Slab City 2: "We're All Here Because We Ain't All There."

An outlaw biker, a fugitive mother of three, a cancer survivor and a bearded lady. Profiles from the Last Free Place In America.

(Hi, I’m Sanjiv, this is Minority Report, a newsletter about subcultures and fringe groups. This is the second post about Slab City, perhaps the epitome of an American subculture. It won’t make sense unless you read the first, Slab City: Ask The Dust, which is a necessary introduction. Please support however you can!)

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The term “marginalized” usually refers to race, gender and sexual orientation. Those are the big ones. Disability too. But poverty and sickness, not so much. And as for mental illness or a traumatic childhood, barely at all. They’re on the margins of “marginalized” at best, ever since the left’s doomed turn toward identity politics.

A trip to Slab City is a corrective. These people are marginalized in the most literal sense—they’ve either opted out, or (more commonly) been forced out by a system that has never much cared to catch you when you fall. And most Slabbers are white and straight with a smattering of other identities thrown in—in other words, they seem to reflect America at large in demographic terms. The difference is that these groups are more unified here, their distinctions are less important. There’s a solidarity here that is hard to find out in Babylon. You don’t find MAGA flags or “in this house we believe” yard signs. Because at the Slabs, people are brought together by what binds us all, no matter your demographic—the elemental need for food, water and shade, and a vulnerability to the cruel twists of life that afflict us all without prejudice.

I’ve narrowed the selection here; several interviews didn’t make the cut. The goal isn’t a representative cross section but a reflection of the stories that I found most affecting. My question was always the same: “how did you get here?” And the answers roamed and wandered as you’ll see.

But to a fault, they reminded me to be grateful, and to remember just how powerful the forces beyond our control are, and how easily they can send us flailing. Of course poor choices were made too, but—at the risk of sounding like a bleeding heart—these are choices shaped by childhood, family, mental illness and trauma.

As a wise man once said, the more you know about someone, the more you forgive them.

MARTY

At the entrance to Marty’s camp is a sign: “Trespassers will be shot. And survivors will be shot again.” One of those joke signs you get, and common enough in the right company, it’s like an NRA version of “Bless This Mess”. But with Marty you have to wonder. He was once in a biker gang out of California known as the Riders Association. “Riders Ass” it said on the patch, but they were no joke. His exploits sent him to prison for 25 years.

“If there’s stuff on the seat just move it,” he says, ushering Sanctuary Val and I into his camp. “We had quite a crowd last night.”

Marty hosts the karaoke at the Slabs. Every Friday night Slabbers come to his outdoor lounge area to do shots and choose a song. It’s a Slab City institution. He set up a small stage in the corner of his camp, with a mic stand, and a little bar, and an old school popcorn machine that he’s fixed up. And it’s all free, even the liquor.

“It’s free, even the shots,” he says. “It’s not about squeezing money out of people. Just come for a good time.”

You’d never guess from meeting him that Marty had such a checkered past. Though he looks like an old biker, with that mustache and beard, and the slightly bowed legs after years in the saddle, he’s 72 now, and all his edges have been smoothed. He’s calm and level-headed, a grandfatherly figure at the Slabs, a voice of moderation and order.

“I have no problem calling the cops,” says the former outlaw. “The cops are a gang, and sometimes that’s what you need. They’ll say ‘you're a cop caller’ but I don't care. You act right, you won't get the cops called on you. Period.”

Marty’s story is perfect for Slab City - it’s like a fable of freedom, its risks and rewards. He set out to be free, giving up everything for the open road, a life outside of society and responsibility. But it cost him his freedom, which took him a quarter century to win back. And now, in his final quarter, he has found a home in the Last Free Place, where freedom has a different flavor, a tepid echo of his biker days.

“I just like not being under the thumb of a lot of regulations,” he says. “That's the main thing right there. It appeals to the rebel inside me.”

He was a teenager in Baltimore when he was drafted for the Vietnam War in 72, straight out of high school. He served in the Navy, trained in electronics and radar equipment, and he found work in that field after the war, fixing up military equipment. For a few years he was a 9 to 5 guy. He got married young, had a boy and a girl. So far so conventional.

