There is a mom and pop restaurant on Main Street of a little town. The kind of hometown diner where all the town has breakfast. It was the kind of place like the hotel diner in Tampa where I shoveled in ham and eggs, hash-browns and grits with OJ, coffee, white toast and jelly after my 5:30 AM to noon shift on the Tampa Tribune in the early '60s. I liked those real restaurants on real streets in the days before the McGrease burgers and plastic pizza joints multiplied like rodents across the American landscape on the new red highways instead of the blue ones where the people lived. If Robert Frank had photographed a movie of his trip or Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady had had a good director we could see the models for all our cross-country journeys as they slide over the land on chromium wings and an American flag tankful of money.
There are good ol' boys hanging out in that diner and they are, deep down in their collective souls, not so good as we would have liked. We, my wife and I, made that cross-America jaunt in '69 in a sad T-bird from Brooklyn with orange and green dash lights. In the West Texas panhandle we stopped at one of those glass-front Mom and Pops where I wanted my eggs over light, my grits and coffee just in case all that speed for crossing the country bleary-eyed wasn't enough to keep my eyes open. I learned my driving and my speed from an old truck driver before I decided I really was a college-boy boy and not a permanent truck driver. But there in Texas on a fine morning we got out of that New York-plated T-bird and I looked in that diner with my long hair and black beard and I could tell that this was not the place for us — better dead-hungry than dead-dead. Those good ol' cowboys came to the window to see the New York hippies. Peter and Dennis think the world is warm and fuzzy and Jack thinks that he is a hometown boy, just from another hometown, and those mistakes cost dearly.
Article comments
1 - Howard Dratch
Now that this is an Editors' Pick , I have to berate myself for one horrible error. Peter Fonda's father did not act in It's A Wonderful Life. That was Jimmy Stewart and I should have been awake and thinking instead of playing the keyboard and dreaming of old days -- good and not.
2 - SHARK
Nice piece.
I had one major problem with the movie: implying that America's PROBLEM could be simplified/symbolized by a couple of rednecks in a pickup truck was sort of a WASTED opportunity --
although I also had a scary confrontation (as a longhair [on the road] at a small cafe in Amarillo, Texas).
What's funny is: nowadays, many small-town texas cowboys have long hair and a meth lab out behind the barn. My, how things change!
Also note: a few years ago, AmericanExpress had a commercial featuring Peter Fonda; at the end, it showed, "Member since 1965" or some-such early date -- which means our counter-culture socialist anarchist dope-smoking "hero" was carrying a friggin' American Express card at the height of the revolution!
: )