Enchanted Mesa, New Mexico
(first posted 10/8-2013) “About those car deliveries that you do,” my friend Tom said. “How would you like to take me and Marilyn with you on the next one?”
His full name was Thomas M. Disch, and he was a writer and a poet. His friend was Marilyn Hacker, and she was also a poet (eventually, she became a famous one). I had doubts about going coast-to-coast with a couple of poets, especially because they said they would be writing poetry collaboratively along the way. That didn’t exactly sound like a fun road trip. Also, Marilyn could not share the driving, because she had never learned to drive. But I always find it hard to say no. So I said, “Yes.”
Tom Disch and Charles Platt
This time the car was a Caribbean Blue 1969 Chevelle Malibu hardtop, which we picked up from a multistory garage in Manhattan in May, 1970. Tom drove us out of the New York metropolitan area while I sat beside him trying to give directions from an inadequate map. He was the kind of driver who goes around corners in a series of straight lines, and panics easily. When confronted with a pedestrian stepping onto a crosswalk or a traffic signal turning red, he would jam his foot on the brake and vent a shrill, high-pitched “Oh!” while all the loose stuff in the car slid onto the floor.
After an obligatory Howard Johnson’s roadside dinner in Pennsylvania, Tom suggested that since none of us wanted to see the eastern states, he could continue driving till around 5AM while I slept on the rear seat, after which we’d trade places. I duly passed out in the back, but woke abruptly a couple of hours later, sensing that something was–different. Then I realized that the car wasn’t moving.
Heavy rain was hammering the windshield and the roof. “Where the hell are we?” I asked.
“Interstate 80,” said Tom.
I peered through the side windows. “But you stopped in the fast lane!”
He gestured at the water pouring down the windshield. “Well, no one can possibly be driving in this.”
Tom was a very intelligent person. In fact he wrote a whole book, once, about intelligence. Common sense, however, was another matter. “Get this car onto the shoulder, immediately!” I yelled at him. He muttered and grumbled but did as I asked. Moments later a huge truck roared over the section of asphalt where we had been parked before I woke up.
My traveling companions wrote what they called “stochastic sonnets.” These had fourteen lines in iambic pentameter (the kind of thing that Shakespeare used to write), except that Tom and Marilyn had a modern experimental approach, using chance to create unexpected and sometimes comical juxtapositions. They wrote alternate lines, without revealing what they were writing. They just told each other the grammatical structure. For many miles I sat listening to one poet saying to the other something like, “I have a noun, a transitive verb in the present tense, but no object. Your turn!”
This was really irritating, but I have never enjoyed being a minority of one, so I gave in and asked to participate. After I struggled through my first collaboration with Marilyn, she and Tom praised it in the manner of scientists who were surprised that a chimpanzee could do sign language.
The random combinations of lines had mixed results, but because we were all looking at the same scenery, the poems did contain consistent imagery, in their inimitable fashion. As in, “Jasper and agate, quartz and porphyry / Assault Tom’s senses as he drives the car.” Or, “The baby horses on the barren soil / left beer cans and used condoms by the curb.”
Then there was, “The volatile aroma of Gulftane / Burned all the clotted bird shit off the hood,” memorializing the higher-octane version of Gulf gasoline.
Las Vegas 1970 The Stardust
And after Tom and Marilyn stayed up all night in Las Vegas with the help of substances that I declined to share, they wrote: “Fleeing Nevada slightly wired on speed / The car tires fried upon the Interstate.”
Las Vegas Strip 1970
Marilyn said she liked the poems so much, she would self-publish them in a limited edition of 900 signed copies. There would be 300 for each of us. The booklet would be called “Highway Sandwiches,” which had been a roadside sign that we saw, but was also a sly reference to the way in which the verses were co-written.
For the cover, I sketched a picture of my view from the car’s passenger seat. Marilyn made the photocopies, and forty years later, Highway Sandwiches has become a collectible item. Inscribed, it sells for $50 or more. I feel a bit stupid for having thrown away most of my copies, but who knew?
Thomas Disch, Marilyn Hacker, Charles Platt 1970
Marilyn won a National Book Award a few years after our road trip, and now has an impressive Wikipedia entry. Tom is in Wikipedia too, but he developed a lot of health problems and ended up taking his own life in 2008. Funny how things work out; he might have died a lot earlier, along with myself and Marilyn, if he hadn’t moved our Chevelle out of the fast lane on that night in the Pennsylvania rain storm.
Sounds like you had a very lucky escape, I see examples of incompetent driving everyday but sheer stupidity is fairly rare most offenders only do it once.
Heyy, you have a wiki entry too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Platt_(author)
Pretty cool, but what’s even cooler is that the sandals in the photo also appear in the sketch!
Great story, and those poems are hysterical. We may have to try that on our next family road trip, right up there with mad libs.
