Motels I have known: the van years

Never send your son on the road. Part Three

The author’s 1968 Dodge camper van, Broadway Hustler

It was 1974 when spying an ad in the classifieds, I hied myself from my loft on Houston Street over to Deep Brooklyn and bought my 1968 Dodge former laundry delivery van from a guy who owned a laundry in Red Hook, natch.  The thing was only six years old but already sported 144,000 miles on the odometer, and man did it show.  I described the van, pictured above, in my classic tome, “The Complete Van Book,” this way:

Note the dents in the side doors.  These came from opening the doors and hitting trees, parked cars, parking meters and the like.  Note the roof vent in its closed position.  This is because it was nearly ripped off backing out of a garage and had to be taped up and wired shut.  Note the missing hubcap and general lack of chrome deep-dish wheels.  This is due to pocketbook problems, hopefully to be alleviated by heavy sales of the book you now hold in your hands.

What I proceeded to do was drive my van around the country at least once every year, writing stories I would file for the Village Voice, where I was a staff writer.  Do you see what those glory days of what they called “alternative” journalism were like?  I could just pack a bag and walk over to the lot off Varick Street where I parked the van, hop in, head out of Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel, and go wherever I wanted and write whatever I wanted, and the Voice would publish my dispatches from the road.  Jeez, I look back at those years with abject wonder.  I wasn’t earning much, $80 a week from the Voice and whatever I could pick up from magazines on the side, but gas was about 50 cents a gallon, you could buy a quart of oil for about the same price, a key cost factor, given the fact that the straight-six engine between the front seats in the van burned enough oil to solve the OPEC problem that was on the horizon.

The van’s interior had wood-panel siding and had been outfitted with a double bed all the way in the back, and a gas stove and sink mounted in a little counter across from the side doors.  There was some puce-green indoor/outdoor carpeting on the floor, mock-gaslight sconces mounted on the paneled walls, and the laundry guy’s wife had sewn up some red-white-and-blue patriotic curtains which covered a couple of side windows for privacy. 

One of the advantages of driving a camper-van around the country was that you could pull off the road and park the thing and climb in the rack in the back and conk out until you hit the road again in the morning, turning motels from a necessity into a luxury to be sampled only occasionally, especially when you needed a shower.  The Motel 6 chain had recently sprung up at exit plazas off the interstates across the country, so spending a night between allegedly clean sheets and getting a shower wasn’t much of a strain on my road budget.  You had to keep a pocketful of quarters handy, however, for the TVs in the rooms, which cost 25 cents for thirty minutes of often snowy-picture airtime.  I used to drop a quarter and turn on the 10 o’clock news whenever I took a room in a Motel 6 and check out the local crime headlines to see if there were any good murder trials to drop in on.  You never knew when you were going to run across a juicy double or triple murder out there in the flatlands of Ohio or the rolling hills of Arkansas.  I checked in for a stay in Pueblo, Colorado, while I was waiting on delivery of a new driveshaft for the van (it had dropped to the ground and gotten bent in Glenwood Springs and had to be replaced) and came across a doozy of a drug-murder that involved gangs moving smack north up the I-25 corridor from Mexico.  I was glad when the driveshaft finally arrived from Denver, however, because some of the gang members attending the trial had begun to cast suspicious looks in my direction, scoping me out as either a narc or competition in the dealing game, I guessed. 

I bet I had driven the van cross-country two or three times when my friend John Lombardi, a magazine editor who assigned me several of the best articles I had ever written, told me he had an interview in L.A. for a potential job with L.A. Magazine.  I was about to head out in the van, so I asked him if he would like to drive across the country with me.  John was a city guy from South Philly, and although he had worked in Chicago for the Playboy empire and flown around the country numerous times, he had never driven across.  I convinced him that seeing the country through the windshield of the van was way different than the view from 30,000 feet – wait until you see the oranges and reds of the buttes in New Mexico and Arizona! I remember telling him – and Lombardi bit.

We drove through the Holland Tunnel and headed west.  I decided to take the southern route and drove across New Jersey and Pennsylvania on I-78 and headed south down I-81 at Harrisburg, soon crossing into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  We drove straight through to someplace south of Harrisonville and pulled off for the night.  I thought I’d give Lombardi a taste of what real van life was like, so I just parked the van in a roadside lay-by, unfurled a couple of sleeping bags, and we spent the night.  I gave John the luxury bed in the back and I slept on an air mattress on the floor. 

