Into the Wide Open Imagination
- bart plantenga
DJ Kees flees Amsterdam under mysterious circumstances with teen daughter, Alouette. Something to do with local enforcement, a biker gang, purported debts, damaged Harleys. The 2 hitchhike around America’s Midwest in pursuit of the LA mystery woman, a mythical benefactor – if she even exists. They eventually end up back in Brooklyn where they must survive, Kees as DJ and Alouette in a new high school. Kees must turn to slave-wage construction-renovation work offered by his deceitful landlord. Things go from hilarious to hallucinatory to absurd to harrowing in Brooklyn’s post-hipster-DJ-slumlord underworld, Here they wander through a dubious landscape in pursuit of a legendary club DJ … The entire story is told from Alouette’s Point of view.
[exc. 5 ch 5 from RADIO ACTIVITY KILLS]
DJ Dutch Cheese is taking his daughter on a character-building, memory-collecting voyage to some imaginary a-ha moment.
… We’re hungry under the viaduct, in the middle of the middle of some nowhere, as blurry cars driven by anonymous heads speed home from work, a warm light swaying gently over their kitchen tables, silverware wrapped in mauve napkins, screw-cap bottle of wine, individual Diet Cokes, the take out spread on real plates so that it feels like home cooking. We’re between two roadside mileage markers – did we both at the same time wonder how reflectors are made. “The dazzling mystery of it and everything…” he says humbly. We have no one to call on phones with no signal in an emergency. He is about to toss his third-hand Nokia 3210 into the weeds down the embankment but I dierect him not to.
“It is better to travel than to arrive someplace.” OK, and …
“But we’re standing still!”
“OK, but you know we will move soon.”
Evidence of life – someone lives here. Discarded empties – Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, Annie Green Springs Lemon Satin, mangled Coke can – strewn about, a stained mattress, used adult diapers, campfire evidence, silverware, empty food cans. A thousand more cars whoosh past – wshshsh wssshhhssh. I am yelling as they pass us by: I AM NOT A LOSER, A DANGER, A CREEP. IT TAKES MORE THAN HUMAN NATURE TO MAKE A HERO LEAP [Couplet … should write it down.]
We kill the wait with ridiculous lyrics sung at the top of our lungs: “Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony, down here / in the gutsy guts of deer / We keep warm / Try to make ends meet / You die a slave to money then you die / with nothing let to eat / we follow the arrows
“… run over that flimsy frown …”
My mind dreams the commercials already seen: “Honey Nut Cheerios: The irresistible part of this good breakfast,” declares the bee. “Can you name the Lucky Charms marshmallow shapes?” Asks the leprechaun. “Sure! Hearts, stars, horseshoes clovers and blue moons.”
I reach into the side pocket of papa’s rucksack. Pull out the Hohner and begin to breathe into it, no real tune except something like a blues. I spot a hollowed-out crescent moon of truck tire retread, balance it upright, climb inside. “We’re Hungry for Lucky Charms in California” is the name of my song. He hears it and joins in: “LisTen here, babe / I’m broke an’ I’m hungry, too / … / And I would like to know, babe / Can I go home wit’ you?” [Remember to tell papa NOT to pronounce the “T” in “listen.”]
He leaps over, snatches the harmonica from my lips – was I mocking him? – and tosses it over his shoulder, down the embankment. And, as if to punctuate the horrible stillness, to jinx our lonely minds, no cars are passing by, no breeze blows, the world is standing still. It is in this stillness that he has a change of heart.
He gazes contritely over to where he tossed the Hohner and I know he’s thinking: what’s jinxing us is a lack of optimism. I can count to 10 and he’s already sheepish repentant – as always – says something stupid about being stupid and, ja, daar gaat ie, there he goes, leaping over the guardrail to retrieve the harmonica down the steep incline. The immediate regret is painful to watch.
