Terrible Terrible Terrible

April 25, 2008

I spent the day in an open-air automotive show yesterday at the Carlisle fairgrounds up in Pennsylvania. This is known as “Spring Carlisle,” a bi-annual event whose other part is—predictably—“Fall Carlisle.” I’d never gone, so I wanted to check it out. King Oort, Big J.O. and I rode in my compact wagon with a cooler of cokes in the back, and a bag of pretzels and others snacks I’d picked up at the store ahead of time. The morning drive was through the pretty countryside of that area, just north of the Maryland line.

We parked in a lot just adjacent to the town’s firehouse, walked a short distance to “gate one,” and paid our fee to get in. Thousands of people had descended on Carlisle for the event, the car next to us wearing tags from Nova Scotia. The Canadians who were getting out, stretching their legs after the long drive, told me they came every year, wouldn’t miss it for the world. I bade them good day, wished them lots of fun. This was my first time, and I didn’t know quite what to expect. I’d been to an event up there before, but not the BIG one, the one that I’d heard car people talk about, refer to as though the listener should know immediately the reference. After a while I got the reference, but still didn’t quite know what to make of it.

This is what I make of it now: You enter the gate and start walking, and it is still early day—maybe nine in the morning. At the end of the day you’re still walking, and you haven’t seen the whole thing. And you only stopped for one lousy bowl of chili, which was actually quite good, while King and J.O. chatted and you slowly ate, taking maybe a half-hour break from the walking tour. And then you walked some more, through rows and rows of vendors---selling tools, old car parts, automobilia, signs, more tools, pieces of cars, whole cars, sections of classic cars put up for sale by hopeful sellers. Then I stumbled upon my two-seater Mazda, just having changed hands, the sale in the final stage, with the new buyer calling his insurance company to insure it for the ride home. It was the same car, with the same wheels, same paint, same year. The interior was torn, well-worn, the odometer read 138,000 miles There was a roll-bar and a fire extinguisher attached to it, to give it a more race-car look. Actually, the roll-bar would be a nice addition, as I believe it affords a good deal of protection in case of a rollover accident. I asked the final price, which was $4900. I was immediately satisfied with the day and the trip, for I’d paid only a hundred dollars more for mine, and it had less than half the mileage, looked more or less new—and didn’t have torn seats. I was smug.

With the walking only about half-done, I came across a bargain table of old car radios. I wanted one for the Dodge truck, which didn’t come with one when I bought it. I guess for three hundred bucks, you can’t get a decent truck WITH a radio these days. I picked up three of them, as they only cost a buck apiece. One or all of them will work, and will do just fine in the truck. I am not particular, as long as the thing emits some kind of sound and I can change the station. The other ones I’ll throw into the scrap metal pile.

At one of the indoor exhibition buildings, there were yet more vendors, more automotive stuff to buy, to look into, to ask about. Then there was an artist who’d put some of his paintings around. There were a lot of them, and they were universally awful—the stuff of adolescent fantasies, depicted by someone who hadn’t progressed beyond that stage in talent or in emotional development—his technique raw, undeveloped and unschooled. Actually, there are many adolescent artists who are superb—I went to high school with some of them. This person wasn’t one of those. His works were the equivalent of home-room scribblings torn out of spiral binders and then put up for everyone to see. It was kind of embarrassing, but offered a nice break from the otherwise mundane assortment of car-related stuff, which—truth be told—started to look very much the same after an hour or two of walking. I saw the creator of these works in my mind, putting a brush to yet another terrible canvas, his friends looking on with beer.
“Man—that shit is awesome!” Says one.
Another beer says, “You outta be puttin’ that stuff out for sale, make it so everyone can see ‘em!”
“Yeah!” the first beer says, “you can use my van, put a bunch of em in there, take em around—maybe to car shows an’ stuff.”
The young man was lucky once to have an actual model—a real person to pose for one of the hideous works. When she saw the finished painting, how she looked, was depicted, she took the wet canvas and smashed it over the hopeful artist’s head.
She could have uttered, “You ain’t no Norman Rockwell!” But no one would get the reference, neither she nor the young man wearing the recently-painted canvas—his head poking through like a Jack-in-the box. Instead, she would say, “I seen better pitchers on a box of Cap’n Crunch!”
I took some photographs, put one of them up here. Enjoy.

