Off Main Street

by Michael Perry

  “I had no formal training,” he says. He is low-key and unassuming, but speaks with one eye on the clock, in the manner of a man who has much to do. “A friend’s dog died, and he asked that I draw him a picture of it. I did. And then I was an artist. Eventually, I had some of my work for sale in a cafe, and the owners of Creative Display saw it. They asked me to do some artwork for them. Then in 1976 they asked me to run the plant.”

  Today, Vettrus has fourteen employees, and business is brisk—a fact over which he is mildly despairing. “I am a combination businessman/artist by necessity,” he says ruefully, riffling a stack of government forms on his desk. “Of course I’d rather just be an artist.”

  The bulk of FAST Corp. business comes from water parks, which order trailerfuls of hippo drinking fountains, gorilla swings, crawl-thru fish, whale fountains, and turtle slides. The company also supplies figures for miniature golf courses, civic projects, playgrounds, lawn decoration, and national brand promotions.

  Despite the fact that FAST has a collection of over five hundred molds, Vettrus receives roughly one dozen requests for new items each year. “You just tell me what size you want of it.” He grins. When a new project is commissioned, the object is photographed from the front and side, then “blown up” using a system of grids. Next, the front and side profile cutouts are constructed in full size from five-by-twelve sheets of cardboard taped together. The cutouts are then joined at bisecting right angles and sprayed with carvable foam. The foam is sculpted (faces and hands are sometimes sculpted from clay for greater detail), plastered, spray painted, and then coated with wax. A fiberglass casting is then made. When it hardens, it is cut away. The original model is destroyed in the process.

  A similar process is then used to make the actual statue. The cast form is sprayed with wax, then fiberglass. After removal from the form, the statue is trimmed and sanded, then painted. “We use automotive paint,” says Vettrus, “so once they’re done, we just bolt ’em down to the trailer and roll down the highway.”

  “I do more of the detail sculpting—hands and faces—and the painting,” says Vettrus. “If you want to know more about the initial sculpting, you should visit Oz.” “Oz,” as it turns out, is longtime friend and fellow sculptor Dave Osborne. “He’s out in the industrial park across town carving a twenty-five-foot gorilla.”

  Dave Osborne is in his fifties. He has been sculpting colossi of one form or another since 1962. “It’s all I ever done,” he’ll tell you. Today he is standing on a stepladder, wielding an electric coping saw. Bits of foam cling to his sweatshirt, dot his hair, gather on his thick eyebrows as he carves out the waist of his twenty-five-foot gorilla. Across the workshop the gorilla’s unfinished torso holds its arms high and wide, as if hoisting a giant beer keg over its head. The sculpture is too tall for the building and must be constructed in two halves.

  “My background, as far as the sculpting?” says Osborne, lowering his saw. “Ummm…nothing really. I learned to work with large size and shape through the billboard business. Learned how to scale things up. Nothing formal. I didn’t take no schooling of any source.” He is a stocky man, self-effacing but eager to describe his work.

  “The hardest part is you got to have a photographic mind.” He picks up an air wrench, presenting it in side and front view. “For instance, if you pick up an object like this and say, ‘OK, make this ten feet tall,’ that’s fine, they can give you a picture of it and you can make the cutouts, but you still have to have a heck of an imagination what the missing parts look like. It’s like this ape. Unless you have an ape sitting right here, you have to fill in the detail.”

  Then, as if he has made it all sound too difficult, he grins. “Aww, we just grid it up.” He waves a dismissive hand. “It’s just like building airplanes.”

  America, the country where we do everything bigger and better, seems a natural for colossi—and indeed, America does seem to have cornered the market on kitschy colossi, although Karal Ann Marling points out that second place in the colossus race traditionally goes to totalitarian regimes. “They don’t tend to be popular. They are often designed to stun rather than impress. Saddam Hussein designed a Gulf War Memorial in the shape of giant hands holding a scimitar above the citizens of Iraq.” I’ll take the prancing prairie chicken, thanks.

