"Welcome to the Overlook Hotel!"
It all started out innocently enough. My friend Jim and I had decided to go on a hike on Christmas Day. We hadn't seen each other in a while, nor been hiking together in even longer. I suggested a couple of local trails in the Santa Monica Mountains, but Jim wanted to go up to the Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains. He'd taken me up there a couple of times before, once to a place called Echo Mountain and another time to Henninger Flats, which by the way, is not flat at all. Those hikes were a little more challenging than my local favorites, but well worth the effort.
So, on Christmas Day, I packed up my supplies: camera, water, almonds, poetry journal. Plus a couple of awesome turkey pastrami sandwiches on this amazingly dense dark rye bread made with whole rye meal and black strap molasses, and my special ingredient, spicy hummus! I put the sandwiches into a handy insulated bag I'd picked up at a yard sale on one of our previous hiking trips.
When I got to Jim's house, he was rarin' to go. First, we drove his roommate Matt to a relative's house for a family Christmas party. Matt often goes with Jim on his hikes, but not today. Also in the car with us was Donza, Jim's dog, named for Aldonza a/k/a "Dulcinea" the peasant girl who is idealized by Don Quixote. Donza is part Labrador Retriever part Pit Bull, and all sweetheart. She was a "rescue" and still has a somewhat nervous demeanor around strangers and other dogs, but once you get her out on the trail she's one happy pup.
We took the 10 east and turned north on Santa Anita Ave., which runs right up into the mountains where it winds through Big Santa Anita Canyon, ending up at a place called Chantry Flat. Again, not flat. We circled the parking area, which was completely full, and found what appeared to be the last available spot on the side of the road leading back down the mountain. Chantry Flat has a large picnic area, a Ranger's station, and a pack store for outfitting hikers and backpackers. There are several trailheads branching off from Chantry Flat including one that goes all the way up to the Mt. Wilson Observatory. We were planning on taking the Upper Winter Creek Trail that runs along the canyon wall to a camping area called Hoegee's Trail Camp, then returning along the canyon floor along the Lower Winter Creek Trail, about five miles round trip.
We got out of the car and I grabbed my camera, my almonds, my journal and some water. I decided to leave the sandwiches for after the hike. Jim was pulling some things out of the trunk. I asked him if I needed to lock the door, but he said he would lock up. I shut my door and Jim closed the trunk. Then he looked at me.
"Uh-oh."
"What?"
"I think I left the keys in the car."
I looked in through the window and sure enough, there they were, hanging in the ignition. I tried my door thinking it was still unlocked. But it wasn't. Jim tried the other door. It too was locked. We were locked out. On a mountain. On Christmas Day.
"It's okay," Jim said. "I can call Triple-A. Oh, wait, no I can't. I left my phone in the car."
I'd left my phone in the car, too. In one of the pockets in my handy insulated sandwich bag. We looked around for a pay phone, but found none. We checked the pack store, but it was closed. So was the Ranger Station. There were a few private residences but they looked abandoned. The picnic area was swarming with people, though. Kids playing, people grilling. We thought about asking one of them to borrow a cell phone, but then decided we'd wait until after the hike. It was still early and we were only going five miles. We'd be much more disposed to sitting around waiting for a tow truck after we'd had our exercise. So off we went.
Jim led us up a fire road that turned into a trail. Soon we were deep into the canyon surrounded by trees and rocks and a trickling creek. It was really beautiful. I was glad we'd come up here. What a great way to spend Christmas Day. I'm not religious, but I've always said if you want to get closer to God, you have to go outside.
We talked about music. Jim and I were in a band called The Buzzards a few years back and we both consider ourselves songwriters. Another friend and fellow songwriter had recently sent out a list of his favorite records of the year. We discussed some of his choices. I told Jim all about a CD I'd been listening to lately that was inspiring me to write more songs.
