The Dark Knight of Lake Elsinore
“What are you publishing this week?” my wife asks.
“I was going to put out the dildo story that triggered last week’s dildo story.”
“Really?”
“Should I not?”
“Back-to-back dildo stories?”
“Is there a hard limit on dildo stories?”
“It might be a little much.”
“Nah, I think it’ll be okay.”
“Two weeks of dildo stories might be two too many. You struck gold with last week’s dildo story. Don’t push it.”
“Hold on. Say that again. But slowly, I need to write it down.”
“Don’t you dare.”
Suffice to say, because my wife is smarter than me when it comes to dildo story frequency, I’m going to save the follow-up dildo story for a later date and avoid any would-be faux pas. My apologies, or you’re welcome, depending on where you come down on the dildo overkill debate.
I grew up in Lake Elsinore, which was named after the castle in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. When we were kids, though, we heard a different story. It went like this. As the explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo explored the California coast, he dropped anchor in San Juan Capistrano and sent a cabin boy through a mountain pass and down into a valley to scout fresh water. Three days later the boy returned, skin pale, hair ghostly white, and on the brink of death. Cabrillo asked the boy what had happened, what he had seen. The boy replied, “Hell, señor!” and dropped dead. In honor of the boy’s death, Cabrillo named the lake after the boy’s dying words—Lake Hell Señor—which by and by became Lake Elsinore.
I don’t know that I would equate it to hell, but I had my share of horrifying experiences there. This is one of them.
In high school, I got a job at the Nike outlet store, which was a considerable upgrade from my gig as an accidental Walmart model by way of MacDonald’s. The job mostly consisted of flirting with coworkers, cracking jokes with my friends/co-workers (including my cousin Josh), ignoring our managers, and shooting dirty looks at customers to prevent any questions, requests, or interactions.
We also spent a lot of time brainstorming nicknames. There was a bald, goatee-wearing bruiser in shipping and receiving named Peach; a nerdy, computer-obsessed cashier named Spacebar; a community college student named Rammer; a single mom and Pamela Anderson super fan we called Barb Wire; and there was a Mexican guy we called Deke, for reasons that would become apparent all too soon.
Deke went to my high school, but we ran in different circles. I was on the basketball team. He wrestled and played football. I made a lot of assumptions about him, and they were all wrong. It was one of my earlier—and more profound—lessons on the discrepancy between what seems and what is.
If you had asked me what music Deke listened to, I would have said hip-hop or gangster rap. And he might have, but he was more eclectic. He was a skilled musician. He played drums in his church band, and when he came to my cousin Josh’s house to hang out one day, he brought his acoustic guitar, and while we were talking about Pulp Fiction or which girls at work we thought were cute, he would start strumming and singing:
”Well, I guess it would be nice if I could touch your body… I know not everybody has got a body like you…”
And then he would stop and pick up the conversation as if he didn’t just break out into a George Michael tune. “Yeah, ya know who really does it for me at work? The Hitchhiker. Those crooked thumbs, I don’t know, there’s something about them…”
My cousin and I would laugh at these lyrical non sequiturs, and Deke would look away, like his feelings were hurt. We’d try to reassure him that we thought he was funny, that we weren’t laughing to criticize but laughing because we found him endearing.
“I’m playing,” he would say. “I’m not butt hurt.” And then he would pivot, “So, Norm, tell me about your great, big dreams.”
“Um…”
“Um? That’s all you have to say. It’s a great, big, crazy world. How are you dreaming about it?”
“I guess—”
“Jitterbug…”
“Huh?”
“Jitterbug…”
“Um…”
“You put the boom-boom into my heart…You send my soul sky-high when your lovin' starts…”
He was charming and sweet but really weird and sort of lonely. And harmless. Mostly.
One day at work, he said this to my cousin and me. “Neither of you have been on the Batman ride.” Which was a weird way to start a conversation.
“The roller coaster at Magic Mountain. Yeah, we’ve been on it a few times.”
“No, not that Batman ride.”
“Is there another one?”
“There is another one.”
“Where?”
“It’s a secret. I can take you. Tonight, if you want.”
Lake Elsinore was pretty boring for teenagers, so we jumped at any opportunity that didn’t involve angel dust or gang initiations. After work, we followed him to the edge of town, where we turned off onto a dirt road and drove a mile or two through a range of hills. I don’t know how high it was but we could see the north end of the Lake pretty clearly from the elevation.