Then he bought a Harley.

“I started taking off for the weekends and not making it back by Monday,” he says. “Then it was Tuesday. Until eventually, I just quit. The road called me you could say. And yeah, it caused a lot of problems.”

He rode all over these United States. Wind in his hair and all that. An American archetype. “It’s probably the same feeling people get from jumping on trains, or hitchhiking. I went barhopping from town to town - I don’t know if I was an alcoholic, exactly, but I loved to party. And pretty much every town I pulled into, there's a woman in a bar that's lonely enough to take you under her wing for a while. What can I tell you, I was young, dumb and full of… you know what.”

He fell in with the gang when he came to the high desert in California. And it wasn’t long before it happened. “Someone died during a robbery. It’s nothing I’m proud of, I have to live with it. The charge was homicide. I started out in Old Folsom and Soledad and then when I finally paroled in 2005, I was in San Quentin. All the big houses.”

The reason he was paroled was because at San Quentin he became a Buddhist and took a vow of non-violence. The Green Dragon Temple, also known as Green Gulch Farm in San Francisco would visit the prison every week and Marty stuck with it for five years. The transformation was immense.

“I meditate every day now, it keeps me pretty centered. And I loathe violence. I'm like a teetotaler, I can't stand to be around people who do that anymore. Of course when alcohol’s involved some people become bullies, but I try not to let that happen here. That’s what the cattle prod’s for.”

Often, under the desert sky, the music will take him back to his youth. To when he was a foolish young buck burning the days in bars from LA to Chicago.

“That’s why I do the karaoke,” he says. “It reminds me of my biker days. Because it’s a party basically, but without all the negative trappings. For me, it’s a labor of love.”

“I love it here, but honestly the community is up and down. Some people are so full of themselves that they think they can do what they want because it’s the Last Free Place in America. Most of the thefts and stuff are drug addicts. Twenty years ago the place was different. People were older, they were RVers who would travel around the country. But then young people started to come in because of that movie Into The Wild. The traveling kids started coming and when alcohol gets mixed in…

If you study any of the Bibles you’ll see the history of human nature, and it's not very good. We definitely need some form of government and I think America has a good system. Our capitalist society needs to be preserved. It has its faults, but it's better than any other scheme that’s been invented.

The fact that this place exists within a capitalist society is a good thing. And I promise you Imperial County doesn’t want this property sold off. Because once it’s in private hands, they have to enforce the codes like they do everywhere else . That's why I think that every county in the United States should have a Slab City where people can go and just be left alone, stop all those draconian regulations. I think it would solve homelessness.”

FLEURISH

I meet Fleurish at the Oasis Cafe. She makes space for me at her table. Soft-spoken and friendly, polite to a fault, she agrees to an interview after breakfast, so we head out back to where it’s quiet, to a little library behind the Oasis, one of two at the Slabs. A trailer full of books, essentially, with a couple of seats, shaded and cool. A haven.

Fleurish is a bearded lady. That means she has polycystic ovaries that disrupt her hormone production. She could shave, as many others with this condition choose to, but she doesn’t see the need. “I’m lazy,” she says.

Unlike most Slabbers, she came from privilege. Her father was a corporate insurance guy in Washington DC, and her mother an ambitious 2^nd wave feminist—political and engaged, they met at the Democrats Club in New York City. Fleurish was the oldest of two, and her folks were hopeful that she would follow in the same WASPish path of a prestigious degree followed by a well paid career and so on.

But instead, Fleurish grew up anxious and depressed, and these emotional issues have derailed her time and again. While she seems cheerful in person, even joyful, her friends know her as deeply pessimistic, with a lot of anger against her parents in particular.

We are all wounded children to some degree, and our adulthoods are the measure of how well we tend those wounds. Fleurish is a picture of that struggle. She sought meaning and solace in various intentional communities, turned broadly towards New Age mysticism, and has been coming to Slab City on and off since 2018, leading an itinerant life, spending a summer here, a summer there. She’s 43.

