By PHIL PATTON Esquire, October, 1998  I am standing knee deep in blackberry brambles and kudzu when Bill Simpson threatens me. "I could leave you here," he say with a thin smile, and, "and by morning the possums and bobcats would have picked your bones clean."
Simpson's Car Parts, north of Memphis, looks like nothing more than a jungle. Junkyards, or salvage yards, in the more polite term, are the ultimate end of the assembly line, the final link in the great chain of automotive being. Guys who love cars have to love junkyards. Not the new age salvage yards that call themselves recycling centers but by-God junk yards, where they are ashamed to use the word and where they measure thing in acres not "units." . In the desert or the brush, old cars in nature, more than the glittering restored cars of vintage shows, hold the texture of the past--raw and rusty, but more real. The Parthenon is a ruin too. Like other sorts of ruins, junkyards provide a kind of archaeological record of the American love affair, not to say obsession, with the automobile. Nowhere do these flourish more richly than in the hinterland of Tennessee and along Highway 61, running down into the Mississippi Delta. Of these, none of them is so large or so thickly populated as Charlie Simpson's, on Highway 70 northeast of the Bluff City The reason is straightforward: this is the poorest area of the country, where people of necessity treasure old cars and parts of them. In Tennessee, it's not that big a step from the country practice of keeping two or three cars in the yard out behind your trailer to keeping two or three hundred, hell, two or three thousand. Charlie Simpson, Bill's father, owns about fifty acres, or 5000 cars, laid out and grown over: an elephant's graveyard from which old parts are quarried and cars restored. And in no particular order, he is at pains to tell me. "I've got a Model A and Crosleys. Hudsons and Kaisers. LaSalle. Packard. Nash Metropolitans and Rocket 88s." "Is there an order to the way you have the cars arranged out there?" I asked. "Are they lined up by model or by year or as you get them? "No order," he said. "No rhyme. No rhythm." He was right: wandering through the lot, clambering over over fenders, squeezing between bumpers, slapping mosquitos with one haNd and holding back briars with the other, I encounter an arrangement random as the paths of memory, a free associative juxtaposition of make and model, year and type. Falcons roost by Firebirds, Tempests by Plymouths, Chevelles by Hudsons. Doors and hoods dangle askew beneath the cheap floozy fluff pink of the mimosa tree, fenders lie amid the tangle of blackberry, honeysuckle and poison ivy. Dragon flies flick among orange tiger lilies. Snakes are very much an issue. Bill and I head into the green, more burrowing than walking. Ripening blackberries--black and red in equal numbers--burst from transmissions and fire walls. Through the trees, shapes of light swim across the ground, as if we are underwater. And everywhere, up trees, over cars--kudzu, that soft leaved, relentlessly green Asian import, once hailed as miracle crop, growing a foot a day in the hot sun. Here at Simpson's kudzu serves as a cheap metaphor for the import invasion, sinking big old American cars. The big ocean liner of a 68 Lincoln Mark rears up against the kudzu as if about to head for the bottom. The tail fin of a late fifties Cadilac tail fin rises like a conning tower. "Is that one Elvis bought?" I ask, it being common knowledge around Memphis that the King bought some three hundred odd of the cars. He got a big kick out of sidling up to some ordinary citizen with his nose pressed against the glass at the dealership and asking him which one he wanted most and buying it for him on the sport. "It could be," Bill said. "I know know we got one of them damned ol 'things Elvis drove in some movie. The one with the door flapping open in front. Two wheels in front, one in back. Whatever the hell was that?" "Isetta," I say. "the funny little BMW." "Yeah, that. Over here." It looks like a cracked egg. 
Deeper into the green, we come upon the butt of a rusty Ford Falcon, the compact car Robert McNamara dreamed up one day in church, the story goes, scribbling the specs on the back of the hymn list, a few years before he went off to head up the Pentagon for JFK. Behind it sits a '49 Mercury, the customizer's darling, chopped and channeled, lowered and legthened in a thousand ways. It appears to have run head on into a small tree. Only from the way the tree bends around its bumper could tell the tree had grown up since the car arrived.
