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Dinty Baseball, Hot Dogs, Mescaline, and Chevrolet |
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An
Essay Utilizing A Passage from
Aldous Huxley’s
Doors of Perception
as Section Headings
Thus it came about
that, one bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and
sat down to wait for the results. Huxley,
Doors of Perception
Unlike Huxley’s dream car, mine was black—jet
black, convertible, with rounded fenders and a silver Indian chief on the
hood. My dream car sat in the woods, abandoned. We found it rusting, hemmed in by trees and
brush, with no easy answer to how it had arrived. Maybe fifteen years earlier there had been a
path or dirt track, some way to drive a car into this dense urban thicket,
but just then we couldn’t see that. Four crew-cutted
boys in cut-off jeans, wheeling our bikes through damp woods in search of
anything to divert our boredom, all we could see here was an inexplicable
circumstance, pure mystery. It was mid-summer, and the weeds and ferns
were so plush underfoot that we didn’t need our kickstands. We simply let our
Schwinns and Huffies fall
onto the soft green carpet, then bound forward on
foot, descending on the abandoned car as if it were the long-lost grail. I
remember even now the intense, radiated heat of the dark metal baking in the
July sun; can still recall the smell of rubber tires, and some peculiar odor
coming off the cloth seats. If I close my eyes, I can see the torn rag top,
and the loose piles of broken glass scattered all about. The car, I believe,
was a My ten-year-old mind struggled to comprehend
this unexpected discovery—someone abandoning an entire car. An entire car?
I was holding onto everything in my brief life: bottle caps, baseball cards,
broken metal, small bits of oddly shaped stone. Yet someone had left a car,
lost track of a full-sized automobile. It made no sense. Perhaps that is why Tommy Mucciarone refused to approach. Tommy just glanced
fretfully over his left shoulder while the rest of us, the boys on the Schwinns and Huffies, yanked at
the oxidized wipers, searched for the missing cigarette lighter, picked
through the rubble and trash of the floorboards for coins, maps, clues,
whatever little thing we could find. Tommy, no doubt, was anxious that the owner
might return. He understood—we all understood, from the layers of rust and
the thick growth of weeds perforating the floorboards—that this hulk had been
here for a decade or longer. But the owner might still come back. This was a car after all. We would come back, had it been our car.
Occurrences are not alone and we are not
apart from that which does occur if only when the stars are out and waters
rise to lunar songs of times before they knew the moon was earth to men in
solemn cubes of blueish light on evening rides with
relatives and closer friends than even neighbors are. Again. Then it came when old men drank in musty
bars and cherry bombed the bathrooms until laughter struck the night and
whiskey breaths puffed home to lukewarm meals and upset women’s hearts until
morning drenched the sky and woke the men who panted off to work. And times then came when women drove in
drunken fear through whitened roads of shining hopes and banks of snowy
fantasies until the metal touched and ripped and ran and wandered to a formal
place where pistoled men write funny words and
listen to their radios so that they can drive you home in emblemmed
cars so neighbors can peek out and wonder where thee lady had gone wrong. I wrote that breathless bit of prose roughly
twenty-two years ago; banged it out on an old Royal typewriter while sitting
shirtless in my backyard, working on a tan. I was also stoned when I wrote it. I think it shows.
The automobile and various forms of
inebriation were fairly well connected for the first three decades of my
life. I’m not bragging, understand. Not even close.
