Arthur is skinny. We all look young and vibrant.
We see the home where Psycho was filmed. The set of the New England town where Jaws was shot.
We take a helicopter tour of Los Angeles. Jimmy sits in front. We see Dodger Stadium. Cars corkscrew around the highway like little toys on a child’s racetrack. We fly out toward the ocean. Over the beach. People walk into the waves; they all seem to be tanned.
Thursday, August 19, 1982. I tell the camera that we were just checking out of the Bel-Air Hotel. Jimmy follows me. He is smiling a clever smile. We walk on a path under low tropical-looking trees. There is a pool. We stop. Paul is filming. I tell him to make sure he gets us all in the shot—that is the most important thing. Arthur leads us to the Lincoln Town Car we’re renting for the trip. He says, “Step right this way, to the American West.”
We pass by the San Bernardino Mountains. Seventies music is on the tape machine. Arthur has planned all the music to correspond to the geography. In a little town, Arthur slows down. He says, “Maybe I can get a quick milk here. That’ll tide me over.”
The ruddy hills are turning into steeper mountains, and the shrubs are becoming pines. We listen to a Quincy Jones song. Jimmy is discussing the drumming, but Arthur tells him to hold on. This is the prettiest scene yet, he thinks. “We’re twenty-six miles out of LA, just passed Big Bear,” he announces. He describes a lake. Flat and completely like glass. It is impossible to differentiate the actual terrain from its reflection—the real from the image of the real. “It reminds me,” I say, “of the time we were in Israel, and we looked out into Lebanon and Jordan. Just like that.” A place where the desert was so wide it all looked like water, like an oasis.
When we listen to the song “The Boxer,” Arthur says it reminds him of baseball. “Whenever I get up there to sing it, that’s what I think about.”
Paul is trying hard to hold the camera steady. All you can see now, near Barstow, are pink, rugged hills. We could be on Mars. “We are now fully aware that we exist,” Arthur says. “It’s our earth now.”
Now we are on the road. Arthur wants Paul to film just the road, only the road. “Cecilia” comes on. Arthur says this is one of the hardest songs to do. Jimmy asks why. “Oh, it’s the groove, the rhythm of it.” Arthur sings along to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” He blows it. He wants another take. We laugh at him. “It’s not funny, Jimmy,” he says sarcastically. Jimmy can’t stop laughing. His voice is still like a little kid’s.
We are listening to classical music. The sunset is thin and bright. These are the types of skies in which one expects to see celestial events. I explain that the mountains are proud. They rise up like the pyramids. Arthur says we are 229 miles outside of Los Angeles and 100 miles short of Las Vegas. At one point, someone asks me if I can see the mountains. “It’s hard for me to say,” I reply. “I think I can sense the shadow.”
We are in front of Tower Records in Las Vegas. Arthur is inside looking for Brandenburg Concertos, numbers four, five, and six. Paul tells me to sing. I sing “Chantilly Lace.” Arthur comes back without the Brandenburgs; instead, he got Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Arthur is lost in Vegas. He cannot find his way out. He says he has never gone this way before. Later, he explains that when we laugh, we put the internal part of ourselves in the proper place. Then we begin to heal ourselves from the core on out.
Arthur explains that straight ahead is a brownish lump, which is a mountain. A little to the left is a grayish lump. He says there is a satiny look to the bottom of it. “You know, I think Teddy Roosevelt is really our president on this trip,” Arthur says. “He was a great naturalist. A great traveler.”
Jimmy says, “It’s an oven outside.”
“That’s a simile,” Arthur says. He explains similes and metaphors. He says metaphors become more important the older one gets. “People who use metaphors well are a joy to listen to. There are not many.”
On top of Hoover Dam, Paul makes sure to film me in my nearly invisible white shorts. I stand behind Jimmy. They think this is the funniest thing.
“Clearly, this is the most enormous stretch of concrete you’ve ever seen,” Arthur says. The water is green near the edges and blue in the middle. We’re 487 miles outside of Los Angeles when we hit Arizona. We listen to Billy Joel. Arthur sings along. At the Utah state line, I get out with Jimmy and Arthur and stand in front of the mountain daylight time sign. If we go on, we will slip into the past.
A motel room at night. Arthur reads to us from Independence, a Hollywood tell-all, in his room. He is sitting up on his bed, his head against a white concrete wall. “That book is delicious,” I say. “A very readable book,” Arthur agrees.
The following morning, the mountains become giant and steep and orange. The space between them possesses a very specific, very tangible force that wafts up against the car as we make our way along the road cut into the mountains.
In Zion National Park, it begins to rain. I ask what it is like out. “Raining,” Arthur says. “When you get to the bottom, you get the earth that’s fed by the underwater wetness of the
