The one thing I miss is hitchhiking. Now there’s no more of that. When’s the last time you saw
a hitchhiker? … It was my way of seeing the country. The open road,
especially in the western United States, is still very pristine,
but everything else around it has changed.
• Ed Ruscha
• bart plantenga
[exc. 4 from RADIO ACTIVITY KILLS]
Alouette: “I just dyed my hair green for the Monk Mental gig. I run my fingers through my hair. It’s gecko green, rad, hypnotic.
Monk Mental mashes grafitti, poetry, free jazz, speed metal, Ramp-Up skate-punk comix, tubas, and Gregorian chant costumes with Goth Hoodies on skateboards – the undersides permarkered with a fusion of pentagram + anarchy ? + a smilie ?. But you knew that. They’re playing the Swimming Pool, the abandoned pool in the middle of disappeared-industry Williamsburgh. Sound here careens magically around the smooth, faded aqua contours of the deep end, where 1000 kids per day swam in chlorinated water to beat the 1960s August heat. It’s supposed to open back up. They’ve been promising it since before I was born.
MM posters everywhere. I’m psyched. Tickets: $21.95 ticket + $18.99 Manic Panic Electric Lizard hair dye. But then papa springs it on me; we’re leaving tomorrow – before the gig. Why? Where to? I love you, papa, but you can be so frickin’ irkatatin’!! GRRRR! I feel a premenstrual feline fit coming on. NoNoNo!
He hates my silent treatment because it usually works. Not this time. He tries to make it up to me: gives me a pretty chain with a vintage yellow 45 spindle dangling from it. You look at his rough-hewn, chiseled face and you think there’s no sensitivity, no tears stored up in there. But I know better. There’s a water tower full in there.
I play with the spindle as a grey sunlight pours through our windows. Who to give my ticket to?
I don’t know what got into him. He just completed a benefit gig at ABC No Rio for undocumented refugees, mixing Woody Guthrie’s Asch Recordings and some scratchy Folkways records with his favorite Crooklyn Dub Consortium extended outtakes and white label, 12-in. dub-doom glitchcore remixes.
Guthrie’s lyrics spurred him to embark TOMORROW on our Post-9-11 Dust Bowl travels to see “the reality of how mankind suffers in the shadow of ill-gotten wealth with no lasting value.”
He’s been obsessing on this cross-country idea since I was born in 1990. He’d put his finger in the book Wiplala to hold our place while he’d serenade me with dreams, words from Kerouac, Van der Elsken, Steinbeck, to gently cast me off to sleep.
Wiplala’s a kind of early Harry Potter. Not really. A tiny being with uncertain magic talents turns a major poet into a statue. The statue becomes famous and when the poet is unstoned, brought back to life, his books become popular. The part I remember best mirrors how we live: Wiplala has shrunk himself down to dwarf size to help his father escape an unaffordable restaurant bill by transforming him and the rest of the family into dwarfs, allowing them to escape the wrath of the restaurant owner. Later they get a lift in a fruit basket to travel a good distance. Freaky foreshadowing.
Papa stands on a chair, grabs On the Road off the shelf, and reads: “… all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere.”
Papa’s books promote nomadism over home ownership; being is moving as measured by the escape speed produced by impatience, temporary employment, curiosity, and technology. Papa’s not wonky; he felt it was our duty to cross America: ghost towns, roadside architecture, diners, truck stops, monuments to weirdness, places mentioned in songs, Alberta [Canada] where Days of Heaven was shot, people he knew in Chicago, “monuments” to Kerouac, Robert Frank, Jim Morrison’s Mojave Desert, O’Keefe, Guthrie, Jack London’s San Francisco – and that mysterious patron-woman in L.A.
• Albertson message: “Woody Guthrie sold root beer in Pampa, Texas, age 16, discreetly selling alcohol that he pulled from a secret panel in the stand to mix with the root beer.”
