1
LENNY BRUCE WAS DEAD.
That was the last thing we heard before the Blaupunkt blew, midway across the Penn Pike. Now, with no radio, Big Irish and I could do nothing to amuse ourselves but replicate Noo Yawk doo-wop sounds that were even then decrepit oldies.
We slept whenever fatigue overtook us, inflating air mattresses at roadside. The second night, along what still remained of66, between Tulsa and Bartlesville, we gazed up at the Perseus showers and watched phosphorous meteors score the sky three, four, five times a minute, each and every one of them beckoning us to California.
Somewhere in the sea of grass west of Amarillo we appropriated a wonderfully preposterous moosehead coatrack that had been abandonded at roadside. We were able to maneuver it into the VW by standing it upright through the open canvas sunroof.
Irish, lunk that he was, had actually volunteered for the Marines only to come up 4-F—a bum knee. On the coast at last, I dropped him with family in Oxnard, where he figured to learn the lath-and-plaster dodge. Alone, I continued north in the rattling, buzzing Beetle to the Bay Area and observed real, true hippies.
Then, abruptly, I piloted the VW due south, altogether bypassing L.A.'s mustard skyline, not stopping till Tijuana, where, just to be able to say I'd done it, wholly expecting to cluck my tongue in superior Anglo disapproval, I saw a bullfight. Instead, to my everlasting shame, I experienced transcendent awe through every blood-soaked veronica.
Finally, I drove back up the coast as far as Leo Carillo Beach and saw real, live surfers and also seals.
Wandering aimlessly on perilous roads through canyons, and on broad freeways where each individual lane rivaled whole eastern highways, I found myself at last somehow on Figueroa Street in the middle of what passed for downtown Los Angeles.
Across the street at Felix Chevrolet they were already advertising clearances to make room for the'67s. Broad posters covering the showroom windows boasted that GM would out-Mustang the Mustang with this thing called Camaro.
But I was a New York boy, and cars were transportation. It was 1966 and I did not think about cars, did not think about surfing, seals, hippies, bullfights. What I thought about was the war. What I thought about, more precisely, was the draft. And at long last I decided to turn myself in.
Two months had passed, maybe more, since I'd mailed my card back to Vincent Esposito, the clerk at the Queensboro Plaza Selective Service Center in Long Island City. I'd enfolded it in a Days of Rage rally flier upon the back of which was scrawled most respectfully my message: I would no longer play Good German to Lyndon Johnson's ego.
I had been on the lam now some sixty days. Having resolved to surrender, however, caused a strange serenity to settle over me.
I was not especially afraid to go to jail. Activist pals, Freedom Riders from the early civil rights days, told me they'd never had so much fun as when getting clapped into trashy county lockups. Boasts of such exploits, they assured me moreover, had encouraged firm-breasted, pointy-nippled, long-haired, faded-denim-clad women in artsy-craftsy-clinky-clanky earrings and no panties cavalierly to drop their bell-bottoms.
Peace movement counselors had assured me that after years of writs, waivers, motions, denials, dismissals, stipulations, petitions, and a potpourri of still other assorted processes and procedures, I'd eventually serve some fourteen months, tops, and at a federal honor farm on the order of Danbury or Lompoc, where I'd while away the hours puttering in the vegetable garden. And—though I could not yet appreciate it—if the timing was right, I'd even play knock-hockey in the rec room with high officials of the Nixon administration, including the Attorney General of the United States himself.
But this yawning, gaping calm was now suddenly lanced by the appearance in my mirror of a somehow familiar plain brown Buick sedan bearing U.S. government plates. Had it been tailing me for some distance?
Inside were two men—a Negro and an Oriental—wearing suits and ties. They drew alongside. In what was clearly a rehearsed motion, the black man at the passenger's window thrust his wallet at me vertically and let it fall open, exposing the gleaming bronze shape of a badge-sized shield.
"Federal marshals, son," he sang out quietly, almost an apology, in a basso to rival Levi Stubbs. Here was a practiced aw-shucks affect to soothe any fugitive's soul. Side by side we rolled to a stop at a light.
"Stuart Thomas," he continued, "please pull your vee-hickle to the curb. You are under arrest for violation of the Selective Service Act. You have the right to remain silent. In the event you choose to speak …"
I was vastly, overpoweringly relieved. I readied myself to pull to the curb, to step from the car, to offer up my wrists for shiny silver cuffs. I took a deep, cleansing breath and instructed myself not to panic.
At which point I promptly panicked.
Not waiting for the light to change, as if my flesh were not my own, as if my body were inhabited by an impostor, as if my right foot belonged to some stranger, as if I observed all this as a dispassionate party from across the street, I floored the pedal and lurched blindly through the impossibly heavy cross traffic at Adams Boulevard.
The Buick in hot pursuit, we careened down Figueroa. My four cylinders were no match for the oversized supercharged government-issue road machine, but in urban traffic my Volks provided something of an advantage.
A bus loomed up between us, followed by a Helms Bakery truck. I swerved left, right, this way, that, and found myself at last on a diminutive side street that was actually a service entrance to the campus of the University of Southern California. The chase ended as quickly as it had begun. The government sedan clearly had been trapped in traffic and was nowhere to be seen.
It was August and the quad was wholly deserted. The VW coughed to a halt at the end of a stunted street. My heart clicking like a ratchet, I abandoned the vehicle where it sat and raced into the nearest building, a ramshackle collection of interconnecting structures that appeared to be ancient wooden stables.
A crude plaque above the shabby entrance read: DEPARTMENT OF CINEMA.
A sign below it, hand-carved in polished mahogany, said: REALITY ENDS HERE.
ESCAPE FROM FILM SCHOOL. Copyright © 1999 by Richard Walter. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
