And you may ask yourself, David Byrne reminds us, “Where does that highway go to?”
This one goes to Vegas and beyond, following as Route 66 sometimes did, the Union Pacific and Amtrak route into the Mojave through Barstow and Baker toward Nevada.
But Amtrak doesn’t serve Las Vegas anymore, not by train, anyway, only by bus (then why call it “Amtrak”?), so the trains one sees running beside Interstate 15 are blue-collar rigs, trafficking in bare necessities, not leisure.
Beyond Victorville I lose The Mother Road as I-15 heads toward Barstow. 66, also called “The Main Street of America,” used to wend from here toward the settled towns north of Victorville, but the Interstates were plotted to cut to the chase and cut out the Main Streets. At Barstow 66 will cross my path again, intersecting I-15 to turn toward Daggett, now a ghost town, Ludlow, Needles and on to Arizona. So much of Route 66’s lore is now about its role as a “historic” road, a ghost road, decommissioned from its active status as an official U.S. “Route” in 1985. Yet it never trespassed on Nevada, a state renowned for ghost towns. Bypassed, converted or overpaved by newer roads along its 2,600-mile stretch between Santa Monica and Chicago, 66 is now, in parts, CA2, CA110, I-210, I-10, I-15, I-40, I-44, I-55. “Please help us save this invaluable piece of Americana before it is only a memory,” reads a brochure from the National Historic Route 66 Federation that I pick up at a gas station on the Interstate in Barstow. It makes me think of Curtis, driving out through the unpaved desert to “help us save” the Indians before they were “only a memory.” Well, hell. What’s the whole of our experience if not “only a memory”? My father and mother are “only a memory” to me right now, but so is my daughter’s childhood, and my own, and she and I are both alive—what’s so regrettable about something being “only a memory”?
Unless of course we’re talking about a race of people.
Or the soul of a marriage.
Or love.
But a road? Can we justify nostalgia for a road? Far younger than the Silk Road or the Via Appia, Route 66 was a road whose working existence spanned less than fifty years, roughly twice the average life span of celebrity. What was celebrated about Route 66 was, first of all, its place in the memories of those who came to California from Oklahoma and the Panhandle during the Dust Bowl years, like Steinbeck’s Joads; and then, for later generations, what was celebrated about Route 66 was not only that there was a song about it but that there was a TV show about it, too. The song (…get your kicks on Route 66…) was written by Bobby Troupe who was from my home-town and whose father owned the best music store there. Bobby and his chanteuse wife Julie London always made the front page of the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal when they came to town in the 60’s, Julie’s dramatic bosom generously displayed in whatever outfit she was wearing. I can’t remember whether Bobby’s Route 66 song was the theme song for the Route 66 TV program, but I do remember the Corvette and all the driving around through western scenery and that it costarred George Maharis, who, like my mother Mary, was a first-generation Greek American. His family came from Corfu and owned a restaurant and Mary watched the show each week because she had a crush on him. Neither of my parents ever traveled farther West than Chicago so their image of Route 66 derived from what they saw on television. In black and white, like a Curtis photograph.
Instant vintage.
What my parents knew about the real Route 66 approximates what I can know about Theodore Roosevelt by looking at Curtis’s photograph of him. Did he have yellow teeth? Russet highlights in his hair? Indigo coronas around the pupils of his eyes? Except for paintings of him, every image that I’ve seen of Teddy has been in black and white, just like the images of the West on television back when all the broadcast world was shades of gray. When I was still in high school, no fewer than sixteen shows a week were Westerns. Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry in the 40’s, Roy Rogers in the 50’s, and then in the 60’s there were dozens of them—The Rifleman, Have Gun Will Travel, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Palladin, Tales of Wells Fargo, Death Valley Days, Big Valley, Bonanza, The Virginian, Broken Arrow, Cheyenne, Cimmaron City, Rawhide, The Lawman, High Chaparral, Laramie, Colt 45, Maverick, Bat Masterson, Wanted: Dead or Alive.
Cowboy shows.
Cowboys and Indians.
