Not Fade Away

Dodge Jim

Description

Floorboard George Gastin is part of an insurance scam to wreck a pure white, mint condition '59 Cadillac originally intended for The Big Bopper as a token of an admirer's love. But Floorboard George has other ideas and when he disappears with the car, gangsters and cops are soon in hot pursuit. On the road, the crazy characters, hitch-hikers and demented preachers he meets provide the high-octane entertainment as George covers many miles - and states of mind - in his quest to find the true spirit of rock 'n' roll.

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 05 avril 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781847677136
• Langue: English

Extrait

This one’s going out for Mom, brother Bob, and Victoria (that’s right: dedicated to the one I love); for Jacoba, Leonard, and Lynn; for Sylvia, Boney Maroni, and Peggy Sue; for Jeremiah, Jerry, and Jack; Freeman and Nina; Gary, Allen, Lew, and John; for Boots, Annie, Dick, Joe, and all the cats and kitties down at the Tastee-Freeze on a hot summer night; for all the players and dancers and pilgrims of the faith; in memory of Ed O’Conner and Darrell Gray; and to the great spirits of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, R.I.P.



Contents
Title Page Dedication Introduction Epigraph Prologue Part One: Floorboard George: Coast To Coast & Gone Again I'm Glad You Mesologue Part Two: Doo-Wop To The Bopper’s Grave At The Moment Part Three: The Pilgrim Ghost Right Foot Nailed Epilogue Preview Praise for Jim Dodge Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright
Introduction
KEVIN SAMPSON
Jim Dodge lives on a remote ranch in Northern California. His is a community of potions, ghosts, myths and legends and his writing – the most imaginative of any living author – reflects the best traditions of the yarner. Magic, music and the hills and forests of deepest darkest California inform all his books. Fup , an enchanting tale of immortality and fence-posts occupies a world of whiskey stills where the lawman turns a blind eye to justifiable criminality. It’s only the dog-savaging, fence-chewing, duck-rutting wild hogs that have him stumped. Stone Junction deals with a network of philanthropic anarchists and alchemists who can do anything they want . And they do. They make themselves invisible and steal the biggest diamond in the whole world. They can beat anyone in a fair fight if they need to, and they sometimes make love to seven maidens under one full moon. Strange things are afoot in the forests of Sonoma County, we can only hope.
Potions figure strongly in both books and it’s under the influence of another mystical ’flu remedy that the vessel of Not Fade Away receives the testimony of Floorboard George Gastin, retired hippie car thief. Not Fade Away is a rattling good yarn about a chap who’s paid to steal and destroy a perfect white Cadillac. Before steering us through the whacked-out cut and thrust of a pan-American car chase, however – and it’s one heck of a weird taxi-ride – Jim Dodge gives a precise and loving portrait of the fledgling San Francisco Beat movement.
It’s easy to think of the San Francisco scene revolving around Haight-Ashbury, flower power and love-ins. It’s easy to think ’69. But the seeds of the hippie scene were scattered fifteen years earlier with the free thinkers, jazz musicians and dodgy poets of the North Beach community. Café Trieste and Bar Vesuvio became the hangout for every philosopher and drifter in town. It was a great time for ugly guys to get laid. You turned up, read poems and copped off. It’s a magical time magically captured at the start of Not Fade Away . Jim Dodge manages to mock the scene and celebrate it, brilliantly, both at once. In one episode a youthful Floorboard George meets Kacy, a rich, beautiful dropout at a jazz bar. His description of Big Red the saxophone player bending and sustaining his notes in a way that drains the listener’s soul is stunning. Kacy makes George take his clothes off outside the club and walk naked with her to his apartment. It’s a superbly erotic scene, neither salacious nor sentimental. He barely described the sex yet you read it with a soaring bonk-on. His evocation of high times and loose living is spellbinding – truly rock ’n’ roll writing at its best.
That spell is cast over the rest of the story, too. It’s a fabulous fable, rich with exotic, deranged, hopeless characters. It’s rare to find yourself rooting for such a fantastic array of losers, but this is the essence of Jim Dodge’s writing. It is wonderfully humane. There can’t be a writer so besotted with his own creatures. He made them and he adores them, one and all – even Scumball, the baddie. So we meet and fall in love with Donna Walsh, trailer-trash single mom, unlucky in love, barely keeping it together. There’s the shamanistic inventor, Joshua Springfield who traverses the land, experimenting with light and sound and drugs. The Reverend Double Gone Johnson is looking for a few dollars to start his own church – the only other thing stopping him is his search for the appropriate name for his new love sect. Should it be The Comedown Tabernacle Of the Grim View? Or The Rock Solid Gospel Light Church Of The Holy Release? Whatever, it sounds like a church you’d cheerfully don your Sunday best for.
All of this splendid battiness is underscored by a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack that as good as jives off the page at you. Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis, The Everlys, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and so many more are written up with a relish you can taste. If the story were not so grippingly told you’d have no choice but to drop the book and wrench your dorsals doing back-drops to ‘Chantilly Lace’. George’s mission is to deliver this Caddy to the grave of The Big Bopper himself and pay the final tribute by setting the rockmobile ablaze. As he sets off on this incredible picaresque, the bump and grind of the music, music, music is never far away.
As Floorboard George charges through the city limits and interstate highways, day and night, mile after mile sustained mainly by the 1,000-pill jar of uppers he bought at the outset, you start to get a sense of his immortality. Perhaps the drugs take their toll on the reader, too, because a pervading atmosphere of sub-reality starts to infuse the characters and places and scenarios. Towards the end of his journey George encounters crazies like Phillip Lewis Kerr, The Greatest Travelling Salesman In The World, who have a distinctly spectral feel. George starts having visions and hearing voices. You can feel his paranoia as the big world closes in on him. But above all you feel that no amount of road blocks, helicopters, FBI gooks or clueless gangsters will ever get close to George. You know he’s an Untouchable – he won’t fade away.
With his amphetamines mine reduced to a sticky residue, George arrives at his spiritual destiny. Ghosts and legends and tragedies rend the skies. The boundaries between the real and the unreal, between myth and truth, between substance and vapour have been blurred forever. The narrator comes out of his potion-induced stupor, unsure whether he even met Floorboard George Gastin at all. Was his story told to him or did he dream the whole thing up? We don’t know. We don’t need to know. We ourselves have just come out of the trip of our lives, a hallucinatory ride through the motels and madhouses of rock ’n’ roll America. That’s about as good as you can get from words on pages.
This is Not Fade Away . A classic, indeed.
Kevin Sampson September 1999