It was thick as some Central American jungle, full of lost races, vanished tribes, as long gone as the explorers they were named for LaSalle and Hudson and DeSoto and the deeper I got into it the more I felt like an explorer too, of say, Mayan ruins. I remember an account from the 1830's discoverers of Palenque in Honduras, all about "gloom and mystery" and cities become "a desolation and abode for reptiles." Wrapped up in these vines,I decide, the cars too are the architecture of a lost civilization, the once bright Vs and Zs of chrome, all those logos of crowns and laurels and wings, turned an ashy pewter. The hulks show eyeless light sockets. We seem to be working our way back in time back, as through the concentric rings of a tree. Maybe there is an order here: imagine a series of dynasties, a succession of cities, their wreckage lying not in layers but side by side. Outside, the lean flanked sixties stuff. On the blue fender of one,the chrome lettering has fallen off, leaving a cloudy shadow reading "Malbu," like sky writing. Further in, we hit the fifties: a Nash Metropolitan from the fifties, perky as Howdy Doody. And even deeper, darker now we see fast backed black coupes of film noir Forties. Inside, the radios in decaying dashboards like like the fronts of Bijous and Odeons on a small town main street; the speedos are set in chromed arches like miniature juke boxes. As the afternoon wears on and we move deeper into the lot, things turn from submarine to subterranean. We enter a cave of trees. All the cars here seem black and brown. A huge dark shape hunkers in the shadows: a house, walls bowed out and the roof sagged like a saddle seat. The old family house, surrounded with the Simpson's oldest cars, thirties and forties black items, a Buick 8 with its grilled snout. Trees as thick as hub caps grow right through their back seats. The cars themselves come to seem part of the growth. The more I get used to the place, the more I conceive of Simpson's not as ruin but as farm, plantation, ranch--Rancho Futuramic indeed. It is as if rusting cars were an agricultural product and this a particularly rich crescent of soil, as if Simpson were raising cars instead of storing and cannibalizing them, as if the industrial materials were turning into natural ones, smooth metal and glass into vegetable and animal textures. Raising cars, even, from the dead. Something happens to the paint as it gets old, for instance: there are the colors of pumpkin and grape, of orange creeping into red in a Cezanne peach and some Duco version of Rembrandt's pentimento and patina. The purples and scarlets suggest those of apple skins. A Buick Roadmaster wears the skin of a winesap; a yellow Caddy had turned Golden Delicious. The greens and blues had become the hues of bird's eggs, dappled and spotted. There is rust everywhere, of course, but rust in hue and subtlety unimagined, animate rust: red powery rust, high tech appearing rust, like the Cor-ten steel of an abstract modern sculpture, but rust like blood waiting to be reconstituted, chimpmunk brown rust, and rust fine as cinnamon. A whole rounded Forties car in dark brown rust appears carved out of solid chocolate. At last I stumble on a clutch of old Oldsmobiles--the cars of the late forties and early fifties, with the miracle Rocket 88 engine. Your father's Oldsmobile, literally, winged rocket plane on the hood, cherry red bullet tail lights--the rocket's thrust froze--and on the rear deck, a finned rocket, straight off an Astounding magazine cover, its chrome miraculously still bright. This rocket was oddly familiar to me; I had toddled around a car like this infancy, and rubbed little fingers over such a rocket. Futuramic was the Augustan era of the car. In those days, cars stood at the center of culture. Dynaflow, Starfire, Fiesta, Bel air --the very names flow from the tongue like the chrome along their sides. They set the style, even the beat. That two-tone 54 Ford inspired a table radio, that fins of that '57 Chrysler swoop out like the winged roof of a drive-in. This was styling to inspire doo woop and rockabilly and r&b. Fifty years ago, in the fall of 1948, when the Rocket 88 arrived, it was the biggest thing to hit Detroit since the war--a powerful light V-8 that became the instant star of infant NASCAR. The marketing boys at Olds put Plexiglas windows in the hoods of special cars sent to dealerships to show off the engine and the designers wrapped it in a new styling--Futuramic. They ran ads that showed a cowboy riding beside the new car out West, driving under a gate formed by huge silhouetted rockets supporting the name Futuramic Rancho. Futuramic styling took its name from the GM Futurama at the 1939 Worlds fair and its look from the P-38 World War II fighter, the subject of designer's fantasies during their idle war years, sketched while the car factories were turning out the fighter's engines. "Futuramic"--the word sang with the energy pent up by war, released in peace-- the future arrived, the future automatic. Soon there were Futuramic car washes, Futuramic drive ins. This, I think, is the graveyard of the civilization of the Futuramic. Dropped into the convertible coupe, the 88 made arguably the first muscle car. Over the next few years, Olds put the engine into the Fiesta and Starfire