I dislike reading novels with a lot of table setting. Of course, it took me a long time to understand how to begin Journey, American without doing it myself.
There was only one way and that was to dive into the story without any toe-dipping. The boy met death in the military. Journey the young man courts death on wooden race tracks.
Flat Out ’Til Sunset
The heart of a sunny afternoon is the finest time to drink.
I’ve been drinking here at Low n Slow forever and a day. I first darkened the doors nearly 46 years ago. It pretty much looks the same, too. Oh, there are more lights, that nice jukebox, the music, but all the things go. Things we think are forever are not.
Curley’s racing trophies used to take up the whole top shelf behind the bar. You can still make some of them out behind all the booze. That’s the way glory goes.
Eugene Debs even showed up one night and stood up before God and everybody and railed - raged - on the rich and how they were taking from all of us and keeping everything for themselves. I bet you don’t even remember who Eugene Debs was. He was a socialist and he scared those rich bastards so much that they threw him in prison and burned down his house for good measure.
He was a sight, though.
Curley was more than just Low n Slow. Far more. He was one of a handful of men who raced the Murderdromes through the golden years and lived to tell about it. He bought this place for a song and it was his fallback.
The sport was so big the Hollywood film colony showed up in droves to see it. When Jack Prince was done building speedways nearly every man, woman, and child in America had seen a race or read about them in the papers.
Motordrome is the proper name. Before motor racing came on, the only racing in the world was on bicycles. They raced in velodromes, but that was mostly in Europe.
Americans took to racing cars almost as soon as they took started driving them. Most of the roads were terrible. They raced on them anyway.
All of us coming back from over there were quick to realize war isn’t the only place you can stare down death or yourself, whichever one might be bothering you more.
Did you know there was to be a motordrome where the Beverly Wilshire sits now?
What in the hell, right? There was.
After all that everyday death over in France, burning up time seemed natural. The music was fast, the dancing was fast and the women were fast. I enjoyed all three. Put me on a motorcycle, though, and I could find fast better than most men. Curley and I did it as long as we could and were really none the worse for wear.
Most of the rest didn’t make it or were never the same.
you should have seen the place. What a thing to behold. The only one bigger was Indianapolis, but they had nothing on Beverly Hills.
The entire thing was wood. Wood was cheap back then. I bet they cut a quarter of the Sierra down to build it. Wood was cheaper than laying brick and faster to build with, too. Indianapolis tried paving, and I guess it outlasted everyone, but it wasn’t the fastest track. The fastest of them all was in Beverly Hills.
Beverly Hills was not always Beverly Hills. When I first when up there in 1919 it was dirt roads and bean fields and a bunch of nothing, to be honest with you.
The first California motordrome - that’s the proper name for them- was in Playa del Ray but it burned down in 1913. They all eventually burned or rotted in winter.
Nothing was built to last, even though people like to think it was.
Maybe art and books were made to last. Not even the movies have lasted. Not really. A lot of them burned or rotted, too. What you see in an art house today is just a fraction of how many they really made.
America remembers to forget once again.
Beverly Hills Speedway, now there was a thing of beauty. When you stood at the bottom and looked up the curves were banked so high all you could see was the sky and it was always blue. Those high-banked curves were what made the track so fast. Barney Oldfield, Louis Durant, and so many more big-time drives loved to run here.
Prince and his group of investors, including the likes of Douglas Fairbanks and Cecil B. DeMille, spent a lot of money building a showplace for the show business people. The seats were hand-carved! That was for the fancy people. Hollywood did not exist then, so the new money called themselves a colony. Imagine, a colony full of movie types.
They would wash the track down with lye before the races. What a smell. That was to get the oil off to improve the grip, allegedly. The only grip you had was on the handlebars, which felt precarious at best and downright useless the rest of the time.
I can smell it now…the oil and gas, the cigar smoke from the stands, the lye, the California dust which, by the way, is the finest-smelling dust in the world if you ask me. Remember, I breathed plenty of that fancy fucking French dust.
I had picked up an Excelsior in Omaha when I got home from the war, they were fine bikes. Excelsior went out of business forever ago. I rode that thing everywhere and ended up in California, and went to work for the American Messenger Service. Always go with what you know, right?
There was a lot to see and a lot to know.
Los Angeles was big, not big like is now, there were no expressways. Way better, of course, but every old man says that doesn’t he?
Messages and packages were going in every direction, so it wasn’t hard to get to know all the nooks and crannies.
It was busy. On the rare days, the weather was bad, I would drive a company truck. It was an old Ford and a chore to drive. Mostly I rode a motorcycle. It was a warhorse of a Harley.
Los Angeles had just come off a long spell of rain. That afternoon was spectacular. I had been sent to San Ysidro Canyon. The house was big as hell and I was told the Hollywood actors Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had just bought the place and named it Pickfair.
It seemed like it took up half the damn canyon. I barely got to the door when a tallish, kind of dignified man in a dark suit and hat came out to greet me. He was not hired help.
“You are from the service?” he asked with an English accent.
I nodded and stood there while he fumbled through the pockets of his coat and vest. He pulled out a letter in an envelope and handed it to me with another slip of paper with an address on it that was out in Beverly Hills.
You have to understand Beverly Hills was nothing like it is now. Then it was mostly bean fields and orange groves. It would not be long before money took care of that.
