The Search For The Great
Blue-Pink American Night-Part 32-With Western Artist Ed Ruscha In Mind
By Sam Lowell
Just then Bart Webber was
in a California state of mind, was ready to chuck everything and go back on the
road, the road to perdition to hear his wife, of thirty plus years, Betty
Salmon, tell it when he went off on his tirade about the old days, and worse,
the old guys, guys like Markin who had dragged him out West kicking and
screaming. Now to hear him tell it Bart was the guy who propelled the sluggish
Markin westward. We will get to the why of Bart’s new found interest in
retracing his youthful fling in the bramble-filled West, out there where the
states are square and you had better be as well on the way to the edge of the
continent and the dreaded Japans sea for failure but first the what.
It seemed that Bart had
jumped the gun somewhat because he found himself out in San Francisco, the
place where he met up with Markin and some of the other North Adamsville corner
boys in that fateful year of 1968 when he rode for a few months with the guys
on Captain Crunch’s yellow brick road converted school bus come travelling
caravan home, at a printing and media conference, what would be his final
conference since he was putting his printing business in the capable hands of
his youngest son who truth be told had been handling the day to day operations
of the shop anyway and was itchy to run the operation himself. While riding on
the BART into the city he noticed on a billboard that the de Young Museum in
Golden Gate Park was featuring a retrospective by the Western artist Ed Ruscha,
an artist that Bart had always admire ever since he had seen his series on gas
stations and their role in the great post-World War II golden age of the
American automobile, the wide open highways and cheap
gas.
Taking an afternoon off he
went over to Golden Gate and viewed the exhibit, a show that had well over one
hundred paintings, photographs, prints and petro-maps. One set of photographs
taken on one of Ruscha’s trips from his native Oklahoma to Los Angeles via the
southern desert-etched route drove Bart to distraction as there he saw gas
stations in places like Needles, on the California-Arizona border, Kingman,
Flagstaff, Gallup, and a few other places he had passed through on one of his
hitchhike or car-sharing trips to California. Saw too coyotes, Native American
reservations, buffalos roam. Saw a series of prints and paintings of the famous
Hollywood sign that told him the first time that he had seen the sign up in the
hills that he had arrived in the land of sun and fantasy. Saw a darkly
troubling painting all done in dark somber colors of the death of the Joshua
trees in the high desert, a place where he had performed under the influence of
serious dope inhalation the “ghost” dance with Markin, Jack Callahan, Josh
Breslin and Frankie Riley. Saw plenty of photographs and paintings detailing
the degradation of that part of California Ruscha had travelled through on
those golden age trips. He was, well-known as a man not to show much public
emotion, shaken almost to tears at the vistas that he witnessed. Could not get
the thoughts of his old “hippie” minute out of his mind. (That “minute” then
signifying that he finally came to a realization after a few months that unlike
Markin, Josh, or Sam Lowell another late arrival in California from the corner
boys who stayed on the road for a few years that he was a stationary person,
missed old North Adamsville and missed old ball and chain Betty
Salmon.)
Here’s how the whole thing
played out back then and maybe, just maybe you will begin to understand why
Bart was shaken almost to tears for visions of his long lost youth. Despite the
urban legend Bart tried to create lately around his role in sending Markin
westward Markin, and only Markin was the guy who led the charge west. Had been
the guy of all the guys on the corner who predicted, predicted almost weekly
from about 1962 on that a big sea-change was coming and they had better be
ready to ride the wave. They all, Bart included blew Markin’s predictions off
out of hand because frankly if the subject around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor come
Friday night wasn’t about girls, cars, money, getting drunk or any combination
of those subjects they didn’t give a rat’s ass as Frankie Riley would say about
some seaweed change.
Things pretty much stayed
that way all through high school although that didn’t stop Markin from his
predictions especially when the black down south got all uppity (signifying
that the corner boys except Markin didn’t give a rat’s ass about that subject
either and maybe worse) and folk music, the urban folk revival as
Markin called it, took off. All that meant and this was stretching it was cheap
dates with girls who might put on. Bart was even less interested in the latter
since Betty was still stuck in some Bobby Rydell crush and did not like folk
music (and still didn’t so Bart only played it when she was out of the house).