But now it’s almost tomorrow; pack my bags – don’t forget flapoor my knuffel, stuffed rabbit – and we’re outta here. Surprise is a head-on of speed and secrecy and shakes up the dust, he says. What about school? He left a message on the school answering machine, something about a family emergency.
We really did head out that earlybird next morning – thrushes and robins – weird being the only kid going this way while everybody else is going that way. We haul our bulging rucksacks and tote bags full of food and loose stuff onto the PATH to Jersey City. We tromp past WOOF, he tipping his imaginary trilby at the front door, past Holy Name Cemetery, past the guy with the donut stand and coffee brewing, up to Lincoln Highway, the Pulaski Skyway and Interstate 78. This took hours BTW, and felt like we’re going to age 20 years by the time we reach California.
WARNING
DO NOT PICKUP HITCHHIKERS
MAY BE ESCAPING ‘PATIENTS’
Hitchhiking is unpredictable [and less safe now, which he doesn’t mention] except for the looooooong waits that would annoy even the most deeply meditating guru. You want to go here but are let out there – a geographical pinball machine. At a gas station you ask 10 people how to get somewhere and they don’t know and you don’t remember why you ever thought you wanted to go there and when you finally get there you realize it’s nowhere really, so you walk up the next on-ramp west.
Hitchhiking’s about humiliation – adventure, sure, but also exasperation and humiliation – which is not something you seek out – unless you’re a Buddhist or something. Papa “forgot” to tell me that people don’t hitchhike like “back then” in those books sitting on that plank of rescued sailing ship wood and that the glorious-inspirational part was harder to come by these days with weird-ass gruesome stories, military policing, and paranoia. That happy share-a-ride-relationship between hikers and drivers is no more. He aims to cut against every grain to prove people are still good. Just hug strangers, listen to them Winnie the Pooh-style …
He says people used to feel sorry for you if you were down on your luck, standing in the rain; now they snicker, blame your character flaws – or say it’s God’s way of disapproving of the poor. But papa is still convinced there are many out there like him to fix this cosmic glitch.
Although we’re not Jews or Gypsies, Bedouins or Berbers, Burgundians or hobos, deportees or Deadheads, Beatniks or troubadours, circus performers or Rastafarians, Villon or John Lee Hooker’s “Wandering Blues,” we ARE something. His message, avoiding all the danger stoked by myth and misinformation chokes the life out of you.
Once on the road, I warm to papa’s magical trust of strangers [sometimes] – as I tag along from point A to Z. His trust, you will soon see, persuaded dubious characters to rise nobly above their limitations, suddenly unable to sleaze us over and feeling mighty big about their little generosities. Call it hippie or karma or naive or stupid or careless or wacked or … spiritual. But papa, being all too very human, drew a line and I would soon find out where in the mud he drew that line.
Standing on an up-ramp in the junk, I snap a photo: discarded diapers, bottle shards, an afro-head of tangled cassette tape, bright plastic bits, McDonald’s cups, Burger King boxes, New York Post headline: “SMASHED: Lights out for Lohan 48 hours after DUI bust,” slivered rubber shavings, latex particles, microscopic bits of black carbon crap, oil, sulphur, crap-ass metals like zinc and nickel dusting your shoes, with airborne tire dust particles irritating your nose … the romance of the open road.
“I don’t want you sending these liften fotos naar Katja.”
Papa pulls out his weird, mauve, dinosaur-egg shaped, not-quite ghettoblaster, to make sure I experience hitching as fruitful, poetic, educative – and bearable. He balances it on the guardrail like he’s rearranging our living room. First song – maybe it’s coincidence [NAAA! KAN NIET!] – is “Help Me Understand” with papa accompanying Hank Williams full-lung style. Nobody’s going to pick us up with a crazy guy singing to the grey skies. But I indulge him the bad singing; sometimes bad singing is funny – but mostly pathetic. This is both.