“My mother didn't really want kids, she wanted to be a feminist businesswoman. She felt bad for all the stay-at-home moms who didn't have the professional life in Manhattan that she had. So, growing up, I never felt a connection with her. I always wanted more affection but she didn't have it. And dad was never home, he was a workaholic.

I struggled at school. I failed out of Bard College in New York State. That was when I first became suicidal. I eventually went to Earlham college in Indiana and graduated in politics and history but I was so focussed on graduating, I didn’t think about what career to do afterwards. So I ended up working at Starbucks, which felt like a huge failure. Everybody I went to school with was off doing big things. Then I broke up with a boyfriend. That was the first time I was hospitalized. I cut my wrist.

I worked at IKEA, Toys R Us, all these retail jobs. And I loved the customer service part, interacting with people. But I was also really hard on myself. If I was going to be late to work, I’d be so embarrassed, I wouldn’t get out of bed all day or call anybody, so I’d get fired for being a no-show. And then I’d feel like I disappointed everyone. This happened over and over, first out East and then when I moved to Denver. The second time I was hospitalized, it was pills.

Eventually, I couldn’t bring myself to go to work anymore. I felt like, well, if I'm not happy here, let me go explore. I was looking for an intentional community. So I did a dozen tarot readings about where to go, and the cards said San Diego, and a friend was like, ‘hey check out Slab City, it looks really cool.’

I came in 2018. I left on the Spring Equinox. And it was wonderful. I was in this place where people don't do anything all day. It was social without getting a job. I could go meet people and learn the guitar. I love meeting people. And I could rent someone’s trailer for like $200 a month.

I had a boyfriend here called White Wolf. He was a white albino Black man who played the harmonica and had blonde dreadlocks. Really cool guy. But he was a Flat Earther, and I wasn't allowed to disagree, it was like I was crushing his dreams. Then COVID hit, and everything shut down. No more socializing. So we went to his place in South Carolina for a few years. I lived with a medicine woman, I did stuff with pagans out there, but I really missed the Slabs. So I came back in 2023. It was a brutal summer. But I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t afford gas. My parents were giving me a monthly stipend on the 20th of each month when the new astrology sign starts, but I'd spend it all the first week. I know.

When I first got here my mother was like, ‘you have to get a job, you can't live off the money we're sending.’ And I said ‘I'm not prepared to get a job so either stop sending it or let me do what I want with it.’ And they kept sending it. I think my dad was able to talk her through it. They've always told me, ‘we’ll help you if you need, but we’ll be disappointed.’

They actually visited for the first time last week. I think they expected more snowbirds, like fully intact RVs, not burnt out. I asked my mother, ‘what do you think?’ And she said, ‘things seem to be falling apart a lot around here.’ Like she was at a museum—“what was the theme?” Very distant, observational. But I was impressed. In the past they've been more judgmental. Maybe it’s because they’re getting up there. My mom's 79 and my dad's 84. Me, I’m 43. I know I look younger. Part of me is like, ‘you just have baby fat because you never actually matured and you're just a little stupid little…’ You know, that voice! Aargh! Shut up!

Have you heard of bibliomancy? You can open up a book too and just start reading and it’s got a message. Look at this one: “The Language of Flowers”. That’s already perfect, because my name is Fleurish. Let’s see: “He stepped toward me and dropped the camera strap around my head…” Oh wow, how funny is that? Reading about photography while I'm sitting here and you’re taking a picture!

That’s how you know you're on the right path.”

BERYL

Beryl—“it’s Burl”—was the first person I met at the Slabs. I popped into the Oasis and there she was, her unlit joint parked in the crook of her mouth. “How you doing honey? Coffee?”

Once the fight petered out—the fight at Sunday breakfast I wrote about in Part 1 of this series—we sat across the table and she told me her story. Lit the joint and laid it out. No bullshit, because that’s Beryl, she calls it like she sees it. She’s been at the Slabs since 2008, which makes it 17 summers and counting, so now she’s considered an Elder. They call her to weigh in on disputes and scandal and community decisions. At the Range, she’s on the harmonica in the house band. She does the food there too—$5.50 for a double cheeseburger—as well as breakfast at the Oasis every morning at a round $6. “People gotta be able to afford this stuff!” She’s a worker, always has been.