  But is there room for giant things in America anymore? Sometimes it seems most of our modern colossi are conceptual; the Internet is a perfect example. Will people still pull off the road to look at an acromegalic cow? Karal Ann Marling doesn’t think so. “There are not a lot of new ones being built. We’ve gotten just a little more sophisticated than ‘big equals interesting.’” But Vettrus and Osborne disagree. “We don’t promote a lot, but every year it seems like we do something for a city or a community,” says Vettrus. “Seymour, Wisconsin, is the hamburger capital of the world, and they just called me and want to rent our giant eleven-foot hamburger for three months this summer…and if they like it, they may end up buying it for the city.

  “When they’re traveling, people just love to stand next to something and have their picture taken. It highlights their trip and gives them a remembrance of where they’ve been. Something that’s larger than life-size is interesting.

  “It’s a photographic thing.”

  Dave Osborne is standing beside an unfinished gorilla toe the size of a third-grader. You can’t convince him the hunger for colossi in America has died. “It’s simple. It turns heads. It’s like the Big Boy they had there for a while. He had that hamburger…it was simple.”

  Despite the upbeat spin of Vettrus and Osborne, hints of change are afoot. Increasingly restrictive ordinances regarding signage have caused many Big Boy restaurants to opt for simple, one-dimensional illuminated emblems. The demand for full-sized Big Boys has tailed off, and FAST Corp. stopped making them several years ago. Back in Toledo, they’ve patched Big Boy the murder victim back together as best they can. His stomach and one ear are still missing, however, and out in front of the restaurant he so proudly represented, his concrete footprints remain unfilled.

  1996

  P.S. Nine years later, I hereby retract the Rush Limbaugh line. Not that Rush requires defense, the line just isn’t that good. It’s disingenuous, easy, and instantly dated. Giggles for comments of this sort emanate chiefly from the choir loft and are thus discounted. Furthermore, once you call someone a big fat idiot, you have lowered the level of your discourse to the point that you will only regain the high ground by crawling.

  The Roots Remain

  War is a morally repulsive business, and when the fog of battle clears, we are quick to consign the details to history and myth. But veterans are details who walk among us. I was reminded of this one green morning a few years ago, when I walked to my kitchen window only to be startled by a tottering rank of soldiers advancing on my peonies. There were eight of them, old men with rifles, one man bearing the Stars and Stripes on a flagpole cantilevered off his belt buckle. I gaped a moment, then recognized the troops as the local veterans color guard, rehearsing for an afternoon funeral. The back door of the Legion Hall and the back door of my house open toward each other, and the men of the post had turned the potholed alley between us into a parade ground.

  I find it difficult to address the subject of veterans without descending into star-spangled cliches. And so I treasure the off-kilter image of that benevolent morning invasion. I watched as they counted off their steps and fell in line, watched as the sergeant-at-arms commanded them to raise their rifles, to ready, aim, fire, watched them finish by snapping the steel butt plates to the ground. They worked the drill again and again. Frequently one or the other of them missed a command, jerking his rifle into place a beat behind, or sneaking a peek at the next guy in line in the manner of a child gone lost amidst the choreography of a grade-school Christmas pageant, trying to clue in and catch up without breaking the stiff posture formality requires. One of the men had difficulty standing at attention—now and then his rawboned f
rame was swept by a list and sway, as if he were a cattail bumped by a breeze. But they were game, and they kept at it until they got it right, and then they stowed their rifles and departed for the cemetery. Not long after, a wire story in the local paper reported that United States veterans were aging and dying at a rate—500,000 per year, according to some accounts—that made it increasingly difficult to field color guards like this one for ceremonies, funerals, and parades.

  Five years passed, to a Monday morning last spring. I was upstairs writing and heard voices sifting through a backyard screen. I went to the window at the head of the stairs. It was the ragtag platoon, drilling again. They stood on the fringe of my grassy lot, hoisting and aiming their clunky rifles. I wondered who had died, then realized it was Memorial Day, which cast the question in an entirely different light. I thought of the newspaper article and, noting that the company before me had waned a man or two, made my way downstairs and out to the alley. I recognized the tall man who served as our village postmaster for twenty-one years. “Where you headed?” I asked. “Seventh Day church,” he said. I felt silly and dissolute, standing there in my sandals and baggy shorts, corn-fed and safe and only accidentally aware of the significance of the day.