“A little girl prayed at the close of the day, / Cause her daddy had gone far away, / On her little face was a look of despair …”
Big blue button eyes of mine are as judgmental as eyes get, especially when they float up out of sight into the frontal lobes. He calls them “taser eyes.” I withhold them for now.
“Now schat [darling], you know why I am a DJ – HAW!” Then in a fidiculous Dutch hillbilly accent: “You know she didn’t ask to be brought into this world / dum dum dum / There could be a lot more honest loving / In this wicked ole world today …”
Meanwhile, I stick my thumb out in blasé Christiane F. style. “Listen!” finger in the air, “… to the magical call of de woudzanger, the wood warbler.”
Even if I did care, I wouldn’t show it.
Some short rides, a few miles each to the next off-ramp, we – I! – hook the magical ride, a faded-blue Ford Taurus, minus a hubcap. The guy will take us all the way to Harrisburg because he’s no ordinary soul; he’s “attending the annual religious conference for small congregation pastors in Harrisburg.” Earning spiritual brownie points, but we’ll take the self-satisfied-benevolence-as-proof-of-holiness thing and all the preachy blabla because it means movement toward our destination – wherever that is.
“I wear a tie, shave every morning because I aim to please God thoroughly. Ah, goodness is good!”
I give papa the cold-blue-eye-no-god’s-a-pervert-cruel-mofo-comments stare. Papa is hippie-naive accepting, but draws one line at bible-spewing.
“Hey, rev …” His North Sea stare.
“Reverend Horace.”
“Whore Ass… Darling, I am a victim of myself,” Papa quips as he shoves ghettoblaster into his rucksack. I note his road cassettes: Edward Ka-Spel joining Algebra Suicide in a Paris basement gig [1989], Phoebe Legere joining the Ex to cover Destroy All Monsters in an abandoned Detroit suburb strip mall [1989], Joe Ely & Joe Strummer, a backstage Top of the Pops jam with the Dave Clark Five and John McLaughlin [1965], Sinead O’Connor singing Hildegard von Bingen.
“The diamond is in the middle of a dog poop and so how will I vis it out?”
I sit up front, don’t really know why, but that’s how it worked out with our bags and all. Reverend Horace: “Use your seat belt – it’s the law … God sees all.” Papa’s mumbling, eyes fluttering like venetian blinds in a storm, already dozing.
“I am more than happy to do a good deed a day.”
“You do two good deeds, you can skip a day.” Last mumblings of a dozing papa.
“Now, that’s not how our LORD keeps tabs. He’s not from human resources, you know.”
Papa curls up like a dog in a basket.
“I see trust rewarded – you feel good trusting people.”
I tell Horace our who-what-where.
“Amsterdam is where the devil resides. The Dutch have abandoned god. Churches closing …” His fascination tempered by his showy disapproval.
Papa’s out like a black-&-white crime photo of a murder victim by a famous photographer we saw in a retrospective in a museum. Everybody looks innocent and vulnerable asleep: papa, murderers, mafkezen [weirdos], the homeless, prostitutes …
I tell Horace about school, studying design, kinetics, dynamic multimedia, labor history, art and “helping papa with his DJ work.”
“Plenty of bad drugs at these craves.”
“He doesn’t really do raves.” Horace, like most Americans, is most curious about the Red Light District: were the women expensive, beautiful, naked, pitiful, Christian; do they have license numbers tattooed on their wrists, did they bathe after each degenerate, live in houses, like chocolate, speak English, and were they open to saving? So rapidfire I could barely answer but my answers did not really matter because his questions simply projected a series of arousing images on the backs of his eyelids, the kind he may have seen before in a Christian documentary. And out of nowhere: “In the fight against the devil, you sometimes have to play on his playing field.”
