The bullet had gone through two curtains and lodged in the rear wall of the stage. I can show you that hole. If you want to look, I can show you.
Right before he died, Jimmy made a commercial for the Highway Safety Council. They show it here twice a year in the driver’s education class. The day they show it, I sit in. The students in the class each have a simulator. You know, a steering wheel, a mirror, a windshield with wipers that work, dials luminous in the dark.
Jimmy did the commercial while he was doing his last picture. He is dressed up as a cowboy, twirling a lariat. Gig Young interviews him. They talk about racing and going fast. Then Gig Young asks Jimmy, the cowboy, for advice. Advice for all the young drivers who might be watching. And I look around the class, and they are watching.
It is the way he begins each sentence with “Oh.”
Or it’s the lariat, the knot he fiddles with.
That new way of acting.
What is he thinking about? Jimmy was supposed to say the campaign slogan—The life you save may be your own. But he doesn’t. He looks toward the camera. He couldn’t see the camera because he wouldn’t wear his glasses. I can see what is happening. He is forgetting. He says, “The life you save may be”—a pause—“mine.” Mine.
I guess that I have seen that little bit of film more times than anyone else in the world. I watch the film, and he talks to me, talks to me directly. I have it all up here.
He kissed me.
He died.
Leave his life alone.
I know motivation. I teach motivation. I teach acting.
PIECES
I parked that night in a lot across the street from a restaurant I wanted to call on the next day early. I had gotten into Fort Wayne late, having driven all day from my home in Corbin, Kentucky. I had made a side trip crossing the Ohio at Brandenberg to Maukport, then on to Henryville, Indiana, where I was born and grew up. It was for old times’ sake. No one knows me there now. I talked with no one. Climbing north, I had this sense of things starting up again. It was already hot. They were running, and I took my place in the stream of white-haired travelers hauling those silver trailers, driving those new finned cars, passed only by Negro children being driven south out of the cities to Grandma’s place on the land in Mississippi or Alabama. These are the times of real migrations. With the warm weather and those new highways, people had started to move. I was on the road all the time and hadn’t seen anything like it. Not since the thirties.
The traffic put me late in the city. I got my bearings from the bank building downtown. I’d been here before a few years earlier in 1950. I found Anthony Street, and followed the overhead trolleybus lines, a main street, and must have even followed a trolleybus because I remember thinking they still have these, the smell and the sparks and the sound of sliding metal. Fake lightning. And there might have been real heat lightning that night and lightning bugs.
The elms looked real sick in the streetlights. I didn’t have time to find a place, or money if I had found one, having not much more than enough for gas and a bit extra, just in case. Nor am I so inclined. I like sleeping in a car, especially my car. I have my spices. And there was a change in the weather that night. So when I spotted the Hobby House Restaurant — and I had some trouble since it was locked and dark — I pulled into the lot across the street which had a huge sign still on that late. It was a painter’s palette with three brushes poking through the thumb hole. Each dab of paint was lit up by a different color of neon.
It wasn’t a paint store but an ice-cream parlor. Each color a flavor of ice cream, I guess. The sign burned and buzzed to high heaven, but I was able to settle down in the backseat with beaten biscuits and my scales.
I weighed my spices and herbs in the pools of colored light for the next day’s meeting.
The palette was on some type of timer.
At midnight, it went out and silent just like that, even though no one was around to switch it off. And there was lightning that night but no thunder. It flashed as I put my things away in the dark.
Am I telling you too much? These things might not be to the point of the matter. But give me a little room to build up speed.
I’m sixty-six years old, which should give me a pretty good enough excuse to act this way.
I can remember fifty years ago as if it were yesterday. I can’t remember yesterday.
The maps in my time you had to read. Three miles from the county line, turn left on the macadamized road, an old Indian trail, and at four and a half miles, with red barn on the right, take another left. This is county road 16. Oil mat. Roads weren’t lines then. Give me time and I’ll make the turn.
I sell a recipe for fried chicken. That’s what brought me to Fort Wayne that night. I used to have my own place in Corbin, and I couldn’t complain. Business was good because my cooking was good. Country ham, black-eyed peas, red-eye gravy, okra and string beans, watermelon pickle, hoe cake, baked apples. Duncan Hines wrote me up in his Adventures in Good Eating before the war. Gave directions. The shed on your left, the fence on your right. That kind of thing. He got you right to my door. No Worcester Diner, tablecloths, and gravy boats. And the thing was in place. I even had a root cellar with roots.
Eisenhower’s defense highways put me out of business. I sold it all for a big loss. My wife said that it was about time we went south anyway, and she wanted to head down that new 75, a clear shot to Florida, SEE ROCK CITY on every barn and birdhouse. But I wasn’t going to manage on my Social Security wearing Bermuda shorts, thinking twice about buying this pack of Beechnut gum.
A few years ago, I taught a good friend of mine, Pete Harman of Salt Lake City, how to fry chicken with this recipe and every indication was that the chicken did a job for his business.
There are some other places too. Other men who have heard about it. They would send me four cents, a nickel a bird. But it was nothing I worked at or thought about. And now these cars were passing my place. Though I couldn’t see the traffic, I could feel its steady rumble through my feet. Those roads are so big you can hear things like you can over open water.
My last good days were feeding the crews who drove the graders and dozers. Their hard hats were lined up on the rack by the door like skulls. I’d rather wear out than rust through. So I got on that road, joined the rumble with the Pete Harman deal in mind. I put a pressure cooker, the spices and scales, my apron and knives in the backseat of my ‘53 Pontiac. It had an amber Indian head on the hood, and it handled like a boat. I shipped out over that sound.
It was no great adventure. I’m an old man, after all.
I started by cooking for my family. Time to get out of the kitchen and take it on the road since the road had up and gone. It’s not so strange. You fellows are fretting right now about what to do with your folks, I bet. I had to make up my own mind, had to make a little money.
So I hadn’t met her yet. Instead, I am in a parking lot in Fort Wayne, waiting for this restaurant to open up for breakfast. A crew of high school kids is tarring and repainting the lot. They are making noise as thev close off a section with rope laced through the handles of gray sealer cans. I’m the only car in the lot. It’s a big lot. They lay down the parking stripes that look like fish bones on the tar. I can see the painter’s palette sign is turquoise. Down the way is the baseball stadium where the Pistons play. There are big silver pistons on the press box. I know beyond the stadium is a road being built.