He’s back in a matter of a few grumbling, offending-a-god-that-doesn’t-exist in however many minutes with a triumphant YOOHOO, with his trim, now-damp, olive-green, suede jacket covered in pollen and effluvia exhaled by sweet-smelling flowers. Ah, he’ll lecture me later about how the effluvia of flowers during hot, humid weather is drawn into the air by rapid evaporation … the mature dandelion flower head is called a “blowball.” POOF. Time is, as he saw it, no longer about the measured ticktick but the swirly woosh of the creek running down to a body of water we don’t know the name of and the blowball being washed downstream.
“Is this heading to a meal?” I ask, deflating his moment of triumph, holding his trophy, his dented Hohner. But a two-way smirk – me to him, him back to me – makes it all OK again.
What he has not figured on is that as soon as he disappeared, a car stopped to pick us – or me – up. Late-model Ford Torino, imitation leather seats, power windows – and a pile of newspapers and ad circulars piled almost to the ceiling in the passenger seat so that our driver must physically lift his body out of the seat and arch his back over it to talk to me outside. A girl alone has a thousand percent better chance of getting a lift, but a 2000% better chance of getting hassled. I will later mentally photograph that sickly, passive-aggressive smile of the molester as he gazes through your clothes to see movies of you and him you don’t want to see.
The astonishment of our ride transforms his sick gray smile to bug-eyed panic. Maybe he’s thinking carjack as papa jogs toward us with a triumphant YOOHOO. I assure him that he’s harmless – except, of course, if you rile him with a cassette of the Eagles or Little River Band! Please let this guy be into something acceptable! Please.
We climb in, curl our legs around our packs wedged in at the foot end of the back seat. The man is quiet to the point where you have to wonder if anyone is driving and so you look over real quick every five minutes to be sure. He drives at exactly the speed limit, which means that everyone’s passing us as if we’re standing still.
“They might get to where they’re goin’ faster. But that just means the more time they gotta kill that’s killin’ them. The moment they’re born, people don’t know what to do with themselves. Me, I got hobbies that keep me outa boot hill for a while yet.” His comment is his philosophy of life.
Why do people disappear into their evening TV gazing – eyes reflecting the tube’s glare, the same meals, same T-shirts, same comments about the weather over and over to the point where they bore themselves out of existence? No one knows their names or next of kin. They never knew anyone, made no impression, never had a nickname, never scored a goal. The factories they worked in no longer exist. They put their faces down on the glass of a copy machine and no image appears on the sheet of paper.
Was he the kind of guy who pumps a tankful of gas every Thursday for years but nobody knows his name? What does he leave behind: a used car, unpaid bills, uneaten leftovers, a book with a few dog-eared pages, a collection of hubcaps from cars he no longer owns, a photo of a woman with a crisp, heavily lacquered, bouffant and a shirt covered in musical notes? His gravestone: without birthdate, without epitaph and not a single flower that whispers “I remember you fondly.”
Our grey guy with grey fluffs of winged hair around a balding head turns out to have a name: Roy, he tells us from the side of his mouth, neck wrenched around to not quite face us, never taking his eyes off the road. Roy turns out to be nice: not yet a mummy. Asks from over his shoulder: “You guys hungry?” We shake our heads YES in unison. Roy has a kind face. I wonder about the relation of kind face to nice guy. Can the face lie?
“I could tell. Yuh look a little wilted.”
He grabs some food in crinkly plastic bags, wedged between his thigh and the pile of papers that nearly touches the ceiling and smells kind of musty, old like you might find a newspaper with the headline KENNEDY IS SLAIN, JOHNSON SWORN IN, Castro Admirer Charged. I suddenly had this vision that the pile represents all the news that has happened since he was born so that at the bottom you might find a 1931 headline: MOBSTER CAPONE INDICTED ON TAX EVASION.
He threw us two cans of Foodland Super Chill Diet Cola and an unopened bag of Baco-Flav Cheez Hornz®, a local supermarket imitation of General Mills Original Bugles.
“It’s bad for yuh but I won’t tell yer mom. I can be bad with the junk food as long as the wife ain’t ’round chimin’ those diabetes blues.”
