TransporterUSA
Categorized in: Travelogues
Some of you might have seen a film or two from this piece of work— the story of a highly versatile, athletic and professional driver who pledges to transport The Package from point A to point B, no matter what. Starring fighter and actor Jason Statham. Let’s see how yours truly measures up.
Buff ‘n scruff, real rough — 3 out of 5. Mostly scruff, somewhat buff, occasionally rough, mostly on the outside.
Martial artist; superlative close-quarter fighting skills — 2 out of 5. Does being a master of epigrams count?
Saturnine effects — 5 out of 5. The Transporter can gloom it up with the best of them and outserious seriousness itself. Yes, The Transporter is the strong, silent type.
Sparse hair on head, tending toward baldness — 1 out of 5. Full head of hair so far. The Transporter prefers not to feed rumors of negligible thinning up front.
Vanity aside, for the duration of the working week that starts right this minute [July 15, 2015 — DL] I will assume the guise, identity and persona of The Transporter as I drive cross-country to deliver The Package. As befits the task, at my disposal I will have a brand new sports vehicle. In the larger-than-life film, The Transporter drives an expansive black sedan. In real life, The Transporter pilots a lithe white convertible. Tight and right, as the saying goes, with the wind in the hair. Still got the four rings just below the hood, and a helluva growling beast under it.
As he gets ready to roll from an undisclosed location on the outskirts of New J̶a̶c̶k̶ York City, The Transporter is shown here wearing characteristic NYC black and fad-resistant polarized eyewear; i.e. incognito. Design majors, note the lovely chiaroscuro effects created by the classic B&W combination and finessed lighting. Next stop — Philadelphia, where, belying the stereotype of a bad-ass driving, ass-kicking, fist-first lifestyle, The Transporter will seek to feed his finer sensibilities, i.e. replenish the coffers of his sensitive artistic soul by visiting a landmark building, the first of a trio designed by favorite architect Louis Kahn that The Transporter plans to take in firsthand before reaching his californific destination. All while delivering The Package, of course.
Wishing The Transporter — all together now — ‘Bon Voyage!’ as he sets out on his assignment spanning this great and loving land, we are naturally put in mind of W. H. Auden’s words:
“God bless the U.S.A. — so large, so friendly, and so rich.”
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Past noon on the first day, The Transporter rolls into Philadelphia. The air outside is at 97 degrees (F), in stark contrast to the 37-degree (C) blood coursing through our driver’s veins. In the non-historic part of downtown, his attention is immediately monopolized by a woman so compact and bouncy so as to look like a junior high school basketball player, with funky light-gray braids turned up and toward the back, the entire top row of teeth missing from fang to fang inclusive, unfurling an unmitigated stream of intense vicissitudinal complaint at someone seemingly across the street, but, sadly, also across an unbridgeable perceptive divide. Unshaken, but stirred to seek a balancing shot of great architecture, he leaves the car in a safe place and enters the UPenn campus on foot.
The Richards Medical Research Laboratories sneaks up on him, as if an extension of the old-school 18th- and 19-century brick buildings serving as pathology labs and other places where divine design is studied on the cutting edge. Others before him have presented the building more convincingly, in the black & white era, and yet in a picture of his own he manages to capture two parked and locked bicycles guarding the main entrance, rising up like the standard stallions rearing up on top of colonnades. Green transportation, yes, but no match for The Transporter’s white steed, which will whisk him to his next planned stop: the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
An energetic supervisor of parking attendants wearing blue and, incongruously, a big smile, asks: “You delivering something to California? Why don’t you pick me up a classic 1979 Mercedes, pearl green, for my wife, for our 45th wedding anniversary?” His minions call him “that little blue thing” behind his back. All of him barely looks older than 45. The Transporter treads carefully, just in case; this may be a trap. The Package must be delivered safely, fast, and with minimal tangential activity. He gets into the car and speeds southwest.
