Welcome to the serialisation of the novel New Hope. The story of one young man's journey from the childhood traumas of family tragedy in post-war America, to his dreams of escape and adolescent awakening while living in a sleepy small town on the California coast. His time meandering along the coast of Big Sur, and his journey of discovery through an America itself going through the cultural and social upheaval of the burgeoning counter-culture movements of the late 50s and 60s. One man's attempt to make sense of the world, of life and of himself. Always knowing and believing, that in among all the turmoil and disillusionment that he would one day find New Hope.
New Hope: Part 1
Pismo Beach - 1957
I often wished I was Bugs Bunny, so that I too hadn’t taken that left at Albuquerque. Unfortunately I lived in Pismo Beach. I’d lived here as long as I could remember. Vague flashes of another time sometimes invaded my dreams. But in my waking moment, all I could remember was the dusty roads and weather beaten and sun bleached motel shacks. I was sat in that darkened movie theatre waiting to see an early showing of The Brain from Planet Arous, too old at seventeen, and too cool to take too much notice of the little kids cartoon they were playing before the main feature I’d come to see. It was, as it turned out, Bugs Bunny and his sometimes side-kick Daffy Duck in ‘Ali Baba Bunny’ unknowingly at the time, was the spark that inspired me to take that life changing wrong turn that this story is all about. I’d like to be able to say that it was reading Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’, released the same year as that damned cartoon that really inspired my moment of awakening. The truth was it was Bugs and that damned duck that did it for me. Bugs Bunny and his bad sense of direction, was the beginning of my journey. If a missed left turn at Albuquerque had sent Bugs on adventures way beyond the boredom and boardwalks of Pismo Beach, then that was the way it was to be for me too. I figured if I went from Pismo to Albuquerque, and hung a right, I’d soon find myself down which ever rabbit hole Bugs came from soon enough. Or if I went left would I end up in Ali Baba’s cave with the bunny and the duck. It was all too weird to contemplate.
Anyway, right left or indifferent, it was October 1957. I’d hit that not-really-anything age of seventeen just over two weeks previous, and was sat in the Pismo Beach movie theatre as a way of escaping from my Mom’s preparations for the 11th annual Pismo Beach Clam Festival. Mom was determined to win the clam chowder cook-off this year, so she’d paid me to get from under her feet while she had another one of her practice cook-offs. Which meant clam chowder again for dinner that evening. I was sick of the stuff. So it was that Saturday morning when I came downstairs to breakfast I walked into what looked like a sea-food war-zone. Pots, pans and dozens of clams were flying everywhere among the heat and steam rising up from my mother as she stood slavishly over the stove. Mom always seemed to become somewhat unhinged around this time of year. Her usual composed exterior began to show cracks, allowing the steam to vent. Getting away from the house for the day was a fine idea, and being paid to do so was even better. I was more than happy to take the annual pay-off, skip a late breakfast so as to catch the matinee performance down at the movie theatre.
So there I was, The Pismo Theatre, on Pomeroy Avenue was the only movie theatre in town. It was only a block away from the beach, so as I walked out into the dazzling late afternoon sun, after sitting through two showings, I turned purposefully left away from the direction of home and headed towards the setting sun, following the sound of the distant ocean roaring up the beach at the end of the street. The Fall sky of this mid-October day was a clear crisp cool blue, which made the immense orange disc of the descending afternoon sun stand out even more than usual as it hung graciously above the swelling presence of the imposing Pacific Ocean in front of me.
When I reached the pier, it was that time of the day that had always confounded me, especially in the Fall. No longer late afternoon, but not quite early evening. The great orange disc not low enough in the sky to be described as setting yet. This was the time that brought out the fishermen, a couple of hours before the highest point of the tide. Lone men, rods dangling over the side, a thin translucent line running down to the brightly coloured floats bobbing on the gently undulating waters, whose rolling anger had been calmed by the returning waves that had already crashed against the shore line, dragging back shell and shale. I slowed my pace, as I always did, at the point where land dissolve into the sea. It had always fascinated me that geography isn’t static. Tectonic shifts, emerging islands spewed from the very core of the Earth, and the ever changing coastlines. I have a globe sitting on the desk in my bedroom. I often imagined it as pulsating, constantly in flux, not static and fixed as it was portrayed to be. A giant alien, floating in space. A great disembodied brain maybe. And we, we’re no more than insects crawling on its surface. Mites, parasitic blood-sucking vampire aliens, unknowingly living on the surface of Gigantor the planet sized brain.
