Chaos Is Your New Lady

Read the writing on the walls. This is America muttering to itself in the kitchen before stumbling off to bed.

The shattered wall of a bathroom stall says Stop Making Excuses in baby blue paint. Beer bottles are scattered everywhere, their labels bleached by the desert sun. Skateboard fragments and condom wrappers, little amber vials and empty dime baggies. There’s a drawing of Bruce Lee’s head attached to the body of a zebra. The names and dates of young lovers are everywhere. Jay + Jessica, 2009. Alex + Jodi, 2010. Are they still together? A woman’s crudely drawn legs fills the bottom of the empty swimming pool, weeds spilling out of the grates. A hot pink scrawl says Fucking is Freedom. Around the corner in purple bubble letters: Love Wins.

Welcome to Two Guns, Arizona. You’ll find it near mile marker 230 on present-day Interstate 40, the highway that wiped out a big chunk of Route 66 in the early 1960s, strangling countless towns along America’s Main Street that were not blessed with an exit ramp. The government briefly explored the possibility of using an atomic bomb to expedite the building of the interstate, which would have killed even more small towns.

Two Guns was always a dark stop along the road, ever since Earl and Lousie Cundiff purchased these thirty-two acres for…