That night, deep in the Shenandoah Valley, he stays in a safe house built by a former seafarer who took boards from his ship and built them into the edifice, and took a young bride from a southern port and installed her in a new home inland. The caretaker, instructed by HQ to be helpfully informative and discreet, offers in the way of architectural details that there were three fireplaces around the chimney stack, near the entrance; the stairs and doorways were wide and women in hoop skirts descended from their rooms on the second floor and danced merrily around the fireplaces, dress hems swinging. The Transporter imagines comely lasses dancing off the staircase and ‘round the fireplaces 130 years ago, wishes he were back in that perhaps more beautiful, if no less brutal time.
Out back, on the next knoll, there is a cemetery where 200 Confederate soldiers are buried.
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The true nature of a Mexican joint that looks suspiciously like a hole in the wall of a West Virginia gas station is revealed when The Transporter sees that its full name is “Pupuseria & Mexican Restaurant”. He suspects that that first word is misspelled, but chooses not to dwell on such small details.
In the meantime, local radio exhorts listeners to “Let The Lord rain down on you!”
Speaking of manna, apart from his daily bread and chocolate, The Transporter is fueled exclusively by pristine, organically-sourced, Fair Trade, high-purity coconut milk, stored at practically subzero temperatures in a white cooler inside the similarly white vehicle transporting him inexorably westward. He drinks it at gas stations, in the car, anywhere but at restaurants. His crucial mission may not be compromised by even a smidgen of risk stemming from eating food contaminated by the stares and vapors, and otherwise immediate presence, of others. After all, of all the sins against public decorum, eating in public (and counting money in the open) surely must be the worst. Indeed, it is not clear why public eateries exist, since it is always awkward to watch others eat, and even more indigestion-inducing to eat in front of others. Handling cash afterwards is also low-class. But, as a gourmand of a friend says, I digest.
West Virginia, wild and wonderful, as its license plates say, rolls by, topsy hill after turvy dale. At the first Waffle House just past the Kentucky border, a gloom-radiating woman with gout, lipedema and a bouquet of old-age conditions waiting for that extra order of bacon and third Coke with lots of ice to come out and show themselves, is called ‘baby girl’ by the waitress — levels more endearing in its disregard for physical reality than the ‘honey’ with which a diner waitress on the Eastern seaboard would’ve anointed such a client, or any client. Her companion, a man of a rough sort of 60, with a shriveled body and a swollen face marked by the dying gleam of once-piercing steel-blue eyes; also a Rudolph-red nose; allows the same waitress to call him ‘darlin’ ’ and ‘tame’ to his face. If she were a bourbon, that waitress, I reckon she’d be an inexpensive 8-year-old, served neat.
One thing about Kentucky — the grass is always bluer here. I’d like to come back some time and horse around on it.
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If you’re ever in Little Rock, Arkansas, try 90.5 FM, an excellent classical station. Make sure to have it on when you’re in front of the W. Jefferson Airplane Clinton Biblioteca Presidenciál, looking at this guy:
Now, everyone remembers what Bubba Clinton is most famous for: “depends on what the meaning of the word is is” — spoken like a true lawyer, although sounding somehow wrong. Well, if wrong is what you’re after, here’s a gem from a radio announcer in southwest Arkansas:
“If you’re in the market for a kind of animalistic friend or family member, we urge you to come in and open your heart to the possibilities.”
In case you’re wondering, they had too many puppies and kittens at a local shelter and wanted people to come in and take them—to have and to hold; and not, say, to cook and to eat. Because, man — the possibilities…
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Let us try to glean as much meaning from this second-long video of an Arkansas highway as we can. Interpretations, anyone?
As the white-hooded convertible growls contentedly, the Transporter is put in mind of what was driving this entire enterprise — and not just in the mechanical sense — the internal combustion engine. He remembers an acupuncturist telling him after taking his pulse: “Outside — you calm; inside — like a volcano!” Which is to say that he’s driven — surely a desirable state for a transporter. He wonders how much mileage one can obtain from harnessing this constant volcanic eruption. He meditates on how this sort of control can transport one.