Funny when you’re hungry you don’t even look at the list of ingredients. But in the backseat papa begins to read it like a poem. He reads ingredient lists in a busy Albert Heijn – everywhere, really.
“Hornz contain enriched corn meal (ferrous sulfate, niacin, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, and folic acid), coconut oil, sugar, salt, baking soda, cheddar cheese, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, maltodextrin, disodium phosphate, sour cream, artificial flavor, monosodium glutamate, lactic acid, artificial colors, citric acid and Butylated hydroxytoluene to retard oxidation.
Papa’s raspy singing voice: “He’s a junk food junkie / He used to be a lot more hunky / But he’s a junk food junkie / Blame it on the food yeah, you know it’s bad … I’m sounding Klunky and that’s damn sad … dumdum dummm …”
It’s a feast and papa’s celebrating. Me and Roy grunt our approval. Roy’s warming up now; he’s one of those who’s grateful to be alive and you’re grateful for that.
“I wanna show you guys where my family’s got me plotted to bein’ buried. Almost buryin’ me already. Hahaha!” We shake our heads to acknowledge that we’re listening, laughing along, as we crunch our Hornz and sip our sodas.
“D’yuh mind?” What can a person dependent on this chauffeur say in response?
“That’s cool.” Correct answer, papa!
I keep an eye on Roy; if I stretch across papa’s lap I can see Roy, his kindly eyes staring out over the steering wheel, white knuckles, tight grip, gentle smirk, intent on getting us to his final resting place. His balding head with those few cloudy tufts of hair floating around the sides, like a reproduction of a Japanese mountain painting with a Buddhist monk wandering through, one hanging in his office.
On the Torino floor I read the front page of a discarded issue of THE KUTZTOWN AREA PATRIOT: LOCAL FOUNDRY SHUTS DOORS TO WORKERS:
… former-employees who had collectively put in over 218 years at the Kutztown factory, stood in a daze in front of the closed gates never to produce railroad car couplings or giant teeth for earth-scooping machines again. Some were 65, others turning 60 with no job, no health care, no severance pay and no clue of where to look for a job at this point in their lives. Some suspect that the Texas owners of the foundry wanted to break the union and reopen the plant, or just transfer operations to Mexico. …
Papa’s on this trip for a million reasons – half don’t make sense, the other half are annoying: the mysterious lady benefactor in L.A., his relationship with mama, escaping a certain dangerous situation … Maybe I can write a report for geography-history class – werkstuk: “Effects of the Interstate Highway System on Longing” – and save my grades and my VWO status at the Montessori Lyceum Amsterdam.
Or maybe he’s just avoiding grief: Papa says as you get older there’s less and less time between grieving moments. Just before we took off we had biked to the final viewing of a dear friend, not a dear friend, a friend, someone he knew, barely knew, had had some conversations with in passing at the Silo and had nodded hello to on occasion.
In any case, his face could crop up on your mind screen and make you wonder: What is another human? He was just another American squatter at the Silo squat who papa thought also “made radio” but he did not. Papa learned – not until after the final viewing in Uitvaartcentrum Zuid [Mortuary South] – that his name was Jim [or Tim?], while nobody was willing to commit to guessing his last name.
“He had none,” DJ Leo Hallelujahinfrasonic aka Andreas Badder-than-Bad ensures. “Like Cher and Bono.”
It seems Jim had no options; had been disowned by his cattle-ranch-owning parents – some thought – or his father was an influential cattle industry lobbyist [maybe], or Jim was running from a past involving student loan defaults or dropping out of college or refusing to work for the family business. There was talk of a bank account, a trust fund, US intelligence provocateur infiltration into the Dutch ecstasy scene in exchange for reduced marijuana possession charges and so on, scratching serious incarceration time. But that’s probably more paranoia amongst the radiomakers – glorying in the idea that radiomakers were somehow worthy of the efforts of international surveillance agencies.