I walked along the length of the pier, coming to the end I climbed onto the railings and lent out over the water. The breaking waves seemed darker than usual, the support pillars of the wooden pier melodically cleaving Neptune’s magnificent dark sapphire into a multitude of mesmerising facets, hypnotic to the eye and captivating to the soul. “Hey there! It’s young Howie Lever. How ya doin’ Howie?”
“Mr. Gilpin,” Senior, came hobbling slowly towards me. “Hello sir, I didn’t see you there. Caught anything?”
“No son, Jonah had more luck with fish than I’ve had today.” He said resting a leathery hand on the railing next to me. He looked out to sea. “It ain’t easy being a fisherman in the winter.” He smiled, a twinkle of sinking sun shone in his eyes. I smiled. A fiery rim dipped into the icy waters, scattering a sizzling blaze across its surface.
“Hey Mr. Gilpin, you want me to take a stroll home with you?” He’d been living across from us with the Gilpin’s since his wife died a few years previous. A gruff yet gentle man, with the pioneering spirit etched into every line of his craggy face.
“That’d be fine. Not too much to carry anymore, but these old bones need a young bull to cart my burden from time to time.” I jumped down, and offered my arm. We set-off slowly heading homewards, the last rays of the setting sun warming our backs.
“You’re a gracious young man Howard Lever. So tell me, how’s life been treating you? How’s that father of your’s? Still asphalting half of California? You’ve just had a birthday as I recall. How old are you now son?” We walked, as he talked.
I often wished I was Bugs Bunny, so that I too hadn’t taken that left at Albuquerque. Unfortunately I lived in Pismo Beach. I’d lived here as long as I could remember. Vague flashes of another time sometimes invaded my dreams. But in my waking moment, all I could remember was the dusty roads and weather beaten and sun bleached motel shacks. I was sat in that darkened movie theatre waiting to see an early showing of The Brain from Planet Arous, too old at seventeen, and too cool to take too much notice of the little kids cartoon they were playing before the main feature I’d come to see. It was, as it turned out, Bugs Bunny and his sometimes side-kick Daffy Duck in ‘Ali Baba Bunny’ unknowingly at the time, was the spark that inspired me to take that life changing wrong turn that this story is all about. I’d like to be able to say that it was reading Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’, released the same year as that damned cartoon that really inspired my moment of awakening. The truth was it was Bugs and that damned duck that did it for me. Bugs Bunny and his bad sense of direction, was the beginning of my journey. If a missed left turn at Albuquerque had sent Bugs on adventures way beyond the boredom and boardwalks of Pismo Beach, then that was the way it was to be for me too. I figured if I went from Pismo to Albuquerque, and hung a right, I’d soon find myself down which ever rabbit hole Bugs came from soon enough. Or if I went left would I end up in Ali Baba’s cave with the bunny and the duck. It was all too weird to contemplate.
Anyway, right left or indifferent, it was October 1957. I’d hit that not-really-anything age of seventeen just over two weeks previous, and was sat in the Pismo Beach movie theatre as a way of escaping from my Mom’s preparations for the 11th annual Pismo Beach Clam Festival. Mom was determined to win the clam chowder cook-off this year, so she’d paid me to get from under her feet while she had another one of her practice cook-offs. Which meant clam chowder again for dinner that evening. I was sick of the stuff. So it was that Saturday morning when I came downstairs to breakfast I walked into what looked like a sea-food war-zone. Pots, pans and dozens of clams were flying everywhere among the heat and steam rising up from my mother as she stood slavishly over the stove. Mom always seemed to become somewhat unhinged around this time of year. Her usual composed exterior began to show cracks, allowing the steam to vent. Getting away from the house for the day was a fine idea, and being paid to do so was even better. I was more than happy to take the annual pay-off, skip a late breakfast so as to catch the matinee performance down at the movie theatre.
So there I was, The Pismo Theatre, on Pomeroy Avenue was the only movie theatre in town. It was only a block away from the beach, so as I walked out into the dazzling late afternoon sun, after sitting through two showings, I turned purposefully left away from the direction of home and headed towards the setting sun, following the sound of the distant ocean roaring up the beach at the end of the street. The Fall sky of this mid-October day was a clear crisp cool blue, which made the immense orange disc of the descending afternoon sun stand out even more than usual as it hung graciously above the swelling presence of the imposing Pacific Ocean in front of me.