  I had a quick shower and left for the church. On my way, I noticed a crowd had gathered down on the corner of Elm and Central streets, where Mack and Jack Most were taking down a big old spruce tree in someone’s yard. It was a tricky job. The tree was surrounded on three sides by power lines, the solid trunk within easy reach of a house, and the top liable to land in the Security Bank parking lot if it fell wrong. Mack and Jack are identical twins, and around here, if you want a tree taken down in close quarters, you call the Most boys. It’s a dangerous art, felling trees in confined spaces, requiring a seasoned mix of caution and derring-do. They had a few helpers, and a goodly audience of bystanders. I counted upwards of forty people sitting along the curb opposite, along the far side of the house, and on the steps of the United Methodist Church.

  Three blocks will take you to the edge of this town no matter which direction you drive, and I was shortly at the Seventh Day Baptist church. We sat on folding chairs in the gravel parking lot, and there weren’t many more than thirty of us, but they had to unfold a few more chairs for latecomers, and when the post commander adjusted his hearing aid and grasped the slim wooden lectern, he declared how pleased he was at the increased turnout. But then he recalled when Memorial Day meant bands and marching, and a parade that wound down Central Street and turned up Main, where the people waited in honorific rows. I wish, he said, we could get people interested again. The post chaplain offered a prayer, a retired butcher led us, a cappella, in the national anthem, and we recited the Pledge of Allegiance, which always reminds me of kindergarten and the flag at the end of Mrs. Amodt’s blackboard. Reverend Susan rose in her calico dress to draw from the New Testament, and I know I should have paid closer attention, but I was listening to the superficial bustle of the cars out on the state highway, and the sparrows, and wondering at the passage of time, how it outlives men and their wars, but can’t seem to cure us of fighting. Then Reverend Susan spoke of sacrifices made not for the present but for the future. Many of the fallen, she said, fell saying, “I care about those coming after me,” and I wondered where that put me. Reverend Susan finished, and the post commander rose, only to have a swoop of wind knock the flagpole over his head, at which he grinned and allowed as how he’d never gotten a Purple Heart, and in a hopeful and impish voice, asked, “Did it draw some blood?”

  Representatives of the Ladies Auxiliary read the poem “In Flanders Fields” and another poem described as being “from the newspaper.” We sang “America the Beautiful,” and I thought of Mrs. Carlson, our beloved elementary music teacher, gone now for some twenty years. It seems my every patriotic thought is tied to grade school. The post adjutant read a poem called “I Am Old Glory,” and I thrilled to the historic cadence, although it had a line that went “I am on the side of God,” and I’ve got to tell you that made me a little nervous. And then, over in the cemetery, the firing squad rose, and those four rifles cracked as one—no contingent of fresh-faced marines could have fired more crisply. There were, in the united reports, echoes of terror and pride, of men falling and mothers weeping, and the implication that some freedoms are earned, many are conferred, and not a few carry the scent of gunpowder.

  I am hip to the dangers of nationalism, jingoistic flag-waving, and the glorification of war. It is difficult to reconcile our ironic postmodern culture, larded with cynicism and a sense of entitlement, with these aging warriors. It is even more difficult—assuming, as I do, that frequently neither God nor any moral force is on the side of Old Glory—to find hope in the remembrance of war, in the attrition and ignorance fostered by the passage of time, in the idea that more people clustered up to see a tree cut down than to honor the ghosts of freedom. But I reckon I’m thankful to live in a place where two guys with a chainsaw can outdraw the satellite dish for an hour, and I’m thankful a rickety group of back-alley irregulars marched through my yard to remind me that history grows toward the past, but it is born in the present—a fact that implicates each of us in the shape of the future. The old soldiers fade away, taking their wars with them, leaving us to do what we will with the spoils.