April 28, 2008

And across the way, in Paris, a young man is receiving his first recognition for his efforts in film. In the Montparnasse neighborhood, a few stories above the busy street, with iron-railings decorating marble-like balconies, a patron of the arts entertains him. She is conversant with the artists, great and lesser known. His work—a documentary—is causing a murmur, his name is being mentioned in the big cafes along the Boulevard Saint Germain, maybe occasionally in the jazz spots near the Rue de Seine, the air inside one impenetrable and unbreathable cloud of smoke. The film has something to do with walruses; there is apparently something more to these animals than anyone had ever suspected, had wanted to know. Everyone had been fine with them, knowing vaguely that the big tusked animals swam around and maybe liked to sleep on rocks. Now, those who have seen his work are talking about walruses like never before. He is American, so this success is unusual, these stirrings in the big city that lays claim to much of the cultural wealth of the world. Cinema-goers sit and chat, watch the evening Parisians pass by, chat some more, think of something observant to say about his work, any work.

The young man looks down from the curtained windows that give way to the balcony, the airy and gauzy coverings easily brushed aside, sees an older man toiling with a Deux Chevaux. One of the wheels is off and he is fighting the machine there in the street, his struggles there in plain view, with the disabled car parked against the curb. He tinkers down there while the young man above, being asked to sit for tea and maybe some biscuits, watches. His patron is a beautiful woman whose path in life has been a single-minded pursuit of the most beautiful and enlightening things imaginable—things that she encourages in others, having the resources and connections to make the most marvelous things happen. He is an oddity, a rough diamond, but with potential. There will never be anything between them, his contribution being only what he can bring to the world of art. She has known many men, has known things that he will never know.

Down in the street the wheel is back on the Deux Chevaux, the car is started and is leaving a blue trail of smoke and noise down the street. The man’s time has passed, he knows it as he wheels the car through the grey and occasional sunshine of an April Paris. Whatever small mark he could have made, should have been made long ago. So he tends the concession at the cinema across town, in the Rue de la Harpe, takes the tickets from the pretty young couples arm in arm, closes the doors as those Paris night-dwellers are going off to fetch a drink and smoke, heads thrown back, leaning easily in their chairs, the brilliance of the city illuminating them, their thoughts, their lives. Sometimes they mention the young American, ask each other if he has anything important to say, nod at each other’s comments, ask for another drink, another smoke. He has his pleasures: Occasionally takes the train out to the end of the line, to a deserted station—maybe Pont de Sevres--sits blinking in the sunshine of a beautiful day, the train ride giving him a break from the city, the noise, the pretty young couples who wander off into the night, arm in arm. Back in his neighborhood, in one of the many small streets near the serious and formidable edifice called the Pantheon, where men are buried who actually did leave their mark, he feeds the wild cats who have come to adopt him as a trusted caregiver, never letting him get too close, but coming around regularly to see what he has for them. The fish, too, are often the beneficiaries of his free time, as he takes some hardened bread from the previous day over to the fountains at the Tuileries to drop into the waiting mouths of the large orange specimens that populate the park. Occasionally he will spend a minute writing down observations of the day. More often he will not.

Today I replaced the brakes on the Dodge pickup. It took five-and-a-half hours and squandered a whole day. And only one side is done—it still remains to replace the brakes on the other side. The half-wit asked about the truck, wanted to know what was going on. I told her about some floor-mats I’d promised to give her, wanted to tell her that I hadn’t forgotten, but that I no longer had the floor mats.
“You know them floor mats what I tolt you about?” I asked. “Well, I looked and looked, and then looked in one more place an finally figured out I didn’t have em no more.” Then I improvised, saying, “I called to my old girlfriend Cherisse, and I said to Cherisse, I says, ‘You know where them floor mats has got to? Cause I swear I been lookin an cain’t find em nowhere.” Then I told the half-wit that Cherisse told me she’d given them to the people who run the Salvation Army.
“An I said, ‘”Why’d you go’n give them floor mats away?” And she says, “Well you didn’t have the car no more, why you gonna keep them floor mats around like that?”
An I says, “But they was MY floor mats!” An she says, “But you didn have the car no more!” And on and on like that. She shared that her grandson—one of eleven—has recently had his second child. The new mother lives at HER mother’s, he lives with his own mother, and the two—by all accounts—are struggling.
“I can’t hardly wait till they have a third child,” I said. Them’s nothing more precious than them precious little chirrens. Yessir—we need more’n more of them little chirrens on account of they gonna take care of us all one day up in the sky.”