We passed a few other hikers here and there. It was good to see other folks enjoying the trail on such a beautiful day. Chantry Flat was built at a time when Angelinos were flocking to the mountains to enjoy the natural beauty outside of the big city. A rustic resort called Sturtevant's Camp was constructed a little further up the trail from where we were going. Walking in the woods used to be a popular way for people to spend their leisure time. Nowadays most folks only seem to go for walks in shopping malls or on treadmills. But, happily, on Christmas Day there were plenty of people enjoying the trails of Big Santa Anita Canyon with Jim and Donza and me.
When we got back to the car, I still had a few almonds left and even a little water. We asked around to see if we could borrow someones cell phone, but it turned out that there wasn't any service up there. We hadn't thought of that. We scouted around again to see if we could find a pay phone. Still no luck. Outside the Ranger's office, I saw a guy throwing some stuff into a dumpster. I called to him, asking if he knew if there was a payphone around. He said there wasn't, but we might be able to get cell service if we walked down the road a bit. I told him we'd locked our phones in the car, so he offered to open the Ranger's office for us. But, when I went to find Jim, he'd already gotten access to land-line at one of the private residences and was on 'hold' with Triple-A.
When he got off the phone, Jim told me someone would be up to help us within an hour. That didn't seem so bad. We went back to the car to wait. By this point I kind of wished we had those turkey sandwiches I'd packed. We ate a few almonds and sat on the low stone wall across from the car. It wasn't late, but the canyon was in full shade already. And the wind was picking up. It was definitely getting cooler. I had a long sleeved shirt and a windbreaker in the car. Along with my cell phone. And those sandwiches. With the dark rye bread, made with black strap molasses. And spicy hummus.
Over the next hour, we saw many cars heading back down the mountain. Not too many coming up, though. The wind was blowing pretty steadily and it was cold. I jumped up onto the stone wall several times to try and keep warm, but my legs were kind of tired from the hike. We decided to move back across the road to get out of the wind, but it didn't make much difference. At least I had my poetry journal. I could always write a poem about how two idiots froze to death on Christmas Day in the middle of a National Forest.
Jim went back to call Triple-A again, while I waited with Donza. She was not thrilled about sitting around doing nothing while other dogs were off frolicking and smelling each other and such. But we had to keep her restrained or she'd try to mix it up, and that would spell trouble.
Jim returned with not-so-good news. The Triple-A Operator had said they sent a guy up to Chantry Flat, but somehow he didn't see us. Which was ridiculous, because we were literally the first car you would see if you drove up there. The Operator also said that they wouldn't be able to send another truck up the mountain because the road was closed due to a forest fire. This was also ridiculous because Jim was standing next to the Forest Ranger at the time and he said there was no fire. Nevertheless, the best she could do was call the local police and maybe they would come up and help us.
The whole phone-call process had taken about a half hour, during which time it had gotten darker and colder. Jim suggested that we might have to break a window. During our earlier scouting expedition, I had noticed several tools up around the pack store that might be utilized for breaking into a vehicle. I was in favor of prying open the trunk and climbing in through the back seat, a technique I'd seen work once before. Smashing the window seemed extreme to me. But Jim thought that prying the trunk would cause more damage and cost more money than simply replacing a window. We decided to wait a little longer to see if the cops showed up. We'd feel pretty dumb if we smashed the window two minutes before the cops arrived.
Over the next forty-five minutes or so, we saw almost every car exit the Chantry Flat parking area and not a single one come up the road from town. It seemed that maybe the Triple-A Operator was right and the road was closed. We were both pretty cold by now. My teeth were chattering and I was too tired to jump up and down anymore. I was out of almonds and water and the wind was getting relentless. Time for desperate measures.
I walked up the trail to the pack store, where I'd seen an axe leaning against a stack of wood. On the way I passed a woman who was grilling steaks. I don't really eat red meat anymore, but those steaks smelled awful damn good to me. I got to the parking lot for the pack store and looked around for the axe. It was pretty dark and I couldn't remember exactly where I'd seen it. Luckily there was a nearly-full Christmas Moon shining through the trees. I poked around an old shed that had a 'No Trespassing' sign on it, then went over to the front of the store. Suddenly, a bright light blinded me. It must have been on a motion sensor. It lit up the whole parking lot, including the stack of wood where the axe was. I grabbed the axe and headed back down the trail.