As he rolls quixotically through dusk-took northwest Texas, The Transporter happens upon a field of giants:
And when he sees the lighted sign “Variouse lanes will be” and nothing else, The Transporter knows it’s time to stop for the night, in order to contemplate the variousness of lanes in life available for the taking.
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The howl inherent in the pall of the Texas plains at twilight is well evoked by Dobrinka Tabakova’s Concerto for Cello and Strings, which just happens to be on the radio as The Transporter caught the sunset 75 miles from Post, Texas, where he lays his weary head down for the night at a roadside motel run by immigrants from Gujarat, naturally.
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The largest clouds between Tatum and Roswell, New Mexico are like titanic fists of vapor, stark and cartoonish in their thrusting relief; Dali-worthy.
The ones closer to the horizon are in pastels, with fringes that Murillo would have been proud of and Michelangelo would have been borderline satisfied with, as he was with everything he wasn’t outright furious about.
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Before stopping for the night in Las Cruces, NM, traveling west on I-70, at 80-some miles per hour I passed a sign reading ‘White Sands National Monument’. I slowed down and kept going for half a mile, but something made me turn around. A good thing, too. It was the sunset hour. Driving a mile into the national park, past the place where you pay $3 to the two rangers in the guard booth, you see the asphalt turn white. Another three miles on this path brings you to a land of dunes — great white dunes set against mountains blue from the angle of the light and a pastel sky burning in the west with the sunset, filtered through laminae of heat and dust and clouds. And the clouds over these dunes of gypsum sands are creatures of pure light, shorn of heft, filled with nothing but air and a sort of purity of existence. They simply are. These clouds don’t seem at all painted, yet if there could be a picture of heaven, of a clarity and beauty at the level of Revelation, of G-d communicating with the world via light and its cousin, color, it would probably look like this:
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In Bylas, AZ — a spot on the map skewered by Interstate 70, and a civic entity consisting mostly of a mini-market, post office and restaurant surrounded by acres of utter, sun-bleached destitution — in the mini-market I am approached by a wiry man in his mid-forties and asked: “Do you play football?”
I hesitate.
“Not really” I say, “but I do play soccer on occasion.”
The man livens up. “Yeah, of course, man. That’s what I meant — FOOTball!” He cringes: “Not that bullshit the Americans play!”
“Oh” I say, “because most people…” “Well, anyway, yeah –”
“Reason why I asked”, the man gushes “is because I saw your shoes.” I’m wearing a pair of Adidas indoor soccer cleats. They are an intense shade of turquoise, with white stripes on the sides and quilted argyle stitching up front. Hard to miss, for sure.
We strike up a conversation. The man, who is about 5'7" and slight, in a loose white T-shirt and shorts, has skin the color of burnt caramel and small glistening olives for eyes. He volunteers that he’s an Apache. I tell him that I want to stop by Oak Flat, the sacred Apache land that Rio Tinto, the British-Australian conglomerate famous for roughnecking and even offing locals at mining sites around the world, wants reclassified as private land, so it could extract 500 tons of copper from it, leaving a wasteland behind. (I first find out about it the night before.) He says that, as a non-Indian, I might not be able to enter, and starts asking everyone in sight about it. He turns left and right, looking for the right person; his eyes light up; he’s a bit of a busybody.
“Hey, brother!” he hollers at a sloth-like young man approaching us as we stand outside the minimarket. The man’s got a lazy eye and a manner to match it.
“Hey, brother!” Now he’s approaching the man, who finally grunts something in return. “Do you know if they allow non-natives on Indian land?”
The sloth-man looks at him with suspicion. A few seconds pass.
“I’m Apache” the soccer-playing Indian says, hoping to break through the other’s reluctance to talk inside stuff with an outsider.