As we spoke, she was clipped and flinty at times, seemingly eager to push the conversation along. But at others, she spoke in long paragraphs, tears springing to her eyes as recounted her life in Babylon, the Slabbers term for the world outside Slab City. It wasn’t that she had struggled there, or that life was cruel, it wasn’t. She thrived in Babylon. If only she could have stayed.

Born and raised in Chicago, to an American dad and a Japanese mom, she was the ADHD kid at school before they diagnosed that kind of thing. After high school, she worked in a bank for years and had a knack for it—she was working with the boss, going on golf trips. But then they laid her off. And she realized that maybe banks might not be the good guys. Or as she puts it: “I was playing all that little junior exec shit but then Reaganomics hit and my eyes opened. I don’t want to be on this corporate pirate ship!”

Restless and eager to work, she quickly found a job with Fedex, out in her truck delivering packages. How she loved that job! She was in a long term relationship with a girlfriend at that time. Happy days.

Then: breast cancer. Chemo, mastectomy, the works. The end of her relationship after a decade. And perhaps worst of all, she couldn’t do her route anymore. “I didn’t want to let a disease take my job!” She’s crying now. “But chemo did a number on my body.” And the Chicago weather, that bone cold of winter and the draining humidity of summer. She had to move to the South West for the climate. Down by Yuma where the air was dry and warm.

So at 47, she packed her Ford Escape with a heavy heart. And she drove.

“I split out January 2nd of 2008. That's when I left Chicago. I didn't know anything about this place. Didn’t know what I was going to do. I just came out west via Route 66.

I was camping at the Salton Sea, and this Canadian couple, they were birdwatchers, they took me to see Salvation Mountain and Slab City. Just keep an open mind, they said, it's all about the love. And I liked it here, it was just an extension of camping to me. I could get food stamps. I had a car, so that made me marketable. And I liked the system. I like bartering, you know.

First thing I did was come here and volunteer at the Oasis. People saw that I’m willing to work, I don’t need no handouts. And I won't play that game like, “oh, I'm just a girl.” Never.

My first tent died real quick out here. It disintegrated in the heat. So I lived in a friend’s trailer before buying my own. But one time I left town for New Mexico, and on the way back, I had this vision of my camp getting destroyed, and that vision caused me to get stuck in the sand. I got a flat tire and had to call 911 for help. When I finally got back, someone had sold my camp from underneath me, and my stuff was all over the place.

I didn’t leave, though. People helped me out and I just kept going. Just because there's a couple of jerks doesn't make the whole place bad. I felt comfortable here. I felt at home. There's something incredible here. I can't explain it, but shit happens here all the fucking time, like a special vortex.

I know people say this place is lawless because that’s what they see on social media. That’s why social media’s going to kill this place. Because people see this stuff and act stupid when they come here. But it's not lawless. I know guys that have been torched out of the Slabs because we found paper on them as being child molesters. But we don't like that in our community. And there's people that take care of that.

I had to handle a hit and run recently—Tori, she's all over the Slabs helping people. Then someone hit on her electric bike and drove off. No broken bones, nothing like that, but her bike is destroyed. Anyway, we found the person and I told him we could call the cops or he could have a face-to-face with Tori. Either way, he’s not driving around this community anymore. And he decided to sign his car over to Tori and leave. But he wasn't forced to, he had a choice.

I'm going to do whatever I can to protect my community. It's our home. Where are all these people going to go, you know?”

VALKYRIE

She said she’d do the interview, Valkyrie, she volunteered. Because she loves talking about this place, how it saved her life and her kids’ too. But then I ask about her past, and she gets evasive.

Seems there are places she just can’t go at 9.30am on a Sunday. Not with the day just starting and her kids hovering. Anyone can see in her eyes that there’s pain there, and regret, and all kinds of memories that she’d rather not awaken.

This much I do know. That she’s originally from Virginia, from Roanoke in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Thought not from a traveler family herself, there were always travelers around growing up. “We had a house full of dirty kids and train hoppers,” she says. And after school, she chose that life for herself. “I became what you’d call homeless for about four years. Living out of a book bag. It was OK.”

