Drive, he said
Andrei Codrescu takes the
wheel for the first time in Cadillac style
Review by
John Radanovich
Several years ago, a New York television producer listened to
a commentary by poet-“anarchist” Andrei Codrescu
on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" with
great interest. Codrescu, editor of Exquisite Corpse magazine,
might be called America's leading prophet of the offbeat and
kooky because he invariably manages to find the strangest aspects
of American society and renders his experiences with a mordant
wit and sarcasm—and in the accents of Count Dracula, another
native of Transylvania.
Codrescu's commentary on the night the producer
was listening concerned a dockside motel in Florida where the
guests are encouraged to fish out of the windows of their rooms.
An overweight couple, Codrescu said in his hilarious delivery,
had horrified him by battling a shark they had hooked, and reeling
it past his window.
This unusual personality was just what the producer
needed to lead a driving expedition—with a camera crew—to
the oddball corners of Florida and record what they found.
Expanded
to include other strange and interesting places across the country,
the trip was released as a film, "Road Scholar:
Coast to Coast Late in the Century," and most recently as
a book (with photographs by David Graham).
But when first approached
with the idea, Codrescu refused for the reason that he had never
learned to drive. Which was a good thing: The few times he had
been behind a wheel had nearly ended in tragedy. He prefers to
walk and take the bus (he is a professor at Louisiana State University
and for years has taken the Greyhound bus to class from his home
in New Orleans (presumably to listen in on interesting conversations).
An activity that, as he would put it, is practically a seditious
act in our automobile-worshipping society.
The book and movie, then,
had to begin with Codrescu's driving lessons in New Orleans. After
the cursory lessons and test, he and his nervous crew set out in
a red 1968 Cadillac convertible; he may be all too aware of the
tradition of the journey in western literature, but he wanted to
go in true, American road trip style. Mimicking some of Jack Kerouac's
movements, Codrescu set out across America in search of adventure,
experience and enlightenment.
He went first to New York to visit
beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the Statue of Liberty, and had dinner
at Sammy's Roumanian steak house (arguably one of the nuttiest
restaurants in the country, and right up Codrescu's alley) on the
Lower East Side of Manhattan. The travelers then made a quick pilgrimage
to the grave of Walt Whitman, an important influence on Kerouac,
Ginsberg and Codrescu himself, before zooming out into the American
night. What Codrescu found was some of the most unusual human scenery
possible.
The crew made stops in Detroit, Chicago, California and
other points West, for the most part looking up Codrescu's old
friends, junk artists, gun lovers and New Age dealers. In mock
epic form, Codrescu was transformed by everything he encountered,
and he also began to change into a "driving American" by giving
his automobile human characteristics. After visiting the Cadillac
plant in Detroit, he says, in the parking lot "where she
was born," he pilots the car that "glides past its
grandchildren with the grand air of a dowager."
In New Mexico a skeptical Codrescu underwent, for the cameras,
a "spiritual rebirthing," aided by his "mother," a
man named Foster. Codrescu's rebirth included a graphically imagined
ordeal of his actual birth. Like the original, it's painful.
But this time Codrescu decided he would be born wearing his black
moustache. "It's all right," his birthing coach said, "Mommy's
here! Mommy's here!" Codrescu noted this with his usual
sense of humor and says, "I am now at the point of the trip
when I am beginning to have serious doubts about the sanity of
any Americans, including myself."
The rest of the New Mexico section is filled with other stories
of crystal healers, soothsayers, religious shrines and converts,
and fortune tellers - such as the woman whose bedroom is visited
regularly by aliens, although Codrescu unhappily reports seeing
none. Codrescu found in Sun City, Ariz., a geriatric punk band
named One Foot in the Grave. Its members perform in black and
leather and T-shirts that advertise the funeral home business
owned by the singer (a chick in her 60s). He underwent "light
therapy" atop a mountain, witnessed a drive-in wedding in
Las Vegas, learned to shoot an automatic weapon from a former
Playboy bunny gun instructor who, for a fee, will teach either
in fatigues or in the nude. Typically, and for the experience
itself, Codrescu eagerly requested "nude" but the camera
crew voted him down for propriety's sake.
In Chicago, they found
a gospel church whose members worship while rollerskating. He
visited the original McDonalds, now a museum. "In America," Codrescu says, "we
don't need surrealist art. America is de facto surrealist."
All
the while Codrescu nosed his most American of automobiles into
the strange places of our country, he ruminated on the nature of
Americans, automobiles, and our aggressive technology.
David Graham's
photographs and hilarious captions and text by Codrescu give us
one of the funniest and most literate road-trip books around. And
although the book on its own is more than worthwhile, hearing the
movie narrated by Andrei Codrescu is really the biggest pleasure
of witnessing this wandering adventure across America.
©Times-Picayune
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