When I reached the pier, it was that time of the day that had always confounded me, especially in the Fall. No longer late afternoon, but not quite early evening. The great orange disc not low enough in the sky to be described as setting yet. This was the time that brought out the fishermen, a couple of hours before the highest point of the tide. Lone men, rods dangling over the side, a thin translucent line running down to the brightly coloured floats bobbing on the gently undulating waters, whose rolling anger had been calmed by the returning waves that had already crashed against the shore line, dragging back shell and shale. I slowed my pace, as I always did, at the point where land dissolve into the sea. It had always fascinated me that geography isn’t static. Tectonic shifts, emerging islands spewed from the very core of the Earth, and the ever changing coastlines. I have a globe sitting on the desk in my bedroom. I often imagined it as pulsating, constantly in flux, not static and fixed as it was portrayed to be. A giant alien, floating in space. A great disembodied brain maybe. And we, we’re no more than insects crawling on its surface. Mites, parasitic blood-sucking vampire aliens, unknowingly living on the surface of Gigantor the planet sized brain.
I walked along the length of the pier, coming to the end I climbed onto the railings and lent out over the water. The breaking waves seemed darker than usual, the support pillars of the wooden pier melodically cleaving Neptune’s magnificent dark sapphire into a multitude of mesmerising facets, hypnotic to the eye and captivating to the soul. “Hey there! It’s young Howie Lever. How ya doin’ Howie?”
“Mr. Gilpin,” Senior, came hobbling slowly towards me. “Hello sir, I didn’t see you there. Caught anything?”
“No son, Jonah had more luck with fish than I’ve had today.” He said resting a leathery hand on the railing next to me. He looked out to sea. “It ain’t easy being a fisherman in the winter.” He smiled, a twinkle of sinking sun shone in his eyes. I smiled. A fiery rim dipped into the icy waters, scattering a sizzling blaze across its surface.
“Hey Mr. Gilpin, you want me to take a stroll home with you?” He’d been living across from us with the Gilpin’s since his wife died a few years previous. A gruff yet gentle man, with the pioneering spirit etched into every line of his craggy face.
“That’d be fine. Not too much to carry anymore, but these old bones need a young bull to cart my burden from time to time.” I jumped down, and offered my arm. We set-off slowly heading homewards, the last rays of the setting sun warming our backs.
“You’re a gracious young man Howard Lever. So tell me, how’s life been treating you? How’s that father of your’s? Still asphalting half of California? You’ve just had a birthday as I recall. How old are you now son?” We walked, as he talked.
We were walking down Cypress when he stopped mid-flow. Looking over at a house on the corner I could see his thoughts drift-off and then come flooding back. “The DeLillies!” He exclaimed with some surprise to himself. “Perry and Daisy,” he went on checking his facts to himself as he went. “About, uh, thirteen years ago now, as I recall.”
“What’s that Mr. Gilpin? Sir!” The name DeLillies rang a vague bell, but just couldn’t place it. I’d heard talk, something had happened in that house we were now stood across from. Rumour, whisper and over-the-fence gossip. What was it? I couldn’t recall.
“Shot her he did. Right through the heart.” Tapping at his chest with a finger as he dredged-up deep sunk memories. “Then turned the gun on himself. Again right through the heart.” Two of his fingers automatically formed into a revolver, thumb sat on top as the hammer. I tried to imagine looking through the window and seeing a smoking gun hanging precariously from a limp hand, two bodies… Mr. Gilpin interrupted my train of thought. “Local gal she was. Young un too! Forties I’d reckon.”
“Why’d he do it?”