There’s a pause.
“I’m Navajo” the other man says and looks ahead, moving on.
After asking a couple of more people, we arrive at the understanding I had originally, which is that Oak Flat is in a public park, and therefore accessible to anyone, even “some white guy” as he refers to me casually. I want to tell him that even though I’m not a Native American, I arrived in this country during my own lifetime and involuntarily. I want to explain that my ancestors had nothing to do with the denigration and decimation of Indians on their own land, to reassure him that I stand with the cause. Instead, being driven by a deadline, I thank him for his help and drive on, toward Oak Flat.
“It’s past Globe and before Superior” I am told as I wave and say good-bye again.
I find the campsite empty, although it’s clear that someone had been there very recently and will return soon. A small family with a preteen sets up camp to the side. I hike up along a trail, climb a rock and survey the Apaches’ sacred land.
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After 6.5 European days and 3 400 US miles, The Transporter finally makes his californific destination.
He is shown arriving at balmy Marina del Rey @+73 degrees F (23 C), after having traversed the southern Arizona desert @+112 degrees F (44 C). (Face not shown/altered / footage made grainy for security purposes.)
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It’s not a coincidence that the work of Raymond Chandler — the quintessential master of pre- and post-war LA noir — still rings true in terms of the feel of today’s LA, not least because it is written in the first person. This town is all about ego. You can see it in the preening, tanned young and not-so-young things on the avenues and boulevards parallel to the beaches, in the shiny, expensive cars everywhere, with tuned Porsches a dime a dozen, BMWs like dirt under your feet, if LA had any dirt under your feet, and Maseratis outnumbering Chevys.
The weather is a dream, and so in places you still have neon signs dating back to Chandler’s times, with “sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad” hiding behind them.
Some more relevant quotes from Chandler’s ‘The Little Sister’, which I read while staying in Los Angeles: “I turned west on Sunset and swallowed myself up in three lanes of race-track drivers who were pushing their mounts hard to get nowhere and do nothing.” “…a blaze of light. The terrace was packed. The parking lot was like ants on a piece of overripe fruit.” In the near-lying mountains: “There was the odor of wild sage, the acrid tang of eucalyptus, and the quiet smell of dust.”
“We’ve got the big money, the sharpshooters, the percentage of workers, the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit — and Cleveland… the riffraff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup. Out in the fancy suburbs Dad is reading the sports page in front of the picture window, with his shoes off, thinking he’s high class because he has a three-car garage. Mom is in front of her princess dresser trying to paint the suitcases out from under her eyes. And Junior is clamped onto the telephone calling up a succession of high school girls that talk pigeon [sic] English and carry contraceptives in their make-up kit.”
“It is the same in all big cities, amigo.”
“Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood — and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail-order city. Everything in the catalog you can get better somewhere else.”
“You are bitter tonight, amigo.”
And then, of course, there is this one line which, if it was the only worthwhile thing in the book, would still make it worthwhile to read the whole thing, just to find it: “the great fat solid Pacific trudging in to shore like a scrub-woman going home”. And that’s the thing about the so-called Pacific Ocean — the name for the thing is a bitter joke, an off-hand, throw-away remark worthy of Philip Marlowe at his most cynical and tired, since everyone knows that there’s nothing peaceful at all about this fat, solid mass of water.
As an old film critic said once about Sunset Boulevard, a film about opportunism and exploitation and wishful thinking and appearances in Hollywood — a remark that can be stretched to all of LA: “It looks more real today than it did back then: less gothic, less melodramatic, less flamboyant.”
To this New Yorker, for all its real and non-melodramatic non-flamboyance, LA felt very much like a place about which you’d say “there is no there there”. Or is that just how they make it seem? Is it the sun? Is it all part of the plan?
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The Transporter — over and out. Till we meet again, amigos.
This travel journal written in mid-July 2015.
