Ed Abbey and the Wizard Crystal Fart

A beautiful woman strolled into the Oracle Inn bar. She was a total bombshell. She was long and lean with heather in her hair and honey in her hips. Women like that didn’t just walk into the Oracle Inn unaccompanied on a regular basis. In that big empty bar she sat down just a couple stools away from me. We exchanged small talk about the weather and local events which in turn led to conversation about our small town’s monthly newspaper. She loved the little newspaper and I wrote for the newspaper. She smiled at a joke I made. She had a beautiful smile. Things were going well.

Not only was I getting to flirt with a beautiful woman but I was getting to talk about books and literature too. Naturally, the conversation led to Oracle’s most famous literary resident — Ed Abbey. Cactus Ed had spearheaded the militant arm of America’s environmental movement in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s with books like Desert Solitaire, Good News, Brave Cowboy, and Abbey’s ode to environmental sabotage The Monkey Wrench Gang. Abbey had been America’s most political nature writer since Henry David Thoreau.

“I met Ed Abbey once.” I told her.

Really.” she replied.

So I told her the story. I had been a young man attending the University of Arizona and used to hang out at the Market Spot Café with a cup of coffee, pen and paper, writing away. There were other regulars at the coffee shop including professors, bums, nerds, and a certain hippy gypsy who used to sit in the corner and read Tarot Cards for bits of small change. He would lay out the cards and reveal them one by one, doing a song and dance, hand rolling his own cigarettes with rings on every finger. Business in Tarot cards was usually bustling. Sometimes an entire gaggle of sorority girls would sit at the table and have their fortunes read one by one. He would adjust his lion’s mane of hair, preening, as he predicted a beautiful young woman was about to have a passionate affair with a much older man.” The girls would giggle and squeal.

There was one stormy winter day when business was slow, so slow that me and the fortune teller were the only ones in the coffee shop.

“Would you like your cards read?” he asked.

“Sure, what the heck,” I replied.

“You must be a powerful wizard,” he said, before he even turned over a single card. “I can sense the magic.”

No fooling. He really said that. I pondered my reply.

“You must be quite the sorcerer yourself,” I said. “Or you never could have detected me.”

He reached across the table to shake my hand, the crystal pendants dangling from his neck clattered and rattled. He told me his real name but it didn’t matter. I had already given him a nickname — the Wizard Crystal Fart. He read my cards and told me my fortune. It was all bad news and looking back on it, everything he prophesied has come true. That was when Ed Abbey, the great writer himself walked into the café.

All that jewelry the Wizard Crystal Fart was wearing he had made himself and you could buy it for a price. One year the Wizard Crystal Fart had been commissioned to make a very special jewelry piece for a very special birthday. Friends of Ed Abbey’s had hired the Wizard Crystal Fart to custom make a silver monkey wrench pendant, a magic eco-warrior talisman for the prophet who had written The Monkey Wrench Gang. Abbey supposedly wore the pendant all the time and according to legend, when his body was laid to rest in the middle of a remote piece of wilderness, he was wearing the silver monkey wrench then too. While Abbey was paying for his coffee at the register, the wizard introduced himself and informed Abbey that he had been the one who had fashioned the monkey wrench pendant given to Abbey as a birthday gift. Abbey smiled and used two fingers to pull the monkey wrench and silver chain out from under his shirt.

Celebrity awestruck, the Wizard Crystal Fart gushed. “I am such a huge fan,” he blurted out, so excited he stammered.

“Thank you.” Cactus Ed said.

“In fact,” the wizard replied, “I am reading one of your books right now.” The title of the book suddenly escaped him. “It is the novel about Phoenix and Tucson after the apocalypse… you know Tucson and Phoenix…”

He was trying to think of Good News a book about an unexplained apocalypse in the near future and the fate of the two Arizona cities in the new world. Abbey smiled politely and waited for his exuberant fan to collect his thoughts.

The Wizard Crystal Fart continued, “You know which book I am talking about, the world after the apocalypse… its about Tucson and Phoenix… Phoenix and Tucson… it’s a tale of two cities.”

Abbey laughed. “I am afraid that I did not write that one.”

Abbey sat at our table for awhile and we discussed books and literature a little bit. Mostly we talked about wonderful places to go hiking. Over the years I have visited many of the places Abbey revealed that afternoon, beautiful secret oasis well hidden in the wilderness.

“And that was the time I met Ed Abbey.” I boasted to the beautiful bombshell at The Oracle Inn bar.

“He is a great writer,” she agreed, “But he is also a heartless bastard. I haven’t been able to read any of his books ever since I slept with him.”

“I know what you mean” I said. “Me too.”