It had been pitch-black when we pulled over, so it wasn’t until we woke up in the morning that we could see where we had parked.  John looked out the back window of the van and loudly exclaimed, “Check that out, man!  It looks like the cover of the Crosby Stills and Nash album!”  We had parked across from a little rundown clapboard shack that had a rotting porch with an old sofa sitting on it.  I had seen dozens of rural shacks like it over the years, but John’s frame of reference from growing up in Philly made me look at the place anew.  Sure enough, it was very similar to the place where the three rockers had posed for the cover of their first album, released in 1969.  Redolent of what would become known as “country rock,” the Crosby Stills and Nash album cover had turned out to have captured that zeitgeist perfectly.

That was the last night we roughed it in the van, however, both of us concluding that the van didn’t really work for two guys on the road, so it was motels from then on.  We drove further south that day on I-81 and crossed into Tennessee at Bristol.  This was the first time Lombardi had ever had his feet on the ground in “the South,” and he was understandably nervous.  There we were, a couple of long-hairs in a van with New York plates, it was 1975, it was known that “hippies” were not taken kindly to down there in what was still called “Dixie.” I told Lombardi to relax, I had driven the same route only a few months before, everything was cool.  Right about then, we made the turn onto I-40 heading for Knoxville, and what was the first thing we saw?  Two hippies up against the side of their VW bus, held at gunpoint by Tennessee State Troopers while several others searched them and their vehicle.  There went my theory that we didn’t have anything to worry about as we spent the next several days crossing the American South into Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. 

But we made it through unscathed, I thought, as we breathed a sigh of relief and drove out of Texas into New Mexico and entered what could be at least called “the West.” Only one more state to go, Arizona, and we would be safely in California.  A couple more days on the road and we’d be there.

I pulled the van off in Tucumcari, New Mexico for the night.  Now, you really have to have been in Tucumcari in 1975 to understand how remote that godforsaken little burg was.  You think you’ve seen some boonies as you drive through western Oklahoma, then you hit Texas and pass  through Amarillo, and…nothing.  Years later, I would drive through the same area on a road trip with my seven-year-old daughter Lilly in the car.  She was looking for something to listen to on the radio and finally gave up.  “Daddy, there’s nothing but Jesus and cowboys out here,” she said.  She was exactly right in 2001.  In 1975, I think it might have been more like nothing but Jesus and cows.

You could call Tucumcari an oasis between Amarillo and Albuquerque, but that would be unkind to the word, “oasis.”  Truck stops, motels, gas stations, Dari-Queens, and a couple of cinderblock massage parlors was more like it.  We checked into a double room in a motel on the western edge of town and I headed straight for the shower. It was like a hundred other motel showers I had experienced, or so it seemed until I turned on the water.  A single, thin stream of rusty water coursed from the showerhead in a limp curve. 

“This fuckin’ shower is fuckin’ fucked,” I shouted through the door.  “What’d you say?” Lombardi replied.  “I said, this fuckin’ shower is fuckin’ fucked,” I repeated, wriggling my body awkwardly under the thin stream, trying to get my back wet.  I moved from side to side, crouched down, stood straight, and still there were areas completely dry.  I heard Lombardi’s laughter through the door.  “That’s a new one, Truscott.  I think you managed to get more ‘fucks’ in a single sentence than anyone I’ve ever heard.”

I finally managed to get soaped up and marginally rinsed off, and it was Lombardi’s turn.  I was still drying my hair when I heard him:  “This fuckin’…shower…is…fuckin’…fucked!” he called out between gasps of laughter.  We had achieved the catch-phrase that would last the rest of the trip.  This fuckin’ burger is fuckin’ fucked!  This fuckin’ gas pump is fuckin’ fucked!  In the desert, this fuckin’ sun is fuckin’ fucked!

A few moments later, we were dressed and ready to head out the door for a diner we had seen on our way into the Motel, when we heard pop! pop! pop! from outside.  I went to the window and pushed the curtains aside and looked out.  There were several pickup trucks pulled up in an empty lot across the street from the motel.  A crowd of young guys were sitting in the bed of one of the trucks drinking beer and firing pistols into the air.  Pop! Pop!  Pop!  Laughter.  More beer.  Pop!  Pop!  Pop!  More beer.  More laughter.