I may be young, but I took this to mean he might one day be called upon to do “under-the-covers” work – for the lord. The preachy always rail against what they’re most tempted by. Amsterdam was an open invitation for him to ask me pointed questions about sexuality, sex ed, condoms, promiscuity, and whether it was true that they showed us how to put on condoms using a banana and that Amsterdam girls were already having loveless intimacies because sex in Amsterdam is “like McDonald’s here.” But there you have it.
I answer as honestly as possible with papa dozing. I was the projectionist at the movie theatre of his brain. Did I really see him touching himself by holding the steering wheel at the bottom so that his hands could graze against his crotch? So discreetly practiced you cannot be sure.
I offer him juicy tidbits of things I’d heard – boys walking through the bioscoop [cinema] with their piks out, grabbing girls’ hands and putting them on their piks. Opening one end of a grape and then screwing it onto your nipple and then letting a girlfriend eat it off, while boys on the other side of the kantine [cafeteria] watch. Stuff like that. I look over to watch his bushy caterpillar mustache twitch, reaching out toward my shoulder? As if his mere touch has healing properties due to his close proximity to god. It made me uneasy and that made him uneasy – the spiritual equivalent of that pat on the back that steals your wallet. He concentrates on driving, eyes on the road, as he points out, “these things basically steer themselves these days,” patting the wheel of his Taurus.
“Should you not be in school?”
“Yea.”
“It is a crime to keep your child out of school. Truancy is a gateway to future crime: burglary, vandalism, drugs … By the way, call me REVEREND Horace.”
“Because that’s your name?”
“Indeed … I am a pastor, not a preacher.” He too used to hitch in the 1970s and found it “the perfect way to escape a cloistered youth and meet real Americans to spread the gospel. Nowadays, hitchhikers worry about being the victim. But I hope to keep shepherding the …”
“Sheep?”
“… hitchhikers, migrants, those who’ve had their licenses revoked. I pick them up whenever I see them.”
“What’s the diff? Preacher, pastor, minister? Different phone extensions to god?”
“Haha. Preachers are the flashy running backs in white shoes. Pastors are the team players, the guys with the plays, who make the hand-off.” Did he say “hand-off” in a loud, creeple way?
“I sorta understand but …”
“Oh, yes, of course, you don’t know American football over there. Silly of me.” Did he just innocently – or strategically – flop his hand down on my knee like a damp dish towel and leave it there for a micro-second too long?
“Preachers are fire, brimstone, Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker – great motivational speakers, mind you. Respect! But pastors, do most of the hard work – shepherding the flock, reassuring the uncertain, balancing the budget. I go both ways, if you know what I mean. The preacher is the star, the Mel Gibson, we’re the assistant directors to the big director in the sky. Make sense?” He points up to make sure I know he knows where god lives.
“Why rev and not pastor?”
“Reverend! It’s the same but reverend is more … honorable. I’m the Mister Fixit of the ministry trade. The Lone Ranger …”
“I work on the physical, spiritual, financial, and administrative parts of a congregation. Not easy when troubled souls are so troubled by these troubling times.”
At this point, on a straightaway piece of US 78, he reaches across my thighs [short punky tartan skirt, attitudinally ripped fishnets, not ideal for hitchhiking] for the glovebox to … grab a cassette. As papa will tell you, cassettes liberated us from the tyranny of record companies.
“The cassette is a Dutch invention.”
“Is it now.”
“That’s what papa says.”
On the recoil to the upright position, Horace’s wrist almost imperceptibly, grazes my knee. I glance over to see if he’s watching for my reaction but I cannot tell. His face had that empty-glass-with-two-damp-cigarette-butts look – boredom suffocating soul. I tolerate it, unsure it isn’t just his innocent spatial orientation miscalculation. Papa content as a first grader napping in the back.
Horace makes a second lunge for the glovebox and this time grabs the right cassette – his grazing suddenly seems bolder. It’s the magic of his trade to shroud all in uncertainty or higher purpose.
OK, what was it going to be? Ah-ha, not-too-loud, soft rock – he’s humming along to Seals & Crofts and then another band, which wakes the dead: papa bolts upright as you see corpses in bad zombie movies do: Sweat, nausea, bug eyes. Amazing.