Stayed that way for a couple of years after high school as they went their
separate ways except the Friday night reunions at Tonio’s to, well, kill time.
Then the Vietnam War came on strong which they did give a rat’s ass about,
wanted to see the commies bit the dust although except for Sal Russo and Jimmy
Jenkins who laid down his head over there and whose name now is on black marble
down in Washington and in granite in North Adamsville, they did not volunteer.
(Those who were called eventually all went including Markin who lost a lot over
there, had serious troubels with the “real” world coming back and in the end
couldn’t shake whatever it was that took the life out of him.)
Then in the spring of 1967
Markin did two things, one, the fateful decision to drop out of Boston
University after his sophomore year to go “find himself,” a characteristic of
the times, of the generation, of the best part of the generation and the other,
the less fateful but still fraught with danger decision to head west, to
hitchhike west to California after he had read Jack Kerouac’s On The
Road about six times and declared that now was the moment that he had
been talking about all those Friday nighst in front of Tonio’s. So he headed
west with no compulsion, wound up hooking up with a caravan out there. The
Captain Crunch yellow brick road caravan that would eventually be composed of
at least a half dozen North Adamsville corner boys turned “hippies” for varying
lengths of time. Bart was pretty late on that “train” didn’t go out until the
summer of 1968 after he found out that due to a childhood injury that left him
with a pronounced limp despite a couple of surgeries was declared 4-F, unfit
for military service by the friends and neighbors at his local draft board.
That pretty late also meant that Markin who shortly after he got out to San
Francisco received his own draft notice and was an additional reason why Bart
left the road early since he knew the ropes.
Bart, despite whatever
happened later, was happy to be heading out and once he decided to go he also
decided that he would hitchhike out like all the other guys except Sam Lowell
who to placate anxious parents, really an anxious mother went out by bus. Even
Sam after five plus days on a stinking Greyhound bus with the usual screaming
kids left to wander the aisles and the inevitable overweight seatmate who
snored and despite a couple of pleasant days from New York to Chicago with a
chick who caught his eye and whom he flirted like crazy with said later that he
would have rather hitched than go through that again (and all his later trips
would be done that way. Bart figured that although the road might be slow with
the many false starts and being left in some strange places where grabbing a
ride was not easy that it would be interesting once he got past the stifling
East and Great Plains to see what was what in the West (that stifling Ruscha
could attest to since he was nothing but a child of the Great Plains, hell, an
Okie so he knew he had to head west in that big old Chevy Bart had heard he
went out to L.A. in that fateful 1956 year when he went to art school there.
Bart thinking about the
experience, that first road out, that always served as a hallmark for every
guy’s trip out remembered more or less vividly all those dusty side roads he
got left on after his own trip through Oklahoma. Although the big Eisenhower-driven
national security Interstate highway system made it easier in the mid-1960s to
travel the hitchhike road than all the back roads and Route 66 that Bart had
read about in Jack Kerouac’s travel the open road book On The Road that
Markin made everybody read when they all were in high school even though he
wasn’t much of a reader, didn’t think as much of the be-bop beats as Markin did
who thought they were the max daddies he was waiting for even though by their
time the beat thing was passe was old news, ancient history it was actually
easier to get rides on the smaller roads where people could see you from down
or up the road. In any case you were sure to be left off on more than one back
road since that was just the way it was, nobody who was say going to Denver was
going to let you off in the middle of Interstate 80 when you saw the sign for
Cheyanne just ahead.
Funny all the strange signs
he saw out on the open back roads like the mere fact of putting a
sign up would draw people to your Podunk town , or your Podunk store. He had
had to laugh when he saw Ruscha’s photograph of a town out in nowhere which
probably had a population of less than one thousand but which had a sign
documenting all the about ten church denominations that kept the good people of
the town on their feet. He had seen more Jesus Save signs and the like than you
could shake a stick at the further west he went until they stopped,
stopped dead the closer you got to coastal California. Saw more
signs for cigarettes, beer, whiskey, dry goods (quaint), no trespassing, no
loitering, no anything than he ever noticed back home. He wondered if people
travelling through North Adamsville had that same feeling about his own Podunk
town. He knew for sure that there were not top-heavy signs about all the
religious denominations of the town at least not in the Acre where all you saw
was a fistful of Catholic churches, Roman Catholic for the unknowing about
differences.
