyway, he never read or wrote well, and he quit school to work on the family land, toward which his mind always drifted anyway: getting money for a tractor, enlarging the pond, putting pipes around it... He loves doing things himself. That’s what I did, he says, and here I am today.
Does he have heroes? He has a hard time picking favorites because he always changes his mind and tends to see good in everything. There was this show called Emergency where the main characters were these two young guys, but it was their vehicles that were his heroes. He used to draw crazy car contraptions in his school notebooks, like trucks with booms and pulleys.
When he leaves his property and drives out to where the quiet side street intersects two busy lanes, he gets an odd feeling: now he’s subject to other people’s rules and regulations, he’s not in Kansas anymore.
You ask what he makes of the Beatniks and Hippies, if they’ve ever overlapped, considering San Francisco’s an hour south, he’s been here his whole life, and you’re interested. Oh, he says, I don’t know, hobos come to mind, you know, winos in suits with flowers riding rail cars. You say: you’re either on the bus or off the bus. Or hanging off the back bumper, replies the Minister.
In the past few years, he says, Petaluma sheriffs have killed innocent people. Andy Lopez was thirteen and carrying a BB gun that looked like a real gun. He was shot seven times and killed.1 Another man was pulled over mistakenly and, in the struggle to get him out of the car, suffocated to death. There’s a lot of crank around, the Minister says, you’d be surprised. There are people out there who’d slit your throat for forty bucks, and it’s no different here in Petaluma. He says everyone’s human and the police have a nasty job, that they want to go home at night, that when they show up to work in the morning, they’re not thinking Today I want to kill someone. But, he says, they’re not going to give you the benefit of the doubt.
In 2014, around Thanksgiving, the Minister opened some sort of gate in a fence. His mother’s longhorn cow, Baby, was grazing, hidden, just on the other side. Baby lifted her head as the Minister entered, the tip of her horn punctured the side of his head, and the Minister’s right eyeball popped out. He blacked out. When he came to, he remembers crawling to his neighbor’s, where he asked them not to call the ambulance. He recuperated on his own at home without pain meds. At night, his screams were so loud that a couple renting from him had to move.
God, he hates doctors. Six months before his eye, he got in a car accident, was almost paralyzed, and had to walk with a stick for a while. You’re lucky if the ambulance comes, he says, because then you get a good doctor, not like the one doctor I had — Harf was his name, like Barf. And lawyers are even worse than on TV. He had to see a lawyer in San Francisco after his injury. What he remembers: a high-rise, a fortune to park, and, in the waiting room, a circus, a quack, a midget receptionist, and a strange guy with weird glasses.2 Once he made it out of the waiting room, the Minister told the lawyer that he had told his doctor he was feeling better, and you know what the lawyer told him?: Never tell a surgeon you’re getting better. What a mess! He realized that if the lawyer and doctor don’t make money, nobody does — and what you get is change. Whatever doctors and lawyers say, he says, they’re like God.
Does he believe in God? He prays, he says. You ask how. He empties his mind. Nature is God, he continues, you’re on your own in this world, it’s between you and God. I forget the name of my church, he says, all religions are good. It’s not how much money you give to the church or if you attend every Sunday, but about every little act you do, each and every day. We’re special, we have free will, we have to be careful what we do with it. All my daily actions are religious, he says. He still feels young at heart, but time goes by quickly, it really does...
Since Thanksgiving 2014, he says, things have felt funny, different. He started thinking about the land, where his family has been for so long. He lights up talking about it. The soil is special, he says, and we’re in a great, indented bowl in the hills. It makes sense, logically, that a meteor or something crashed here long ago. It all fits. There’s two feet of good, silty soil all across Petaluma, that’s why things grow so well here — and then it’s ironic, that plane crash back in the ‘40s. What plane crash? you ask. Back in the ‘40s there was an unidentified plane crash in the Petaluma countryside, and the government was confused and I find that interesting. There was something going on, so many reports of sightings, talk of foo fighters. Whatever crashed might’ve thought it was a different planet because of the asteroid soil. But the Petaluma Army came in, then the Coast Guard, and whatever it was, it was covered up. When the Minister asked his family who’d been around back then, they were cagey and didn’t want to talk about it. When he tracked down the other two extant Petaluma families who’d lived in the crash area in the ‘40s, he found them to be tight-lipped as well. Both of their houses had bunkers built in the basements, he got tours. Were the bunkers for the invading Japanese, or something else? You had to wonder. The Minister found a Park Ranger whose hobby is locating military plane crashes, the guy came out and said there had to be some records, then he never got back to the Minister. Was he silenced? Top secret? Told to Drop it, maybe? There’s gotta be a reason, the Minister says, that all these thoughts get in my head after I got hit in the head. If an asteroid crashed here, that would explain everything. But, he says, I don’t give it much thought, I’m really a guy for facts, so I just let it go.
And what about this whole minister thing he’d dropped so casually earlier in our conversation? Is he actually a minister? Yes, he is. It’s no big deal to be a minister, he says, there are shoddy ones and good ones, like anything. It’s just forty bucks, you call some guy over in Berkeley. And why is he a minister? It was for Limo Bob, you know, that guy in the ads with the mink fur coat and all the cars around him, really cutting edge stuff. The Minister used to have a limo from Bob made for the ‘84 Olympics in Los Angeles. So he called Bob once (why, exactly, he can’t remember) and they did a circuit going to juvenile halls and schools promoting Limo Bob’s book on his rags-to-riches life story. My Gosh, Limo Bob is a character, the Minister says, the white Mr. T, even Clinton gave him gold cufflinks. He’s got this car down in Florida called Excalibur with pillars and marble floors and tug trailer behind… And, no, the Minister did not vote in the last two elections.
Ongoing vigils for Andy Lopez overlapped with last summer’s demonstrations and protests: https://www.kqed.org/news/11822946/in-santa-rosa-a-week-of-tear-gas-rubber-bullets-and-over-150-arrests
Mad weird, Mr. Jones.