“Dunno. There were rumours of course. You know how the women round these parts like to beat their gums. But, no-one really knows. How could they?” Once again my imagination took over. I imagined a man mild mannered, slightly built man walking in through the door, catching his wife in the arms of another man. A door-to-door salesman. Smooth, in a sharply tailor suit and a wit to match. Once again Mr. Gilpin’s voice cut through. “Roughneck he was, from way back east originally. Though he’d lived in these parts a good number of years I dare say.” I played out the scene again. A brut of a man bursting through the door, almost taking it off its hinges. The lumbering giant having been spotted on his way up to the door, the slick snakes oil salesman makes a quick exit through the kitchen. “Nice enough guy, but he won’t no pushover. He liked his hooch did Perry. A bit too much some ‘ud reckon. Yup! Back in the day this place was littered with gin mills. He liked to, you know?” He made a drinking gesture and winked at me. “Ossified!” Now the image was one of a slightly dishevelled man of medium build, staggering back from a bar. Falling through the door, after a night of cheap liquor and loose women. Catching his wife in the act, his anger inflamed, he shoots her dead. Bang! Suddenly he sobers to the shocking situation at hand. Racked with guilt and the shame of his own misdeeds, he turns the gun on himself. Bang! Two lives snuffed out by two fleeting moments of misjudgement. Another cheerless tale in the chronicles of Pismo Beach.
Mr. Gilpin chuckled to himself. “Oh boy! Those were the days Howie. You should’a seen the chassis on some them Janes that frequented those joints. Yup! Those were the days.” He’d drifted off subject, and I detected a note of melancholy, as his last sentence trailed off. “Funny where life takes you.” He squeezed my arm, a deep retched sigh fell out of him. “Make sure you don’t let life take places you don’t want to go Howie. You gotta get hold of those reigns early, and no matter how hard it fights you. You keep that on the path you want to go down.”
“Yes sir!”
“Think my old nag is just ‘bout ready for the glue factory. It’s been a fun ride, but time to climb down now and let younger men pass on by.” As he said this, he rubbed what looked like a nickel between his fingers, gently kissed it, wiped a tear from his eye, and put whatever is was back in his pocket. I didn’t know what to say to this, so I didn’t say anything. We simply walked on, walked on in contemplative silence. He reflecting on the long road travelled. I, on the short distance I’d got behind me, and the long twisting unknown that lay ahead.
“What’s that Mr. Gilpin? Sir!” The name DeLillies rang a vague bell, but just couldn’t place it. I’d heard talk, something had happened in that house we were now stood across from. Rumour, whisper and over-the-fence gossip. What was it? I couldn’t recall.
“Shot her he did. Right through the heart.” Tapping at his chest with a finger as he dredged-up deep sunk memories. “Then turned the gun on himself. Again right through the heart.” Two of his fingers automatically formed into a revolver, thumb sat on top as the hammer. I tried to imagine looking through the window and seeing a smoking gun hanging precariously from a limp hand, two bodies… Mr. Gilpin interrupted my train of thought. “Local gal she was. Young un too! Forties I’d reckon.”
“Why’d he do it?”
“Dunno. There were rumours of course. You know how the women round these parts like to beat their gums. But, no-one really knows. How could they?” Once again my imagination took over. I imagined a man mild mannered, slightly built man walking in through the door, catching his wife in the arms of another man. A door-to-door salesman. Smooth, in a sharply tailor suit and a wit to match. Once again Mr. Gilpin’s voice cut through. “Roughneck he was, from way back east originally. Though he’d lived in these parts a good number of years I dare say.” I played out the scene again. A brut of a man bursting through the door, almost taking it off its hinges. The lumbering giant having been spotted on his way up to the door, the slick snakes oil salesman makes a quick exit through the kitchen. “Nice enough guy, but he won’t no pushover. He liked his hooch did Perry. A bit too much some ‘ud reckon. Yup! Back in the day this place was littered with gin mills. He liked to, you know?” He made a drinking gesture and winked at me. “Ossified!” Now the image was one of a slightly dishevelled man of medium build, staggering back from a bar. Falling through the door, after a night of cheap liquor and loose women. Catching his wife in the act, his anger inflamed, he shoots her dead. Bang! Suddenly he sobers to the shocking situation at hand. Racked with guilt and the shame of his own misdeeds, he turns the gun on himself. Bang! Two lives snuffed out by two fleeting moments of misjudgement. Another cheerless tale in the chronicles of Pismo Beach.
Mr. Gilpin chuckled to himself. “Oh boy! Those were the days Howie. You should’a seen the chassis on some them Janes that frequented those joints. Yup! Those were the days.” He’d drifted off subject, and I detected a note of melancholy, as his last sentence trailed off. “Funny where life takes you.” He squeezed my arm, a deep retched sigh fell out of him. “Make sure you don’t let life take places you don’t want to go Howie. You gotta get hold of those reigns early, and no matter how hard it fights you. You keep that on the path you want to go down.”
