The White Album (13 page)

2

The scene is quite near the end of Roger Corman
’s
1966
The Wild Angels,
which was the first and in many ways the classic exploitation bike movie
.
Here it is: the Angels, led by Peter Fonda, are about to bury one of their number
.
They have already torn up the chapel, beaten and gagged the preacher, and held a wake, during which the dead man’s girl was raped on the altar and the corpse itself, propped up on a bench in full biker colors, dark goggles over the eyes and a marijuana cigarette between the Hps, was made an object of necrophilia
.
Now they stand at the grave, and, uncertain how to mark the moment, Peter Fonda shrugs
.
“Nothing to say,” he says
.

What we have here is an obligatory bike-movie moment, the oudaw-hero embracing man’s fate: I tell you about it only to suggest the particular mood of these pictures
.
Many of them are extraordinarily beautiful in their instinct for the real look of the American West, for the faded banners fluttering over abandoned gas stations and for the bleached streets of desert towns
.
These are the movies known to the trade as “programmers,” and very few adults have ever seen one
.
Most of them are made for less than $200,ooo
.
They are shown in New York only occasionally
.
Yet for several years bike movies have constituted a kind of underground folk literature for adolescents, have located an audience and fabricated a myth to exac
tly
express that audience’s every inchoate resentment, every yearning for the extreme exhilaration of death
.
To die violen
tly
is “righteous,” a flash
.
To keep on living, as Peter Fonda points out in
The Wild Angels,
is just to keep on paying rent
.
A successful bike movie is a perfect Rorschach of its audience
.

I saw nine of them recently, saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook
.
I saw
Hell’s Angels on Wheels
and
Hell’s Angels ‘g
.
I saw
Run Angel Run
and
The Glory Stompers
and
The Losers
.
I saw
The Wild Angels,
I saw
Violent Angels,
I saw
The Savage Seven
and I saw
The Cycle Savages
.
I was not even sure why I kept going
.
To have seen one bike movie is to have seen them all, so meticulously observed are the rituals of getting the bikers out of town and onto the highway, of “making a run,” of terrorizing the innocent “citizens” and fencing with the Highway Patrol and, finally, meeting death in a blaze, usually quite a literal blaze, of romantic fatalism
.
There is always that instant in which the outlaw leader stands revealed as existential hero
.
There is always that “perverse” sequence in which the bikers batter at some psychic sound barrier, degrade the widow, violate the virgin, defile the rose and the cross alike, break on through to the other side and find, once there, “nothing to say
.
”
The brutal images glaze the eye
.
The senseless insouciance of all the characters in a world of routine stompings and casual death takes on a logic better left unplumbed
.

I suppose I kept going to these movies because there on the screen was some news I was not getting from
The NewYork Times
.
I began to think I was seeing ideograms of the future
.
To watch a bike movie is finally to apprehend the extent to which the toleration of small irritations is no longer a trait much admired in America, the extent to which a nonexistent frustration threshold is seen not as psychopathic but as a “right
.
”
A biker is goaded on the job about the swastika on his jacket, so he picks up a wrench, threatens the foreman, and later describes the situation as one in which the foreman “got uptight
.
”
A biker runs an old man off the road: the old man was “in the way,” and his subsequent death is construed as further “hassling
.
”
A nurse happens into a hospital room where a biker beats her unconscious and rapes her: that she later talks to the police is made to seem a betrayal, evidence only of some female hysteria, vindictiveness, sexual deprivation
.
Any girl who “acts dumb” deserves what she gets, and what she gets is beaten and turned out from the group
.
Anything less than instant service in a restaurant constitutes intolerable provocation, or “hassling”: tear the place apart, leave the owner for dead, gangbang the waitress
.
Rev up the Harleys and ride
.

To imagine the audience for whom these sentiments are tailored, maybe you need to have sat
in a lot of drive-ins yourself,
to have gone to school with boys who majored in shop and worked in gas stations and later held them up
.
Bike movies are made for all these children of vague “hill” stock who grow up absurd in the West and Southwest, children whose whole lives are an obscure grudge against a world they think they never made
.
These children are, increasingly, everywhere, and their style is that of an entire generation
.