“Make sure this letter gets into the hands of the man that owns the property on Wilshire. Go to the house on the edge of the field and you will find him.”
He gave me his card. “If he says anything at all, come see me at my office. I must know.”
I looked at the card. JACK PRINCE.
Prince tried to block my view into the home, but behind him, I could see a large room with a clutch of serious men gathered around a table with a large set of blueprints splayed across it. Some smoked. The whole scene reminded me of the headquarters at Catigny - men plotting something that mattered.
He flipped me a cartwheel. That’s what we called a silver dollar back then.
I cooly snatched it from the air.
“Off with you now,” Prince said.
That’s the thing about the rich. You take what they toss you, but it’s best to never let them think they own you. The military was good for me in that way. I could salute and act respectfully, but I didn’t have to like them.
I never liked being dismissed, either. But a dollar is a dollar.
I headed for the bean field where they would build the speedway that was to change all of us. Every single person on this Earth, except the ones doomed from the start, has a moment when everything changes whether they know it or not.
Some have more than one.
That bean field and what grew from it was one of mine.
I delivered the letter to an overalled man bossing a bunch of Mexicans around behind the house on the edge of the field.
He read that letter sort of out loud and I guessed he wasn’t very bookish. The letter offered that bean farmer a thousand dollars for his 275 acres. A thousand dollars!
“You tell Mr. Prince hell yes I will sell it,” he said. “But they can’t have it until I bring in my last crop. Once we’re done picking the beans, I’ll sign the papers.”
He didn’t appear to have anything else to me and I didn’t see any silver coming out of his overalls so I turned and left to go find Prince and his office back in the city.
Prince was not there, but another man was. He sat at a wooden desk with a lamp. He had blueprints spread out in front of him, too. That seemed to be all these men did all day. Looking at blueprints.
“You the rider we sent to Beverly?” the man asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Did the farmer say anything?
“He said hell yes,” I said. “He just wants to bring his beans in and you can have it.”
His face lit up. He stood and stuck out his hand, “Art Pillsbury. That’s about the best thing I’ve heard lately.”
He sat back down and took a deep breath. He studied the blueprints intently for a few seconds, then gave me a serious look.
“Now I need you to run an errand for me. My errand is going to have to stay private. I want you to take these prints here to a place that’s going to copy them. Have them make two copies. I’m currently living at a hotel, and you will deliver them there. Don’t just leave them at the front desk though. I want them hand-delivered to me but be patient. Keep them safe and keep your mouth shut.”
“I’ll need to tell my foreman I’m doing this job,” I said.
He smiled a bit.
“No you don’t,” he said and pulled a crisp twenty out of his pocket. A twenty was a pretty rare site to me and I must have shown my surprise.
“This work?”
“Yes, sir, that works better than anything I can think of in this world.”
He rolled the prints up and stuck them in a tube. He handed it and an address he scribbled down.
“Don’t let me down,” he said and handed me the twenty.
“Never happen, sir.”
“You were in the war?”
“As best as I can remember,” I said.
“Remembering is only easy if you choose to keep the good stuff and leave out the bad,” Pillsbury said.
I turned the tube under my arm and left that office.
A couple of days later the copies had been made and I went to Pillsbury’s address. He must have seen me through his window because he met me at the door.
“These prints are for something very special we’ve got brewing up in Beverly Hills,” he said, leading me into his office and pulling one set out of the tube. “You familiar with racing?”
I was. I raced before the war at a track in Omaha though I was young and lacked the courage to run at true speed. I needed to feel possible death, and did, in that forest in Catigny. Courage does not need the possibility of death as an ingredient, but it makes for a way of living that feels freer than someone who never knows death until the last second they live.
Pillsbury opened the print and thumbed through a few drawings and opened it up. I was not sure what I was looking at it but it looked like the entrance to one of the curves.
“The problem with Omaha, and all the other tracks Prince has built across the country is that they are like pie tins,” Pillsbury said. He waved his hand over the drawing, then pointed a finger at the sweep of the curve, moving gently from the top to the bottom of it as if he were touching a photograph of a woman he once loved.
“See this curve here,” he said. “See how it gently curls and comes up steeply. A car, a motorcycle, whatever, is going to tilt going into this curve, not topple.”
I knew from Omaha that the hardest part of keeping what was basically a motorized bicycle from spilling or practically flying off the track completely was managing the curves. They were steep and would break the momentum.
“I stole this from railroad designs,” Pillsbury said. “This is called a Searles Spiral and that is going to make Los Angeles the fastest place in the world. We will set records from day one. Get out there yourself and you’ll be a better man for it.”
The track looked like a dream and the stands and the rich and famous and the just rich would sit beneath a broad roof shielded from the sun. The entire thing would be from the forests of the Sierra - the fence, the hand-made seats, and even the fancy toilets for the ladies.
Pillsbury got quickly got serious and looked me in the eye.
“You are going to take that second print there in that tube home with you,” he said. “Prince is trying to steal this from me. I heard he is trying to patent the idea and build tracks without me. I didn’t like the English much when I fought with them, and I don’t like him much now. The man can build tracks but doesn’t understand how to improve them. Take it, and I’ll see you at the Beverly Hills Motor Speedway.”
Somehow I knew my life was about to change. Running flat out to sunset was my destiny.
As always, I love comments and suggestions for how to make the story better. What is missing? What could be different?