As I sauntered down the trail towards the car, I heard a gaggle of teenage girls waiting by the entrance to the main parking area. For a moment, I pictured myself from their point of view, hunched over and shivering, stumbling down the trail in the moonlight in a nearly deserted picnic area on Christmas Day -- carrying an axe. "Welcome to the Overlook Hotel!" I could see the headlines: "CRAZED AXE FIEND TERRORIZES INNOCENT SCHOOLGIRLS IN NATIONAL FOREST." I wondered what would be the proper course of action. Should I try to hide the axe from view by holding it behind my back? Or would that just make matters worse? Should I swing the axe freely by my side, devil-may-care, its sharpened blade glinting in the silvery moonlight? It seemed like a no-win.
Fortunately, the teenage girls paid no attention to me whatsoever, and I slipped by without incident.
When I got back to the car I held out the axe for Jim, but he declined, asking me to do the honors. I really didn't want to be the one to smash his car window. I'd never smashed a window before. At least not on purpose. But I'd seen it done on TV and it didn't look so hard. Besides, my sandwiches were in there.
I picked up the axe and swung for dead-center. Not too hard, but with a clean, firm strike. CRASH! The window exploded into a thousand nuggets of glass. I was shocked for a moment. It really had been easy. And now we were in!
Jim unlocked the doors and got into the car. He tried the ignition, but... nothing. The battery was dead. He had left the ignition in the "on" position. No problem, we could always give it push start. But first we tried flagging down a driver to see if they had any jumper cables. I think it was the van full of teenage girls I'd passed earlier. They had no cables. At about the same time, another van came up the road and went into the parking area. Jim and I were talking about how to push-start the car when the other van came by again. I flagged him down.
"Can you give us a jump?"
"It's the least I can do."
It was Triple-A. He had just made it up the road.
Turns out, this was the second Triple-A van that had been sent up the mountain to rescue us. The first one had literally burst into flames halfway up the road. The driver pulled over and jumped out just in time. The road had been closed for the past two hours while they put out the fire. The driver was unharmed, but apparently his wife was pregnant and due to go into labor any minute.
A few minutes later we were back in the car, engine running, heat on full, and headed down the mountain. I took out one of my sandwiches and handed half to Jim. I'd been describing them to him for the past three hours and he was looking forward to them as much as I was. They were delicious. Whole rye meal with black strap molasses, turkey pastrami, and spicy hummus. Best sandwich ever.
As we wound down the road back to civilization, we came upon a crazy sight. Blue, red and yellow lights flashing. Three fire trucks, two State Troopers, an ambulance, the Triple-A van, and another van that was little more than a burned-out shell. We stopped. The owner of the Triple-A van came up to our window with one of the Troopers. He asked us if we were the ones who had called for assistance, as if to prove to the Trooper that he was telling the truth. The Trooper just nodded and told him not to worry about it. I asked about the first driver's pregnant wife. The owner said she was fine -- she hadn't had the baby yet.
So that was nice.
We drove back down the winding road towards home, enjoying the rest of our amazing sandwiches, guided by the wondrous light of the blessed Christmas Moon.
"These roads don't move, you're the one that moves."I wrote a novel once, back when I was young and still believed in everything. It was the true story of a cross-country journey I took in a Volkswagen bus with my old buddy Ray. The stated purpose of the journey was to track down another old buddy who'd gone off the radar -- or so we believed. The true purpose of the journey came to reveal itself in other ways, such as the writing of the novel.
The true purpose of the journey may continue to reveal itself, as I continue to retrace the seemingly disconnected routes of my past.
One thing I do know -- there was another Presence riding along with us in that old VW. An unseen Guide, who whispered strange incantations during lonely stretches of endless moonlit highway, and howled with crazy Zen laughter in the mist-laden dawn. His name was Jack Kerouac.