Had seen above all the
signs that directed you to the nearest gas stations, almost a ritualistic sign
that you were still in the golden age of the automobile, of the superhighway
and of cheap gas. Hell even in North Adamsville right across from the high school
he remembered the service station owners who had business right next to each
other would have “gas wars,” would have signs out with prices like 30 cents per
gallon versus say 29 cents. Yeah, cheap gas, and plenty of service too. Lots of
guys, guys who needed to support their “boss” car habits worked as gas jockeys
filling up tanks, checking oil and tires and wiping off windshields. Saw every
kind of gas station from the one franchised out by Esso and Texaco to little
fly-by-night operations with no name gas, a rundown coke machine that barely
worked and bathrooms with stained sinks and broken plumbing and had been
cleaned since Hector was a pup. You had to use your own handkerchief to wipe
your hands. Even some of the diners, diners like Jimmy Jack’s back home where
all the guys hung out after leaving off their dates if they didn’t get lucky
and wind up down at the far end of Squaw Road on Adamsville Beach fogging up
some “boss” car into the wee hours of the morning had gas stations or at least
pumps out on those long stretch deserted roads so nobody would get stranded on
in the hot sun (and the owners probably figured that while stopping for gas the
little family might as well have something to eat at the high carbohydrate
steamed everything counters and booths.
Saw plenty of weird natural
formations along the way getting twenty mile rides here from ranchers or
farmers going up the road, fifty miles there from high-rollers taking the high
side to Vegas, a few miles from high school kids joy-riding to while away the
afternoon to avoid the dreaded chores that awaited them at home. Saw every kind
dusty dried out tree seeking nourishment from the waterless ground. Saw rock
formations hounded by the winds and sheered to perfection. Saw every color of
brown, of beige, of grey. Saw too in Joshua Tree of a thousand tears, tears for
the creeping civilization that was choking them away and tears one high doped
up night when Markin and a few others channeled the shamans of the past in a
ghost dance off the flickering canyon walls, hah, walls of brown, of beige, of
grey. Bart never got over that experience, never saw what the white man, what
his people had done so clearly even if he wasn’t about to do anything about it
except load up on peyote buttons and ancient dreams of mock
revenge.
Saw above all as he grabbed
that last one hundred, maybe one hundred and fifty mile stretch to Frisco town
the refuge of the high speed road, the broken glass, the road kill, the busted
fences where some fool had gone off the highway drunk or doped up so he didn’t
feel a thing, saw stripped off bare truck tires blocking easy passage on the
road ahead. Saw the bramble, the flotsam and jetsam of modern day life. Saw too
though as he got closer to Frisco, as he could almost smell the ocean, the
land’s end, the Japan seas or back home that the West was very different, that
those who had make the trek, maybe were forced to make the trek were very
different from the East that he knew. But maybe too they would have to run from
a thing which they had built.
Later. after he arrived in
San Francisco, met Markin, Josh and Frankie on Russian and then joined them on
the journey south for a few months (with a couple of trips back home in
between) he would see Ruscha L.A. would see those luscious Hollywood signs, and
would like any tourist from Podunk image that he had the wherewithal to make it
as a star, or something like that name in lights. Got to
know L.A. too well, couldn’t handle the freeway craziness, couldn’t handle the
sameness of the endless strip malls, the endless rows of tickey-tack houses,
couldn’t handle the sprawl that was turning a small town into a nega-town. Yeah
he knew exactly what Ruscha was driving at, was trying to chronicle. But still
he missed the opportunity to see if he did have what it took to survive in
California, to have drunken in the scenes.
And you wonder why Bart
just then as he approached retirement, as he approached his seventh decade he
was in a frenzy to repeat his past.