He stopped his banged-up gray Toyota truck and shouted out the window at us. “Park and get in the truck with me.” I put my car in park and we headed to the passenger side of his truck. When we opened the door, he was wearing a Batman mask. Not like a cheap one, no, like an expensive, thick rubber one that covered his face and draped across his chest and shoulders over his Nike polo. “Get in,” he said, with all the stoic authority of Michael Keaton’s Batman. We laughed, of course, but we got in. He sings George Michael songs, I thought to myself. How dangerous could it be?
It was an awkward fit. The truck was a stick shift, and he had it capped off with a large ball emblazoned with the Batman logo. My cousin slid into the middle and I sat shotgun. I barely managed to get the door shut, our thighs squeezed together, pressing against the truck door, testing the integrity of Japanese automotive engineering.
He shifted into first gear, fixed his gaze ahead into his low beams, and said “Hold on.” And then he stomped on the gas. The truck sped forward, and it seemed like we were about to go over a cliff, but he jerked the wheel, and suddenly, I understood why he referred to this as the Batman ride. We weren't just off-roading—we were in a full-blown, low-budget action sequence.
The truck yanked hard to the right, slamming my cousin into my side and pinning me against the door. Gravel shot out from the tires. Dust whipped up, enveloping the truck it drifted along the dirt switchback, the headlights carving streaks into the dust cloud. I could barely make out the shape of the hill ahead before we were already on top of it.
He hit the brakes and let the truck idle in neutral. From this hill, we could see the entirety of the lake, the Ortega mountains behind it, the moon overhead.
“Holy shit, Deke, you’re gonna kill us!”
He slowly turned out my cousin and me, cool and calm, just a hint of a grin beneath the mask. Then he said, “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?" Which is actually a line said by Jack Nicholson’s Joker, but it didn’t seem like the time to point that out.
Next, Deke cut the lights and shifted into gear. The truck slowly started rolling forward and he shifted into neutral.
“Deke, what are you doing? Dude, what are you doing?!”
The truck started to descend a hill. I only knew this because I could feel the butt-puckering sensation of zero gravity. I couldn’t see anything. Just the occasional slice of terror when the moonlight hit just right.
All the while, Deke wrenched the steering wheel, yanking it this way and that way, like some kind of mad conductor orchestrating a series of near-death experiences. He shifted into gear to get up a hill, then back into neutral whenever the mood struck—some sort of bizarre tango with gravity and momentum, chaos and control—a reckless flirtation wavering between obedience to physics and surrender to the night. There were drops, there were berms, there were slopes and switchbacks—at one point, I’m confident we were airborne.
My cousin and I cycled through terrified screams, nervous laughter, and probably some form of speaking in tongues. Deke tossed a look at us when he wasn’t busy driving the crazy train, a crooked little shit-grin on his face. He must have done this dozens of times, maybe hundreds, to be able to do it not only expertly but in character.
Finally, the ride came to a complete stop, right back where I had parked my car. As I tried to catch my breath, Deke (so named, by the way, because of this evolution—Batman…The Dark Knight…DK…Deke) broke out into song:
“Because I gotta have faith, faith, faith… I gotta have faith, faith, faith…”
It’s harder than you think to choke a guy who just put your life in danger when he’s singing a George Michael song. So we just laughed it off.
On the way back down the hill, I looked out the lake and thought about the story of the cabin boy who went through “Hell, señor,” before dropping dead — the one who didn’t survive the ride he was on. And then I thought I better start dreaming, better start living a life that makes sense of this great big, crazy world.
If you enjoyed this, consider reading some of my other stories:
Horseplay: a story of broken bones and a wonderful wife.
Send in the Clowns: a study in nightmares.
Bloody Towels: a meditation on gratitude or the lack thereof. Also, my children were not murdered as a result of this story, but I’m wondering if they should have been…
First, "hard limit on dildo stories" was not lost on me. Subtle but layered in nuance.
Second, there is *no* such thing as too many dildo stories. This could turn into a dildo-centered blog and I'd show up every week with excited anticipation.
Third, glad you survived Deke's driving skills in order to tell the tale. At least he had the sense to wait until after his Dark Knight themed ride to bust into George Michael tunes.
Hooley dooley. Deke sounds like a fun guy. You coulda called him Shiitake.