by Jim Dodge
Besides, early on I got into the methamphetamine version of speed. The heat wasn’t on then, and you could buy a handful of pharmaceutically pure benzedrine from any truck-stop waitress between Tallahassee and LA. That’s why truck-stop waitresses were so good humored and sassy back then: they had a lock on the bennie concession. Just about all the drivers used them, and I sure held up my end. For two years there I thought White Cross was the trucker’s health plan. Dad never used them, though, said they’d rot your reflexes and make you try to do things you couldn’t do. What I found out was even worse: they helped me do things I shouldn’t have.
What Dad used was coffee – one-gallon stainless-steel thermos – and he’d put maybe three shots of peach brandy in it. Hardly taste the brandy. And Dad knew how to sleep. He’d sleep four and drive twenty. Thing was, he slept those four hours. Shut his eyes and straight to deep sleep without a quiver. And four hours later, right to the tock, no alarm, he was fresh and ready to roll. He claimed he never dreamed on the road, or no dreams he remembered. Me, I dreamed all the time. But I never slept.
Dad dreamed at home, though. I heard him down in the kitchen one morning telling Mom he’d dreamed his brain had turned into a huge white rose. Mom just burst right out crying. Dad was saying, ‘Hey, hold on, it was a great dream – I loved it.’ And Mom, really sobbing then, said, ‘Yes. Yes it is, Harry. I know it is.’ Dad says, ‘So why the waterworks?’ And I could hear Mom sniffling, trying to gather herself, saying, ‘No, it’s a fine dream,’ and then they must’ve been holding each other because all I could hear was their muffled voices and the coffee glubbing in the percolator. But I understood why Mom was crying: some dreams are just too beautiful to have.
That’s probably part of the reason I was hitting those ol’ white cross benzedrines so hard – sometimes twenty a day. They fed my natural inclination to go fast, which I’m sure was also partly the baffled frenzy of being eighteen years old and suddenly cut loose of school. Jamming like a cannonball cross-country, riding it as fast as you could make it go, getting paid to eat the horizon was a magnificent feeling, but pretty soon it got so I didn’t want to stop. I was young, restless, and dumb, but I somehow knew deep down in my gut that when it gets so you don’t ever want to stop, that’s when you have to stop, or you’re gonna be long gone for good. I’d lost my license in two more states, had a nasty bennie habit, and was spending far too much time getting fried in the short-order hearts of truck-stop waitresses. The life was collapsing on me and I knew I had to make a move. So in October of ’56 I headed to San Francisco, mainly because hitchhikers I’d been picking up agreed it was about the only place in the country with a pulse. It’s odd, looking back: 1956, and I wanted off the road. And I really, truly, cross-my-heart wanted to get away from those little white pills that made you go fast and feel good. Well, to be honest, I didn’t want to, but I understood that I was going to make a bad and unhappy mess out of myself if I didn’t. Even if I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to be, I knew it wasn’t a shit-heap wreck. Maybe the bare minimum, but I had some sense.
Soon as I hit Frisco, things started running my way. I found a sweet little apartment, clean and cheap, above an Italian bakery in North Beach, and took a job driving tow truck at Cravetti’s garage. After a tough month, I’d cut the bennies back to two a day, which for me, you understand, was virtual abstinence.
Towing was different back then. Any call, whether a bad wreck or just somebody parked in a red zone, went out on an open line to every towing service in the city, and the first truck there got the job. Hell, after 18-wheelers, driving a tow truck was like driving a Maserati. I snagged a lot of work. It took me a while to learn the streets and the best routes, but it never took me long to get there.
