Three miles outside Nixon, heading north-east, getting away from Reno as rapidly as was practicable, Ed Dorn stopped to pick up one of the First (now Last) People, a man who said he was half Shoshoni and half Paiute. And who was making a fifteen-mile hike towards Route 40, where he hoped to catch a ride to a town run on gambling and drive-through divorce: 'The Biggest Little City in the World'. (You can experience something of the bounce of light, the affectless hardbitten opportunism, in John Huston's film The Misfits. Wild horses as yet-to-be-processed dog food. The above-the-title actors are doing it for the last time, nursing cancers and bungalow death wishes. Arthur Miller certainly wishes he had left his script as a nouveau roman. But he manages to locate a new wife among the throng of international photographers who have been hired to add class to a failing product. The portfolio of Magnum stills overwhelms the movie. And appeals to an entirely different demographic of collectors and aesthetes.)
 
Questioned, as they jolt along, Dorn at the wheel, the black photographer Leroy Lucas beside him, the walker explains why his journey is necessary. He is going to sell a pint of blood for five dollars. Fresh blood is the only available welfare. The buyers don't discriminate, they're not like the Diners Club vampires of Forks, with their preference for free-range forest animals. 'They just mix it all up. Nobody knows where it comes from.'

Dorn reveals, by way of return, that in the ...