Rev’s meek smile full of unresolved issues: “I am sorry to awaken you.”
“I am sorry but there is no other way to put this. I hate this music the way a vegetarian hates McDonald’s.”
The first notes of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” open the floodgates of papa’s loathing. Horace, the preacher had touched a raw nerve because everything that’s wrong with humanity, the music business, religion and god is symbolized by the Eagles’ fame, the very band Horace hoped would reveal his hipness to the sounds of today, if by “today” you mean anything post-big-war.
“UGH. Worse than air raid sirens.”
“So, may I ask: How did the Eagles sell 200 million records if they’re so horrible? Tell me that my good friend!”
“FFFF, het slechtste.”
“Sprechen das English!”
“Means the worts. He IS going to tell you, Mr. Horace.” Really.
“
“The fohkin’ Eagles are to rock what fohkin’ McDonald’s is to burgers. If god is good, why would he make the Eagles?”
“My good man, no need to flip your lid. No cuss words.”
“How old are you, sir Hoe-race? I’m 1966.”
“I’m 1954, class of 1972. West Point ’78. Let me tell you, my friend, when the Eagles came along, this country was in deep doo-doo. Vietnam, Watergate, the sickening 60s were just barely over. The Eagles had that great new sound. They were VERY popular at West Point. Every cadet at the time had an Eagles LP …”
“I rest my case, your honor. The Eagles prove there is no god. REAL devil’s music!”
“Please, good manners, do not interrupt. My friend, take Black Sabbath, now that’s the devil playing mischief with the souls of the young!”
“The devil speaks to us using self-indulgent tri-tones and forever feedback guitar solos and drug-inspired texts?”
“I’ve been there, held the hands of youngsters coming off bad trips or the havoc wrought by the diabolus in musica. Truth be told, the Eagles were a breath of fresh air. It’s no accident that two of their biggest hits have the word ‘easy’ in the title – ‘Peaceful, Easy Feeling’, and ‘Take It Easy’. Love’m!”
“And what about: ‘I wanna sleep with you’?”
“I don’t listen to dirty songs, fella. And the Eagles don’t write filth. Taking words out of context is a cheap trick, a lazy liberal way to win an argument already lost. The whole line, ‘I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight, with the moon and stars up above,’ isn’t about sexual congress at all! It’s about a man who wants to share the simple things; mother nature, in all God’s great glory with someone.”
“It’s junk food for ears.”
“Pardon me for the overwhelming majority of us loving Big Macs, loving our country, our selves, our military, our Eagles.”
“Uh, self-love. Isn’t that a sin? Like pride or masturbation …”
“I WILL NOT ALLOW such language in my car. You can discuss the world in a respectful manner.”
OK, dominee.”
“You can’t argue with 5 billion sold. I guess you know better than the rest of the world.”
“When we end up sprinting for the lifeboats, we’ll see who makes it in. The Eagles is what’s wrong with capitalism, democracy …”
“It’s like you have a bee up your behind. We have democracy and capitalism that’s the envy of the world. We have the right to vote with our wallets for a dazzling variety of goods. Our shelves are always full. Thank God. This is his reward. You think you can get a Big Mac in a Communist country? The answer, my friend, is a great big N-O! Personally, I’m glad to live in a country where we can eat a big Mac at midnight, and listen to the Eagles while I do so!”
“Reverend Horace, please … my dad …” I wasn’t in any mood for religious debates.
“Eighty reasons why Big Macs suck: high fructose corn syrup, ammonium sulfate, mono- and diglycerides, ethoxylated monoglycerides, monocalcium phosphate, guar gum, hydrolyzed corn, calcium disodium …”
“NO! PAPA! Not now!” He clams up. Irritation in my voice does it’s job.