The competition was intense. I remember the first call I took. Mainly because I didn’t know the turf and innocently went the wrong way up a one-way street, I aced in about three seconds in front of this insane fool, Johnny Strafe, who drove for Pardoo Brothers. I was chortling as I hooked up, but when I got back in the cab and hit the ignition, damn engine wouldn’t grab. Like it wasn’t getting spark. I look up puzzled, and there’s Johnny Strafe holding my plug wires like some greasy bouquet at a marriage of rubber freaks, and before I can even scream he starts stuffing them down the grating on a corner storm drain. I’d have gone after him if the cops hadn’t been on the scene. I complained to them, but they had other problems. Finally this older sergeant took me aside and told me, ‘Hey, if you can’t tow him, the other guy gets to. It’s called “eat shit, rookie,” and that’s how it is. We’ve got enough to do without dealing with you crazy assholes. You’re new, okay, you didn’t know. But don’t bother us again.’
So I developed a few chops of my own. Turnip up the tailpipe, that’s one I introduced. One time around the Fourth of July I slipped under Bill Frobisher’s rig and taped a box of sparklers to his manifold. When the heat set ’em off, you should’ve seen Bill hit the pavement running. I got Johnny Strafe back, too – squirted Charcoal-Lite all over his front seat and set it off. He was hooking on at the time and didn’t even notice the flames, but fortunately I’d brought the biggest damn fire extinguisher from Cravetti’s shop and I filled his cab up with foam till it was running out both windows and the radio was gurgling like a drowning rat. The second one was even better: I took a can of quick-dry aluminum spray paint and did his windshield.
Anyway, there I was, just a nudge short of twenty, driving tow like a werewolf at top dollar for my trade and generally enjoying myself. I was still holding the bennies steady at two a day – one after breakfast and one for lunch, and that was it. It helped that I was living fairly regular, clocking 8 to 5 on the day shift, weekends free, two squares a day, and logging six hours of solid Z’s most nights. Health – nothing like it.
The job was great, even if it was work, but the true joy was living in North Beach. The place was alive. This is the late 1950s I’m talking about, and the Beats were going strong. Lots of people will tell you the best time was ’54, ’55, before all the publicity hit, but for a wet-eared kid who’d been stringing his nerves between Miami and St Lou, this looked like a good time to me. The Beats were the people I’d been looking for. They had a passionate willingness to be moved. It was a little artsy-fartsy, sure, lots of bad pretenders, but it was a whole helluva lot better than Sunday School, which is what the 50’s were generally like – a national Sunday School for the soul, smug with dull virtues, mean with smothered desires. But the thing is, you can’t live in fear of life. You do and you’re dead in the water.
The Beats at least had the courage of their appetities and visions. They wanted to be moved by love, truth, beauty, freedom – what my poet friend John Seasons called ‘the four great illusions’ – while my passion, at the time, was the firing stroke in a large-bored internal combustion engine transmitting its power through the drive-train and out to the wheels – four small illusions. Because of the explosive qualities inherent in the liquified remains of dinosaurs, I could roar through the day and the dark at speeds no one even marginally sane could consider reasonable. And if I happened to mention what that felt like in any North Beach bar, more than likely the woman on my left had just written a poem that tried to capture that same abandoned moment and the guy on my right had finished that very afternoon a painting he hoped touched the same soaring spirit, and we’d be yakking drunk and laughing till the bar closed at two in the morning and I was walking down Broadway in the fog, shivering and elated. That was North Beach. An eruption of people hungry for their souls. And for all the poses and silliness, it was splendid.
I did my share of posing, I must admit, most of it prompted by raw teenaged insecurity and a sense of intellectual inadequacy. This I hid with the usual ration of brass and bravado, but bald ignorance is a lot harder to cover. Since I could authentically claim – as few others could – an honest working-class life, I hid at first behind a fairly nasty anti-intellectualism. Fuck big words, I drive a truck. Fortunately, m
ost people were gracious enough to ignore my bullshit, and generous enough to include me in conversations and lend me books. You could pick up a couple of Liberal Arts degrees just sitting in the bars and listening. Gradually I changed from an anti-intellectual to an unbearably eager one. I wanted to know everything – an appetite I’ve had many subsequent occasions to regret.
