B. Compulsion

[Johnny Law Kilt Mah Bruther, pg. 2 > First draft, circa 1988, plus several revisions over the years]

ghosts shades of memories memories
flickering in twilight
autumn scars
& Johnny Law monitors it all on CB channel 9
shivering at midnight
under the cover of darkness
the fire unattended burns low
I, the shy one
see the girls at the meeting hall
dangled in the hush of elegant whispers
catapult in the spark shower into legend
in black steel trimmed with chrome
Johnny Jack, American child

[Back to 1984, or was it ’85] What a trip! Somewhere on the Road — where exactly? Did I get a snapshot at the fateful instant? — I fell deeply in love with my country. Or was I seduced? No, it’s wrong to use the language of romance to describe this chimerical feeling, a collage of hormones, allegiance pledges, a million sights, sounds and smells. Like mist in a Kentucky valley, crickets and toads in a Mississippi evening, and gasoline at the pump at a mon’n’pop filling station in Jersey. My biggest revelation in those early years (roughly ’82-’90) was how enormous the USA is geographically. It was the metaphysical expanse that blew my mind wide open. By God, TEXAS! With JP that summer I got to absorb America as a wide-eyed naif, an innocent, trying to figure out. what cool is and how I could be that. Oh to be young and clueless, reckless with abandon, and full of simmering juice! In a month we traversed thousands of miles, cruising through and pausing in wildly differing ecologies and cultures, North, South, East and West. I fell in love with roadside attractions, some hokey, some illuminating. Eventually, the history, kitsch, commerce began to blend together and blur. We sprinted up the Rocky steps, giggling, stoned. I played mournful sax, a paean to miners, on a rocky outcrop overlooking a valley creek in my hometown under a bright full moon. The World’s Fair in the Big Easy was amazing, especially those gorgeous neoclassical sculptural decorations. The balmy ride along the Gulf Coast was just WOW! On our trek I fell in love with then-affordable local and regional quick-serve foods (which were largely made from scratch, but in big batches, wryly, commonly touted as “home cookin’”): Chowder! Biscuits and Gravy! Gumbo! Barbecue! We ducked and dodged giant flying cockroaches in Houston, hanging out by Big D’s pool, with Christmas lights all around, festooned like a Mexican vacation resort. …We somehow made it back to South Bend in time for classes. At the start of junior year, I wasn’t refreshed and invigorated by my summer break. I was a strung out wreck.

Back at school, I grappled with my powerful Road conversion, which haunted my days and nights. A glimpse of the freeway would trigger overwhelming, irrational bouts of longing. I daydreamed about the Interstate. I sympathized with those lonesome outlaws when they crooned about the lost highway calling to them, telling sad tales about how they end up running on empty or on the run from the Man, eventually pulling on a smoke, sitting by a jukebox playing Hank or Patsy, in some rundown honkytonk, bone-weary, whiskey-drunk, beat-down and broken-hearted. The flip side of that depressing trope filed me up, too! Skynyrd, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, and dozens of others became my life’s soundtrack after that summer with JP. My Road obsession began to manifest in impulsiveness, manic spontaneity. The drive-to-drive adeptly configured itself to be intimately personal to me, similar to a death encounter. [Those unfortunately were occurring with increasing frequency, which we can get into later.] On a whim I would hop a flight to New York out of Chicago, on People’s Air, $49 each way. Imagine! I was selling hand-painted FunkShunArt t-shirts to fund seat-of-you-pants jaunts all over the continental USA. The Road was becoming my mainline fix, an overarching mindset and frame of reference, a secular replacement for the Catholicism of my youth, whose influence was rapidly waning, with every toke, blackout, hookup, Violent Femmes concert and art stomp up and down the Avenues of Manhattan. I was becoming aware of the rich and varied Road symbology, and the many arcane codes, the twisted metal burnt out metaphors. Mine would turn out to be a permanent awakening to the American land and people and what binds us [Main Street], at depth.

This phase of realization entailed profound psychic change, which unfolded contiguously to my fanatical immersion in and devotion to art life, which itself came on like a flash flood, avalanche or meteor shower, capsizing me, swamping me, plundering the good boy persona I’d cultivated in high school. Now, I was living a nutty version of Art School Confidential, chasing muses, visiting hundreds of galleries and dozens of museums, partying and painting day and night, doing shows, readings, screenings — and scrambling to maintain a decent GPA, call home at least once and shield my parents from any fallout my misadventures generated. I imagined I was discovering who I might really be meant to be. A new self-image was materializing, with serious implications for my future, my life path. In the immortal words of the Allman Brothers, (I had decided) I was born a ramblin’ man, and began concocting a lineal argument, quasi-factual, to support that contention. The rationale was circular: I inherited a potent predilection to wander (genetic defense); I behaved the way I did because of an impossible-to-resist-or-deny desire to wander, which was the result of a) peer pressure, b) acculturation, c) drugs and alcohol, d) bad parenting, e) bad society, etc., etc., etc. In short, nothing was my fault, if I got in.trouble for any of the wild child stunts I pulled, which, again, was happening more and more often, becoming more of a chore to hide, with serious consequences attaching. In reality, the friction could be chalked up to my reticence to embrace being and becoming 1) a 20th Century American artist/writer/thinker, 2) an alcoholic, and 3) Free, a true, pure Road Man, without knowing how to do it, or what any of “it” was , or what “it” meant, or that that was really what I attempting. I can’t help but admire my youthful audacity and pity my alcoholic denial, willfulness and ignorance. Instead, I did what any liberal arts-trained fellow when faced with an intractable metaphysical dilemma would do. I pantomimed a scientific method of self-discovery. For example: I prospectively charted my Urge to Road (U2R) as a clinician might chart a disease: the U2R became pronounced when I turned 18 and left home for college. U2R started to manifest in modest weekend sojourns, then fall (to Colorado) and spring breaks (Oregon), and a couple of awesome late summer weeks in California, then sophomore year… Twelve action-packed months later, I was progressing toward an epiphany. …Like that. {The text would benefit from a fancy graphic here; data visualization; Cartesian planes… Ed} Needless to say, authority figures and loved ones were becoming concerned by my passionate disintegration.

PLATES

Gallery 1

[Description: Samples from the California Car Culture print folio (circa 2007)]

Gallery 2

[Description: Samples from WP Last Rites FUNerAll Road Trip (2009), LA2WV]