My Red Stallion

When I was a child, growing up in Southern California - and that’s Southern, with a capital S.  Not just lower case.  It was a reality all its own.  (Still is, to some extent.  But a dark version of the earlier one.) - and specifically the coastal town of Long Beach (where I am now; back, in the closing stages of my last, fourscore and a bit days on this earth, and in this dimension; for all I really know) - I had a red bicycle.  It took me wherever I wanted to go.  And my trusty steed and I  went to a lot of places, in my reality of the time.  Not just to school and back.  But to the larger school, of my surroundings.

And especially to the local public library.  (Which took me to all sorts of places as well.)  Over on a main drag from downtown Long Beach all the way up, for all I knew, to L.A., miles and miles away, like on the edge of a matrix that I was living in, to me.  That matrix would extend further afield to, and for, me when I grew further up, and could drive my mom’s car up into the mountains north and east of our L.A. County basin; but for the many halcyon years of my growing-up days - my Red Period; as opposed to De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period, say - it was off somewhere in the vicinity of L.A.; and the magical place of Hollywood, where they made the movies and Saturday midday serials that kept us kids captured for years and years.   

This, you may not readily understand, was before TV.  That reality changer didn’t come into my life, or the lives of the people around me, until 1949, when I was in the 9th grade.  I remember our first TV set well.  The large radio (and there were days to savor; but to move on) in our front room gave way to an even bigger console with a very small screen; but big enough, to extend my reality.  First to the likes of wrestling from the Long Beach Auditorium (with the announcer’s signature ‘Whoa-o-o-o Nellie!’ at some major move by the likes of Gorgeous George, with his mane of white hair, and hair curlers, that he threw to his adoring fans), and Mike Stokey’s ‘Pantomime Quiz,’ featuring mostly minor Hollywood celebrities playing charades (a major fixture on the show being the impeccable character actor Hans Conried).*  Hollywood at its ‘best’.  Before it turned to its ideological worst.  Oh - and a major event, in those early days of ‘the box’: the long drawn-out saga (a real-life version of the former Saturday serials at the movie theaters) of The Kathy Fiscus ‘Story’, where a small girl had fallen down a deep well while playing in a vacant lot, and the rescue attempt and its coverage live went on for days, 24/7, including drilling a well alongside the one that she was trapped at the bottom of, in an attempt to tunnel over and through to rescue her.  A gripping drama with, unfortunately, a sad ending.  But TV at its finest.

And then we would change the channel - just like that - and be entertained with miles and miles of Westerns.  Gunsmoke.  Rawhide.  Wagon Train.  Have Gun - Will Travel.  Wanted - Dead Or Alive.  Bonanza.  Bat Masterson…   

Until TV turned into the”vast wasteland” of Westerns (and ‘excessive violence and frivolity’) that JFK’s chairman of the FCC  characterized it as some years later (Newton Minow, for you oldies; remember him/that??), which caused a stir big enough for the Big Three - CBS, NBC, ABC (that’s all it was in those days) - to alter their offerings somewhat.  But the heyday of Westerns on TV was great stuff, as far as I was concerned.        

And then 'they' killed JFK. 

In cold blood.

In plain sight.

And I woke up from the dream, that we had all been living our lives in.

The dream world.  Of such fantasies as there being a Truth behind the whole shooting match.  Not just the philosophy - the reality - of By Any Means Necessary.  Whatever It Takes, to accomplish your ends.  Lie, cheat, steal.  

Kill…      

I don’t want to be like a turd hanging on for dear life to the only Body that it has ever known, to keep from being flushed down the toilet into the Unknown.  No; I want, rather, to be like -

well; like 

a red bicycle.  Capable of going wherever in its reality it wants to go.

With its Master.  

Ah…And to get back to the local public library, for a moment, before I leave the scene, of my halcyonic  childhood years.  It took me to all sorts of places as well.  To the country of My Friend Flicka.  Of Lassie.  (Before the TV show.)  White Fang.  And as I grew older: Two Years Before the Mast.  Giants in the Earth.  The humor of H. Allen Smith.  The Citadel.  But wait - not to leave the early years too soon, grow up too quickly.  What adventures!  Finding footprints in the sand with Robinson Crusoe; and poof - I was there.  And riding the waves of desert sand with Lawrence of Arabia, and poof - I was there.

And then they killed Kennedy.

And I woke up from the dream world.

And have never looked back.

Except in such moments as this.

Nostalgia.  In my waning days in the waning sun.

Memories.  

Of the likes of the days when it was just me and my trusty red steed.

Well.  My red bicycle.

There was nothing - nothing - like those days.

But - 

Who knows.

(The Shadow knows…)

—

* You should have seen him with Jayne Mansfield, trying to pass a grapefruit to each other under their chins, in hijinks between charade sessions…

   …and his presentation that got his team to realize he was pantomiming the ditty ‘What a wonderful bird is the pelican,/Whose beak can hold more than his bellycan’. Priceless.