“I’m never as proud of being an American, to be honest, as when I’ve finished a sermon on a Sunday morn and I’m driving home with The Eagles in my ears, and special sauce on my tongue!”
And then, mid-reminiscence, his right hand reaches across my knees again, to grab yet another cassette. He dramatically thumps the EJECT button, then thrusts the new cassette in and he is again transported to a kind of heaven – like you see on TV when a heroin addict presses the needle into his vein – singing along to the celestial harmonies of … Little River Band Greatest Hits.
I’m worried papa’s about to lose his nuts and screws.
If the Little River Band can make anybody horny or pious, then life’s a mystery. Why so many earthlings have such bad taste in music? The lord works in mysterious ways.
Horace’s eyes glaze over, focusing on the horizon, mouthing the words as if in deep communion with an imaginary friend.
“People on their own are getting nowhere / I am on the road to see / If anything’s anywhere and waiting, just for me …” Hand tapping the steering wheel.
I glance over and suddenly see the man who must have been the inspiration for Ned Flanders – that mustache, that almost-smug, shallow, proud-to-be-normal jolliness-for-no-reason.
“Did anybody ever tell you you look like Ned Flanders?”
“Um… uh. I did not know The Simpsons is broadcast in your country. WAUW-diddly–WAUW!” A quick glance my way to be sure I’m not screwing with his head.
“You know, Homer’s neighbor.”
“Oh, of course-iddly-orse, as a joke I suppose some’ve ribbed me about it. Oh my lordiddly doo, the ribberinos I have taken.” I glance over; he’s absolutely sure he’s being super clever. His winks seal it.
“I am sorry, pastor, but can we change the music?!” Papa’s fidgeting in the backseat.
“No diddley can do, son! We’re diddley done there. It’s either my waydly way or the high-diddley-way.” I am sure by now he thinks he has created a bond with me via this popular character.
“OK, Rev, you win.”
“Reverend!”
“I cannot imagine making love with LRB playing. I cannot see anybody playing them at a senior ball or even shopping music. Laxatives? Row three, sir!”
“It’s ‘aisle,’ not ‘row,’ papa.”
“Thanks schatje. The LRB are like cigarettes – you lose a minute of life every minute you listen to them!”
“That’s ironic and now you are coming down to the very soul of me – we indeed DID choose ‘Reminiscing’ for our college graduation ceremony – West Point Class of ’78. We chose it democratically in the class prom committee.”
“So much for democracy!”
“You can say that coming from a country that has turned its back on god and converts its churches into discos. ‘Reminiscing’ is great. It was in the Top 100 for SIX months! Are you saying all of those fans are wrong?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know it was a personal favorite of John Lennon’s? I bet you didn’t know that.”
“Life’s a mystery. It is hard to love humanity with their LRB and then confusing Thelonious Monk for a boxer. LRB is Barry Manilow on Xanax plus percodan in a Motel 6 lobby for people who piss on the rugs!” Papa can be so dog barky, bending out of shape over crap like musical taste.
“Barry Manilow happens to be a very, very, talented songwriter. He wrote jingles for Coke and Pepsi?”
“Papa! Relax!” Stern blue eyes.
“AGGHH – Little River Band, Loverboy, Foreigner, Toto, Loggins & Messina, Hall & Oates, Tony Orlando & Dawn!!”
It’s not just dislike: These acts to him represent fundamental flaws in humanity, defective DNA in the human gene pool …
Papa’s all too UNaware that Rev could just kick us out if he got to be too much. Horace’s face flashes red. Beads of sweat appear on his throbbing-veined forehead. Hair – LOTS of it! – growing out of his ear.
The more vehement papa gets, the smaller, more pathetic he seems. First papa is pointing out that there is no god and so no devil. But now he’s claiming that LRB is the devil – who does not exist. Grrr.
“In Harrisburg I will be highly honored to read my much-praised ‘Feed the Flock’ sermon that addresses the pressing issues in our community: child care, affording diapers, skateboarding past curfew, fornication, car payments, foreclosure, what if your daughter is attracted to her best girlfriend …”
“Nice.”