‘… music, sweet music…’

Martha and the Vandellas , ‘Dancing in the Street’
PROLOGUE

‘ To the understanding of such days and events this additional narrative becomes necessary, like a real figure to walk beside a ghost .’

Hanie Long,
Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca



THE DAY DIDN’T begin well. I woke up at first light with a throbbing brain-core headache, fever and chills, dull pains in all bodily tissues, gagging flashes of nausea, a taste in my mouth like I’d eaten a pound of potato bugs, aching eye sockets, and a general feeling of basic despair. This deepened with the realization that I had to get out of bed, drive a long way on bad roads, negotiate a firewood deal, and then drive back home to the ranch, where I still had my own winter’s wood to get in. If I’d had a phone I would’ve instantly canceled the meeting, but since the ranch was too far out in the hills for the phone company to bother with, and because it had taken me a week to set up the meeting with Jack Strauss, who was driving all the way over from Napa, there was no choice. Besides, Strauss was going to front me $1000 on twenty-five cords, which was $993 more than I had, but about $4000 short of what would’ve satisfied my creditors. At the mere thought of my finances, despair collapsed into doom. Compelled by circumstance, I arose, dressed, stepped outside, and greeted the day by lurching over behind the empty woodshed and throwing up.
The dawning sky was black with roiling nimbus, wind gusting from the south: rain any minute. I let out the chickens, threw them some scratch, split kindling, and moaned through the rest of the morning chores. Back in the house, I started a fire in the woodstove and put on the tea kettle, then scrabbled through a cupboard till I found my first-aid kit, in which, against all temptation, I’d stashed a single Percodan. Though it looked small and forlorn in the bottom of the vial, I swallowed it with gratitude. I was sending a sowbug against Godzilla, but anything would be an improvement.
I hurt. Since I had taken neither drink nor drug for a week – another depressing realization – I assumed I’d fallen victim to the virus sweeping our rural community. People were calling this one the Smorgasbord Flu, because that’s how the bug regarded the body; in some cases the feast had gone on for weeks. The thought of weeks made my stomach start to twist again, but I bore down, fighting it back. To lose the Percodan would’ve killed me.
Feeling slightly more in command after my show of will, I choked down some tea and dry toast, damped the stove, and then oozed out to my ’66 Ford pick-up to begin the long drive to the meeting with Strauss in Monte Rio.
The truck wouldn’t start.
I took the long-bladed screwdriver off the dash and got out. Hunched down under the left fender-well, I beat on the electric fuel pump till it began clicking.
The truck started at the same moment as the rain. I switched on the wipers. They didn’t work. I got out again and pried up the hood and used the screwdriver to be