Would you look?

Way Back When, in the 90s
Halfway to Somewhere, Iowa

The guy was wearing blue jeans, an army jacket, and a baseball cap. He took off his cap to reveal close-cropped graying hair. His face was lean and muscular, and his eyes were bright.

“Do you want me to strap in?” he asked as I hooked up my seatbelt. I said yes, and as he hunted for the belt, he said, “Never use ‘em myself. I was in the paratroopers in the war, and I don’t like to use ‘em. If I’m on a plane, I want to sit in the back and not wear a seatbelt. If something happens, I want to get out of there fast. Ya know, they can’t force you to use one. Most plane accidents take place on landing or taking off, so what I do, I just go up to the first-class section.”

“You mean on a commercial airliner?” I asked, noting that he had put the shoulder strap over the wrong shoulder.

“Yeah,” he said, and then adjusted the strap after I pointed out the correct position.

The guy then started rapping about how he was going to Fargo, North Dakota, to join a pro-life church group called the Lambs of God. He said some of the head guys were in jail in San Antonio for trying to rescue babies: i.e., to prevent women from entering abortion clinics, most likely. He said, “They don’t like it in Texas when you go in and try to disrupt their industry. And that’s what abortion is – a baby-killing industry!”

He said he was a construction worker and had also worked in the steel trades in Pennsylvania, where he was from originally. I told him I was an editor, originally from Illinois.

“When I was in prison,” he said, “I met a guy who was a good writer. He’s originally from Germany, and he saw all his family killed by the Nazis. He wrote a book called Acquiescence to Slaughter. Yes, that’s the name, Acquiescence to uh . . . Slaughter. It’s about the state of things in America today. You can see a connection between a Nazi state and the way things are today.”

I thought of things Walker Percy had written or said about the connection between the Nazis’ ideas and practices of “purifying the state” and euthanasia, and present-day practices of abortion, but I didn’t say anything. This guy scared me some, and I wanted to get off the subject he was riding hard. Then, out of nowhere, he mentioned talking to Colleen Dewhurst, and that was my opportunity.

“Colleen Dewhurst! She was married to George C. Scott! You met her?” I asked.

“Hell, yes,” he said, “Right on a park bench in New York City. You’re liable to run into anybody down in the Village!”

“Ah,” I think to myself, “A former steelworker who has hung out in the Village and talked with Colleen Dewhurst. Pretty interesting.”

“Hey, ya know,” I said, “I saw this great movie that Colleen Dewhurst was in—.”

“Queen of the Rebels?” he interjected.

 “Nah, it was a movie where George C. Scott played a guy who used to drive a getaway car for the Mob in America, but he retires to Spain. The film opens with him driving a sports car . . . “

“The Last Run!” he says, “Yeah, I’ve seen it. It’s a good movie.”

“Yeah, well in that film Colleen Dewhurst plays a prostitute that George C. Scott visits when he gets restless, and also there’s another woman that he gets mixed up with. He actually had an affair with this woman and he dumped Colleen Dewhurst and married the other woman, whose name I can’t remember.”

“Trish Van Devere,” he says.

“Yeah, that’s it, Trish Van Devere!” I say. (Obviously I’m pretty excited at this point. I don’t often have such scintillating conversations on the road.)

“I remember her because she’s better looking than Colleen Dewhurst!” he says.

“Well,” I say, “I like Colleen Dewhurst.”

“Ah, she’s O.K., I guess,” he says. “I was standing in line to see Queen of the Rebels in New York, and I saw her sneaking in the, you know . . .”

“The back door?” I asked.

“Yeah, the back door!” he says, “I thought of accosting her, but I didn’t. Later on, when I actually met her, she struck me as being one of these types, ya know, they look down on you . . .” He makes a gesture of looking down his nose.

“A snob,” I say.

“Yeah, that’s it! A snob!” he says excitedly. “She was a snob!” he laughs.

Here’s The Last Run:

https://youtu.be/iW9lCnna1Qg

. . .

From this we go into more movie talk. His favorites: Triumph of the Will, by Leni . . . what’s her name? Eisenmueller? I say. “Riefenstahl,” he says. “Yeah, what about the 1936 Olympics?” “Hmmm,” I say. “I thought maybe you meant that D.W. Griffith film about racism in America [Birth of a Nation].” “No, don’t know that one,” he says. “How about The Little Emperor, Chaplin’s last film? It’s great – he plays five different parts.”

(NOTE: He means The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin played the dual roles of a Jewish barber and the Hitler-like Adenoid Hynkel.)

“I’ve seen the part where he plays Hitler and dances around,” I say.

“You’ve seen the movie then?” he asks.

“Nah, just the part where he plays Hitler and dances around and stamps his feet.”

(NOTE from future self: Sounds like Trump.)

. . .

Somehow we got into famous last words, and I told him a lot of stuff about Tolstoy and about The Last Station, about how Tolstoy fell into a suicidal state in mid-life and came out of it only after seeing that the Russian peasants were happy and content with their religion.

I tell more about Tolstoy’s own development of a radical Christianity and about the fight for his copyrights and how he and his wife read each other’s diaries and how he finally couldn’t take it anymore and just left one night with a flashlight and a fur coat, . . .

“With nothing else on?!” the guy asks, “Just a fur coat?” he laughs.

“Nah,” I say. “He had on his union suit.”

 . . .

He tells me about his times in Hollywood, where he trained to do or be something – perhaps a broadcaster – at the West Coast extension of Columbia College in Chicago, which had been founded by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater.

More film talk. Then he says, “I got a buddy who says films can’t portray two things correctly: combat and sex. Now, I tell ya, if you saw two people going at it out in that field, would you stop and look?”

I looked out on the big stretches of dirt and corn stubble. “Yeah,” I said, “I’d stop,” thinking about the pagan practice of copulating in the fields to ensure good fertility in the soil.

“C’mon,” he says, “You’d stop to see somebody screwing?”

“Yeah,” I said, my face reddening, “I’d stop.”

He laughs. “Well, at least you’re honest!” I got a buddy who tells me all about peeping at people having sex when he was a kid. And he names names!”

“You mean, like, the people he was peeping at?” I ask.

“Yeah!” he cackles. “The old man stickin’ the salami to the old lady! And how he sniffed panties hanging on the clothesline!” I notice that the spittle at the corners of his mouth is collected there, building up froth.

“Hey, ya know?” he says. “You’re a good conversationalist, ya know that? Some people just talk about themselves, ya know? They get into, what do ya call it?—a diatribe—ya know? They just talk about themselves!” He laughs.

. . .

Here’s the turnoff to Onawa, thank God. This has all been quite interesting, and I tell the guy that, but sniffing panties and watching the old man stick the salami to the old lady are about my limit.

I pull the car off the road and put on the hazard lights, and we go back to get the guy’s gear out.

“Ya know,” he says, “It’s been said that ‘Big people talk about big things, and average-size people talk about things, and little people just talk big!”

And I’m not sure whether he’s got the quote right, or how it flows from the conversation we’ve had about cripples being ultra-sensitive and carrying chips on their shoulders, or about Karl, “a sawed-off German actor” he knew in Hollywood, or the snobbery of Colleen Dewhurst or the neo-Fascism in America today, but I shake his hand and he’s off down the road to Fargo.

I reckon it all might make sense, one of these days.

https://youtu.be/s261QD8iEro