Prologue — Dreams of Route 66
July of 2001 would be the cruelest month breathing life into the summer of my discontent. The thesis plunged into the shallow recesses of my brain — my country is a land full of sellouts, corporate created meals and sad, trapped people working jobs to get by. Hell, not even a year ago the majority of the interior of the country voted a mildly retarded Vlasic dill pickle into the presidency. I could see all the people who sided with the murderers of Matthew Sheppard — born again Christians with crosses folded into the crooks of their armpits, holy water sweating from their pores, and John Q. Public of the Biblebelt who’s forever concerned with “Da E-con-o-my” walking into the voting booth and pulling the lever moving every dial, cog, number and wheel in the machine strictly to the right. If you get pregnant, keep that baby inside or we’ll blow-up your doctor. Mexicans, stay out! Not one person ever considered a vote in that booth for George Bush was a vote to turn The United States of America into America Inc., with every money-making opportunity sewn up for only those with cash in hand.
Even Kerouac, with his expansive trips from ocean to ocean in the 50’s found that his country was full of working stiffs who couldn’t dream the American Dream anymore. His only solace in the whole novel On the Road was jazz music and a nice Mexican girl he’d met in California, who lived in a shack. What color was her American Dream? Shanty brown? What did all her hard work earn her? How good was she in the sack? If I weren’t an angry man I wouldn’t blame his generation — The Baby-boomers. To this day they celebrate themselves as a counter-culture who changed the world. Even Dennis “Easy Rider” Hopper uses VW vans and tie-dyes to sell American Express financial services. The truth is, a mighty few were called to arms in the Hippie Revolution, with the majority of 60’s youth having their pricks pulled tighter behind their legs by old fools who couldn’t understand Eisenhower’s warning of the Military Industrial Complex.
I spent the winter months of 2001 buying books about the highways of the U.S. I became fascinated with Route 66 (that’s root, not raut). This was the Mother Road — the Main Street of America — commissioned in 1926 out of the Federal Highway Act of 1921. The route connected Chicago, Illinois to Los Angeles, California. Route 66 took travelers from the center of America to the west coast bringing people through a sociological warp. Not only did the geography itself change but the people along her changed — their wants, their way of life, their culture all inspired by the land, old traditions (the way we’ve ALWAYS done things). Americans always head west. West holds the promise of prosperity and hope, an open, virgin, untamed land waiting to be fucked. As Americans headed west it was God, man and earth working together to create unique opportunities to make money. This is the way we’ve always done things in America, selling our hopes and dreams to any available buyer for the right price. Some of us are successful while others hoard the cash they make waiting for the one big deal giving them financial security, which means another 50 years stocking fruit at the chain supermarket.
I was like one of those hippie doofuses on LSD who somehow transform a Hefty cinch sack full of coffee grounds, shiny lecithin-coated egg shells and cans of B&M baked beans into a lost piece of Pablo Picasso’s art. The myth, fantasy and lore of the old road pried its way into my thoughts. It was all hallucination. I wanted to wander Route 66 in search of life, exciting times and stories to tell for years that I could repeat over and over and not have someone tell me, “Oh, you’ve already told me that,” when they know they’ve heard it but can’t remember it and don’t want to hear it again. I wanted to talk about the kitschy pink motels and huge plaster statues of snow-white lumberjacks holding giant hot dogs. The visions popped into my head — all the books showed photos of motels built in the 1950’s, popular icons I had seen before but couldn’t place, open roads with songs of the past leaking out of the cracks in the concrete — get yours kicks....
I felt as though all the books were brochures of what I would see. By the time I started surfing the Internet and joined the National Route 66 Federation, I was ready for the trip of a lifetime. I could only do this trip for a first time once — the next time, in 2005, would be a follow-up study. I hoped my dreams, along with the dreams of the Joads, could be found on America’s Main Street — there’d always be something more compelling a few more miles down the road.
‘Main Street’ is a concept to hold and study right down to the etymology of the word and the number of dots per inch it would take to print those words on a piece of paper. Every town, burgh, city, had a Main Street. Even if it wasn’t particularly named Main it was a street that was Mainly for something. Town Halls, churches, libraries, courts, schools, grocery stores, restaurants, hardware stores, pharmacies, parks and clothing stores are all found on your main street. The smaller the town the more concentrated the Main Street, like a can of frozen OJ. It was the main place to go to get everything you needed — Jones Street, Washington Street, 3rd Street, all were places to live, but a Main Street, you couldn’t live without.