I wanted to ask: Why didn’t somebody just ASK him/Jim/Tim!? He once said to me and papa: “Ambition is not all it’s cracked up to be. All I want to do is have a garden, grow and smoke weed, read sci-fi novels.”
Papa met him on Christmas eve one year, at a Chinese restaurant in the Leidseplein, the only restaurant open that night, where he, Jim, it seems, ate five or six times a week. They discussed radio, Philip K. Dick’s android simulacrum head that went missing last year.
DJ Leo Hallelujahinfrasonic remembered that Jim/Tim had come to Amsterdam for the High Times Cannabis Cup, and simply stayed. But no one found anything in his possessions, no tell-all hard drive, no address book, no letters postmarked from Wyoming, no pix of next of kin on his beer crate nightstand that gave any hints to a past, no spiral notepad with meticulously noted grades for marijuana samples, no pictures of sisters … Nothing.
I do remember that if there was any sun, Big Jim could be found sitting in the same wobbly chair in the same place at the entrance to the Silo facing south into that little sliver of sun, moving his chair with the wandering autumn sun. There he’d read his PK Dick, sipping his rooibos tea from a chipped mug.
“In ‘The Cosmic Poachers,’ the Adharans are insect squatters, leaving their eggs behind on abandoned planets …”
He bent your ear for no more than a minute to discuss a movie plot, rub his belly, mention the weather, needed repairs to the Silo [it’s future as a squat fortress], may have been on the Silo board, maybe wanted to be a musician or was one – banjo or mandolin? Complained of bad knees as a result of weight issues. And then one day as me and papa arrived to make radio, his garbage-retrieved kitchen chair was empty. And under his chair lay a long-stemmed, soiled white plastic camellia, the kind that his fans leave on his Colorado grave.
At Jim’s wake papa suggested I look into the open casket. I don’t get queasy like papa does. For me it’s all learning. We were the only visitors except for DJ Leo Hallelujahinfrasonic and a woman who used to have an art studio at the Silo and only came out of respect. But she could not add a single detail to his biography and that made her somewhat tearful. You stand there staring out into nowhere, sigh, and then move along to your next destination. As the uitvaartcentrum was closing I opened the guestbook and noticed only six people had signed it. Papa also asked the man in the suit, his hands knotted behind his back. He said niet meer dan tien [no more than ten]. He adjusted his tie and said: “He will be cremated tomorrow. But who will come to pick up his ashes?”
“If I go like this …” Papa contemplated the inconsequential anonymity of it all, “I will rather you just don’t even bother with this, just slide me out of the casket’s front, recycle the box, dump me into a canal, nail a cardboard sign to a tree declaring my dood – FOR THIS DJ THE TURNTABLE STOPPED ITS SPINNING …”
And now I see we’re veering north off Interstate 76, wending up into the local hills with its modest, dented, discolored aluminum siding homes set back from the road like a fist in a coat pocket and past the only buildings to mark Broad Top City [not a city with no more than six buildings downtown including the convenience store, the Eagle’s Nest Inn and the gas station]. We stopped and bought a feast bag full of groceries including yogurt drinks, sparkling lemon-flavored water, trail mix, mini-apple pies, and three plain cheese sandwiches that the man wrapped carefully in wax paper with a smile not entirely his own. When we step outside we realize we had trusted Roy with all of our stuff left in the car. Papa rubs his hand through my hair. We crawl in with Roy tapping along on the headrest to a song in his mind. He shifts into drive and makes a right onto a secondary road.
We make a slow left into the Broad Top City Independent Order of Odd Fellows Cemetery and float down a crunch-gravel lane where we park, get out, stretch our arms toward clearing skies as glorious as our hearts felt. There we stand on freshly mowed grass in front of the grave of his brother George Vaughn Horton with a grave marker next to it that said Roy Horton: Born June 5, 1931 ~ Died.
“They’re just waitin’ for me to go horizontal,” he muses aloud, aimed more at the sky than us as he opens the car door and plugs in a cassette that plays “Mockin’ Bird Hill” as he takes us around to the back of his brother’s gravestone, nods toward the stone and there we can follow the lyrics as the sun makes a weak appearance through the haze.