This is just how it had been. My first automobile memory was the
inspiration for whatever you want to call that piece of writing above—a prose
poem, a cry for help? My memory is of
careening through a blizzard one Christmas Eve, my mother at the wheel. No
one should have been out driving that night, given the visibility, but more
to the point, my mother was drunk—so bombed that she eventually scraped the
front bumper of our family Chevy across the side panels of two or three
parked cars. I was six or so. “Don’t worry,” my mother
kept telling me. “I’m all right.” But she wasn’t, and she knew it. We were a block from our house when it
finally dawned on Mom that skimming metal to metal against a line of parked
cars was not acceptable, no matter how much snow was falling, or what the
holiday. Her response was to drive two miles out of her way, straight down
snow-drifted The officers behind the desk, perhaps
already caught up in their own Christmas Eve revelry, seemed to find my
mother’s predicament amusing. I don’t remember, but I’m guessing they took
down the pertinent information. Or maybe they didn’t. It was Christmas after all. What I do remember is that they drove us
home in a black-and-white cruiser, with chains on the tires. Ten years later, I turned sixteen. My friend
Peter had a Volvo—or rather, his father had a Volvo—and throughout most of
our high school years we would pass the weekend evenings by filling the Volvo’s
interior with sweet marijuana smoke and cruising the boulevards of our
lakefront hometown. This was in the early 70s. The smoke gave everything in our world a
pleasant, surreal quality. It served as an antidote to the edgy boredom of
our teen years. It blocked out the trouble all of us were having at home. It
connected us with our older brothers and sisters, the Sometimes Peter, Jim, Danny and I would stop
in the K-Mart parking lot, get all “smoked up,” then go inside to watch the
night-owls shop under fluorescent lights. The shoppers seemed so oddly
significant, examining boxes of detergent in the unnatural glare. We would giggle a lot. Then we would drive some more. The first car I ever owned was a
putty-colored ‘72 Datsun. I bought it for $400 in
the Squirrel Hill section of Palmer was a drug dealer. He was my
drug dealer. But we also hung out. I think it amused him to have a friend like
me—straight-arrow, studious, a campus leader. It amused me to have a friend
who dealt drugs. My little walk on the wild side. Plus, the drugs were always
available, often free. I had developed a problem. One night we were playing cards at Palmer’s
dining room table when four men kicked in the door. They had guns, and were
not pleasant. They took the drugs, and money, and sped away in a Ford. My second car was a 1966 VW Beetle, with an
engine not much larger than what you might find in a mid-sized snowblower. The 12-volt electrical system could barely
power the lights—they often dimmed when the car accelerated. There was no heat.
I loved that car. Still do. Wish I still had
it. One late December afternoon, I took my VW
onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. As chance would have it, a massive ice storm
moved in quickly behind me, covered every surface with a dangerous, glassy sheen.
But I didn’t stop. I was determined to get home. In those days, smoking marijuana while
driving made long car trips palatable, passed the time quickly, helped me
stay alert—there was no real end to my rationalizations for what had at that
time become a clear addiction. But the fact is, I
almost never drove any distance without my pipe and baggie at my side. So I smoked a little weed as the ice storm
started, and the drive soon enough became an endless, surreal ordeal of ice
and stalled automobiles blocking the lanes. What should have been a four-hour drive
stretched into twelve. The little VW was steady and
reliable though, until about my tenth hour of driving—it was nearing I spotted the huge headlights of a
tractor-trailer coming up in my rear view mirror, and thought, “Oh God, I’ve
done it now.” The lights kept coming. I kept spinning. The tires whined. Nothing. Let’s step back a minute:
How stupid could I have been? The truck continued forward until it hit me.
Or rather, nudged me—quite gently, given the vehicle’s enormous size. The
unseen driver slowly and deliberately placed the tractor-trailer’s front end
directly onto the rear of my tiny lump of German engineering, locked his
front bumper onto the VW’s engine compartment, and
pushed me up the hill, into the tunnel, where the pavement was dry and
traction was again possible. Then he slowed enough for me to move forward on
my own power. For some time I thought it had been an act
of kindness, but later surmised that the driver of that truck was maybe just
watching out for himself. He was headed to I waved as he passed me on the downgrade,
but God only knows what he was thinking. Let me guess, “There’s an idiot in that
little car.” There was.
In many ways, our cars define who we are. A down-to-earth patriot? Baseball, Hot
Dogs, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet. A rebel? Every
revolution begins with a single act of defiance ( Dissatisfied? Wouldn’t you
really rather have a Buick? Drunk? Suddenly, the world’s glass is
half full again (Volkswagen). Both of my parents drove drunk, with regularity.
Our current president drove drunk, in his younger days. My own shameful
record of motor vehicle impairment is chronicled above. And I am writing this
essay during the 2002 Christmas holiday, amidst the endless rounds of
seasonal parties revolving around booze and food. All around me I see people
drinking, far more than normal, but I don’t see them walking home. An honest person has to admit that though
drinking and driving is universally condemned, it is still widely practiced,
and in most cases, no one intervenes. Thank goodness most of us have enough
sense not to drive when we can’t walk, that only a regrettable few of us are
desperate, misguided enough to weave across lanes of traffic, enter the
highway by way of the off-ramp. But for most of us: a few beers at a party, and off we go. Where’s the line? I remember my amazement when I moved to I later learned—to my further amazement—that
it was legal to drink and drive in the At first I thought my new Our cars are mere extensions of our selves. And we love our booze, pot, soma.
