There’s a strong whiff of the dumbass coming out of Texas lately. The directions are printed right there on the soles of the damn’ boots, yet nobody in authority can pour the piss out of them.
Maybe it’s frozen.
But not everyone in the Lone Star State is all hat and no cattle. For instance, there’s Steve Earle, and there’s also Steve Earle talking about the literary qualities of Willie Nelson, which is even better.
Some of us want to hit the road; others are compelled to.
I’ve been both over the years, rambling from Maine to Spokane and Bisbee to Bellingham, occasionally by thumb, a time or two by bus, but most often behind the wheel of a Japanese pickup truck with a camper shell and all the fixin’s for a bit of home away from home.
Trucks with beds and friends with couches saw me through my rambling, gambling years, as I rolled the dice with one newspaper after another. I eventually came up winners by leaving the business altogether.
Marrying well didn’t hurt, either.
And while I have kipped in the beds of trucks since, I have done so as a tourist, not an honest-to-Steinbeck nomad like the people in Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book “Nomadland,” which has been reimagined by Chloé Zhao as a fictionalized film set to debut Feb. 19 on Hulu.
It’s challenging to make a go of it when your house has wheels. Finding a spot to camp, a shower, or an unguarded Internet connection is a lot like that job of work you don’t have anymore. It’s a whole lot easier when you’re only doing it for funsies and can splurge on an occasional visit to Starbucks or Holiday Inn Express.
The people in “Nomadland” are not posers. They swallowed their fears, and their pride, and jumped into that endless asphalt river.
And speaking of jumps, it’s time for another great leap forward … into the latest episode of Radio Free Dogpatch.
His latest is about wearing the mask, something he was doing long before The Bug® came calling. When he’s not writing, editing, or wrangling his teenage son, Hal runs a jackass ranch, which means moving large quantities of hay around and about. Seems it helps to have something covering your face-holes to keep them from clogging up tighter than a bull’s butt in fly time.
In fact, everything I know about masks I have learned from hay. I’ve gotta figure over the years I’ve moved more than a quarter-million tons of the stuff by hand, and have eaten my share of dust, mold, pollen, fungi, actual grass and alfalfa, and no doubt been exposed to salmonella, tularemia and hantavirus in the process. At some point I started wearing a bandana, and then along came the face/neck gaiters. I’ve not moved any serious amount of hay without one since.
I mostly move serious amounts of words, which is easier on the snotlocker, and the lower back, too. Although I’ve thought on occasion while penning something particularly outrageous that wearing a catcher’s mask might be smart.
S. Clay Wilson made Robert Crumb look like Charles M. Schultz.
Captain Pissgums and his Pervert Pirates. The Checkered Demon and Star-Eyed Stella. Ruby the Dyke. Dude didn’t push the envelope, he lit it up and pissed it out.
I was a fiend for underground cartoons in their heyday, and still am, now that I think of it. My personal fave is Gilbert Shelton, probably because he paid at least as much attention to being funny as to being controversial.
There was R. Crumb, of course. And Bobby London, Vaughn Bodē, Spain Rodriguez, Rand Holmes, Dan O’Neill, Dave Sheridan, Skip Williamson, Jay Lynch, Greg Irons, Robert Williams … shit, the list goes on and on and on. Many were outrageous, and quite a few were funny, too.
But Wilson was out there, all by himself. Even Crumb knew it, and he could punch the squares’ buttons as well as anyone.
Interviewed in the early 1990s for The Comics Journal by the underground-comics aficionado Bob Levin, Mr. Wilson called comics “a great visual art form,” adding, “Primarily, I’m trying to show that you can draw anything you want.”
I took a page from Wilson’s book once, drawing a vile caricature of myself doing something unspeakable and faxing it to a publisher who had wronged me, as publishers are wont to do. I don’t recall whether the act achieved my purpose, but at that particular moment I felt that I could draw anything I wanted.
S. Clay Wilson died Sunday in San Francisco. He was 79.
Surprise, surprise, hey? The guy whose Motel 6 of choice used to be a Toyota pickup with a six-foot bed and a topper wants to see a movie about people who live in their vehicles.
Well, for your information, wiseguys, I read the book of the same name, by Jessica Bruder, and it was excellent. And furthermore, I would watch a flick about paint drying if Frances McDermond were in it.
So, yeah. You can find me with a big box of popcorn in front of the TV on Feb. 19 when “Nomadland” comes to Hulu. But queueing up for a gig at Amazon’s new fulfillment center on the west side? Not this old rubber tramp.
Remember, I read the book. Anyway, I don’t have a Toyota pickup anymore.