3

Palms, Ca
li
fornia, is a part of Los Angeles through which many people drive on their way from 20th Century-Fox to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and vice versa
.
It is an area largely unnoticed by those who drive
through
it, an invisible prairie of stucco bungalows and two-story “units,” and I mention it at all only because it is in Palms that a young woman named Dallas Beardsley lives
.
Dallas Beardsley has spent all of her twenty-two years on this invisible underside of the Los Angeles fabric, living with her mother in places like Palms and Inglewood and Westchester: she went to Airport Junior High School, out near Los Angeles International Airport, and to Westchester High School, where she did not go out with boys but did try out for cheerleader
.
She remembers not being chosen cheerleader as her “biggest discouragement
.
”
After that she decided to become an actress, and one morning in October of 1968 she bought the fifth page of
Daily Variety
for an advertisement which read in part: “There is no one like me in the world
.
I’m going to be a movie star
.
”

It seemed an anachronistic ambition, wanting to be a movie star; girls were not supposed to want that in 1968
.
They were supposed to want only to perfect their
karma,
to give and get what were called good vibrations and to renounce personal ambition as an ego game
.
They were supposed to know that wanting things leads in general to grief, and that wanting to be a movie star leads in particular to U
.
C
.
L
.
A
.
Neuropsychiatric
.
Such are our conventions
.
But here was Dallas Beardsley, telling the world what she wanted for $50 down and $35 a month on an eight-month contract with
Variety
.
I’m going to be a movie star
.

I called Dallas, and one hot afternoon we drove around the Hollywood hills and talked
.
Dallas had long blond hair and a sundress and she was concerned about a run in her stocking and she did not hesitate when I asked what it meant to be a movie star
.
“It means being known all over the world,” she said
.
“And bringing my family a bunch of presents on Christmas Day, you know, like carloads, and putting them by the tree
.
And it means happiness, and living by the ocean in a huge house
.
”
She paused
.
“But being
known
.
It’s important to me to be
known!’That
morning she had seen an agent, and she was pleased because he had said that his decision not to handle her was “nothing personal
.
”
“The big agents are nice,” she said
.
“They answer letters, they return your calls
.
It’s the little ones who re nasty
.
But I understand, I really do
.
”
Dallas believes that all people, even agents, are “basically good inside,” and that “when they hurt you, it’s because they’ve been hurt themselves, and anyway maybe God means for you to be hurt, so some beautiful thing can happen later
.
”
Dallas attends the Unity Church in Culver City, the general thrust of which is that everything works out for the best, and she described herself as “pretty religious” and “politically less on the liberal side than most actors
.
”

Her dedication to the future is undiluted
.
The jobs she takes to support herself—she has been a Kelly Girl, and worked in restaurants—do not intrude upon her ambitions
.
She does not go out to parties or on dates
.
“I work till six-thirty, then I have a dance lesson, then I rehearse at the workshop—when would I have time? Anyway I’m not interested in that
.
”
As I drove home that day through the somnolent back streets of Hollywood I had the distinct sense that everyone I knew had some fever which had not yet infected the invisible city
.
In the invisible city girls were still disappointed at not being chosen cheerleader
.
In the invisible city girls still got discovered at Schwab’s and later met their true loves at the Mocambo or theTroc, still dreamed of big houses by the ocean and carloads of presents by the Christmas tree, still prayed to be known
.

4

Another part of the invisible city
.

“Speaking for myself,” the young woman said, “in this seven months since I been on the program it’s been real good
.
I was strictly a Gardena player, low-ball
.
I’d play in the nighttime after
I got my children to bed, and of course I never got home before five
a
.
m
.
,
and my problem was, I couldn’t sleep then, I’d replay every hand, so the next day I’d be, you know, tired
.
Irritable
.
With the children
.
”

Her tone was that of someone who had adapted her mode of public address from analgesic commercials, but she was not exac
tly
selling a product
.
She was making a “confession” at a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous: nine o’clock on a winter evening in a neighborhood clubhouse in Gardena, California
.
Gardena is the draw-poker capital of Los Angeles County (no stud, no alcoholic beverages, clubs closed between five
a
.
m
.
and nine
a
.
m
.
and all day on Christmas Day), and the proximity of the poker clubs hung over this meeting like a paraphysical substance, almost as palpable as the American flag, the portraits of Washington and Lincoln, and the table laid by the Refreshments Committee
.
There it was, just around the corner, the action, and here in this overheated room were forty people, shifting uneasily on folding chairs and blinking against the cigarette smoke, who craved it
.
“I never made this Gardena meeting before,” one of them said, “for one simple reason only, which is I break out in a cold sweat every time I pass Gardena on the freeway even, but I’m here tonight because every night I make a meeting is a night I don’t place a bet, which with the help of God and you people is 1,223 nights now
.
”
Another: “I started out for a Canoga Park meeting and turned around on the freeway, that was last Wednesday, I ended up in Gardena and now I’m on the verge of divorce again
.
”
And a third: “I didn’t lose no fortune, but I lost all the money I could get my hands on, it began in the Marine Corps, I met a lot of pigeons in Vietnam, I was making easy money and it was, you might say, this period in my life that, uh, led to my downfall
.
”
This last speaker was a young man who said that he had done OK in mechanical drawing at Van Nuys High School
.
He wore his hair in a sharp 1951 ducktail
.
He was, like Dallas Beardsley, twenty-two years old
.
Tell me the name of the elected representative from the invisible city
.