Hopper

by Tom Folsom

  Long ago, one Mattie Mac Masters McInteer bumped along in a covered wagon to Kansas. Reading her Bible every Sunday, she prayed her daughter might witness more than hardship. She even named her after the famous globe-trotting newspaper girl, Nellie Bly, who beat the record set in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Little Nellie Bly McInteer didn’t see alligators in Port Said or lush tennis courts in Hong Kong, but she did grow up to see the grasshopper plague. And the jackrabbit invasion that forced the townspeople to go on roundups—pounding out the rampant bunny problem with clubs so as not to waste bullets. And the Black Blizzard of ’35 when the apocalyptic face of Jesus Christ appeared in a dust cloud over the baseball diamond like the Second Coming.

  Yes, Nellie managed to see a few things through twenty-mile-an-hour winds that sucked dust from the rutted fields and pummeled the egg ranch. It seemed the sun might never shine again, but when it finally did, the dull gray light revealed a weathered old farmhouse with no color at all.

  Then one May day in 1936, screaming in the distance, the Super Chief roared past, splashing its brilliant warbonnet colors of red and yellow onto the egg ranch. Tearing through the Southwest touching speeds of 108 miles an hour, going faster than any train before, the brand-new transcontinental flyer continued its inaugural journey to the Pacific. This Train of the Stars, as the honchos at the Santa Fe Railroad dubbed it, catered to Hollywood big shots ready to discover the next big thing. The egg ranch was just another blip on their juggernaut journey, but one day those big shots would be staring at Dennis, who knew nothing of what went on inside their luxurious sleeper cars named Taos and nothing of their dirty dealings on the Navajo rugs with those aspiring Errol Flynns. But the boy was destined for greatness. Nothing could keep him from lying in the ditch with his dog, waiting for the train. Nellie was so poor she had to make his shirts out of gingham chicken-feed sacks, but she gathered eggs from the coop so they’d have money to go to the movies.

  In singing-cowboy Saturday matinees at the Dodge Theater, Gene Autry yodeled to the delight of the grannies, making them swoon. Against the backdrop murals of powder-blue sky and fake cacti, Autry shot it out with six-guns for the motherless little dogie hooting in the balcony with a sack of chocolates from Duckwalls, the five-and-dime. Opening on The Singing Vagabond, Guns and Guitars, and Public Cowboy No. 1, the red-velvet curtain swooshed close on the promise of unending adventure with the hero riding off on Champion, his horse, followed by his pardner, Frog, with the floppy hat. Entranced by the light that projected the movies, piercing the dust and darkness, Dennis had the strangest thought a boy ever had—and it led him to the heights of fame, and the most debauched states.

  “I was about five,” said Hopper to the journalist as he careened down a precarious stretch of Peruvian track. “My grandmother put some eggs in her apron and we walked five miles to town and she sold the eggs and took me to my first movie. And right away it hit me. The places I was seeing on the screen were the places the train came from and went to. The world on the screen was the real world, and I felt as if my heart would explode I wanted so much to be a part of it.”

  Holding on for dear life, the journalist took note. It was hard to pin down what all this madness on the mountain actually meant to Hopper, but it seemed to be the ultimate incarnation of his lifelong pursuit of the American Dream. It wasn’t the Horatio Alger up-by-the-bootstraps variety they tried to teach him at stinkin’ Lincoln Elementary. It was something far more fantastic he’d been chasing like the ragged tail of a shooting star, ever since he was a little boy on a twelve-acre egg ranch across from the railroad tracks. He’d go far and wide to find it even if it took him to the farthest reaches of the Peruvian Andes.

  Unveiled to America on the cover of Life in 1970, Dennis Hopper smiled in a black cowboy hat, wearing a bolo tie and a shit-eating grin, holding a football in the crook of his arm and twirling a dandelion. The ensuing pages told of a raving madman riding around his private, drug-crazed world in darkest Peru, a world that included “whipping parties” and one inexplicable instance of a woman chained to a porch post Joan of Arc fashion with fire crackling at her feet. The whole tale seemed completely too insane for readers to zero in on a single nostalgic childhood detail. But one Ruth Baker, still in Dodge City long after her famous second cousin flew the coop, was quick to point out the crack.

