Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of
His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His
Check
By Bart Webber
I had been, strangely
enough, in La Jolla out in California attending yet another writers’ conference
which seems to be the makings of my days these days, attending writers’
conferences that is instead of taking pen to paper or rather fingers to word
processor keyboard, when I heard Tom Wolfe had cashed his check. “Cashed his
check” a term (along with synonymous “cashed his ticket”) grabbed from memory
bank as a term used when I was “on the bum” hanging out in hobo jungle camps
and the whole trail of flop houses and Salvation Army digs to signify that a
kindred had passed to the great beyond. Was now resting in some better place
that a stinking stew-bitten, flea –bitten, foul-aired and foul-person place. No
more worries about the next flop, the next jug of cheapjack wine, the next
run-in with vicious coppers and railroad bulls, and the next guy who was ready
to rip whatever you had off to feed his own sullen addiction.
By the way this is not
Thomas Wolfe of You Can’t Go Home Again,
Look Homeward, Angels, etc. but the
writer, maybe journalist is a better way to put the matter of tons of
interesting stuff from acid trips in the 1960s hanging with Ken Kesey and his
various tribes of merry pranksters, the Hell’s Angels, drifters, grifters and
midnight sifters, to marveled space flights in the 1970s to Wall Street in the
reckless 1980 and back who had cashed his check. The strange part of the
“strangely enough” mentioned above was that on Monday May 14th 2018,
the day he died, I was walking along La Jolla Cove and commenting to my
companion without knowing his fate that Tom Wolfe had made the La Jolla surfing
scene in the early 1960s come alive with his tale of the Pump House Gang and
related stories about the restless California tribes, you know those Hell’s
Angels, Valley hot-rod freaks and the like who parents had migrated west from dustbowl
Okies and Arkies to start a new life out in Eden. These next generation though
lost in a thousand angsts and alienation not having to fight for every breath
of fresh air (with the exception of the Angels who might as well have stayed in
the Okies and McAllister Prison which would have been their fate.
I don’t know how Tom
Wolfe did at the end as a writer, or toward the end, when things seemed to
glaze over and became very homogenized, lacked the verve of hard ass 1960s,
1970s, and 1980s times. Although I do note that he did a very although I note
he did an interesting take on the cultural life at the Army base at Fort Bragg
down in North Carolina in a book of essays around the theme of hooking up. That
hooking up angle a sign that social cohesiveness in the age of the Internet was
creating some strange rituals. Know this those pound for pound in his prime he along
with Hunter Thompson could write the sociology of the land with simple flair
and kept this guy, me, flipping the pages in the wee hours of the morning. RIP,
Tom Wolfe, RIP.
CD Reviews
Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Tom Waits, Electra/Asylum Records, 1975
The inner lives of the denizens of that late night diner in the famous painting by the American realist artist Edward Hopper, “Nighthawks” (1942). The scorching literary sketches of the rich and famous and the skid row bums provided by the late “Gonzo” journalist Doctor Hunter Thompson, accompanied by the renderings of the artist Ralph Steadman. The jingle-jangle high side lyrics of the legendary folk musician Bob Dylan of the “Blood On The Tracks” period. The reach into the far side of the part of the psyche exhibited by those down at the base of American society in an earlier period by the novelist Nelson Algren in “Walk On The Wild Side”. And that same reach later by the man of the “mean” Los Angeles streets, Charles Bukowski. Wrap them all up in a whiskey-soaked, cigarette-scarred, gravelly, rasping voice and you have the idiosyncratic musician Tom Waits. Placed in that same company as above? Yes, by all means. Not a bad place to be, right?
Although I have been listening to the music of one Tom Waits for decades, every since I heard Jerry Jeff Walker do a cover of his classic song of loneliness, longing and reaching for the elusive promise of Saturday night dreams in “Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night”, I am not familiar with his biography. All I know is that aside from his own far-reaching musical endeavors, as expressed in numerous albums over the years, he has acted in some motion pictures, most notably as a skid row philosopher of sorts in the movie version of William Kennedy’s “Ironweed” (a natural, right?) and has provided the soundtrack music to many movies, most notably the Al Pacino-starring “Sea Of Love”. That Waits soundtrack version of the late 1950’s, early 1960’s classic teenage anthem to longing and love is just the right example of what Brother Waits means musically to this reviewer. Taking that simple song of teenage longing, Waits’ husky-voiced rendition reaches back and turns it into something almost primordial, something that goes back beyond time to our first understandings that we are ‘alone’ in the universe. Enough said.
But so much for all of that because what I really want to mention is the “Waits effect”. Every once in a while I ‘need’ to listen to words and sounds that express the dark, misbegotten side of the human experience. You know, sagas of Gun Street girls, guys talking “Spanish in the halls’, people lost out there on the edge of society and the like. Is there anyone today who can musically put it better? If you need to hear about hope, dope, the rope. Wine, women and song or no wine, no women or no song. About whiskey-caked barroom floors, floozies, boozies, flotsam, jetsam, stale motel rooms, cigarette-infested hotels, wrong gees, jokers, smokers and ten-cent croakers. Drifters, grifters, no good midnight sifters. Life on the fast lane, nowhere lane, some back street alley, perhaps, out in the valley. This, my friends is you address. Listen up. Professor Waits is at the lectern.
"(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night"
Well you gassed her up
Behind the wheel
With your arm around your sweet one
In your Oldsmobile
Barrelin' down the boulevard
You're looking for the heart of Saturday night
And you got paid on Friday
And your pockets are jinglin'
And you see the lights
You get all tinglin' cause you're cruisin' with a 6
And you're looking for the heart of Saturday night
Then you comb your hair
Shave your face
Tryin' to wipe out ev'ry trace
All the other days
In the week you know that this'll be the Saturday
You're reachin' your peak
Stoppin' on the red
You're goin' on the green
'Cause tonight'll be like nothin'
You've ever seen
And you're barrelin' down the boulevard
Lookin' for the heart of Saturday night
Tell me is the crack of the poolballs, neon buzzin?
Telephone's ringin'; it's your second cousin
Is it the barmaid that's smilin' from the corner of her eye?
Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.
Makes it kind of quiver down in the core
'Cause you're dreamin' of them Saturdays that came before
And now you're stumblin'
You're stumblin' onto the heart of Saturday night
Well you gassed her up
And you're behind the wheel
With your arm around your sweet one
In your Oldsmobile
Barrellin' down the boulevard,
You're lookin' for the heart of Saturday night
Is the crack of the poolballs, neon buzzin?
Telephone's ringin'; it's your second cousin
And the barmaid is smilin' from the corner of her eye
Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.
Makes it kind of special down in the core
And you're dreamin' of them Saturdays that came before
It's found you stumblin'
Stumblin' onto the heart of Saturday night
And you're stumblin'
Stumblin onto the heart of Saturday night
