Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Revving up for a literary ‘Road Trip’

Friday, July 30, 1999 | 10:30 a.m.

On certain daydreamy afternoons in front of my blank computer screen in my austere work cubicle in a featureless office building on the aptly named Corporate Circle Drive, the thought balloon over my head fills with images of escape and freedom. Me, a zoomy convertible and the call of the open road, the song of the highway, the wind in my hair ...

Then again, I hate to drive, so, when you think about it, that's a pretty stupid fantasy. I'm just not a car guy. Nonetheless, when I read James Morgan's "The Distance to the Moon: A Road Trip Into the American Dream" (Riverhead Books, $24.95), my first thought was one of envy: Why didn't I think of this?

Because somehow -- and fasten your seat belts, guys, you're gonna go lug nuts when you read this -- Morgan managed to talk the Porsche people into lending him, for free, a brand new convertible Boxster -- before it was available in this country -- so he could motor around America, thinking big thoughts about our complicated relationships with our road machines. (The title comes from a remark by John Updike about the distances American men drive.)

You'd think a red-blooded guy, a hot car and six weeks' worth of looking for the American Dream while the wife stays home would make for a pretty crazy, lock-up-your-daughters road trip. But Morgan doesn't want to be Hunter S. Thompson. Nor does he want to be Charles Kuralt, roaming the country's picturesque back roads in search of quality time with Ma and Pa Kettle.

He's more like a sociologist on wheels, exploring the ways we relate to our cars, as well as the clots of interstate culture -- fast-food joints, drab chain motels -- that have sprung up to service American mobility. It's an essentially intellectual agenda, and to that end he mixes in auto-history lessons, sociological asides and entertaining man-in-the-seat interviews with car guys he meets along the way. (One car salesman recalls a one-armed customer who insisted on buying a car with a stick shift.)

He frequently Turtle Waxes philosophical: "Leaving one locale, bound for another, we're in a sense suspended from the world," he writes. "Freed from the chain of snarling families and mounting bills and overflowing in-boxes and back-stabbing colleagues, we narrow our panorama of worry to the road ahead. Watching it, we can drift into a place where we're finally the person we might have been, could be, maybe still will be if things turn out right. We can hold this image for minutes or days, as long we don't have to stop the car."

Me, I just use my car to drive to work.

For a guy behind the wheel of a Porsche, Morgan has a little trouble getting up to speed. In the beginning he does more digressing than driving -- it takes him more than 100 pages to get out of Florida. And some of the subplots are either irritating (he has a fight with his wife before leaving, and she spends the whole book angry at him; we never get a satisfactory resolution) or forced (comparing his trip to that of Lewis and Clark).

But road trips are about what you encounter along the way, so once you settle into Morgan's style, the ride picks up considerably. And his car-related memories can be fascinating; in one, he recalls a nighttime drive with his boyhood pal Rusty Calley, who went on to fame and misfortune in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.

For Morgan, the whole car thing began with James Dean -- as a kid, he fetishized a poster of Dean's wrecked dream mobile, investing it with a heated teenage romanticism, wanting to be him.

He ends with Dean, too. After weeks of staying in bad motels, eating mostly crappy road food, encountering plenty of interesting people and considering cars from historical, theoretical, social, cultural and even urban-planning points of view, Morgan finds himself on the stretch of California road where Dean died. And realizes he's no James Dean -- although Porsche offers him a deal on the car, he declines.

He remembers what someone he'd met along the way told him: "Too many people try to live up to their cars. They need to choose a car that's right for who they are."

Reading list

Hey, Joe: Not being a coffeehouse regular, I have very little opinion of Starbucks as either a corporate entity or cultural whatever -- other than to say that its java engineers rarely put the proper amount of chocolate in their mochas -- so I didn't bring many preconceptions to the debut issue of the chain's new magazine, Joe. I'm apathetic to it on its own merits.

Equal parts bona fide magazine and corporate brand extension, Joe just isn't very interesting. Most of the contents can be separated into two piles: Discard Immediately and Discard Right After That. The review section is a loss, as is aging Gen Xpert Douglas Coupland's unfunny analysis of a typical work cubicle; I needed a double espresso after that one. Mark Leyner contributes a hunk of his typical spazzing on the subject of playing God, or bowling, or something; it's hard to tell through all the carbonation of his prose.

Joe does have a few pieces worth reading, though, particularly Pam Houston's essay on the kindness of strangers, and Joy Williams' odd meditation on the Unabomber's cabin, in which she offers us the thoughts of the cabin itself. Like I said, odd.

The theme of this issue is Trust; one trusts the magazine will improve. In the meantime, more chocolate in the mocha!

Vegas between covers: If there's one thing Las Vegans are tired of reading about, it's undoubtedly Las Vegas. Few are the publications that haven't trained their X-ray specs on our town, trying to get to the bottom of the Vegas mystique.

But if you have room for just one more, Oxford University Press is coming out with the unfortunately titled "The Real Las Vegas." Gamely trying to live up to that promise, editor David Littlejohn and a crew of Berkeley grad students descended on Las Vegas in 1997. They report on such aspects of life here as the homeless, the sex industry, unions, megachurches, race, development and the "Nevada attitude." It's not dull sociology, either, but first-person, you-are-there reporting.

While there's an undeniable Berkeley skepticism underlying the whole enterprise, the results are still eye-opening, even for a guy who's lived here for two decades.