The first Main Street I think of is in my hometown — a little suburb of a suburb of a suburb called Southington, Connecticut. The images held in my mind from childhood came first (Don’t we remember everything better as children?). Oxley’s Drug Store with their small luncheonette serving fat chilidogs; the Town Hall where our town council held meetings. The police department with it’s huge black globes of light on either side of the door with the word “POLICE” inscribed and lit in yellow. This was the Main Street I remember. But time passes so quickly from youth to the life of an adult — no one ever tells you as you grow up how life becomes more about “have to” as you get older. All you hear is, “Just you wait. You’ll see how good you have it now.” Gas, electric, Scott toilet paper, Crest tooth paste, Right Guard deodorant, Ajax bath cleanser, Clorox bleach, a Rubbermaid drying rack for the dishes, a broom, GE light bulbs, tampons, aspirin, heart medication — do people like paying for this? These things are the key to adulthood — accepting all the have-tos we can’t see as children and being able to cope and not climb the steeple of a church and send down a rain of bullets onto our neighbors as they walk around in their miserable have-to lives.
The Main Street of my childhood became a series of boarded up buildings in the early to mid 1990s. The luncheonette of Oxley’s Drug was absent of any type of cooking equipment and had its white Formica countertop, burned with hot pots of coffee and stained a pumpkin orange with the plastic-melting acids of the sacred chili, strewn about with consigned goods such as Macintosh computers from the early ‘80s, stereos with record players and eight-track cassettes, tape recorders with no plugs and battery receptors oxidized by the acid from batteries removed five years after they died.
The windows of Oxley’s were covered with faux mink coats and dresses dried with the sweat from when they were last worn at the Hall of Fame lounge where “Boogie Oogie Oogie” was the number one hit that week. The shelves where dusty bottles of Aqua Velva and English Leather once stood were filled with dishes that had no more than one complete place setting, white fluted bud vases you buy in the gift shop at hospitals and wooden salad bowls.
And then, a revival came. Local business people pried the boards off the turn-of-the-century buildings and turned them into coffee shops and comic book stores. Who needs a locally owned men’s clothing store when you can go to the mall and get the same thing everyone else is wearing? The businesses went from necessity to leisure. No more hardware store, you go to Home Depot for that. And God knows it’s better to do business with 16 year-old cashiers who get paid the 1970’s minimum wage and don’t know the difference between a nail and a door knob instead of a carpenter who’s set up a shop to help the do-it-yourselfers.
The town green on Main Street, in front of Oxley’s, has a gazebo and monuments to people and events no one cares about anymore. A time capsule sits there full of Southingtonia from the 1980s. The town hall is a typical municipal building of the 1950s — the interior walls made of white painted cement blocks and offices with wood paneling. It’s drab, emotionless and cold. The old police department was converted into other city offices and the police moved to another part of town — they are no longer on the main street. The bars, of course, were still open — patronized every night by the same crowd.
These thoughts threw a wrench, five screwdrivers and three hammers into the machinery of my Route 66 dreams. I can hear the dream breaking. The Main Street of America can’t be like my Main Street in Southington. Route 66 is alive with all the brimming life that a downtown could offer. The mid-west and southwest portions of Route 66 will open the closed parts of my brain and put back together a complete picture of my Main Street. Americans care about their history and their homes.
But then again, the same thing that birthed the Main Street is what gave life to Route 66. It was just a dirt road that one man made and was then followed by a few more and more and more, until finally they had to lay pavement because the dirt roads weren’t cutting it for the jalopies. Then, people needed places to rest, to get food, to visit, to distract them from the long drive to the west where the opportunities to create a better life were waiting. So many businesses opened on Route 66 were based on the needs of travelers. And now that the interstate highways diverted all that traffic, small town America started to die. The dreams that created Route 66 were the destructor of the same road.
But after traveling her beautiful roads for a few years, I’ve seen more and more Americans realizing the importance of learning from the past, and not just because they see a way to make a fast buck from tourism — these people have fallen in love with the history of the road, of America. And while those people aren’t many, their numbers are growing at horse-and-buggy pace, learning that to dream of Route 66 is to dream of all of life’s possibilities, not just about making money and screwing over the same person who subconsciously reminds you you’re not always alone.