  “Well, Nellie sold eggs,” clarified cousin Ruth. “But the story about her bringing them in an apron to walk to Dodge, that’s not true. That wasn’t Aunt Nellie. She’d do lots of things but she’d never bring eggs in an apron to Dodge. That’s quite a walk.”

  Perhaps Dennis had appropriated for himself the opening scene from The Wizard of Oz when, after the three roars of MGM’s Leo the Lion, Auntie Em fills her apron with eggs in a sepia-toned Kansas. At some point it ceased to matter whether it was a real memory or a movie memory. Hopper probably couldn’t tell the difference anymore as he looked back with a head full of visions paid for by golden eggs.

  Aiming the weapon of choice of his favorite cowboy, Red Ryder as played by Wild Bill Elliott—“He didn’t sing and dress in all that glittery stuff,” said Hopper, “he was just a cowboy”—the little dude fired BBs at the black-clad desperadoes lurking in the wheat fields. Lying in wait for the train and staring above those fields, Dennis no longer saw the blank screen of a Kansas sky. Instead he projected a panorama of Technicolor mountains—the kind they put in King of Dodge City or Vigilantes of Dodge City, which really are nowhere to be found in the town’s flat reality. He desperately wanted go to this fantastical land of the movies, bursting with singing cowboys beckoning him to adventure, but unlike the twister to Oz, the Super Chief left him in the ditch with his dog on its way to his American Dream.

  THE POOL

  The summer the Dodge City premiere blew into town, Dennis’s mother was itching for a change. Marjorie began to teach swimming to the local kids, and per an exclusive contract with the city was promoted to pool manager, a move the Dodge City Daily Globe reviewed as “popularly received by patrons of the pool.” Riding shotgun, her husband Jay Hopper worked at Busley’s, the local grocery, collecting nickels for ice-cold Coca-Cola in the cooler, the sign instructing, “Serve Yourself. Please Pay the Clerk.” Stacking jumbo cans pasted with bold labels for Tendersweet Sweet Corn, Hand-packed Tomatoes, and Bar-B-Q Prunes, Jay proved himself a valuable addition to the Busley Bros., just as his father, J.C., was a well-oiled cog for Western Light and Telephone.

  As Dodge’s meterman, making his rounds on the small-town grid, old J.C. would never think about going off in his pickup truck until his job was done. The Good Samaritan made it home every night for dinner with his wife, a noble grand of the Rebekah Lodge, who led the local ladies in the path of righteous women from the Bible. Bertie Bell found it a blessing that their son had inherited J.C.’s mild, even temperament, Jay’s one flourish being a taste for loud neckties.

  The girls of Dodge City Senior High thought Jay was a jewel of a guy, handsome behind the counter in his spotless white grocery apron, dark and stormy in his Sou’Wester yearbook portrait. In less charitable moments, the girls wondered how Marjorie Mae Davis ever landed him in the first place.

  “I would say perfect,” said one of Jay’s admirers, pondering the mystery. “He was a perfect man. Why would he marry her? She wasn’t real pretty. She was just an ordinary person.”

  The girls were just jealous. A cheerleader on student council, staff on the school newspaper the Dodger, and a performer in the minstrel show providing blackface entertainment for lily-white Dodge, the fiery farm girl screeched in from the egg ranch and sucked the class of ’35 for all it was worth. A history buff with an interest in heritage that eventually led to her becoming president of her genealogical society, Marjorie was bred to blaze trails like one of her great-grandmothers, the very sister of Daniel Boone. If only she hadn’t married the summer after graduation and immediately gotten pregnant.

  Lying flat on her back in the maternity ward o
f St. Anthony’s, Marjorie considered Virginia’s favorite son with his leonine white beard and immaculate gray uniform. She just felt somehow that Robert E. Lee was related to her newborn. Perhaps the Confederate general’s spirit would lead her little bundle, Dennis Lee Hopper, to rebel against the dull tyranny of his father.

  “With our country engaged in war,” declared the U.S. Postmaster General, “it is imperative that prompt, efficient, uninterrupted postal service be maintained.”