Like everybody else, I first learned about Kerouac from his novel, On The Road. Reading On The Road was like a rite of passage, an initiation into the counterculture, the Boy Scout Manual for Bohemians. On The Road was the beginning of a journey that wound its way through the mythological landscape of the American soul, with a Charlie Parker soundtrack playing on the dashboard radio and the ghosts of forgotten poets towering above the distant horizon. It was a call to action, a prayer for deliverance. It made a young man want to move.
So, one crisp spring morning, I set out from Middletown, Connecticut, with my thumb stuck out over Route 9, headed south. I hitched my way down to North Carolina where I met up with Ray, on his way east from Illinois. We had little money and nothing to eat. We slept on the cold ground and wandered under the hot sun. We visited some girls we knew from high school, hoping they would fall in love with us.
But they didn't.
We hitched our way west to Nashville and stayed with another old buddy named Gary. Got drunk and slept it off. Then hitched north, back home to Louisville. All along the way, we met crazy characters and saw wondrous visions. We talked about Life and Love and Music and Truth. We lived in the moment. And we kept moving.
We were on the road.
About a year later, it was time to move again. Winter this time, and I had a vehicle. A blue and white Volkswagen bus with the middle seat taken out. Just a simple caravan, a Conestoga wagon for crossing the Great Plains. We had different reasons for making the trip -- to go to California, to find a lost friend, to continue on our journey. But once we got going, we knew why we were there. The wheels rolling under us, the road spooling out endlessly ahead. The past disappearing in the rear-view. The future just beyond the windshield.
I kept a journal of our voyage -- it seemed like things were unfolding in important and historic ways that had to be recorded. Life had become a novel. Fiction was reality. We were characters, living chapter to chapter. We didn't know what was coming until it happened. Each day was written fresh and then the page was turned.
We got a small apartment in Oakland near Lake Merritt. We got jobs. We worked and slept, ate and drank. Went to movies and concerts. We found our errant friend and failed to lure him home. We argued, commiserated, dreamed and planned. Pages turned. Chapters were written.
A couple of years later, when I actually began the task of transforming my road-journal into a full fledged road-novel, I read Ann Charters' biography of Kerouac, and learned a bit about his unconventional writing methods -- some of which I adopted. As I wrote, carving out chapters from the various scattered episodes and stringing them together in a structure that felt logical, I began to see some sense in what had happened. Or perhaps I imposed some sense onto what had happened. Either way, I was creating order from chaos and finding meaning in the void. I was being a writer.
My one unbending principle was that everything I wrote had to be absolutely true. I believed that telling the truth would give my story a noble authority that would elevate it beyond the reach of my meager talents. I have since discovered that what is true is not always worth telling -- and what's worth telling is not always true. But back then, in the spirit of Kerouac, I wrote exactly what happened, exactly the way it happened.
Of course, the names were changed to protect the (not so) innocent.
After that fabled journey, there were many others. Three more times across the country -- once using the same auto-driveaway service that Kerouac used. Several hitchhiking adventures, including a wild ride through Pennsylvania in a van full of hippies. And one late-night, high-speed run through Alabama that ended up with me leaning against the hood of an Oldsmobile while a State Trooper pointed a shotgun at my head. I even went on the road in Europe, driving from Paris through the Swiss Alps into Italy and then by ferry to Corsica and back into France. That trip felt a little more like Hemingway than Kerouac.
But all of that, as they say, was long ago. I stopped driving, for the most part, when I moved to New York City. My old Plymouth Valiant, which I had operated for years without the benefit of license or registration, sat in my sister's driveway, having become a combination mouse condo and canoe rack. I took the train or the bus instead of driving. Most of my wanderings consisted of long walks on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Here in LA, one spends quite a bit of time behind the wheel, and I often found it a relief to park the car on Friday night and not see it again until Monday morning. But I did enjoy a very memorable drive down the coast one summer with my nephew. We started in San Francisco, where we visited the City Lights Bookstore and Jack Kerouac Alley, then headed south along the Pacific Coast Highway. We stopped for the night in Big Sur, where Kerouac lived one summer in a tiny cabin beneath the Bixby Canyon Bridge.
