I remember it like breakfast today;
Cheerios and banana, July 2022.
Though it was a fall day in 1955:       
I am at the wheel of a 1949 Ford.
Modified, lowered, primered and
dechromed, loud and rumbling,
my left hand is draped over the wheel
nonchalant, James Dean-like, or so
my high school directorial movie
making inner eye assures me. My right
arm is slung just as casually over my
girlfriend’s shoulders. We wait for the
light at 75th and Holmes to turn green.
A black and white pulls up next to us.
The passenger cop, closest to me says,
“Two hands for beginners.” The cop
driving snickers. How am I to answer
this? My face heats. Mary Ellen turns
up the radio; a new sound. The black
and white takes off, siren going, I am
saved from responding. I know there
is no way to shame these goons, that
trying will merely escalate, ending in
‘teaching the hoodlum a lesson.’
Expense. Loss of face, money, girl
friend, job, loud pipes, on and on.
But with their departure and a green
light, comes Tennessee Ernie Ford
with a new song, unheard, uncritiqued,
vaguely Country, but the beat the beat
possesses, holds., “Sixteen Tons” is
the name, the message, the thrall and
hotbed cradling of hypnotic opiate of
voice and tone and words that turn
everything else small and gray and
listener becomes the song. We did
that at that moment as mining and
company stores and folklike mixed
music entered our bloodstream and
clicked on lights in that area labeled
insurgent brain cells and lifted us up
into a multicolored sky. A song did
this, when sloshed into the half-truths
of teenhood, and parental lies and the
deep hypocrisy of The Fat Fifties and
a dimly perceived ground swell of
change, not wholly welcome. Just a
song. Like Anzio Beachhead was just
a landing. Add to that, Elvis, Marlon,
Marilyn, uranium, civil rights, James
Dean’s exit, the Mickey Mouse Club,
Bo Diddley, Marciano, The $64,000
Question, and the Homemaker’s Sea
Foam Green All-Electric Kitchen by
General Electric. And the Bullet Bra.
And Howl…

Published October 27, 2024

Guinotte Wise Wise writes and welds steel sculpture on a farm in southeast Kansas. His short story collection (Night Train, Cold Beer) won publication by a university press and enough money to fix the soffits. Six more books since. A Best of the Net and 5-time Pushcart nominee, his fiction, essays and poetry have been published in numerous literary journals including Atticus, The MacGuffin, Southern Humanities Review, Rattle and The American Journal of Poetry. His wife has an honest job in the city and drives 100 miles a day to keep it. (Covid changed some of the circumstances) Some work is at http://www.wisesculpture.com

Dan Flavin (born April 1, 1933, Jamaica, Queens, New York, U.S.—died November 29, 1996, Riverhead, New York) was an American artist whose installations featuring fluorescent lighting tubes in geometric arrays emit a rich ambient monochrome or multicoloured light that subtly reshapes the interior spaces in which they are displayed, creating intense visual sensations for the viewer. He was one of the leading exponents of Minimalist art and importantly influenced the direction of international contemporary art.