“Yes sir!”
“Think my old nag is just ‘bout ready for the glue factory. It’s been a fun ride, but time to climb down now and let younger men pass on by.” As he said this, he rubbed what looked like a nickel between his fingers, gently kissed it, wiped a tear from his eye, and put whatever is was back in his pocket. I didn’t know what to say to this, so I didn’t say anything. We simply walked on, walked on in contemplative silence. He reflecting on the long road travelled. I, on the short distance I’d got behind me, and the long twisting unknown that lay ahead.
When I was born in 1940, it was the exact same time that with little ceremony they opened the first section of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, considered to be the first superhighway in America. Dad had worked on it in his work as one of his many projects as a Civil Engineer whose speciality was long straight stretches of asphalt that went on for mile after mile. He’d got work, after leaving the Seabees, on the development of the Californian coastal highway system, the expansion of Highway 101 from Los Angeles and improvements to Route 1 north of Pismo Beach, that ran up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco and beyond. At least it meant that Dad was always close to home. We had a good all American family life. You couldn’t complain really, it’s what most people aspired to. It’s the life most people I knew lived. There was no other way to live your life. Or so I had thought for a long time. As I’d got older, the American Dream had become tarnished. I’d come to realise that everything wasn’t so rosy. In fact I’d become so absolutely disenchanted, to the point of loathing. It’s why I felt the outcast, not one of the in-crowd. Apple pie and white picket fences didn’t do it for me. I wanted something else. Only problem was, I wasn’t sure exactly what it was that I did want. I just knew that I didn’t want what was on offer, what was expected of me, what I’d been brought up to become. A shadowy replacement of my brother. I shouldn’t say it, out of respect for my parents. It is how I felt though. I’d always been in Daniel’s shadow. The younger, less bright, more awkward brother. Even more so after his disappearance. I felt their abject disappointment. I wondered if they secretly wished I’d disappeared instead of him. I secretly wished that I had too. Would they mourn me as they did him? Mom wouldn’t have anyone under her feet in the kitchen and Dad wouldn’t have anyone to pay little attention to.
Most recently Dad had been supervising the expansion of the Highway 101 here in Pismo Beach. He’d been focused on the construction of a new bridge over Pismo Creek, at the end of Park Avenue. Or so Dad kept on telling us over dinner every night for the past god-knows how long. He talked little else. I knew all about the planning problems, legislative issues, land rights, compulsory purchases, my knowledge was deep, intricate and multi-layered. Somewhat like the gilt framed schematic cross-section of highway Dad had hanging up in his den in the basement of our house. I often thought that his den was his escape route from the confines of picket fenced life. He’d spend hours alone down there, supposedly working. Planning his escape was what I imagined he was doing. Or at least time and again I would day dream that was what he was doing. Tunnelling under Mom’s kitchen, shoring up the sides with timber, installing home-made lanterns fashioned from tin cans and tallow candles every few yards. Then one day he would emerge, all glistening with sweat and covered in dirt, having broken through just beyond the perimeter fence. Just out of reach of the search-lights and sentry towers. He would come and wake me quietly, and we’d escape together as heroes into the night. But that was just a childish dream. I realise now that what he was doing down in his den, was working. Working, working, working. The man was his work. He was as flat and two dimensional as the highway schematics and blue prints he spread out in front of him every night after dinner.
Now almost completed, this four-lane leviathan of civil engineering snaked its way through the Californian countryside. The sleepy town I was raised in, the Clam Capital of the World, was now firmly anchored to the outside world. We’d always had people passing through, pulling in here at one of the many services stations or motels along Price Street. It just some how it felt like the end of an era though, the prospect of four-lanes of gas-guzzling smoke-belching L.A. traffic heading north to eat all our clams and disturb our sleepy small town peace, made me anxious. The highway had always been there as long as I could remember, but in my mind it was always just Price Street. I hung-out at the cafes, used the restrooms at the services stations on my way home, even worked as a busboy in a couple of the seafood restaurants during summer vacation. This was different, this was something new that would soon be tearing its way through town. The thought of it being connected in such monstrous arterial way to L.A. some how changed things. It made me feel ill at ease with my surroundings. This was home, but it still seemed as if there was some ogre lurking just over the horizon to the south, waiting for the last stretch of asphalt to be laid before it attacked us and consumed little old Pismo Beach in one great fiery gulp. Belching loudly as it got a bout of indigestion from swallowing its food too fast. I hated this clichéd representation of small town America that I’d used to label good old Pismo, but it was my cliché and no-one was taking it away from me without a fight. Pismo was for all its faults the epitome of what is often described as Americana. There was just no getting away from it, it had it all. Mom’s apple-pie, or at least clam chowder, everything any clean-cut freckle-faced Howdy Doody should want.