My first concept of a walking, talking Indian was Tonto on The Lone Ranger—ever wise, ever loyal, deferential to his kimo sabe, never one to waste a word, never one to smile. And you might ask yourself, Who was that masked man? but did you ever ask why, at the height of post-war consumerism and suburban expansion with look-alike streets and look-alike houses, why the legend of the cowboy was so popular?
Think of the TV shows that have taken over the ratings since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—shows that put the pieces of the puzzle back together, shows that solve the crime through diligent and thorough science, shows that find the missing, shows that revolve around an active, wise and super-vigilant government agent, shows that feature ghosts and the crime-solvers who cooperate with them to make the world a safer place. Sometimes we get the heroes we deserve but we always get the television shows our fears dictate.
The current top-ranked series for the past several years speaks to our need, as a traumatized nation, to believe that logic and order reign in the world, that crimes leave discernible fingerprints and that nothing—no thing—arises from unpredictable sources. The series takes place in Las Vegas, which is no random choice, because there is something in our national psyche right now that needs Vegas, needs the idea of it, rather than its base reality. Which may be why each segment of the series opens with an aerial view, different each week, glitzy, shimmering, of Sin City and its environs. Thirty seconds, tops, a bird’s-eye view of neon Vegas, Vegas as mirage—then the show leaves all trace of the town behind for the cool and blue interiors of the crime lab. We know that no municipality on these beloved shores could afford a state-of-the-art glass and gizmo graced lab as the set of CSI pretends, but we believe it, anyway, the same way we believed in Lorne Green’s accent in Bonanza and Miss Kitty’s anachronistic foundation garments in Gunsmoke. Because PRINT THE LEGEND is one of the great lines from one of the great Westerns, and because when the daily reality presents itself as uncomprehendable, we fashion our own myths and then hold those phony truths to be inalienable.
The concept of cowboys and Indians, for instance.
The West had both of them, but those iconic scenes of Injuns chasing John Wayne in his Stetson could hardly be more mythic than an extraterrestrial on a flying bicycle silhouetted on a rising moon.
Indians fought Army men, not cowboys.
Cavalry.
Yellow hairs in navy blue wool uniforms. G.I. Joes on Union wages.
But I didn’t grow up watching boys play Custers and Indians. I grew up thinking Indians were on the side of bad. That the cavalry was good.
The power of the entertainment industry to skew our moral compass is older than the industry itself, it’s as old as the first myths. Revelatory and marvelous, these myths sustain us, even when they are promoting points of view that were never true—and all I have to do is look up through my open sunroof at the desert sky to find supporting evidence in all the Greeks up there, storying the constellations.
Cassiopeia and her daughter Andromeda.
Perseus.
Pegasus.
Orion.
Hercules.
Neptune.
The Pleiades, all seven of them.
It seems the first great Greek diaspora was upward—a Greek APOLLO program to people space waaay before the added boost of jet propulsion. It’s a big wide plasma screen of Greeks up there—as many reruns of Greek myths above me as TV Westerns in the 1960s. And once upon a time people believed in them, believed Orion was exiled for eternity into the sky just as people, not so long ago, believed cowboys went with Indians the way pepper pairs with salt. No cowboys, no Indians. But myths are passionate belief systems that have ended up in someone’s attic, mothballed to t
he sky. They were irrefutable, once. Once, they were sustainable, and the fervor with which they were maintained illuminated the dark reaches of our ancestors’ fears.
Ask yourself what you believe in, and you’ll find out who you are.
Know thyself—the ol’ Socratic oath. (Do normal people start channeling the mad Greek on their way to Vegas?) It’s always HERE, on this leg between Barstow and Baker, that things begin to fray, and by THINGS I mean radio reception, cold reality, and stamina. Even in the dark I know there’s nothing out here but grit, salt pans, deadbrush and mineral deposits on either side of the road—one-horse desert outposts named in honor of the ground. BORON. I stopped there, once, in daylight, shadowing Curtis’s route through the Mojave. There’s a cemetery there, dedicated to men who died laying the railroad through this desert. Their names are bleached away, but the small quadrant of sacred ground near the Union Pacific tracks evokes the labor of their lives with crosses made of railroad ties. Once you leave Barstow, let me tell you, you are out in no-man’s-land—no stops—no recreation—just a long long stretch of straight straight road under godforsaken heat until your first sighting of a billboard promising your first sign of civilization fifty miles ahead.
