Drag City Noir: “The Back Room”

Welcome back to another “Drag City Noir” drop, dear readers, part of our “Dark Lounge” series of Lorelei posts that focuses on the atmospheric darker side of the the track and the town where it resides. Recently deceased filmmaker David Lynch, whom I have always admired and whose aesthetic informs this series of posts, understood that beneath the white picket fences and tidy storefronts of small towns lies something raw and unsettled — a pulse of secrets too jagged to fit the postcard image. He had a way of peeling back the wallpaper of small-town life to show the rot beneath, where dreams twisted into menace and desire walked hand in hand with dread. It’s that uneasy shimmer, the beauty and the bruise sharing the same skin, that colors tonight’s tale! So pour yourself a favorite drink and join your humble blogger, under the watchful eye of the master, as we peel back another square of that wallpaper-or, if you prefer, another chunk of that Bondo!-and see what’s really going on underneath!

The back cover photo of the mythical unreleased album by Wardglenn’s own psychobilly band The Sinisters would be unlikely to raise an eyebrow to most people. But to locals in Wardglenn and some of the surrounding towns, a memory may be triggered by the look of the worn black-and-white linoleum tiles and the heavy red velvet curtain behind them, and its tied up with decades of rumors of an illegal gambling den somewhere in the western Imperial County region that has never had a name or a location that anyone could pin down.

Every town has a place it doesn’t talk about. In Wardglenn, it isn’t the hospital or the highway, or even Drag City Raceway with its long history of wrecks. It’s Whitcomb’s Emporium.

The front of the store looked like a relic from another age, because that’s exactly what it was. Penny candy in glass jars, socks folded in bins, dime-store toys stacked on squeaky metal racks. A shopper could find camping lanterns, fishing reels, even a pair of good boots if they knew where to look. But scattered in between the ordinary stock were things that didn’t belong anywhere. A music box that played on its own. Postcards from towns nobody had ever heard of. A set of binoculars that showed nothing but a gray static haze, no matter where you pointed them. People said Frank Whitcomb, who had run the store since the late forties, was getting senile in his old age, cluttering his shelves with junk. Others said those things weren’t his to sell — they belonged to the Emporium itself.

And behind it all lay The Back Room.

There was no door. Just a heavy red curtain that sagged like a stage prop, yet moved as if it were alive. It breathed in slow, steady pulses even when the air was still. Those who pushed through found a checkerboard floor that seemed to shift underfoot, the squares swimming in and out of alignment if you stared too long. Cigarette smoke and whiskey fumes hung in the air, thick enough to sting the eyes. Men gathered there for cards, dice, or hushed exchanges, but they left hollow-eyed, like something more than money had been taken from them. Some claimed their shadows looked different afterward.

Elaine Whitcomb was seen slipping back there more than once, though no one agreed on why. Some said curiosity, others rebellion, and a few whispered she had business there of her own. When Marty Klein came down from San Diego, slick suit, quick grin, and sharper connections, he didn’t need to be told where the curtain hung. He walked straight through like it was waiting for him.

The Sinisters spent nights there too, back before they were anything more than local boys with guitars and ambition. They laughed about it in interviews, calling it “the room with a sound of its own.” Later, when the band collapsed and scattered — one dead in Chicago, one vanished overseas, one never seen again, and one rumored still to be here — people wondered if the room had swallowed them whole.

Ask three people in Wardglenn and you’ll get three different stories. Some will tell you Frank Whitcomb ran the Back Room like a bookie’s den, the curtain just a cover for dirty deals. Others swear the curtain ran him, that it was the room itself that dictated who walked away with pockets full and who walked out broken. Nobody agrees on details, but everyone agrees on this: Whitcomb’s Emporium sold more than socks and toys. It sold shadows. And once you stepped behind that curtain, the shadows knew your name — and they never forgot it.

Maybe that’s the real lesson, the one Lynch spent his carrer tracing in flicker and shadow: that every town carries its own curtain, its own room where the floor tilts and the light turns strange, where the truths no one wants to name wait with patient teeth. Whitcomb’s Emporium was Wardglenn’s version of that, a place where the ordinary bled into the uncanny, and where the cost of peeking behind the veil was never fully tallied. Some call it rumor, others call it memory — but here in the Dark Lounge, we call it exactly what it feels like: the part of the dream where you realize you can’t wake up.

And there you have it, dear readers, another one from The Dark Lounge! Special thanks to my friend here, and tune in again soon, because there’s an interesting “Part II” to the Whitcomb Emporium story where it ties in with the track and its own racing legends! Because…whether its action at the track or a tour of the town after dark, there’s always something spooky going on at Drag City!