  Receiving orders to report to Kansas City, Missouri, for two years of duty as a subrailway postal clerk, Jay was off to deliver mail for his country. Riding back and forth along the same flat stretch of track between Newton, Kansas, and La Junta, Colorado, he sorted the letters on the westbound No. 7, and about 150 miles into his day whizzed past his in-laws’ farm where young Dennis looked out for the train while his mother ran the pool.

  Luxuriating in the town’s glamorous leading lady role, Dennis’s mommy gave a critically acclaimed performance. Dark from baking out in the sun all day in a dazzling one-piece that accentuated her swim-toned, honey-brown thighs and a glistening set of butterfly shoulders, Marjorie put on the best show in Dodge. Exhausted by the time she closed up for the evening, she slept in town while Jay slept in Newton, their Dennis safely tucked away at her parents’.

  After riding the rails for a year, Jay was able to squeeze in a midroute quickie, getting off at Dodge to spend three hours a day with his wife, barely enough time to get her pregnant again. Depending on how Marjorie looked at it on a particular afternoon, her lot was better than that of the girls with husbands off in Europe, battling Nazis with submachine guns instead of flaccid mail sacks.

  Keeping a cool watch from behind dark sunglasses, Marjorie starred in her fifth season as Dodge City’s pool mistress. Turning twenty-eight at the pool, she got ever closer to that day when she’d appear formless and gray in the mirror like her mother, whom the family treated like a saint for taking care of the boys, frustrating Marjorie so much that she screamed, “I don’t want to hear it!” Another day, Marjorie told Nellie, her own mother, “Go to your room!” It was a nightmare.

  The family gossiped about Marjorie’s endless summer, a sticky morass stretching over five long years. What reason could Marjorie possibly have for abandoning her two boys while she played at the pool? It was terrible how she let her mother take her kids along with all the laundry, all the cooking.

  “Nellie raised those boys,” Nellie’s brother would say. “Marjorie would rather be in the swimming pool than messing with her little kids.”

  Boiling in the heat that once brought Bleeding Kansas to the point of slave revolts and killing sprees, the pool mistress watched from her white wooden perch, embalmed from her high school days with her taut brown body and the burn of Daniel Boone’s blood in her veins.

  Back in winter, Jay had called long-distance from Miami to wish the family Merry Christmas and inform them that he was off to fight in the Asiatic theater of operations. He’d enlisted for the army at Fort Leavenworth and looked handsome in his uniform.

  Marjorie was all alone now, and Dodge was just so hot in the summer, the only escape was going to the movies or jumping into the pool.

  The kids she once coaxed to climb the rungs of the high dive and plunge into manhood were now emerging from behind the shower wall. Old enough to go beat each other up at the drive-in hamburger joint after football games, then hop into gas-guzzling deathtraps and race blind drunk—a pack of hell-raising delinquents.

  Dennis was looking more and more like his father from The Sou’Wester, staring back at her with his slicked-back hair and chiseled-face, leading-man looks. He almost seemed lost to Marjorie, loving Nellie like his mother, but what could she possibly do to make him love his real mommy again as he had when he was a baby? Marjorie knew something that might make a difference. Sometimes in bloody Kansas, the only thing to do was sweat and rot or do something crazy. She told her Dennis that his father had been killed in the war.

  The True Travels, Adventures & Observations of Wild Man DENNIS HOPPER & His Encounter with the Pool Mistress

  Ready to prove himself worthy of the war-ravaged widow in an act of bravery witnessed by practically the whole town, the little cowboy climbed the rungs of the ladder up to the high dive, walking the plank until his toes were curled around its springy edge. Practically naked in his swim trunks as the harsh glint of reality reflected off the water, he sniffed in chlorine and the collective nerve of his classmates at stinkin’ Lincoln Elementary—of men who had taken the plunge and boys too weak to jump.

  The corn-fed jocks who liked to pound on each other stared up at the scaredy-cat kid clogging the pipeline to cannonball glory. Marjorie called from below. She told Dennis if he wasn’t going to be a big boy and jump, he’d just have to stay there all day until she shut down.