Souvlaki, friends.
Homemade baklava.
The Mad Greek. A Greek restaurant. In Baker. In the middle of the desert.
Greeks! you gotta love ’em! and I’m not saying this just because I’m half Hellenic (well, yes, I am saying this because of that), but because Baker is a place that is basically a crossroad to Death Valley, a service road beside a railroad lined with gas stations, Bun Boy and the Bun Boy Motel and a couple of Mexican joints, one of the last places you would expect to find a Greek restaurant serving reasonably authentic Greek food, bursting with rembetika, open all night long.
Just when you need it.
Just when, out along the road, in the desert, you were starting to believe that you are seeing eyes…The promise of feta and olives arises.
The place is all lit up and the Amtrak bus is pulled up in the packed back parking lot, and as soon as I open the door and step inside I may as well be in any taverna in the Plaka or Piraeus.
The walls are white, trimmed in St. George blue, the blue of the Greek flag—the booths are the same unadulterated blue, the whole place floats with light, like an oasis. Plastic grapes and rayon bougainvillea grace the windowsills, and frescos of Mykonos and Santorini fill the two front walls along with a movie poster of Zorba the Greek, a translation of the Greek alphabet and the English lyrics to the Greek national anthem.
(“From the graves of our slain shall our valour prevail,
As we greet thee again, Hail, Liberty, Hail”!)
Tourists on their way to Death Valley congregate here, though not at this time of night, so I reckon most of my fellow diners will be of two varieties—those on their way to Vegas, those on their way from—and you can spot the differences between these two by where their body language registers on the adrenal-ometer.
If you ever wonder about the health effects of a stay in Vegas you should run a random survey among departing gamblers, wannabes and tourists at the rest stops between Primm and Baker.
The ones standing very very still in line have most definitely just departed. Ditto, ones with the dead eyes. The ones in ruined clothes.
Talky ones in freshly pressed polo shirts with toothy wives are on their way in their vintage Continentals, most likely for slots, the house buffet, Wayne Newton.
I take my place at the end of the line in front of the counter and survey the menu suspended from the ceiling.
TIROPITA.SPANAKOPITA.CHICK PEA DIP.GYROS.THE ORIGINAL ZUCCHINI STICK.
A foursome of moody stoners in varying degrees of undress wait petulantly in front of me. Brentwood brats, I reckon: Crossroads grads. A wall-sized plaque of FAMOUS GREEKS and HONORARY GREEKS is next to us and one of the laconic ones stares at it and then, almost by mistake, starts to read aloud: “‘FAMOUS GREEKS,’” she monotones. “‘Telly Savalas.’” She flatlines on his name. “‘The Trojan Horse.’ Yah, I think I saw that. ‘HONORARY GREEKS,’” she reads without expression. “‘George Hamilton. Lord Byron. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.’ Like we’re supposed to know these people.”
“She was ‘Jackie O,’” another of her group registers real slow. “John-John’s mother.”
“‘John-John’?”
“John Kennedy.”
“Which one was he?”
“He’s dead.”
“I thought they all were dead.”
“‘Anthony Quinn. James Joyce. St. Paul. All Macka-Macka—’”
“Macedonians,” I offer.
“They need to get that Nia person up there. That Nia person. Last name starts with ‘V’ or something. Made ‘My Big Bad Thing.’ You know.”
“—big Fat.”
“‘My Big Greasy Wedding.’ Couple years ago. You saw it—”
“Like I’d go to that. I’m not Greek. Who is?”
“Jennifer Aniston is Greek. I’m pretty sure.”
“Well there you go.”
“—half Greek.”
“Chennifer—not even Grik name. I speet on her.”
This from a rasping voice behind me.
I turn in time to see her dry-spit into her open palms. A fierce tiny woman in a black dress, in her 70’s, I’d say, with dangerous eyes, no makeup and what I’ve come to recognize as female Balkan facial hair.