“Intervention, not aggressive, but assertive pro-active mediation, is a solution we have experience with. ‘Unbrainwashing’ some call it.”
“Pardon ME, Rev, but to me it’s all bullshit in a punchbowl. People just wanna hear what they wanna hear and will reward you as long as you spout it.”
“Your lack of respect shows me you were born into a Godless family in a Godless land. You are lost by choice with no interest in who I am …”
“Well, you never bothered to ask me what I do …”
“THERE YOU GO interrupting me again! …”
“AND THERE YOU GO INTERRUPTING ME INTERRUPTING YOU!”
“MAKING A MOCKERY OF CIVILITY.”
“CIVILITY!? YEA, AS LONG AS YOU TALK AND WE PASSIVELY LISTEN LIKE THE REST OF YOUR FLOCK OF SHAVED, PERMED SHEEP!”
“I AM AFRAID I AM GOING TO HAVE TO CAST YOU OFF TO YOUR OWN WITS AND DEMONS, AND HOPE THAT YOU FIND YOUR WAY. NOW GOD DARN IT! GET OUT OF MY CAR, OUT OF MY SIGHT, OUT OF MY LIFE! I WILL PRAY FOR WHAT REMAINS OF YOUR MISERABLE SOULS TONIGHT. AND NOW, GOD DARN IT! GET OUT OF MY CAR!”
He slams on the brakes. Skid marks on the shoulder. White-knuckled hands stiffly gripping the wheel, staring bullets into the westward distance, eyes falling on a place where it would take us hours to get to as we crawl out, bags tossed to the gravely shoulder, papa making a quick sweep of the backseat for junk that could have fallen out of his pockets.
“FUCK YOU, SIR!”
“FUCK YOU! AND MAY THE LORD HAVE PITY ON YOUR POOR DAUGHTER – IF SHE EVEN IS YOUR DAUGHTER!!” And before papa could even close the back door, Horace floored the Taurus, tires spitting up gravel over our feet.
Papa gives him the finger both American style – and British style, just for good measure. And, as Horace merges into traffic he turns around and gives US the finger in a manner only a Rev who feels he has been stabbed in the back is capable of. Like he’s cocking a semi-automatic.
As we stand on the shoulder with a sickly sun quickly sinking, standing at an uneasy angle on a slight slope, papa yanks out the cassette player; cues it up like a smoker fumbling for a cigarette.
“Horace may have been coming on to me.” I confess. “I didn’t say anything so we could ride it out.”
“Shit! GODVERDOMME!” He’s pissed-ashamed, a mixed state I’d endured before. I wonder if mankind can ever save itself.
“SHIT!” Standing there on the shoulder I suddenly have a lightbulb moment: Life will consist of much doubting and wondering.
“Horace’s milky-soft hands … Never lifted a spoon, hammer, carving knife … Or tone arm … in his whole life!”
“OK, PAPA!”
“Almost done, schatje. Almost. How convenient to wrap your inconvenient perversions as god’s way. Geen wonder so many people make deathbed confessions. A few words confessed at the end of greedy, evil lives – ‘I’m fuckin’ sorry dear lord’ – and all the mean-evil crap is wiped off de table and they get served fairy cake by de angels. The ultimate once-in-a-lifetime offer.”
“IK WEET HET, I know.” He’s in such a funk that nothing, not even a shrink or psychotropic drugs will help. I beam him my best smirk.
“Whaat?! WHAAAAT?!”
He’s dying there on the shoulder. I smirk even harder, reach for my canvas bag … silence …
“Whaat?! WHAAAAT?! KOM OP!?” [Come on!] People go mother-tongue in times of duress. He’s on his knees melting from the suspense.
“NOOO! First you promise to behave! For my good, for your’s, for all of humanity.”
