LAST CHANCE

El Camino III

There are white caps on Lake Chicot. I turn down the music—Leonard Cohen mesmerizing the Isle of Wight in 1970 with stories of Suzanne and Marianne—and can hear the wind howling.

The laundromat in Crossett is empty save for the hum of one tumbling dryer. Maybe they’d walked over to the Dollar Tree next door. The snack machine was encased in a wire mesh cage.

I speed west through the spindly pines as the sun begins to set and the sky blooms into a pink haze. I pass a tin shed with a flashing sign that says WILLIE’S LAST CHANCE. A shot-out Schlitz sign hangs over the porch along with a flag so new you can still see the creases where it was folded in the cellophane.

The thin cloth of the banner was backlit by the setting sun, and the reds and blue seemed almost to glow.

Moses and the Burning Bush (detail), by Keith Haring, Bentonville, Ark. (July 4, 2026)

Outside Texarkana there’s a crowd of red-faced teenagers around a silver Silverado collapsed in a ditch, missing its front left wheel.

Deep in West Texas a cluster of smashed and rotting RVs surrounds the foot of a gleaming windmill.

In Clovis, the grackles were chattering and skittering about the giant tree slowly consuming the sign of the now-closed Crossroad Motel.

And as I drive into Taos, there’s a little shack with the doors kicked in and the windows busted out. Across the whole of the building someone has carefully spraypainted in blood red:

R.I.P. OZZY,

complete with little cartoon skulls for the periods.

Mosaic donated by the Class of 1962 (detail), Central High School, Little Rock, Ark. (July 2, 2026)

I looped back through Ozark on the way home because I had seen this 90s 4Runner sitting out front of a pawn shop with a For Sale sign in the window. They’d parked it diagonally in the yard and been cutting the grass around it, but not weedeating, and it looked like it had been sitting up the past few months. It was in pretty good condition and a 4x4 but even though they’d already dropped the price $500, it was still three or four thousand too much.

At the Dari-Delite I got a chocolate malt and a grilled cheese on Texas Toast plus some curly fries and was looking at my phone while this fellow about my age by means of introduction excitedly told the server he was Bill Clinton’s brother, but don’t hold that against me, ha ha. She seemed nonplussed but polite about it. There were red, white, and blue glittering stars on her cheek. Then the fellow said that he was the number two military secret in the country, being that he was the secret brother of Bill Clinton, and then told her his TikTok handle, which was some combination of numbers and the words lone wolf.

I wasn’t so sure what to think, but felt like this was a lot, especially given that we were just at a burger joint, like is that really your opening line, hey welcome to Dari-Delite, you can sit anywhere you want, and your immediate answer is I’m the secret brother of Bill Clinton.

After lunch I wandered into a store down on the square and heard like maybe one or two words of NPR or an audiobook or something from a speaker. The silver-haired woman running the counter yelped and ran over and slapped her phone and the talking stopped.

I poked around the store and there was a shiny gold satin jacket with maroon elastic cuffs. On the front it had the logo of the National Cutting Horse Association and said World Finals, and on the back within a lasso were the logos for Gold River Western Cut Smokeless Tobacco and Silver Creek Western Cut Smokeless Tobacco. I wondered what the difference was, but the jacket was only $30, which I felt like was a real deal. The name Bill C was carefully written on the label in now-faded blank ink.

I bought it and told the clerk that she could get back to whatever she was listening to now that I was leaving, and more or less idly asked what it was. She stared me dead in the eye and said she couldn’t remember, but it didn’t really matter. I guess I looked kind of quizzical and she said it’s just smut. She said it so matter of factly I laughed and said, like what kind do you mean, like unicorns? And she smiled and said naw, vampires.

Number 30 (Birds of Paradise) (detail), by Jackson Pollack, Bentonville, Ark. (July 4, 2026)

I got back into the car and turned on a Dylan record, a new one to me. I had heard him sing a song from it the day before, sitting on a beach blanket on the grass in general admission. There was a little boy and there was a little girl, the old troubadour sang, as night fell across the Ozarks, and they lived in an alley under the red sky, and on the horizon, fireworks silently streamed across the endless darkness.

GORJUS is a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film. But for the foreseeable future, it will be devoted to EL CAMINO, a mostly black-and-white travelogue through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.

If you ever woke up and weren’t quite sure what state you were in, literally or metaphorically, then this is for you, and I reckon we would be friends. Consider forwarding this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.