America the More or Less Beautiful
Mayer, Milton
AMERICA the more or less beautiful by MILTON MAYER T have crossed this country, or this J- here country, a hundred times, or a thousand, in every which direction and by every kind of common...
...You don't have to talk, or listen, or look...
...now he sleeps in the same bed every night, no matter how far he has traveled...
...The cars, usually one person to a car, went by me at a million miles an hour...
...People seem to be beginning to un-enjoy putting out $3.95 or $4.95 for a dollar dinner...
...Without the action Nevada would be abandoned to the gypsum plants and the indomitable Basque shepherds and end-of-the-roaders spawned by the people who didn't make it to the end of the road...
...everybody in North Platte doubtless knows, and the paper isn't published for outside agitators...
...It isn't just in Nevada that the Company has taken over and stamped its implacable stamp on the place and the people...
...Ham and eggs —scrambled...
...Not on the road to Reno...
...They went so slow that they could hardly help stopping to pick you up...
...America is a great country—they're all great countries—but it isn't settled yet...
...Doesn't look as if it ever will be now...
...A big change, when Americans don't know what to think about their country or their kids...
...So you waited until you got to Nevada to eat, and you still had the dollar left over...
...Got to keep Your Tax Dollars at Work: "Rest Area —State Funds $15,000...
...The air of hilarity is down...
...A big change, when people tell strangers that they're against the wartime government...
...A couple of years ago I stood outside Modesto, California, on the freeway, trying to hitch a ride to the coast...
...Reno for Fun," where, the book says, there are six times as many marriages as divorces, was always squalid and is getting squalider fast...
...Maybe the governor came from there, or from twenty miles west of there...
...Castle, the President of the McDonald State Bank, will receive a free meal from Tucker's Restaurant and a free tie from J. M. McDonald's...
...You could fix the driver with your doloriferous eye, and he, in turn, could give you the double-O as he passed you and stop a few feet up ahead if you looked (as I took care to) like a nice boy...
...No more, nevermore do you see the country or talk to the people...
...But it isn't Vietnam and nothing else...
...Land of plenty of land to waste and lay waste and put prodigality into the national bones...
...Baby, knowing better than to ask if they had bulk tea in the house, asked the waitress if the tea-bag could be put in the pot before the hot water...
...it's hard to believe that there are schools and grocery stores and dentists' offices and funeral parlors and babies in Reno, but I suppose there are...
...You wake up in a Cheyenne motel room and you think you're in Chattanooga...
...But it's bad, too, when such fervor as there is in a society is against something...
...Where it is still a little like that—Iowa, for instance—is where the political stability is, too...
...Germans, Swedes, Dutch...
...at least less carefree spending for them...
...The motel is the ultimate triumph of impenetrability...
...In all of them the AP and UPI dispatches refer to whoever opposes Ky (whoever Ky is) simply as "Communists," to make it easy for North Platte, Omaha, and Cleveland...
...His most recent book, "What Can a Man Do?," includes numerous articles originally published in The Progressive...
...No more, nevermore...
...America is Vietnam, all right...
...The traveling salesman used to complain about having to sleep in a different bed every night...
...AMERICA the more or less beautiful by MILTON MAYER T have crossed this country, or this J- here country, a hundred times, or a thousand, in every which direction and by every kind of common conveyance except the surfboard...
...Before I could tell them about Vietnam, they told me...
...Well, that's a little something...
...Then I asked him how many of them win...
...It's the first time since the Russian Revolution that the Red Menace hasn't "taken...
...It's J. Y. Castle Day in North Platte...
...But the action, a nickel at a time, is barely enough as it is to keep Nevada from falling off the map...
...Me, too...
...A big change, when Americans don't know what to say about gooks and niggers and beatniks...
...Illinois' "Here I Rest" ought to have "But Not for Long" tagged on to it, and California's "I Have Found It...