“IK BELOOF HET JE, schat!” [I promise you.] I slowly open the flap, the zipper, reach in and …
“OK!? OK! Shoot me! Amaze me!”
“TAAAAAA-Daaaaaaaaaaaa!!!” I pull out a cassette and hold it aloft the way a hunter does the decapitated head of his prey.
“OH YEAH – JAJAAJAAJAJAJA!!”
He takes the cassettebox Little River Band: Greatest Hits from my offering hand, takes out the cassette, kisses it, reads the liner notes as if performing a eulogy: “Dearly departed Greatest Hits of the Little River Band and next of kin, Capitol Records, who brought this monster into our world in 1982. LRB is like the BeeGees on the wrong drugs. ‘Help is on Its Way,’ ‘Man on Your Mind,’ ‘The Other Guy,’ ‘Lady’” … reading the titles as a judge might read the charges against a defendant.
He loops a finger to hook the tape, starts yanking the brown tape out of the cassette – ZWWISZ – twirling it around and around, like a cowboy twirls his lasso, the cassette swinging further and further outward. He’s laughing the biggest laugh mankind has ever laughed, walking unsteadily up the road to fetch the cassette.
He picks it up, then drops it to the shoulder to stamp on it with both feet until there is no chance it will ever make another sound. Ever.
A deep breath, hands on his thighs, bent at the waist, cracking a smile, throws back his shoulders and strolls over to me. He plants a soft kiss on the top of my head, and I know we’ll be OK for another day.
“WOOOOO!” He thrusts his thumb back out into the world, into the passing whirr of traffic with new gusto. And while he’s preoccupied, I pick up a splintery shard of what is left of the Little River Band product: “Long Way There.” I stuff it into my bag, my first trip souvenir. From over his shoulder, he observes: “The world is in some way a better place now. Only six million copies to go. On to the Eagles, Billy Joel, Foreigner, Captain & Tenille, Air Supply, Starship, Lois Lane, Michael Bolton, Guns n Roses, England Dan & John Ford Coley … Nickelback, Chris Brown, Bananarama!”
Creative-redemptive destruction is like an alcoholic licking the rim of a whiskey glass.
And then he pressed PLAY: a song from the inspiring-annoying category somehow perfect for this moment in America: “Beers Steers & Queers” [Revolting Cocks]. He’s singing along so loudly he spooks birds out of nearby trees.
“Minds’re empty, heads are hollow / You might find out, the truth is hard to swallow / There’s a place down there, where heads are square / Laws are tough, you are bare / … [can’t decipher the words] / Texas is the place, hang ’em high / Beers, steers and queers / Beers, steers and queers …”
I join in, singing-shouting – papa en dochter. The open road has a Kraftwerk beat – that metallic click of the expansion joints between slabs of concrete highway to to which I tap along: car-nothing car-nothing car-nothing car-nothing car-nothing … We’re tired, hungry but we don’t dare say so. “BEERS, STEERS AND QUEERS! BEERS, STEERS, AND QUEERS! … car-nothing car-nothing and then … another ride!
Radio Activity Kills is being renovated. Migration takes many forms & leaves behind many stories.
bart plantenga is the author of novels, Radio Activity Kills, & Ocean GroOve, The Drag Queen & The Flood, short story collections Wiggling Wishbone & The Confusion Spandex, novella Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man & memoirs: Paris Scratch & NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor. He’s a founding member of NYC writer group, The Unbearables. His books YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World & Yodel in HiFi & CD Rough Guide to Yodel have created a misunderstanding that he’s the world’s foremost yodel expert. He produces the podcasts: Dig•Scape & iMMERSE! & as a DJ has produced Wreck This Mess in NYC, Paris & Amsterdam since forever. He is a regular contributor to The International Times. His most recent work appeared in LIT Magazine on squatting & abandoned architecture. Autonomedia will publish his novel BEER MYSTIC in late 2026. [Author photo by Foto Sifichi]
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