and sales zoomed. No wonder it inspired rock n roll. The car was celebrated in the first rock and roll song, Rocket 88, which had literally taken its sound from Highway 61. In March of 1951, not many miles away from Simpson's, a young musician named Ike Luster Turner headed up from Clarksdale Mississippi along Highway 61, in a Buick overloaded with six other musicians--the Kings of Rhythm--and their equipment. The guitarist's amp slipped from the roof and bounced off the pavement of the highway. Once arrived in Memphis, the group proceeded to the Sun Studio on Union Avenue where Sam Phillips stuffed the amp with paper and the sound came out like a sax on the resulting song: "V-8 power and that modern design/ black convertible top and the gal is fine." The beat was the beat of the postwar boom, of pistoning piano, exuberant elecric guitar, surging sax, and the drumbeat of consumption,. By June of 1951, Rocket 88 was number one in the charts. Bill Haley, then a Pennsylvania disc jockey, cut his own cover of the song. Jerry Lee Lewis listened to Ike's piano playing and Little Richard glommed on to it too. The family's new house is across the highway--brick, with a porch where Charlie Simpson sits gently swinging in a bench suspended from chains, a parody of a proud plantation owner. He puts me in mind of Broderick Crawford in All The King's Men or Orson Welles hamming it up in tk. "It looks like you are ranching copperheads out there," I say as Simpson hands me a huge glass of ice water, slick with condensation. "Did you see any?" "No, but I could feel them watching me." His bench creaks steadily. A mosquito hits the electric killer with a sizzle. Around the porch are scattered chainsaws and meat slicers and lawn mowers--the miniature garden version of the large farm of the cars. His business is simple. He ministers to restorer and body shop. "If you keep the new stuff long enough it finally gets to be old stuff," he says. "And any part on it is worth more than scrap." He will sell you a door or a fender or a whole car. He will deliver a car to you. He's traveled as far as Canada hauling hulks forklifted out of the woods. Five generations of Simpsons have been in this business. It could not have begun more naturally. "In 1935 my grandfather was driving a T model back from Texas about a mile down the road when he broke down and began selling parts off the car T for food. He had five kids and just stayed right here." They family had gone west after the Depression hit the textile mills of North Caroline, hoping for work in Texas. They found none and headed back. In the Fifties, the place prospered, pulling in wrecks from insurance adjusters and dealers. "We just held on to new stuff until it got to be old stuff." "What's new stuff?" "New for me starts for me starts around seventy-three. I don't fool with anything after that. Seventy-two on back is about what I got." Everyone in the salvage business seems to agree: in 1973 some watershed was crossed. Some have nothing after '73, some have nothing before. In that year came the first oil embargo. Ahead lay inevitably downsizing and chips and cars you couldn't fix yourself. 73 was when the civilization that reached its height in Futuramic breathed its last and Charlie Simpson thinks he knows why it happened. "The thing is now," he says, "we Americans all try to think alike and look alike. There's no more-- I don't know what the word is-- no more identification. "No car used to look alike. It had its own identification. Back in our day people would see you and know what you was driving, a 55 Olds Rocket. Now with all these Toyondas out there"--he gestured at the cars whizzing by on the highway fifty yards away, the Accords and Camrys that all looked like one to him--"with them cars you can't any more tell what they are." Simpson's is one of the last of its kind. Today's yards call themselves recycling centers, new generation, new age centers where parts are bar coded and computer sorted, an automated DIS assembly line, Toyotized just-in-time demanufacturing. And when the process is finished, the car has vanished. Malls and zoning are creeping close to Simpson now, and condo complexes. He's not sure how long he can hold out. "I had a friend in the business," he says. "He passed on here not long ago and no one wanted to carry the place on, so they just CRUSHED OUT." He pronounces the word with distaste and sadness both and maybe fear. Crushed out--it means bringing huge compactors right into the yard and smashing the vehicles into what the new era salvagers call "flat bodies," to be sold as scrap by simple dumb metal weight. Crushed out. The new yards part out, then crush out too. They dream of recycling, not restoring. Theirs is a sort of Hindu vision--all the car parts neatly rejoining the materials stream, disappearing back into some kind of manufacturing oversoul where the end is not cars but karma. But Simpson, like some fundamentalist preacher, seems to imagine something different: a Last Day when, as the souls of sinners rise to meet their maker, the shells of all his cars might arise again, resplendent in bright paint and chrome, at last having use for all their wings and fins, as they finally fulfill their promise not just to ride but fly.
Books ·
Recent Stories ·
Euroland ·
Webcams ·
Design |