I didn't really know much about Kerouac's life in Bixby Canyon. I'd never read his book, Big Sur, about his attempt to escape the trappings of fame and alcoholism and find some kind of spiritual connection in the rustic tranquility of the California coast. I just knew that he'd lived there and that it was one of the most beautiful places on earth.
A few weeks ago, though, for my birthday, my Mom sent me a documentary called One Fast Move Or I'm Gone, which tells the story of Kerouac's Big Sur retreat. She heard about it on NPR, which my Dad listens to 24 hours a day, and thought I might like it. She was right -- I loved it.
Accompanying the DVD, there is a CD of songs by Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar using Kerouac's words as lyrics. I've been listening to that CD non-stop since my birthday, and one song in particular has gotten stuck in my head. I hear it when I'm swimming. I find myself singing it when I'm out for a walk. The chorus goes: "These roads don't move, you're the one that moves."
At first I didn't know what that meant. It was just a catchy little phrase I kept repeating to myself. But as I listened more closely to the rest of the song, it started to make more sense. It was like Kerouac, still hovering over my shoulder on that moonlit highway, had one more mysterious message to impart. "These roads don't move..." All this restless wandering isn't taking you anywhere. "You're the one that moves." The transformation happens within.
After all these years, I guess I'm still on the road. I'm just not going anywhere.
There was a movie theater in Louisville called the Vogue, that used to show different movies every night for just a couple of bucks. The Vogue showed classic movies, foreign movies, art-house movies, independent movies. They ran The Rocky Horror Picture Show every week for 24 consecutive years. It was the last of the old single-screen theaters. Now it is gone. I saw some great movies there back in the 70's: A Clockwork Orange, Walkabout, Easy Rider, Frenzy, Last Tango In Paris, The Wicker Man, Five Easy Pieces, Woodstock, M*A*S*H, Dirty Harry, Murder On The Orient Express, Dr. Zhivago. Many more I can't remember. But of all the amazing movies I saw at the Vogue, I think the one that made the biggest impression on me was Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Prior to seeing the movie, most of what I knew about Monty Python came from their records. I used to hang around with a posse of nerds in high school and one of them, a guy from Texas of all places, had a collection of Monty Python records. As it turns out, the PBS television station in Dallas was the first station to broadcast episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus -- so he had the jump on us in that department. I don't remember ever seeing the show in Louisville. Though I do recall seeing Eric Idle on Saturday Night Live a couple of times. And I have a vague memory of seeing the Nudge Nudge sketch on the Tonight Show.
Nevertheless, when my nerd buddies and I decided to do a comedy remake of A Man For All Seasons for our tenth grade English class (cleverly titled "A Man For All Seasonings") the Python influence was in full force.
In one pivotal scene from our movie, when Sir Thomas Moron is giving his famous "It's not that I believe it, but that I believe it..." line, the Duke of Norfuk breaks character and says "What the hell does that mean?" Moron replies "I don't know, it's in the script." He pulls a copy of the script out and points to the page in question. Norfuk grabs the script and looks at it in disbelief, saying, "it doesn't make any sense!" He then walks off camera, throwing the script down in disgust. Moron looks at the camera and pulls out a box of crackers, saying "and now for some nice Ritz Crackers!" He shoves an handful into his mouth and the scene ends.
We shot much of our movie "on location" i.e., in the woods near a babbling brook, in back of a liquor store, in the middle of a corporate office park. And since my 8mm camera had no sound, we carried a portable GE tape recorder around with us everywhere and recorded all of the dialogue on the spot. This turned out to be a big problem, since there was a lot of fumbling with the tape recorder, not to mention traffic noise, airplanes and the aforementioned babbling brook. So we had to re-record all of the dialogue in real time while watching the edited version of the movie. We gathered at the Texan's house for the recording session and spent most of the afternoon listening to Monty Python records before getting down to business. It was my first-ever looping session and it was a complete success. And I think it was the spirit of the Pythons that carried the day.
