A standard line of the road: “I feel good, I can take it all the way …”
Dad might have said that to your mother on a middle-of-the-night summer highway ? back seat full of exhausted and cranky knuckleheads ? when she wanted to get a room.
In a 1971 film called “Two Lane Blacktop,” James Taylor says it at the wheel of a souped-up 1955 Chevy Bel Air. He’s not talking to Carly Simon, but to a guy who grew up on the spot in Hawthorne, Calif., visited in this space last week: Dennis Wilson.
Taylor plays “The Driver” and Wilson is billed as “The Mechanic.” A teenager named Laurie Bird ? who appeared in “Annie Hall,” and later jumped to her death from a window while living with Art Garfunkel ? plays an ingénue runaway known as “The Girl.”
Monte Hellman directed, the film bombed, and Esquire declared it its Movie of the Year in ’71.
The story lurches East on fat tires in a cross-country street race ? from Needles, Calif., to Washington, D.C. ? in which the loser forfeits his car. The challenger is played by the only actor in the film, the late Warren Oates driving a spanking new “Orbit Orange” GTO.
Along the path of old Route 66, we cruise Flagstaff, Santa Fe, Boswell, Oklahoma, parts of Arkansas and Memphis, Tenn.
Save for Boswell, I?ve been to all of those places: in a white 1989 Subaru wagon when the kids were in grade school; then in a blue ?99 Beetle with THE WHO license plates while selling my books out of the trunk; and most recently, in a white, 2006 Toyota pick-up with a carpeted camper shell on the back, my “See America First” bookmobile.
I won?t tell you what happens in “Blacktop” before the hot rods reach the nation?s capital. But I will tell you this: In 1959, my folks and my paternal grandparents drove with me from Baltimore to visit relatives in Chicago in Grandpop?s pale green 1955 Chevy Bel Air.
In the back seat was not a teenage runaway with a shag haircut and full, sulking lips but an aluminum pot of homemade tomato sauce and meatballs. No roadside cheeseburgers and milkshakes for that crowd.
“We brought good bread and made sandwiches the whole way,” remembered Mom. “I changed your diaper right on the back seat.”
Rafael Alvarez can be reached via [email protected]