  Back on the corner of Elm and Central, all that remains of the spruce is a flat stump, cut flush to the ground. The family who owns the house just had twins—they need room to add on. Majestic as it was, the tree had to go, and so the Most boys took it down. The roots, of course, remain, spreading wider than the boughs ever did, holding their ground, a testament to things given, and taken.

  2000

  Taking Courage

  A magazine requested essays composed in the wake of September 11, 2001. The name of the magazine is Hope.

  This is a message in a bottle. I send it from a peaceful little island, a cabin in the woods, built by my brothers when they were young. I am the oldest, but their competence—with tools, with machinery, with their hands—surpassed my own long ago. It is October, but the mercury will drop well below freezing tonight. Every half hour, I stoke the stove. The cabin is simple, solid, and square. Chinked with concrete. The hand-peeled logs still as Buddha. There are three sounds: the ruffle and snap of the fire, the hiss of the lantern, and the clack of my Smith Corona Classic 12.

  This cabin sits on ground I memorized from childhood. I lock myself in here when the words aren’t coming. Or when I need to face down the black dog. The bare logs, the wooden chair and table, the silence—they force the necessary confrontations. There are Thoreauvian overtones, but I’m really not much of an ascetic. Some of my best writing and thinking I do all hopped up on Little Debbie Zebra Cakes and black coffee, listening to three-chord roots rock. Tonight, though, I have a craving to unplug and go acoustic.

  I wonder what we know now. Now, the moment you are reading this. The tumblers have been set in motion. Every second is a forking path. As I write, the woods are dark, save for the pale daubs of lantern light angling out the cabin windows. It seems like Earth might be rotating around this coordinate. It is stunning to think of all humankind made contiguous by the globe. It is difficult to think in terms of governments, of man’s inhumanity to man. It is earthen and peaceful here.

  Where I live, we were looking east all day That Day. Through the television, over the Web, with an ear to the radio. We peered through the smoke and the flags and began to get a sense of magnitude. In a faraway city, skyscrapers were falling—would the tremors reach our little township, where the only structure over two stories is a four-legged water tower?

  Our volunteer fire department met for training the following evening. There are twenty-four of us, amateurs playing at a game in which the professionals regularly get their tails whipped. Flipping through Firehouse magazine before the meeting, I saw that 102 firefighters died in the line of duty in the year 2000. One rumbling instant in New York, and that number was eclipsed.
The last burning structure I crawled into was a trailer. We were looking for a guy who turned out to be gone. Until courage meets circumstance, there are no heroes.

  Tell me: How is the nation’s resolve? Very few volunteer firefighters quit the department at the sight of big flames. They quit when they realize the bulk of the battle is a back-breaking slog. Hours spent burrowing and hacking through soggy debris to extinguish intransigent little hot spots. You begin a warrior and wind up a drudge, rolling hose, cleaning equipment, restocking the rigs. The September 11 attacks were nationally iconic. Our response was equally so. Unity. Strength. Charity. But the battle will not always live up to the telethon. Resolutions of substance generally require heavy lifting and extended attention to the mundane. I reckon I’m a pickup-truck-coveting blue-collar capitalist, but this talk of preserving the nation through the wielding of credit cards and the acquisition of king cabs at 0 percent APR makes me snort. It’s hard to know what more—if anything—will be required of us. I’m not overly worried. My neighbors have already crawled through fire with me.

  An East Coast friend said she figured I’d be hearing a lot of rural tavern talk of how it was time to kick some towel-head ass. Well, sure. There’s always some loudmouth eager to swab the flag around like a World Wrestling Federation banner. But I have heard equivalent sentiments expressed on NPR and CNN, refined only in terms of diction and dress. Bigotry and extremism have commonality: Both are difficult to eradicate; both respond poorly to benevolence; and both are an embarrassment to those impugned through putative association, whether we wear NASCAR caps or turbans. The battle for civility will outlast all others.