It gives me a thrill
To wake up in the morning to the mockingbird’s trill
Tra-la-la, twiddly-dee-dee
There’s peace and goodwill
You’re welcome as the flowers on Mockin’ Bird Hill
© Vaughn Horton, 1949
“My brother wrote them words when he’s 28; he wrote many great ones. Les Paul & Mary Ford and Patti Page recorded it. We made it to number 3 on the country charts ourselves. Pretty decent for coalminers, hey? This got’m into the Country Music Hall of Fame. I’m not sure what got me in but I’m in too. We played roadhouses and hoedowns from Maine to Montana as the Pinetoppers. Music saved our lives. We were two of 11 kids growing up right here in coal country. I escaped; I’s already playing when I was 12 with no idea what was gonna happen. I just played like crazy; it was our way of escapin’ the mines.”
“Wow, that’s fantastic. And your brother wanted to be buried back here? I think he wrote ‘Toolie Oolie Doolie,’ or ‘The Yodel Polka.’ Am I correct on that? I sampled the Andrews Sisters version in a house rhythm yanked from A Guy Called Gerald track.”
- Yodeler Elton Britt ran against JFK in the 1960 Democratic primaries promising to campaign with a ten-piece hillbilly band on a flatbed truck, yodeling his way int toe White House.
“You know this all the way in you wet land? … Well, not exactly. My brother wrote the English lyrics. The music was written by a Swiss guy named Beul. George wrote ‘Mockin’ Bird Hill’ in a coal mine just south of here. We weren’t no hillbillies. No way. I got me a degree from Penn State and my brother, he also wrote ‘Choo-Choo-Ch-Boogie,’ which they say was at the crib of rock ’n’ roll, but I’m not gonna drown you in musical factualities and pardon my zip and zing with this stuff. I hope you don’t find me a braggart. Vaughn’s songs were recorded by Hank Williams, George Jones and Bill Monroe. So, no small potatoes. Yep, and me and George played with all the greats like Roy Rogers, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Elton, Brenda Lee, Glenn Campbell, Patsy Montana; maybe you heard o’ some o’ them. Life’s been a hoot.”
“Of course! The mythiest myths! And YOU knew dem! WOW.”
“Life’s good … I knew’m alright and I’ll letcha in on a secret: most of’m were nice folks. We backed Elton Britt who lived down North Main here in Crystal Spring. Sweet and shy, boy, was he ever. Amazing you could even get him on stage. But once he’s up there and belts his first yodel, well, then it’s his kingdom.”
“Hail the king!”
“We did that tourin’ for some time really. The Horton Brothers is who we were and man, if I think about it I was REEEAL young! Life’s good. Britt’s buried right over there too. Lemme glide the car on down. I got a cassette o’ his songs too. He’s a big star and second only to Jimmie Rodgers in the yodelin’ department. Me, I was the fifth of 11, played bass, but in the end, I’s more talented in business, I guess. I eventually worked for Ralph Peer Publishing, workin’ on the music of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. That was all nifty, you gotta know. I been married now 50 years to the same super lady, Lilian.”
Roy points down the gravel path to Britt’s gravemarker. We wander down – the rustle of gravel and whoosh of grass. Roy follows, driving slowly with the car door hanging open, to right behind the bust of Britt staring into the hazy sun. Roy’s fiddling with the cassette player and then suddenly Britt is singing and yodeling.
We walk around the gravestone which has the titles of his biggest hits etched into it: ELTON BRITT James Britt Baker June 27, 1913–June 22, 1972 Composer & Yodeler / “Cannonball Yodel” “There’s a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere” / “Someday You’ll Want Me to Want You” / “Jimmie Roger’s [sic] Blues,” “Chime Bells” / “I’m Tying the Leaves so They Won’t Come Down.”
