Flim Flam Man


When I was doing a lot of hypnosis work I found that the dreams were indeed the royal road to the unconscious, and I began to remember other people's dreams from months or even a year or two back. I would say, "Now do you see what that dream meant?" And I'd get this puzzled look because he, or she, had forgotten it.

It was my profession when I was young to walk into any situation and turn it into about twelve pages of lively copy with a beginning, a middle and an end. Or if there was a hole in the magazine I could pull a humor piece out of my ass that everybody who opened the magazine would read, because everybody likes humor.

I write about psychology because my current focus is on seeing, and the language of psychology is just a way of creating a pattern, or separating something from everything else so I can see it.

"What do you mean by that?"

"I don't know. It sounded cool."

"It sounded obscure. Are you a flim flam man?"

"Among other things."

Nor do I live in or have anything to do with Ash Fork other than I like the name, and it carries with it a symbolism of the World Tree, and also of the divining stick. It's where I turn onto the Interstate when I leave Prescott and where I turn off to come home. It's also where I helped an old woman move a stove one time when I was passing through.

I was with a buddy who was the photographer. He was a free lancer and it was good fortune for him to find a staff writer who was a friend, and would ask for him to work jobs instead of taking the staff photographer. I liked working with him because he and I could come back from a trip with three stories when we had been sent out for one. He made more money and I satisfied something inside me that wanted to demonstrate how good I was at turning just about anything into a human interest piece. So we were always just looking for something we could get involved with.

This old woman was standing in front of her house with this stove and she asked if we could help her, and of course it became a story, a symbolic event that showed Ash Fork in microcosm. After that I had a picture of Ash Fork from the east toward the west, where the streets divide and run up starboard and down port. It always seemed like a beached ship to me because of the way it was shaped. There are other highway towns like that, because before the Interstate was built the highway wouldn't have even considered not passing through town.

That was what it was for, to link up the towns. But then the Interstates came in and they were not to link up the towns, but to move troops and equipment around the country in an emergency situation. So as often as not the Interstate does run through town, but is sort of like royalty sweeping through on the way to the coast. There are exits. There are on ramps. Some towns, like Seligman, get passed by so that they have to lure people off the highway with the promise that there's something unique about the town.

Seligman is like a piece of artwork set out there on the desert. That area of Route 66 is familiar to me because it's where I came of age, graduating from high school in Kingman. I knew the pachucos, the Indian guys who came in from Peach Springs, the rancher kids, the kid with bleached hair that came from San Diego and almost got killed for not looking like the rest of us. My friend Ray and I rescued him and got across the cattle guard to Ray's ranch, which was defensible property.

The image that remains in my mind about Kingman is the City Cafe, where I would meet my friends, and the train tracks I crossed to get there. I smoked Pall Malls and drank coffee and worked in a service station, pumping gas and breaking down tires to fix flats, oil and lube. And always there were the cars from someplace unknown to me, but I knew it was a different world. I wanted to see it, and the way out of town was the recruitment office.

And then a few years later I had been through the Navy and the University, and I came back with my tape recorder and notebooks and sometimes my cameras, because I could do my own photography if I had to. I was a photographer before I was a writer. I remember being in Kingman for a recruitment fair, and of course the military was the main recruiter. What sticks in my mind was a little girl with a balloon walking with her father. She said, "Don't you want to pop my balloon?"

The man said, "No, sweetheart, I wouldn't do that."

The girl said, "Yea, but don't you want to?"

That night I was drinking a beer in a local bar and a woman sat beside me and we talked. She said, "There's nobody like you in this town."

I thought, "I used to live in this town." It felt strange to be back with an expense account, being paid to write stories from my point of view. Just across the railroad tracks was the trailer park where I had lived. This side of it was the little house where my girlfriend lived. Her brother was my friend, and we used to practice with a bullwhip and shoot pistols.

One time he was practicing fast draw in front of a full length mirror. On the other side of the wall, behind the mirror, was the bathtub. His mother was taking a bath. He drew and ... fired ...

It was loaded. The round went through the mirror and the wall and parted his mom's hair. He was lucky he didn't kill her. The first time I kissed his sister she pretended to slip while walking uphill and she fell back into me. She turned her face toward me, just like in the movies. I'd been to the movies, too.

Now it's just another town on the highway, and I'm processing the images as artwork, reflecting an earlier time ... in some way they are processing ... and I walk around now mulling over which elements to keep and accentuate, which elements are for a different story.

The guy who lived there is long gone. There's an older man; he lets go of personal history as he shifts his allegiance to the abstract. And if examination makes the life worth living, mine gets sweeter all the time.

Posted: Sun - August 26, 2007 at 09:41 PM