It’s usually the happy case that you learn best from your friends. My tightest buddy in the early years was this huge horn player everybody called Big Red Loco, a mulatto cat with rusty red hair. He was about 6’7”, and every inch of him was music. I heard him play with all the best, and he cut them into fish bait. Big Red could go out there and bring it back alive. Everybody and their aunt wanted to record him, but he’d had this vision when he was seven years old that his gift was for the moment alone, and that if his music was ever recorded, ever duplicated in time outside memory, he would lose his gift. At least this is what he told me, and I don’t doubt it at all.
Lou Jones – Loose Lou, they called him – adored Big Red’s sound so much that one night he crawled under the bandstand before a gig and hooked up a tape machine through the microphone. He was still shaking when he told me about it the next day: every instrument came through clean on the tape, except Big Red’s sax. Not a trace. I never mentioned it to Big Red. No reason to mess with a man’s music.
Except for his music, Big Red hardly ever spoke. Ten sentences a day left him hoarse. And when he did say something, it wasn’t much. ‘Let’s grab a beer,’ or ‘Can you lay a five on me till the weekend?’ If you asked him a direct question, he’d just nod, shake his head, or shrug – or, maybe two percent of the time, he’d answer with a few words. It drove me ape-shit when I first knew him, so finally I asked him point-blank why he never said diddley. He shrugged and said, ‘I’d rather listen.’
With all that practice he was an incredible listener. He ate at the Jackson Cafe because he liked the sound of their dishes, if you can feature that. I remember one time we were eating lunch and this busboy came by with a big clattering cart of dirty dishes and Big Red slipped right out of the booth, dropped to all fours, and followed it right into the kitchen, ears locked, listening. However strange, it was fortunate for our friendship that he was such a listener, since it’s plain I’m a rapper.
Hanging out with Big Red meant making the local jazz scene. Up till then I’d never given much of an ear to anything besides the singing of tires on asphalt and the throb of a big diesel drilling the dark, but jazz, heard live and close and smoky, with the taste of whiskey in your mouth and a high-stepping woman in the corner of your eye, just took me away. Lifted me right out of myself. I don’t know anything about art, but I do know when I’m gone.
It might’ve been Big Red’s influence – he never owned a record – but I only really loved jazz live, right now, straight to the spine. I bought some records, which I enjoyed and appreciated and all that, but they weren’t the same. I guess I’m one of those people who can’t really grasp something if it’s more than a foot from the source. I mention this as a way of explaining I really didn’t know anything about rock-and-roll, even though it was coming on strong at the time. Blasting from about every jukebox in every bar, it was there in the background, but it never made it through my ears to grab hold of my brain. Besides, people on the jazz scene were constantly putting it down as bubblegum for the soul. But it was interesting that Big Red didn’t bad-mouth it. ‘It’s all music,’ he said. ‘The rest is taste, culture, style, times.’ For Big Red, that was a speech. A lot later, about the time the Beatles were taking off, I remember sitting in Gino and Carlo’s with John Seasons and Big Red, and John saying, more with sadness than disgust, ‘The Beatles are the end of North Beach.’ Big Red, unsolicited, said, ‘You’re right. You can hear it.’
John Seasons was, in a strange way, more mentor than friend, and we really didn’t get close till late ’63, early ’64. John was a poet, and through him I met Snyder, Ginsberg, Whalen, Corso, Kerouac, Cassady, and the rest of that crew – though I don’t think they were ever all around at once. John was always there, it seemed. He’d been living in North Beach before it was hip, and was still there after the fashion had passed. He was a devoted poet with an aversion to the limelight – certainly a notable trait at the time – and a strong academic background. On his living room walls were about two dozen honorary doctorates in about half that many fields – I remember one from Harvard in physics, another from the Sorbonne in linguistics. They were all excellent forgeries. As John was fond of pointing out, he supported his poetry, which he claimed was a true attempt to forge the real, by creating facsimiles of the fraudulently real. John could find absolutely no good reason why people needed documents and licenses to partake of American culture, and it especially pissed him off that you had to pay to obtain them. John wasn’t one to favor undue social regulation in the human community. Art, sports, and the Laws of Nature, he argued, were all the regulation necessary for an enjoyable life. As an advocate of personal authority, he thought it was stupid to award real power to abstractions like nations, senators, and Departments of Motor Vehicles.
