I'm in George W. Bush's brain and it's very, very quiet. A bee buzzes by; it sounds like a B-1 bomber. The dirt under my feet is chunky and disturbed, ankle-deep, making it hard to move around. All I can see in every direction is corn. Tall—8-foot, I'd say—stalks of green corn, standing thick and perfectly still on this calm autumn day. A person could rot in here and no one would know it.
But keeling over in W's spooky brain can't possibly be my fate, can it? I trudge onward through the corn maze. The sound of my own boots clomping through piles of dirty brain is deafening, crazy-making. I turn down this path, and then that, and then this, until the sky begins to spin, until Hitchcockian vertigo sets in and my pulse quickens and the adrenaline gates fly open and I consider for one moment that I may actually be trapped. I try to run, but there's nowhere to go. Everywhere, more corn. I'm about to stop, about to plop my ass down in W's nostril and plead for mercy, when I see them: feet. The lower extremities of another misguided registered voter. Jeans and boots. Toes planted in the dirt. What the ... ? I approach cautiously. The torso is face down. Oh my God—is he dead? Dead and hanging out of George W. Bush's ear? And how many more of these casualties are scattered in this nightmare?
This is not a dream, though. It starts in another brain somewhere, some real- estate investor's, some guy who last summer decided to buy the bulk of Glendale, Nevada, from a widow who owned the town's main draw: a 13-room Bates-ish motel and diner called Glendale Restaurant and Motel. And why not? Glendale's only 45 minutes from Vegas, is this side of Mesquite and Overton, and could be—what with the manifest destiny of Vegas as stick-house impresario—a growing suburban community someday. A sound real-estate investment. Somehow this leads to a corn maze in the shape of Bush's and Kerry's heads, designed using GPS satellite and advertised as a great place to scare your children for Halloween.
"The community project is the brainchild of Wes Adam, Todd Larkin along with Norbert and Randy Aleman," says a news release about the plan. "The housing developments on the drawing boards will be marketed to the middle-class and those who want to pay affordable housing prices that existed three years ago in Las Vegas before the inflation boom.
The rest of the news release, the bulk of it, is about the 20-acre cornfield maze, and how the Kerry side will be "haunted by members of the UNLV softball team," whose propensity to terrify has until now gone under-reported. The Bush side will not be haunted, because Randy Aleman is, his spokeswoman said, a Republican, and so we can assume he feels charged with protecting the already fragile condition of his candidate's head from bogeymen and, apparently, softball players.
Not that I'm one to point fingers at those with fragile heads. I was, I think, the first potential customer to drive from Las Vegas to Glendale after dark, dead set on walking through a corn maze for $8. For those who haven't driven to Glendale on a moonless night, let me just say that a few wrong turns and a stop at a bizarrely desolate "One Stop" store for directions to a remote cornfield can make you slightly ill at ease. Being a stranger lost in a strange town at night can be disconcerting to anyone; being a lesbian asking for directions to the softball players in a small town can be unwise. My girlfriend and I were, however, kindly directed to return to the stop sign we had passed and make a left. And so we did.
Somehow we still missed the cornfield—it was dark, and we were rubbernecking at a fenced-off trailer park when, without warning, the road ended and my headlights landed on a graveyard of mummified cars. All around us: rusted-out monsters of old sedans, twisted skeletons of pickup trucks—a one-eyed Chevy with a deep scar on its face jumped out at us—heaps of body parts everywhere, and no room to turn around. Shit! I said. Lock the doors! she said. As I did a complicated and panicked variation on the classic Y turn in my Honda—up, turn, back, turn, up, turn, back, turn—the lights cast on eerie trees of bent steel and tilted garages that looked like caves for hockey-masked killers, who were surely lumbering out to jam their tree-trunk arms through the windshield and snap our necks. Halloween XXV.
A few moments later, wuss hearts racing, we were driving back up the dark road when we saw a nice little inn up ahead. It was pouring rain, and we decided to check in. A mild-mannered man named Norman who had a thing for taxidermy welcomed us and made us a sandwich. Hmm, I said, I think I'll take a shower.