...An earlier book, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45," was recently republished as a paperback by the University of Chicago Press...
...You can walk in, and walk around, and walk out with your eyes shut...
...The Omaha riots are the world of the Omaha World-Herald and the Cleveland Plain Dealer deals plain pictures of the Cleveland riots...
...and on the way home I saw a beaver working like a beaver on a tree beside a pond...
...And a state university (where, I suppose, they have teaching machines that take nickels, dimes, quarters, and silver dollars...
...Just about beginning to get settled back there, when the tin lizzie rooted it up again...
...50, 75, or 85 cents for a hamburger with an even bigger bun and an even smaller "patty...
...why Garden City, Kansas, I couldn't imagine then, and I can't imagine now...
...By and by, you'll never care...
...Twenty-six minutes to evacuate North Platte or New York...
...You got to see the country, or at least look at it, and smell it and taste it and hear it...
...Joe McCarthy wouldn't know the old place...
...Fat chance...
...America is supposed to be where everybody stands united—for what?—and politics ends at the water's edge...
...all the integrated ads on TV, on the billboards, in the newspapers and magazines, self-consciously saying that what the well-dressed woman is wearing (or scouring or hair-dressing with) is what she's wearing (or scouring or hair-dressing with) whether she's white or black—unheard of, or, rather, unseen, two years ago, or even one...
...But she's a foreigner, and he's a foreigner, and he charged us an un-American $30...
...It's plenty bitter in Nevada in the wintertime when the fun is over, and plenty bitter in the summer when the fun is on...
...Not a peep out of the barflies from start to finish or after the finish...
...At the cast iron Holiday Inn in Grand Island, Nebraska, there's a sign saying to notify the management if you want to move the TV set because it's connected to the burglar alarm...
...No movable lamp lest you steal it (along with the TV set) or else no lamp cord long enough...
...Get out of the dustbowl and bite the dust at the bottom of the deep blue sea...
...The dollar used to come and go easy, because you could eat cheap in Nevada, where all they wanted was to get you inside...
...You'll never know...
...and the other day I was walking along a high-speed highway south of Brattle-boro, Vermont, and a truck with a No Riders sign on it passed me and stopped and backed all the way up and the driver asked me if I needed a lift...
...The heap broke down at Milepost 371, smack at the Milepost, near Rochester...
...Then Baby and I get steamed up and take a dollar apiece out of the food kitty and have fun and get out of Nevada...
...Got to pay 15, 20, 25 cents for a cup of coffee...
...no identification on the truck or the crates...
...Brother Schrodt, a German, was just about the only American we got to talk to from one coast to the other except for three truckers at a Wyoming truck stop, one from Bekins in Seattle and two from Lyon Van in San Berdoo (San Bernardino on the map...
...same doge's lamps, same sanitized king-and-queen sanitation ; same hand-wrought-by-the-million fixtures, which some fellow-Kilroy, trying to hang on to his sanity, has tried, with success, to pull out of the wall...
...We got into Willoughby, Ohio, late and got hooked for a $13 catacomb (plus tax) with a candle-lit restaurant with wall-to-wall carpet and wall-to-wall people...
...Same plastic-and-formica furniture, won't scratch, burn, mar...
...Less spending for Fun, for new cars, new houses, new boats...
...You got to talk to people, of whom there weren't so many...
...Who lives where his folks lived...
...Then you pass a truck on the upgrade, the biggest truck you ever saw, loaded with slatted crates of bomb casings, westbound, whence, whither...
...We're not staying anyway...
...A big, undreamed-of change, Americans bewildered...
...and the third, a twenty-year Army man, that nobody he knew was for it...
...Same as North Platte: If It Doesn't Happen around Here, It Doesn't Really Happen...
...Changes galore, big changes...
...The bar was well lined at eventide in Elkhart, Indiana...
...Now the Nevada prices are the same as they are everywhere else, and the habit's got us...
