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Giving it Up
Years ago, I believe around the mid-80's through early-90's, there was a Volkswagen repair shop on the corner of Duvall and 45th in Austin. Once a week, usually around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, from age 6 until 16, I would ride past it, one of my parents behind the wheel of our old Chrysler station wagon, on our way to my violin lesson at UT. The light at that intersection is a long one, and I remember staring out my window, sometimes for a full minute or more, at the small corner lot jam-packed with old Beetles, Rabbits, and fluorescent Vanagons, some of them piled two-high.
There was never anyone there. This was not a creation of man; it was a natural habitat, a co-op for cars. Oozing from its tiny lot was a mysterious life force, a sense of Volkswagons come alive, the long-abandoned Texaco gas station their home. There was some kind of presence, you could tell, because every week the cars would re-arrange themselves into new positions, rotating front guard duty for kitchen patrol in back. What a marvelous place this was, suspended in a miraculous split-second from the Sixties. In my mind, 45th and Duvall was the center of Cool in the universe.
The mysteries of Duvall Volkswagon gradually gave themselves up, one at a time, over the course of my college career. I think the first crack in the veneer of my VW commune construct appeared when the Chronicle ran a brief interview with the shop's owner and sole mechanic (thankfully, there was no photograph inset to the text). "So, the joint is human after all!" I remember thinking. Later, I had a customer at Audio Systems who was neighbors with the guy, adding to my fact list an address and a list of peculiar life/work habits. Before I knew it, the sweet vapor-dreams of place had given way to unremarkeable reality.
The final wrecking ball of my fantasy swung when, carousing about town in one of my many and varied afternoon drives, I saw a guy working inside the station's garage (which had never been open before). He was in there. Turning a wrench under the hood of a Jetta in broad daylight. And we all know that there ain't no mojo or juju goin' on while the sun still shines.
Like a lover whose backstory has run dry, Duvall Volkswagon, its secrets exhausted, lost all its radiance and charm. The more I learned about it, the less my imagination had to fill in. With each new fact, the place seemed incrementally more ordinary and pedestrian. Sure, there were still outward quirks, but there was a rational, earthbound explanation for every last one of them. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss, you know?
Reading Josh's recent post about the mysteries of a subway sticker triggered this memory, long since dormant and probably never really articulated. And of course, what do I do but try and Google my way to the end of Josh's great mystery. And damned if I didn't get somewhere: I found out what all the flap was about, just stopping shy of identifying the specifc perps. After the thrill of the chase, however, I was left with a miniature version of my own Duvall Volkswagon myth deconstruction fiasco. If I'd just let things stay all film-noir mist and shadows, I'd have a big fat Chandler farrago on my hands instead of a two-page url fact pamphlet.
In the trendier neighborhoods of San Diego, I've lately seen spray-painted insignia on the sidewalks: a stenciled silhouette of Baby Bush with the caption "One-term-president." What is that? An emo punk band? A political activist group? A wry jokester armed with a can of Krylon and good metalshop skills? Like the NYC subway sticker, perhaps it's best to toss that question into the mystery pile of Hillcrest, a fertile composting loam for the imagination.
Last year, it was the "THINK DUSTIN" sticker, with the 'S' printed as a dollar-sign, that was all the rage here, plastered on every transformer box, stopsign, and utility pole imaginable. No one has a clue as to what it means or who put them up. And most of the stickers are faded and tattered now. What's happened to Dustin? Did he just fade and tatter away, too?
I like these little ornaments of the urban environment. They add a dimension of humanism to an otherwise sterile grid of stainless steel and poured concrete, artifacts of anonymous ghosts comprising a larger organic whole: the city as living, breathing superman. Such are the faceless forces that smear into an impressionistic blur of place, a city's cultish mystique. Who'd thought anonymity, that blessing of large urban areas, could be so atmospheric?
Josh, I hope you never find the sticker creator's url (if they even have one). It would just suck away a little more mystery away from NYC, which, unlike Duvall Volkswagon, is admittedly pretty much limitless. Great institutions, like lovers, should never give up their secrets too easily. With the thrill of mystery, our imaginations can run wild and conjure up distractive and creative fantasies shielding us from the blah of suburbia and the 40-hour workweek. Your mystery did just that for me tonight, even if my detective instincts got the better of it. May you dream of adbusters and revolutionaries in underground tunnels armed with rolls of Avery 2" label stock. I'll send my own Vanagon around if it'll help the effort any. Watch for that.
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