Remember Brave New World? Huxley’s futuristic novel spends much of its
first chapter narrating electrical shocks administered to infants, a form of
mental pre-conditioning meant to make the “khaki babies” averse to flowers. Why flowers? The simple love of nature, the Director of
the Hatchery explains, doesn’t quite do enough to encourage citizens “to
consume manufactured articles as well as transport.” In Huxley’s fictional world, transport is
all-important. “Our Lord” is replaced with “Our Ford.” Crosses have their tops lopped off, to
resemble T’s. (As in Model T’s.) “Ford’s
in his flivver,” the Director remarks at one juncture. “All’s well with the
world.” The State wants citizens to purchase vehicles, and then to fill the
storage compartments with costly gear—mountain bikes, Polartech
fleece, Global Positioning Systems, $200 poly/nylon, micro rip-stop shell,
super-wicking sleeping bags—before heading into the mountains. I’ve
modernized the list, of course, because Huxley is not around to do so himself.
Nor is he able to witness all of those
SUV commercials that fill modern television. Who needs legs? The ads tell us.
Load it all up and drive to the top of the mountain! Clearly, the State has won. In Huxley’s novel, the brave new world order
is enforced by encouraging the use of narcotics—calming soma—rather than
bombs. Intimidation has only limited power, the controllers assert, because
violent tactics merely build up resentment in the minds of the oppressed. Soma,
we learn, is far more effective in keeping the lower middle class blissfully
quiet and fully productive. Which makes
me wonder why Dick Cheney and his crowd are so against marijuana legalization.
Julian Heiklen, a
Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at The vegetable Heiklen
wants us to keep and bear is marijuana, and his habit of staging downtown State
College smoke-ins displeases and embarrasses Penn State administrators—my
employers. Thankfully, I many years ago moved beyond my
own pot addiction, but I can still giggle at the thought. A few years back, Heiklen
set his lawn chair in the middle of a main intersection and handed out a
flyer that read: Hello! I am Professor Julian Heicklen, and I love our children. I want to do everything I can to protect them, and that is why we are blocking traffic today. Automobile accidents are responsible for more child deaths each year than any other accident and most natural causes. We want to outlaw the automobile. Anyone owning an automobile should be imprisoned. He gave reasons, including these: —Unlike marijuana, which has never been responsible for a single
death in all of human history, the automobile kills 44,000 people each year
in the —Unlike marijuana, which is not criminogenic,
the automobile is highly criminogenic. It leads to manslaughter, reckless
endangerment, driving under the influence of alcohol, speeding, and parking violations. It also
is used in the commission of crimes, such as arson and armed robbery. He also pointed out that unlike marijuana,
the automobile has no clear “medicinal use,” and that people “deprived of
their cars display irritability and irresponsibility.” In short, the car is a recreational drug,
and we are addicted.
In Doors of Perception, Huxley’s
readers will find a passage—one that follows closely on those sentences used
as headings for this essay—wherein Huxley expounds further on his
mescaline-fueled car trip: And then, abruptly, we were at an intersection, waiting to cross
Sunset Boulevard. Before us the cars were rolling by in a steady stream—thousands of them, all bright and shiny
like an advertiser’s dream and each more ludicrous than the last. He goes on: Once again I was convulsed with laughter. The He is looking, I suspect, for transcendence,
some sort of mystical vision. But from my own previous experience, I would
say he was merely stoned.
Here is the rest of my dream car
story: The boys with the Schwinns
and Huffies didn’t sit in the abandoned We could easily imagine that something
awful, something dangerous had occurred here, or why else would the car have
been left to rot? Maybe alcohol was involved. Maybe something worse. We were as naïve as boys of our age are
meant to be—knew little about drinks, drugs, or Huxley’s warnings about
mechanization and the inherent danger of a society based on the shallow consumption
of manufactured goods—but we could sense power. We knew it resided here, in
this object, this magical abandoned automobile. We sensed the energy in this hunk of metal. Rusted,
stripped, the engine long dead, even this forsaken wreck held a promise we
could not yet fully identify. You will have a car someday, it promised. You will be an adult, and all of what is
hinted at here will be a part of your life. You will hold this enormous power
in your hands, and use it, or abuse it, as you wish. You will become addicted. But I wanted one anyway. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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