...The really big gambling money, which doesn't come out of the machines or away from the tables, goes back where it came from —to the eastern hoods who own the joints under delirious disguises like the XYZ Company...
...One of them said it was a shame when you had to be ashamed of your own country...
...so long ago was an American expected to use his feet for shoe-trees...
...I asked the bald man at the gas station in Battle Mountain if he was permanent there—of course he was—and he said he couldn't get enough together to be anything else...
...But she said she was sorry, too...
...On the return trip you know you're in Cheyenne because you've learned that the ice cubes are square in Chattanooga and round in Cheyenne...
...People-processing in the homogenized society...
...The soulful corporation provides the facade and the decor, and the boss, like the busboy, is a hard-pushed hired hand bucking for a few cents more an hour...
...It doesn't say what for, or whether there's a connection between the McDonald State Bank and J. M. McDonald's...
...And another billboard on your right: "Fun Jets—Los Angeles—Las Vegas—Reno...
...The stucco Wedding Chapels on Fourth Street are falling apart, a crumbling contribution to the world's cathedral architecture...
...U. S. Department of Commerce Highway Program $220,000...
...Mobility jerrybuilt it, and there's more mobility all the time...
...The whine and hum of the highway outside the soundproof motel unit conspires with the grind and the roar of the trucks to drown out the whirr of the air-conditioner that controls you instead of you it...
...As you come turning along the Truckee River into town from Winne-mucca, where the Safeway Supermarket has a row of slot machines, there's a billboard with a big flag on it and the legend, "Save Our Republic—Impeach Earl Warren," and on your left a trailer slum called Happy Valley (which turns out, on a raid a week later, to have been a multiple portable bordello...
...If I were his wife I'd leave him...
...K. Ames' little old-timey butter-and-egg store in Northampton, Massachusetts, turns out, in small print, to be a part of the Kennedy Butter-and-Egg Chain, and what ever became of K. Ames...
...Vegas has taken the play away, two hundred miles closer to Los Angeles, where the people live who need the fun the most...
...After two hours or so a jalopy with two migrant workers came tea-kettling along and took me into Gilroy, where I got a lift in a pickup truck from a fellow who recognized me...
...same plastic drapes, same plastic management, same plastic guests, same concrete floor, same concrete patio, same concrete television program...
...The independent American at last, without the inconvenience of either self-reliance or reliance...
...I could see the air conditioner in the front window and the clothes hung on hangers in the back...
...The waitress said that the only thing they had was instant tea...
...Ninety-five per cent," he said...
...And away you go, sealed in your car, grooved on the freeway, and, at the end of the day, locked in your "unit...
...A great state to travel by night, Nevada...
...There isn't anything in Nevada, not even in California, unsightlier than the big New England towns, the mills abandoned, the village green faced on four sides with red-brick "blocks" converted to gimcrack store-fronts below and left to the loft-rats above...
...Bernd was supposed to go out with his wife that night...
...Long, low rumble of bewildered discontent across the land, all of it focused on Washington...
...Freeway half the way between Chicago and San Francisco—Your Tax Dollars at Work—and more in September than there had been in June...
...who in his right mind would quit when he'd put ten nickels (or dimes, or quarters, or silver dollars) in and the bells all ring and ten come cascading out...
...Automobiles went twenty to twenty-five to thirty miles an hour (with an occasional wild man, on that Garden City stretch, doing forty...
...Guess I'll Move On...
...Then I asked him how many of the permanents played the slots...
...Indications getting more insistent that the bloom is off the boom...
...Vietnam—here's how we were winning there today, folks—was followed by the evening's race riots and the peace demonstrators trying to keep Vice President Humphrey from talking...
...Fill 'er up...
...In the driest interior of the country the Navy makes its recruiting pitch with Burma-Shave-type signs...
...Instead he worked on the heap all night, and all day Saturday, and Saturday night, when he was supposed to go out with his wife again...
...Soulless people, trying to keep body together...
