INSTALLMENT 29: 25 MAY 82

 

Shoulder blade deep in ruminations about mortality, this week’s installment comes to you from very near the scythe-edge of the Hereafter.

Today, Thursday 27 May 82, is my birthday. I’m 48. Happy happy the usual bullshit.

Last Thursday, I had my closest dance with the Faceless One who lives in the Boneyard. If you were on the San Diego 405 Freeway at about 2:45 in the afternoon, you saw my beloved 1967 Camaro, about which I’ve written in this column, overturned and spilling gas across four lanes southbound this side of the Venice off-ramp. Close, dear friends, too fuckin close. When the driver ahead of you in the #1 lane suddenly hits her brakes for no discernible reason when the traffic has suddenly clogged up, and you’re doing fifty, and suddenly she’s doing thirty, either you decide in that instant simply to pray that your karma account is in the plus column and keep on driving up her tailpipe and out her front windshield, or you get very responsible and decide to let her reach a ripe old age by cutting into the median pulloff lane. Remind me never again to think like a humanitarian.

The swing into the pulloff lane was fine. Had she slowed down to let me pass on the left, had she speeded up to get the hell out of there, nothing would have happened. But as I zipped past her thirty, doing fifty and slowing, I saw her face—a white balloon with a terrified expression on it—staring at me through the window. She stayed right abreast of us. God bless you, lady. The back end started to slew. We were going to broadside her, center punch her into the other three jammed lanes of traffic. You’d have heard about it on the 5:00 news. So I cut back toward the divider.

The wheels went up onto the curved surface designed to flip you so you don’t go straight over into the oncoming lanes. We started to turn over.

(They tell no lie. Time does elongate. You don’t get your life flashing before your eyes…thank God…I wouldn’t want to have to go through all that again…but the nanosecond of what’s happening at that instant slows down to a crawl. The mind carefully and leisurely considers everything. My assistant, Marty, was riding shotgun. If we flip once and land on the right side, please let it only be one roll, then I’ll fall on her and crack her spine. What about the cab flattening? What about sliding?)

I wedged my foot under the brake pedal, hung onto the steering wheel, jammed my ass into the corner of the seat…and we went over. We landed on the right side, slid about six feet and came to a stop. The woman in the car beside us went blissfully on her way, leaving destruction behind without thought to stopping. But the guys behind us saw what was going down and they slowed and stopped. Marty was rattling around in the bottom of the car like a ping-pong ball. I was hanging above her like a Carlsbad bat.

Then I smelled the gas. The tank was dumping all over the car. Suddenly there was a face at the window over my head. The guys from the cars behind us were screaming, “Gas! Get out of there, it’s gonna blow!” But they couldn’t pry open the door overhead. It had sprung, and the weight was at a bad angle. I yelled back to them to press in the door button on the outside, and I swung around and used my legs to jack open the door. Then I crawled out, grabbed Marty, yanked her up, dropped her into the arms of the good citizen, and dove back inside.

My typewriter was in there.

I went back a second time for my suitcase with the manuscript of the film I’ve been writing—the only copy—and as I was rooting around trying to pry it loose, a cop appeared overhead.

“Get the hell out of there!” he screamed. “Not till I get my stuff,” I yelled back. “Get the hell out of there, I’ll arrest you if you don’t get out of there!”

“Before or after it blows up?” I said.

He ran.

I got the suitcase, threw myself out of the car with it, and there we waited as gas drenched the San Diego Freeway till the fire truck came.

At 6:00 I was on a plane to Anchorage, Alaska, to deliver a lecture. “Wear the grease-stained pants for the lecture,” Marty said. “Scars of battle. It’ll be impressive.”

So much for you, Faceless One! I’m gonna live forever!

A couple of Mondays ago, the 17th of May, a great many of you who read this column came out to picket at CBS, to protest the political censorship that resulted in the Lou Grant show being cancelled. There were two thousand of you out there, including the surfer. There were a few actors—Nick and Trish Mancuso, Paul Kreppel who played the cocktail pianist Sonny on Making a Living, and a few others—not many, though. You’d have expected more of them—it is, after all, their fight, too. You’d have been disappointed. They weren’t out there. Not many students, either. Some. Not many. I didn’t see any directors. A few writers. Not many, a few. Mostly what I saw was people. No stars, no media faces you’d recognize, nobody very prominent. Just you two thousand dynamite citizens concerned about the erosion of your rights. A lot of members from the ACLU who understand that freedom has to be safeguarded endlessly, without surcease, without catching a well-deserved nap. And people.

I came down wearing the Harlan Ellison cap I said I’d wear so you could stroll up and say hello. I also came down with my Joe Morgan little league Louisville Slugger just in case any Mark David Chapman John Hinckley Sirhan Sirhans wanted to get physical in reference to something offensive in my writings. Not to use it, merely to use it as a walking stick deterrent against the unexpected. Pasteur said: “Change favors the prepared mind.” 

A lot of you came up and said, “You brought us out here.” I always said the same thing in response. “No. You brought you out here!” One kinda sad-eyed guy said he’d been laying back since the late Sixties early Seventies. He said coming out and walking with us made him feel good about himself for the first time in longer than he cared to remember. I liked him a lot.

It was a high, gentle readers. It probably didn’t do one scintilla of good toward getting CBS to reconsider its cowardly actions, but it was the doing of it that was worthy.

There was a sense of being at the right place for the right reason; of being correct in our actions. A sense of community. The three hundred Spartans standing off Xerxes’ multitudes at the Hot Gates of Thermopylae. The SNCC marchers going against Alabama mad dogs and cattle prods. Children in the streets of Budapest flinging Molotov cocktails at invading Russian tanks.

Yes, yes, I know. I overdramatize. Sue me. You shoulda been there. A chill up the spine, friends. Something real happening, life happening, and most of all: people.

I have come to care for some of you very deeply.

Today is my birthday. Don’t send candy, I’m overweight already.

 

Flowers grow in my backyard. I can use any of the non-L. Frank Baum Oz books written after 1921, or a nice pipe from the Cigar Warehouse or…most of all…a solid lead where I can buy a spiffy clean, well-running Packard circa 1951.

Other than that, send no gifts. But if you know where there’s a Packard, let me know. My poor dear Camaro is in the Rheuban Motors impound yard, and they tell me it’s dead. That motherluncher the Faceless One is squatting on the corpse. He didn’t get me or Marty, but he finally caught up with Camaro.

A 1951 Packard could ease the pain.

Happy birthday to all of you. We’re all gonna live forever!