John had a darkroom, two printing presses, a complete assortment of paper stocks, and a collection of official seals that would have shamed the Smithsonian. John was also gay, and it helped that he seemed to prefer highly placed civil servants for lovers. John felt that if your sexual preferences were going to brand you a security risk, you might as well risk some security, and he was convincing enough that his boyfriends helped him expand his collection of official seals, often providing the authentic forms on which to affix them. For John, a bogus California driver’s license was little more than a snapshot and a short typing assignment. He claimed he could fake anything on paper except money and a good poem, and that he could do the money with the right plates and proper stock.
So, after about eighteen months in North Beach, closing in on twenty-one and legal American adulthood, I had a job I enjoyed by day and high friends and wild company at night; and through reading, and by talking to people who knew what they were talking about, I was accumulating enough good information to make a run at knowledge. I was beginning to know my own mind, or at least understand I had a mind to know. Or so I thought.
It was February 1, 1959, two days before my twenty-first birthday, when I came in off-shift and Freddie Cravetti – old man Cravetti’s son, the swing-shift garage manager – motioned me over and introduced me to this runty guy sporting a blue seersucker suit so filthy you could have cleaned it with dog shit. Freddie introduced him as Scumball Johnson, then discreetly remembered some paperwork. When I shook Scumball’s hand, it was like lifting a decayed lamprey out of a slough. He spoke in a low monotone mumble, head down, eyes constantly moving. I made him immediately as an ex-con.
I only liked one thing about Scumball Johnson: the money. Two hundred cash, back when a dollar bought dinner; and that was only the half in front. There was another two yards on delivery. All I had to do was wreck a car without wrecking myself – total it and walk away. Since I’d been making a living either by avoiding wrecks or picking them up, it sounded interesting. First, however, I had to steal the car, which reduced my interest considerably until Scumball explained that the car’s owner wanted it stolen and wrecked so he could collect the insurance. I was completely covered, Scumball assured me. I’d be given a key, a handwritten note from the owner explaining I was checking out the transmission or something, the owner would stay by the phone in case anyone checked, and he wouldn’t report it stolen till I’d called in safe and clear. Scumball said I could use a tail to watch my back and pick me up, but I’d have to pay for that out of my cut. Scumball didn’t care how or where the car was wrecked as long as it was totaled for insurance purposes. If I got myself hurt or didn’t phone within eight hours, I was on my own and nobody knew me. And if I even so much as murmured his name to the law, I would likely be visited by large men who’d had twisted childhoods and would undoubtedly take great delight in te
aring off my fingers and feeding them to me.
A sleazy proposition, sure, but not without some provocative attractions, especially if you’re young, restless, bored, and stupid. Looking back, I’m more astounded than ashamed that I agreed to the deal, though I must admit the $400 pay-off didn’t improve my judgment.
Scumball Johnson. I’ll tell you where he was at: he liked his name. ‘That’s me all right,’ he’d chuckle, ‘a real scumball.’ As if it confirmed his essence. Those are the people I can’t understand: cold rotten to the fucking quick, and quick to brag about it. Maybe that acceptance is close to enlightenment, but to enjoy it so much seems slimy. I can still see his grin. And here’s the weird thing: Scumball was a walking compost heap, but his teeth were perfect – strong, straight, brushed to an immaculate luster. And since he showed them only when someone called him Scumball or otherwise confirmed his sleaziness, the grin always carried this shy, pleased, strangely intimate acknowledgment, as if you were praising him, or he was trying to seduce your loathing.