We sit down on the grass, leaning against the side of his Torino with the front door swung open wide and out pipes “Chime Bells” with that searing soprano yodel and held last note that swoops and shivers like a breeze far beyond the cemetery fence. It’s corny but also kind of OK. We eat our food that right now tastes better than any food anywhere in the world has ever tasted.
“He blew every singer away. He was hillbilly jazz with Rudy Vallee pipes.”
“I didn’t think young folk mind much about the oldies no more. You people have music like that over there? Damn you, you know Mr. Britt all the way over in your Holland and that’s a good sign!”
“I am not so young, sir, and I have too much to learn in too little time,” Papa said. “Cannonball Yodel” came on and papa was moved.
“Wow. WOW! That’s pure punk. Man, that’s rockin’ before rockabilly.”
“People generous toward music are still out there and they hear what they need to hear.” Roy excused himself and scurried over to the car, fast-forwarding to the next song.
“Sorry guys. ‘There’s a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere’ is too dern touchy-weepy. At first, after 9-11 I’d listen to that song up here and then head down Lincoln Highway to Stoystown where Flight 93 went down that fateful day in 2001. I cain’t do it no more. The best revenge ain’t memory; its overcomin’ the grief of it all and makin’ everyone around you as happy as possible.”
“Not a bad philosophy.”
“I first confused him with Elton John.” I whispered, trying to be funny between bites of my cheese sandwich on rye; eat a second pickle spear dunked in mustard on the wax paper. Lick the wax paper. Everything. My father’s talking with his mouth full with crumbs on his lips.
“No, schat, there is no comparing!”
“Britt passed in ’72. I will say I try to make a trip up here every year or so. They say he’s half-Irish, half Cherokee, but I don’t know. He came from Arkansas at an early age to become the purest, highest-voiced yodeling cowboy – EVER! People still try to imitate what he did 30 years ago.”
“I KNOW one: that ‘Chime Bells’ – no TWO. ‘Bells’ is about breath and the sonic power-full-ness of the human voice. It’s like a guitar solo where you sit on a note and make it wail. The other’s ‘Cowpoke.’ Better’n Eddie Arnold!”
“Thank you, sir. Tha’s nice to hear. I’ve lined up a few songs on this here cassette to go along with visiting his grave and ‘Cowpoke’ will appear a few songs later. Britt carried that last high note for a full 80 seconds.”
I’m lonesome but happy
Rich but I’m broke
And the good Lord knows the reason
I’m just a cowpoke.
We crawl back into the Torino, wind down the hill to N. Main Street through tall eiken [oaks] throwing shadows eastward and over the collapsing homes with their mossy asphalt roofing shingles, past Mountain House Road, Acorn Lawn Road, Breezy Manor – it all sounds exotic – to where the road finally gets sucked into the Interstate 76 slipstream, heading a blurry, musing west.
“Sir, you’re a boot hill radio DJ communicating wit’ de spirits.”
“Britt started young too! We all did back then. He joined the famous Beverly Hill Billies. You just see how different life was back then. He’s 12. Hard to believe now with parents hoverin’ over their kids, holdin’ their hands every step o’ the way.”
He periodically peers over his shoulder to make eye contact, never losing the feel of the road – no shoulder, big drop off into a ditch, tall weeds.
“Picked up the yodel from Riley Puckett and Jimmie Rodgers and – amazin’ ain’t it?! – in no time, he’s yodelin’ on national radio. He’s 13. Soundin’ Swiss or like a space alien!”
“Alien from the planet Epiglottis!” We all laugh and nothing makes papa happier than everyone laughing at his joke.
“His ‘There’s a Star-Spangled Banner’ went gold and got him into the White House, singin’ for FDR. First country star to sing there.”
“You definitely sit up and take notice when he yodels! How’d he die?”
“Heart attack, drivin’ his car just south of here in McConnellsburg. Had a heart murmur all his life.”
He breaks into song, “‘He heard the lonely song of the whippoorwill / he heard the lonely echo …’” Papa in the backseat, arms crossed with a contented smile only a cat in the sun can mimic.
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.
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