“Only thing Bra-Peet is ask is bebi. Adonis. I would sell my eyes to have his bebi. So I speet on this Chennifer.”(She dry spits, again.) “She ees eembarrassmant to all Grik wimmin.”
You don’t want to be alone in a dark alley with a woman like this and it both frightens and enlightens me to think I may have one of her vintage enlivening my lineage but what captures my imagination most about her and her type of village crone is their ownership, their absolute and resolute assurance that they own the only info, that they’re in the know not only about which village neighbors have been feuding for a hundred years or how to extract oil from olives but also about what Brad Pitt was thinking when he left his wife. The scary thing about this woman and others who talk about celebrities as if they know them personally is that the exercise squanders civic involvement. Unlike voting in a real election, voting in a People poll accomplishes absolutely nothing, but we’re still encouraged to believe in celebrities as modern mythic gods. Modern-day heroic fallacies. Zeus screwing around behind Hera’s back. Icarus getting high on too much ego. Innocent Ledas losing their cherries on the casting couch.
I place my order, pay and am given a white plastic tipi-shaped marker with a number on it. I take it to a booth in the front room in the corner under the poster of Anthony Quinn as Zorba. Behind me the Brentwood kids are still debating the relative merits of Angelina Jolie versus Chennifer, and to hear them talk, you’d think they are revealing secrets about members of their coterie and I start to wonder how this appropriation propagates itself. They sound as if they believe they know these distant entities, these stars, these misnamed goddesses. As if they and the celebrity luminaries were down. Me an’ Angelina. Brad an’ me an’ me an’ Brad, and to that extent, celebrity is a form of identity appropriation, identity theft, not unlike the man in the hospital in Las Vegas who’s appropriated the identity of my dead father.
But, no: a celebrity relinquishes exclusive ownship of his or her own life.
A celebrity doesn’t steal a life, she or he gives her or his life away.
To us average schmoes.
To the great unknowables, the undercelebrated me’s and you’s of the undercelebrated ordinary world.
And that’s one thing for which I applaud my Mr. Curtis—for raising uncelebrated Indian faces to an iconic status.
We may never know these Indians’ names nor how they lived nor whom they loved, but we will know their faces.
Curtis knew his craft, he knew how to commemorate a face, how to make it memorable with shadow, light an
d shallow focus, because by the time he started driving to the reservations he was a celebrated studio photographer in Seattle who had captured national attention when Theodore Roosevelt asked him to photograph his daughter Alice’s wedding at the White House.
It was the party of the year, that wedding, and Alice Roosevelt was as appropriated and oohed and aahed over as any 21st-century media celebrity. Songs were written about her, a color was named for her and magazines sold out overnight every time Alice graced the cover. The public clamor for details of the wedding—details of the dress, the cake, the guest list—was so distracting from the business of running the country that Roosevelt’s personal secretary issued a formal statement stating that the press was not welcome on the wedding day and that the only wedding photographs that would be made available to the nation’s newspapers and magazines would be those taken by the official wedding photographer who had been chosen expressly by the President, himself.
EDWARD S. CURTIS.
In with The Man.
And one of the things that fascinates me about the life stories of so-called self-made people is how they get from there to there, how one gets born into obscurity and day-to-day economic strain and ends up telling Mr. President smile. Say cheese.
If you look carefully at the portrait that was the official White House release of that happy day, it’s really not a great portrait at all, as a window into the souls of the bride, her shell-shocked-looking groom and her famously boisterous father. Congressman Nicholas Longworth, the groom, poor man, seems to be artificially propped up, barely touching his bride, clutching his gloves in one hand, his glassy expression frozen by the apparent thought, Here I am with this stranger, her acre of dress and The President.
Roosevelt, on the opposite side of the bride, is visibly leaning away.
In the center, Alice plays a subordinate role to the deluge of fabric that swamps more than half of the frame, and the reason I’m so fond of this picture by Curtis is that this is, first and foremost, a picture of something I love, a picture of ATRAIN, Alice’s wedding gown train mounded like an elaborate meringue, its mass diminishing, like real railroad tracks, from the foreground into a distant focal point.
The Shadow Catcher Page 16