In the final scene of "Seasonings", Sir Thomas Moron wonders aloud if he has made the right choice in defying the King. He looks to the heavens and sees a vision of God (played by our bearded biology teacher) giving him a 'thumbs up' sign. The soundtrack swells with the sounds of Beethoven's Ode to Joy and the credits roll.
We considered it a masterpiece at the time -- though I'm not so sure our 10th grade English teacher appreciated it. The line "Neither food nor drink, Norfuk!" which got a big laugh in the classroom, didn't sit too well with her. My nerd crew and I went on to make other movies, including a mega-disaster flick called "Shake n' Bake" about a huge skyscraper that catches fire during an earthquake.
But "Man For All Seasonings" was our undeniable triumph.
So when I finally got the chance to see Holy Grail at the Vogue, I was completely blown away. From the very start, with the title sequence that opens with an ultra-serious look and dramatic classical score then quickly devolves into a mish-mash of mariachi music and llama jokes, I was choking with laughter. It was all there: the absurdism, the inane philosophical prattle, the parody of genre and the self-mocking lunacy. None of these things were necessarily new. Mel Brooks had done it. My nerd pals and I had done it. But Holy Grail managed to elevate this type of irreverence to the level of the sublime. Talk about a masterpiece!
Perhaps the most brilliant aspect for me was the idea of breaking frame. The idea that the movie is constantly referring itself, like the way that Kurt Vonnegut would break out of the anonymous confines of his role as author and address the reader directly, commenting on the novel as it was being written. Holy Grail is imbued with a sense of self-awareness that draws the viewer into the joke and allows us to laugh with the movie as well as at the movie. In the very first scene, we hear the clip-clop of horses hooves and see a helmeted head bobbing up and down, expecting to see the familiar sight of a knight on horseback. Instead, the horse is revealed to be a man clapping together a pair of hollow coconut halves to simulate the sound of hoof-beats. And rather than let that joke simply lie there, more attention is drawn to it when Arthur gets caught up in a discussion of how a coconut may or may not have been carried to the shores of medieval England by a migrating swallow. All played in complete earnest.
Later, when approaching Camelot, one character points out, "it's only a model." And when Arthur and his men finally reach the Bridge of Death, they meet up with "the old man from scene 24." But the best frame-breaking joke of the movie comes when a "Very Famous Historian" is murdered by one of Arthur's knights. The police are called in to investigate and ultimately catch up with Arthur and Bedivere just before they are set to storm the Grail Castle. The knights are arrested and hauled into a police van. Then a police Inspector turns to the camera and says, "All right, put that away sonny." He puts his hand over the lens and the film abruptly ends. It's pure genius.
Of course I couldn't help noticing certain similarities between "A Man For All Seasonings" and Holy Grail. There were the obvious frame-breaking script references, the documentary-style realism, and the inane philosophical arguments. They even used our "God" cameo -- though in their case, God was a Terry Gilliam animation and not a scruffy high-school biology teacher. The fact is, Holy Grail and "Seasonings" were produced at roughly the same point in time. And though the Pythons had a slightly bigger budget and a bit more talent, we shared an attitude with them that gave us the freedom to do and say whatever we wanted in our film, so long as we thought it was funny. There were no rules, only conventions. And conventions were made to be subverted.
I recently watched a six-part documentary about Monty Python called Monty Python Almost the Truth. I was fascinated by all of the behind-the-scenes information, the history of how they all got together and the discussions of where certain sketches came from. But the most interesting segment was the one about Holy Grail. The Pythons revealed how little they knew about making a movie, how little time and money they had, how the camera broke on the first day of shooting, how they got kicked out of their locations and had to shoot most of the various "castle" scenes in the same place. And it all seemed very familiar. And it occurred to me that the lack of resources and experience and equipment contributed to the brilliance of the movie. Because when you are forced into a corner, you often come up with your best work.
I would love to go back and look at "A Man For All Seasonings" again. I'm not sure where it ended up. Or if the film and the soundtrack are even in the same place. Maybe someday I will dig it up and restore it. But the memory of that early attempt is indelible. Just like my memory of watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail at the Vogue theater in Louisville.
Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!