It had always amused Dad that ‘pismo’ meant tar in the language of the native Chumash Indians. He thought it was amusingly ironic that we should live there. I thought it was depressingly ironic that we should be stuck there. Dad was obsessed with roads and road construction. I’d taken a mild interest, mainly to keep the father son lines of communication open. He wasn’t much of a talker you might say, unless it was on the subject of the best way in which to layer the strata of a road. What hardcore to use, how to reduce noise and vibrations, what was the most reliable and hardwearing type of asphalt to use. Damaged caused through thermal cracking, axle weight distribution, on and on he would go, like one of his damn roads. Flat, grey and uninteresting. He was a proud and fully paid up member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, but he’d always had a secret yearning to be an aviation engineer.
In my Dad’s mind Howard Hughes was always the great aviator, the industrialist and inventor, rather than the excentric recluse that he had become by the late fifties. I remember him taking me to Long Beach once when I was seven to see Hughes fly the Spruce Goose for the first and only time. As I remember it just about managed to get airborne, lifted up about seventy feet or so off the surface of the Pacific Ocean, flew for not more than a mile and then unceremoniously dropped back down into the water with a great big belly-flop. Dad was beside himself with happiness. He went on and on about it all the way home in the car, about what a marvellous piece of engineering it was, droning on and on about how ‘Hughes had proved everyone wrong that had ever dared doubt his engineering ability’. I’d never seen Dad so animated, so full of life, so inspired, so passionate. Unfortunately it was a one-off never-to-be-repeated experience all round. The Spruce Goose has never flown since, I’ve never been anywhere with Dad on a father-son outing again, and I have never again got to see the man behind the precise and logical civil engineer that I see sat across the dining table every evening, either.
Anyway, that’s the reason I’m called Howard. I am Howard Roscoe Lever to be precise, rather than Turnpike Roscoe Lever that I could very easily have been called. Though there aren’t many people who know what the R stands for in Howard R Lever, as I try to keep an air of mystery about it. I think it’s best that way. Although seeing how everyone in town knows Dad is called Roscoe, it ain’t hard to fathom that the R may just stand for Roscoe. I just like to think maybe they don’t. Not that I’m embarrassed by my heritage, or by my dad. It’s just that… Okay I’ve got to admit that Roscoe does make me shudder to my very core. I don’t know why, it just does. I guess I see it as my small-town name. Whenever Grandpa and Grandma come to town, whenever they send presents, or the rare occasions I speak to them on the telephone, every time I hear that name it’s like a bolt of lightening has shot through my body. I’m ashamed, I’m ashamed of my secret name. My small-town name. There I’ve admitted it, I’ll hear no more about it. Now let’s quickly move on shall we, please.
Copyright 2014
Most recently Dad had been supervising the expansion of the Highway 101 here in Pismo Beach. He’d been focused on the construction of a new bridge over Pismo Creek, at the end of Park Avenue. Or so Dad kept on telling us over dinner every night for the past god-knows how long. He talked little else. I knew all about the planning problems, legislative issues, land rights, compulsory purchases, my knowledge was deep, intricate and multi-layered. Somewhat like the gilt framed schematic cross-section of highway Dad had hanging up in his den in the basement of our house. I often thought that his den was his escape route from the confines of picket fenced life. He’d spend hours alone down there, supposedly working. Planning his escape was what I imagined he was doing. Or at least time and again I would day dream that was what he was doing. Tunnelling under Mom’s kitchen, shoring up the sides with timber, installing home-made lanterns fashioned from tin cans and tallow candles every few yards. Then one day he would emerge, all glistening with sweat and covered in dirt, having broken through just beyond the perimeter fence. Just out of reach of the search-lights and sentry towers. He would come and wake me quietly, and we’d escape together as heroes into the night. But that was just a childish dream. I realise now that what he was doing down in his den, was working. Working, working, working. The man was his work. He was as flat and two dimensional as the highway schematics and blue prints he spread out in front of him every night after dinner.