I was heading west through Dallas once around 11 at night and was in the right lane of I-30 coming to a sweeping bend a mile or so before the big interchange, on some impulse I moved to the middle lane when I normally always stay to the right. Just 5 seconds later there was a dark vehicle stopped in the right lane without flashers or lights. The guardrail hid them from any far-off line of sight as well ’cause I was in my Karmann Ghia and they towered over the side of the road. There’s no way I would have seen them in time to brake down from 65 mph.
I’ve learned to listen to my instincts and inner voice on the road, they’ve saved my life more than once.
Common sense isn’t so common anymore.
These articles are making me want to do a road trip!
Thank you Charles another excellent read.
Dude: this is the most far-out thing I’ve ever read here!
Dude: Thanks! What more can I say?
Another great read. It’s a good thing I wasn’t there, I would have argued for “Powerglide Poetry” for the title. Highway Sandwiches is better.
You have some great stories. Keep them coming!
This car is a somewhat rare bird – and has some of its own oddities.
Four door Chevelles were pretty rare as hardtops. As a Malibu hardtop with AC, this was a high end Chevelle, yet it has dog dish caps and black walls. You have to wonder about the decision process dealers went through when placing orders.
These Malibus were attractive cars for the most part, but the side trim always seemed incomplete. I think it’s a lack of wheel lip moldings in a year when virtually any middleing car and up had them.
Years of empirical observation has led to believe that Manhattanites and other NYCers had a higher take rate on dog dishes than other regions-likely due to the likelihood of anything fancier being stolen-also people who live there tend to view cars more as appliances.
GM and Ford tended to be pretty good about dealer inventory cars being optioned in a way that most people would buy them.
Chrysler was the one that had oddly optioned cars, and one of the big reasons was the Sales Bank. In an effort to keep the assembly lines going towards the end of the model year, they would just slap whatever options were left in a haphazard way, then the cars would sit in the Sales Bank lots until the dealers would buy them when Chrysler would drop the prices just to clear them out.
Poets are indeed dangerous people! Thanks for a great story.
Stochastic poetry. I get it. In printing, the term stochastic refers to variably-sized dots used to create an image, as opposed to identically-sized dots used in photographic halftones. Seurat’s pointillism would probably be considered stochastic, more so for shape than size.
I like the pseudo Fear and Loathing style cover artwork.
Reminds my of my experimental theater days in Iowa City in the early seventies; big arts scene there at the time, never mind the Writer’s Workshop. I lived in house with a couple of poets, one of which, Alan Kornblum, went on to found a little press still going in Minneapolis. Crazy and fun times….
Great stories! I’m really liking these.
Two comments on driving.
1) I remember Tom’s terrified and terrifying “oh” when about to kill us from behind the wheel. Once, northern England, he, me, Mike Moorcock, and at least one other: awoke to find him driving the wrong way down a divided highway. Oh!
2) tried to teach Marilyn Hacker how to drive in London, early 1970s, a few years after HIGHWAY SANDWICHES. We crashed into a parked Morris Minor and did a bunk.
Thanx for this. I didn’t know Tom well; met him once and hung out on his ENDZONE blog, which is still taking comments like his GHOST SHIP poem although he’s checked out long ago. He was a great guy who had a tough life; Brian Aldiss said he “never learned to thrive.” I wish he was here commenting instead of me.
It’s been at least 30 years since I’ve driven in a downpour hard enough for people to pull over. Are wipers better, are people more reckless, or do I just drive much less in summer? Or is it
global warmingclimate change?It would annoy me when people would keep driving slowly with their blinkers on, but I can also remember some puny driving lights disappearing in the rain.
Poets. I remember a friend back in the 70s who described himself as a poet. He felt that was his occupation, not that he was ever published or made a nickle off it. Nice guy, not dumb, but not wise in the ways of the world either. I could see him stopping in place because of rain.
Speaking of rain, I am one of the last to pull over in heavy rain, but I have at times. Last time might have been in ’07 on vacation heading thru New Mexico and Arizona, you know, desert states. But those occasions are so rare for me I regard it as nothing more than random.
Pulling over in heavy rain is still a wise idea when visibility drops way down, not on the shoulder though ! OFF the road as idiots often come blasting along at 75 + MPH confident that because they can’t _see_ anything, there isn’t anything to fear .
Those Las Vegas pictures remind me of the strip in the summer of 1969 .
I liked Malibus, the Chevelle was an up market trim option .
I had two base models, one, the 1968 post sedan was only a Malibu and I stupidly wrecked it .
-Nate
Wonderful stories. I’m reminded of a fun game to play with friends or strangers at a party: prepare strips of paper, perhaps 1″ x 11″, and pencils. A subject is proposed, participants write the first three or four words of a sentence, fold under the first two or three words so they aren’t visible, and pass to the right (or the left, depending on whether you’re an attendant or a driver ?). The game proceeds, each participant adding three or four words and leaving one showing. When everyone has run out of paper (using both side of the strip, perhaps), the resulting sentences are read in turn. Hilarity ensues. Rinse and repeat.