What happened next, though, that’s where it gets hard. Val takes a lug on her joint, looks off into the distance, meaning deep inside herself, and she sighs a long plume. It’s as though she caught a glimpse of it all, the thirty years before Slab City, like she opened the door just a crack and what came pouring out was just too much.

“That’s… a whole lot of stuff I'm not getting into,” she says. “I've been married a couple of times, got a handful of kids. But here and now there's four of us. That’s what matters. It’s me and these three kids.”

There’s Zander a 15 year old and his older brother Sincere, who’s 17 and six foot eight. And Penelopy who hides her face behind her hoodie the whole time. She’s 12. When they got here three years ago, they had nothing. And this community took them in, fed them, gave them a shot. Valkyrie can’t say enough about this place, the people, the kindness. That special quality you find here.

“My boy Sin [Sincere] is autistic, and this here is the first place in the entire United States that he can come out of the house without me making him,” she says. “He feels comfortable in his own skin, like he can conversate with people in the coffee shop. He wouldn't do that back home.”

Sincere looms behind her with an affable grin.

“The difference is these people here are just like him,” Valkyrie continues. “A lot of people end up here because they've been traumatized. They've been through stuff. Life has kicked them around. But we can come here and not be judged you know? We're all here because we ain't all there.”

She pauses a moment and looks at me. “You know we came here on the run right? I can tell you that story if you like…”

“OK so the day before I came out here, I was supposed to go to court for child support. Not for these kids. A previous marriage. One kid’s already in her mid-twenties. But the dad was trying to get back child support and they were going to put me in jail and put these three kids in foster care. After a year of being fostered you can be put up for adoption, and I was going to be in jail for a year if they caught me. I wasn't going to allow that. So I ran.

We had moved around a bit before then, just going state to state. Sometimes there’s a house I can land at and get set up myself. Friends who are travelers and have kids. We settle down for a few years, then start traveling again. You don't have to do the settle down thing, you know.

But the reason I picked California this time is it’s too expensive to send me back if they catch me. I only owe 5,000 and to take somebody back it's at least a 5000 per state line to cross. It’s expensive

So we went to Florida and hung out there for a bit. And then we was gonna hit Mexico but the border patrol scared the shit out of me. This was three years ago. I was like fuck that, that's a lot of cop cars. So I came all through Texas to here. Took us seven weeks.

I was broke coming across the country. Broke. Spent every bit of money on taking care of them and getting gas to get as far from Virginia as I could. It was awful, but we had some fun times. We stopped at Rutherford Beach in Louisiana, on the Gulf. It’s like a mile of beachfront and behind you is alligators. We were there for two weeks. We slept in the station wagon, in our tent, wherever.

I heard about it from travelers back home, but we never looked it up except the directions. Then the kids started watching videos on the way here and they were like ‘mom it’s all about murder and death.’ I’m like ‘baby don't don't pay attention, that’s more to keep people out.’

And soon as we got here, everybody embraced us. It was welcome home soon as we walked in the door. We lived off grid without food stamps, without phone without anything for six months, because I didn’t want to get flagged on the system. And you can do that here. There's different pantries and free meals. If you play on stage at the Ponderosa, you get a free bowl of chili. You can work for Beryl, she'll feed you on Wednesday night. It can work. But, now we been here a while, I got on food stamps.

Let me ask you this. How many people you know in your apartment block? Like in your building? Because we can get on the roof right now and I can tell you whose trailers is whose, where people are staying and where they were last season. I know my friends and we check on people in the summer. It's more like a Viking village or a Native American village than American society.

And it’s real here. We’re not worried about our outfits here, or our nails or hair, any bullshit like that. So my kids are seeing the real world here. A lot of parents want to shield kids from the bad parts. But why? So it's a shock when they hit reality when they're 18?”

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If reading this has inspired anyone to want to help any of these people, or the Slab City community in general, please get in touch and I can help make that happen.

And stay tuned for Part III, which I’ve been saving up, to be honest. It’s a wild story about the underbelly of Slab City, a nascent Deadwood-style gangster economy.