Now almost completed, this four-lane leviathan of civil engineering snaked its way through the Californian countryside. The sleepy town I was raised in, the Clam Capital of the World, was now firmly anchored to the outside world. We’d always had people passing through, pulling in here at one of the many services stations or motels along Price Street. It just some how it felt like the end of an era though, the prospect of four-lanes of gas-guzzling smoke-belching L.A. traffic heading north to eat all our clams and disturb our sleepy small town peace, made me anxious. The highway had always been there as long as I could remember, but in my mind it was always just Price Street. I hung-out at the cafes, used the restrooms at the services stations on my way home, even worked as a busboy in a couple of the seafood restaurants during summer vacation. This was different, this was something new that would soon be tearing its way through town. The thought of it being connected in such monstrous arterial way to L.A. some how changed things. It made me feel ill at ease with my surroundings. This was home, but it still seemed as if there was some ogre lurking just over the horizon to the south, waiting for the last stretch of asphalt to be laid before it attacked us and consumed little old Pismo Beach in one great fiery gulp. Belching loudly as it got a bout of indigestion from swallowing its food too fast. I hated this clichéd representation of small town America that I’d used to label good old Pismo, but it was my cliché and no-one was taking it away from me without a fight. Pismo was for all its faults the epitome of what is often described as Americana. There was just no getting away from it, it had it all. Mom’s apple-pie, or at least clam chowder, everything any clean-cut freckle-faced Howdy Doody should want.
It had always amused Dad that ‘pismo’ meant tar in the language of the native Chumash Indians. He thought it was amusingly ironic that we should live there. I thought it was depressingly ironic that we should be stuck there. Dad was obsessed with roads and road construction. I’d taken a mild interest, mainly to keep the father son lines of communication open. He wasn’t much of a talker you might say, unless it was on the subject of the best way in which to layer the strata of a road. What hardcore to use, how to reduce noise and vibrations, what was the most reliable and hardwearing type of asphalt to use. Damaged caused through thermal cracking, axle weight distribution, on and on he would go, like one of his damn roads. Flat, grey and uninteresting. He was a proud and fully paid up member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, but he’d always had a secret yearning to be an aviation engineer.
In my Dad’s mind Howard Hughes was always the great aviator, the industrialist and inventor, rather than the excentric recluse that he had become by the late fifties. I remember him taking me to Long Beach once when I was seven to see Hughes fly the Spruce Goose for the first and only time. As I remember it just about managed to get airborne, lifted up about seventy feet or so off the surface of the Pacific Ocean, flew for not more than a mile and then unceremoniously dropped back down into the water with a great big belly-flop. Dad was beside himself with happiness. He went on and on about it all the way home in the car, about what a marvellous piece of engineering it was, droning on and on about how ‘Hughes had proved everyone wrong that had ever dared doubt his engineering ability’. I’d never seen Dad so animated, so full of life, so inspired, so passionate. Unfortunately it was a one-off never-to-be-repeated experience all round. The Spruce Goose has never flown since, I’ve never been anywhere with Dad on a father-son outing again, and I have never again got to see the man behind the precise and logical civil engineer that I see sat across the dining table every evening, either.
Anyway, that’s the reason I’m called Howard. I am Howard Roscoe Lever to be precise, rather than Turnpike Roscoe Lever that I could very easily have been called. Though there aren’t many people who know what the R stands for in Howard R Lever, as I try to keep an air of mystery about it. I think it’s best that way. Although seeing how everyone in town knows Dad is called Roscoe, it ain’t hard to fathom that the R may just stand for Roscoe. I just like to think maybe they don’t. Not that I’m embarrassed by my heritage, or by my dad. It’s just that… Okay I’ve got to admit that Roscoe does make me shudder to my very core. I don’t know why, it just does. I guess I see it as my small-town name. Whenever Grandpa and Grandma come to town, whenever they send presents, or the rare occasions I speak to them on the telephone, every time I hear that name it’s like a bolt of lightening has shot through my body. I’m ashamed, I’m ashamed of my secret name. My small-town name. There I’ve admitted it, I’ll hear no more about it. Now let’s quickly move on shall we, please.
Copyright 2014