...another that his boy was thinking of emigrating and so was he...
...Minimum speed 40, maximum 10,000...
...That's a big change...
...There were only twenty miles of macadam between the outskirts of Chicago and Los Angeles that summer, all twenty of them in one piece running west from Garden City, Kansas...
...They all lose," he said...
...Vietnam is nowhere near Page One in the small-town papers and there are no editorials on the war...
...You buy the local paper to see if you can't locate the American pulse, and sure enough...
...Got to build and crash a $600,000,000 bomber—yep, $600,000,000...
...They look like losers, too, working at Harrah's Club ("For Fun") or at Harold's Club ("For More Fun...
...At Howard Johnson's (which is on the New York Stock Exchange) they no longer put free matches out on the counter...
...Only where unimaginative people stay put, or used to stay put, is there self-imposed order, uncontrived, unimaginative beauty...
...America is where two of those three truckers have sons in college, something that couldn't happen anywhere else in the West...
...The summer of my sixteenth birthday, when I ran away from home, or pretended to, I even walked, and got hove into jail in La Junta, Colorado, not for running away from home, but for walking...
...I looked like a nice man...
...America is where, of a sudden, the downtown streets of the cities are crowded with Negroes with purchasing power and the confidence to go downtown and use it—or withhold it...
...everything's open around the clock...
...Thruway all the way between Chicago and the East, spelled (unless it's spelled "turnpike") "thruway," so don't be a perfessor of English...
...No mechanics—it was Friday night—until we found Bernd Schrodt, just over from Germany...
...Apathy has become the property of the pro-war faction, whose pro-war morale consists of their saying that v/e have to back up our boys...
...Across the road something is being built—another motel, or a church, or a gas station, or an emplacement for another one of Big Brother's Direct Early Warning Stations...
...We didn't see a Negro, not one, in a motel along the way both ways, but we saw MILTON MAYER is a staff member of the English department at the University of Massachusetts...
...to strangers, who became friends when you went into the ditch or your tire went boom or your radiator boiled or you couldn't walk any further in the Mojave Desert in July...
...So I figure there's a little life in the old land yet...
...Where the action is, and where it isn't beautiful, is Nevada...
...Big changes across the country...
...Whose children live where he does...
...The people who peddle the fun don't have it...
...Every time Baby and I cross Nevada we watch the fun-lovers playing the Generous Slots until they've lost everything they have to lose, or more, after the tantalizing little wins...
...Two dollars is too much for fun, though a fellow might lay out that much for happiness...
...Last summer the companion of my sorrows—at the wheel...
...Property of U. S. Government—Keep Out...
...That's good, you say...
...The girl at the register explained that the Company efficiency experts ordered them not to...
...A beautiful country, some of it...
...Magic Fingers—a quarter in the machine by the bed— jiggle you if you aren't up to jiggling yourself...
...we divide the labor, she driving and I looking at the scenery—and I did the round trip coast-to-coast, in our old four-cylinder, mile-high microbus...
...first time since the Spanish-American War...
...A beautiful country, too—they're all beautiful countries—but it isn't getting any more beautiful and it doesn't look as if it ever will...
...It cost us $22.75 (plus a $3 service charge) to be towed into town...
...Going into the beautiful Donner Pass on the eastern slope of the Sierras a "don't-litter-$100-fine" sign and alongside, on the beautiful river, a beautiful car dump...
...A big change...
...I climbed aboard and watched the barflies watching the news on the swivel TV...
...Not all of them...
...You depended on people, and they on you in the same fix or its prospect...
...No need to, no time to, no chance to...
...In Chicago we saw a man behind the counter of a North Side motel, and when we got to a South Side motel a half hour later, looking for a cheaper "unit," we saw the same darned man behind the counter there, and he explained that he works for "the outfit that owns all these places along here...
...Gimme a room...
Vol. 30 • November 1966 • No. 11