No, no, no. It wasn't the Bates Motel, it was the Glendale Motel, complete with hay bales and pumpkins out front and a kind woman inside who told us that the corn field was out back, but not yet open for business.
Somewhere in this story there's a gargantuan statement about the shotgun art of public relations in 2004. About the hefty ring in my nose as a "journalist" or, better stated, a curiosity-seeker. And about our shallow, short-lived interests. Maybe it's here, in the next section, wherein I ask the cornfield's Las Vegas PR person to meet me there in broad daylight for a sneak peek.
So at 10 a.m., I'm sitting on a stool at the Glendale Restaurant's diner counter, sipping water and listening to a 5-foot mechanical Halloween skeleton singing "Born to Be Wild" when in comes Heather Ambe, wearing a low-cut pink sweater, a matching pink purse and a matching pink manicure. She has tousled blonde hair and an impish smile. She's in charge of the corn project.
"There will be hay rides and real buffalo from Logandale ... and a country band ... and a candy store and one of the world's largest Smith & Wesson collections ..."
I write: Candy and guns.
She goes on, "Howard Hughes' Warm Springs Ranch is out here ... a landing strip ... we're re-doing the service station ... getting a liquor license ... maybe a Harley bar ... benefit for cancer ... Randy is a Republican ... I got lost in Kerry's eye ... Clark County schoolkids need a place to take field trips ... maybe an alien section ..."
Ultimately, we find ourselves in the back of the motel facing a cornfield groomed to look like the leader of the free world and his opponent, because that's what this is all about, right? A housing subdivision.
"The corn maze is just a way to get people out here," she says.
They planted the corn in July, after consulting with the experts at www.cornfieldmaze.com, which is run by a 33-year-old BYU graduate who is responsible for some 150 corn mazes shaped like flags and eagles and Larry King. It's called "agritainment."
Our Glendale investors cut the maze using chemicals and GPS, and last weekend, Heather took a hot-air balloon ride above it to see if, indeed, it showed the likenesses of Bush and Kerry. "It does look like them," she confirms, "but my pictures didn't turn out." No matter, because soon enough, TV helicopters are supposed to fly over and broadcast the faces to Las Vegans, who will, if all is right in the public-relations machine, come flocking to the maze to be entertained by agriculture, and perhaps buy some candy and admire a Smith & Wesson, and ultimately, buy a house and sustain a community. This is exactly like the subterfuge of politics.
We trudge toward the chins of the U.S. presidential candidates, past Port-o-Johns and plentiful fake cobwebs stretched over corn stalks. I find myself asking undue questions about corn, when I know this isn't about corn, it's about real-estate development: When will there be actual ears of corn on these plants? Does corn die? Will you harvest the corn? Heather is very patient with me, smiling, laughing, leading a dullard cow to slaughter; I will serve up nicely as a plate of ink.
I walk a few steps ahead into the skull of President Bush. Everybody knows that fields of corn are scary, and I briefly consider the political allegory of this venture. Creepy things happen in corn. Think Jeepers Creepers or Children of the Corn. Creepy things happen in W.'s brain. Think of him turkey-necking and quipping about war and wood in the last debate, giving smirky one-liners to every question. And scarier still, I'm remembering that we watched the debate in large part for the entertainment value. Did he just say, "Need some wood?!" I had held my sides, laughing so hard. So now I'm hoofing through the president's brain, and it feels like a setup, like a fitting death for an ambivalent curiosity-seeker and uninformed political critic, someone willing to be entertained rather than informed, to waste away inside the hollowed-out, corn-stuffed head of the nation's leader. Somebody should make a movie like this, I think, before I realize I am lost, before I panic, before I find the feet of what turns out to be another hoax, but an entertaining one, a scarecrow lying face down in the dirt. But this is about real estate.
The corn maze opens Friday at 6 p.m. Call 336-5491.