  So began the showdown in Dodge City between the little chickie and the pool mistress—like the time Wild Bill Elliott duked it out with the knife fighter in Cheyenne Wildcat. It lasted till Marjorie finally closed up, leaving her hysterical Dennis to climb down the rungs of the ladder at sundown.

  [The cameo was completely wrong for the picture. Cut to Christmas 1945. Like the ghost Dennis had read about in Hamlet, Dennis’s father suddenly reappeared in Dodge City.] Jay wasn’t back from the dead but rather Manchuria, where the postman had been serving as a medic in the OSS, America’s clandestine spy organization. The curtain closed on this chapter of Dennis’s life, and he would never understand exactly why his mother had told him his father was dead.

  CALIFORNIA

  The latest in a line of prospectors and fortune seekers drawn to California, American dreamers came back from the war and flocked to the land of extravagant idiocy, where Walt Disney slapped mouse ears and a happy ending on everything. Dreamers needed their mail delivered, too, and the Hoppers followed, with Jay reporting for duty as the new postman of La Mesa, outside of San Diego. Dennis would finally get to go where the train went.

  He was around twelve or thirteen (some three years after losing and oddly regaining a father), and along the way noticed the Rockies weren’t anywhere near as grand as the enormous blue-violet movie mountains looming in his head. And weren’t bandits supposed to jump aboard as the family blazed through the painted land of Arizona? There wasn’t even a Comanche chasing in hot pursuit. When the Hoppers finally did make it to the frontier’s end, Buck Jones didn’t greet them in a ten-gallon hat. No Wild West Parade either, just a concrete freeway zooming toward a blue version of the golden ocean that stretched beyond the egg ranch.

  “Wow, what a bring-down,” Hopper would say of his long-awaited moment. “The Pacific was the horizon line—in my wheat field.”

  Cowboys didn’t ride past his new home in Lemon Grove with the citrus groves paved over to make way for the dreamers, where the new pool mistress of El Cajon screamed at the new postman of La Mesa. Miserable in his reality, Dennis ran away from home. Seeing as his milk money was barely enough to hightail it to Tijuana, he wouldn’t have gotten far in his escape had it not been for the good fortune of finding the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego’s Balboa Park.

  “Hark ye gentles, hark ye all, time has come for curtain call!” Dennis cried as he ran up the aisle, clanging the bell to start the show.

  In this authentic replica of the Elizabethan playhouse, lying among eucalyptus trees and peacocks strutting in the bamboo brake, Dennis found himself dressed in the rags of a Victorian beggar boy in the Globe’s 1949 holiday pageant, A Christmas Carol. Playing a ragamuffin asking for alms, shoved offstage by the magistrate as the play opened, he settled in backstage, finding a home in the little world of actors in greasepaint. Dazzled, he waited patiently backstage until, on cue, he ran out and snatched a turkey from a redeemed Scrooge. Hearts melted; those beaming, blue-haired grannies would’ve shit in their hats if they knew what the kid was really thinking. He simply hated his dear mother, the scheming liar sitting among them in the audience. Up there onstage, Ho
pper swore he would show her. He was going to outdo her. He was going to be an actor.

  A voracious student of his craft, teenage Dennis cast away his prescribed English class reading at Helix High, made up of “About 5% Brains, About 36% Dolls, About 31% Guys, About 18% Screwheads, About 10% Deadheads,” according to the Tartan yearbook. Diving into a tome of his own choosing, Minutes of the Last Meeting, he pored over this boozy account of a cadre of Hollywood bohemians who boldly drank their way into oblivion in the service of art. Here in the pages lived the finest Shakespearean actor in Southern California, John Barrymore, who drank in life until his liver turned black.

  Boldly sucking in a drag of his cigarette, the great Hopper thrust himself onto the world’s stage.

  In pomaded hair and a too-big gray suit, he played the oily villain in the drama club production of Charley’s Aunt but, preferring serious fare to such hammy Victorian-era farce, also wrestled down The Hairy Ape. He howled in speech club as Eugene O’Neill’s filthy brute who haunts decent society. While the deadheads and screwheads squeaked out soliloquies from The Glass Menagerie for the upcoming National Forensic League high school dramatic declamation contest, Hopper ambitiously took on the toughest role of them all, the indecisive Hamlet.