My van with its New York plates was parked right in front of our room, maybe 50 feet from the pickups.  They fired a few more shots.  “It’s just rednecks letting off steam,” I said to Lombardi, uncertainly.  It was about 9:00.  We hadn’t eaten since lunch and we were starving.  We didn’t have much choice but to walk out to the van and back up, passing right in front of the guys with the guns in the pickups. 

Lombardi shrugged.  It seemed he’d seen guys shooting off guns for fun a few times back in Philly, so we left the room and climbed in the van.  As I backed up, one of the guys waved his gun over his head and called out, “Hey, you wanna beer?”  “We’re going to get a few at the diner,” I called to him as I drove away.

You may not have reached the end of the earth when you get to Tucumcari, but I’ll tell you what:  you can see it from there.

The double beds in our mini-suite when we reached the Sunset Marquis two days later had never looked so good.  Lombardi was first into the shower, and it wasn’t a minute before I heard, “Hey!  This fuckin’ shower is not fuckin’ fucked!”  We both cracked up.  Being in L.A. felt like coming out of a desert and having your first drink of water in a week.  We finished getting cleaned up and walked up to Sunset and took a booth in Mel’s Diner and ordered bagels and cream cheese and eggs and coffee and sat there feeling like millionaires. 

I had begun working on the van book and had some meetings at Peterson Publications, the company that put out Hot Rod Magazine and Rod n’ Custom and several other automotive titles.  I was trying to make a deal with them to use some of their how-to stories about van conversions in the book.  Lombardi was going to his meeting with the people from L.A. Magazine.  We made plans to meet back at the Marquis later.

When I got back to the room, I found a note from John saying that he had gone to see one of his old girlfriends from Chicago, a truly stunning former Playboy Playmate of the month who had moved to L.A. to take a shot at a movie career.  He had told me about her during the drive.  It seemed her career prospects as an actress weren’t showing much promise.  She had been living with a dealer in a house up in Laurel Canyon.  The whole scene was exceedingly sketchy, according to John.  He told me he was worried about her, and the note said he had taken a cab up to her place in the canyon.

I went out for a burger and came back to the room.  The Sunset Marquis was still a rocker hang-out, but the scene wasn’t the same.  Some of the bands that were hot in ’75 like the Eagles and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention lived in L.A., so they had no need to get rooms at the Marquis.  I think the Canadian band, Rush, may have been staying there, but I didn’t know any of them, so I was just stuck in the room watching TV when the phone rang around midnight.  It was Lombardi calling from the girlfriend’s pad in Laurel Canyon.  He wanted me to drive up there and pick up him and his girlfriend.  He couldn’t tell me much on the phone, but he managed to get across that the scene up there “wasn’t cool,” and they had to get out of there.

I jumped in the van and drove up Laurel Canyon Boulevard and turned off on Lookout Mountain Avenue and looked for the turn onto Wonderland Avenue, which Lombardi reminded me was right past the Wonderland school.  I’d been up there before, and I loved the whole concept of a place that had a street called “Wonderland Avenue.”  It just reeked of modernity and possibilities and the future, and I knew there were hillside homes along it with stunning views of the rest of the canyon.

I found the address and pulled up across the street.  Lombardi had told me not to knock on the door, that he would be looking out for me.  Sure enough, he and his former girlfriend soon came out the door and ran across the street and jumped in.  “Get out of here, man,” Lombardi called from the back of the van.  There’s two motherfuckers in there with guns!”

The streets that far up in the canyon were an impenetrable maze, so I turned the van around and headed back down Wonderland as John unspooled the story of what had happened.  It seemed that another former Playmate of the Month was dating the famous producer Bob Evans, and he had shown up at the house earlier looking for coke.  “He’s in there fuckin’ waving a fuckin’ 45 caliber automatic around,” Lombardi exclaimed.  “They had only a couple grams of coke in the house, so Evans gets on the phone and calls up his fuckin’ dealer, and this heavy Mexican dude shows up with about a half a kilo, and he’s got a fuckin’ gun!  He and Evans are waving the guns around at each other arguing over the price of the coke, and I said, we’ve got to get out of here, and that’s when I called you.”

“This whole fuckin’ gun thing is fuckin’ fucked,” I said.  I heard John start chuckling nervously in the back, and soon both of them were laughing loudly.  “This whole fuckin’ trip…is…fuckin’…fucked, man,” he croaked between guffaws.

I made the turn onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard and soon we could see the lights of greater L.A. twinkling in the distance like a phosphorescent sea.  The Sunset Marquis was only a mile away.  We had made it.