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  PRAISE FOR EVERYTHING WE DON’T KNOW

  “[These essays] explore isolation, weaving together the intangible and material touchstones of life periods with remarkable ease . . . Beneath an eternal-boy persona, a surprising tenderness reveals the struggle for human connection . . . Everything We Don’t Know demonstrates the pain of sometimes misguided perceptions, and the many routes an insatiable mind can take.”

  —Foreword Reviews

  “What a great read! Aaron Gilbreath has put together as fine a book of essays as you’re likely to find these days. At times I felt as if I could be reading a John Jeremiah Sullivan collection. Aaron Gilbreath’s strong, candid yet insightful first-person narrative is compelling, clearly honest, and frankly, it reminded me of many things I’d prefer to forget, yet did so powerfully enough to keep me coming back for more.”

  —James Williamson, guitarist of Iggy and the Stooges

  “I’ve been jonesing for the next great collection of personal essays, and Aaron Gilbreath’s Everything We Don’t Know cures my pangs. Booze, drugs, failed relationships, poverty, knee-jerk travel, desperation, joy, music, and recovery—it’s like a primer on late twentieth/early twenty-first century American living, written with honesty, astuteness, and self-deprecation. I loved this collection.”

  —George Singleton, author of Calloustown

  “Aaron Gilbreath’s first collection of essays, Everything We Don’t Know, is a rowdy, exuberant, obsessive, and often hilarious examination of the ennui and energy of a youth spent rambling through the wild west and other meaningful landscapes. Combining a novelist’s understanding of narrative structure and pacing with the essayist’s digressive talents, Gilbreath creates a voice that embodies the best journalistic qualities of Hunter S. Thompson, Mary Karr, and Joan Didion. Gilbreath’s essays combine humorous, unsentimental, unflinching prose with rigorous research, harrowing drama, and confessional moments of deep reflection. Everything We Don’t Know is a testament to the adage that the greatest gift any writer possesses is a curious mind; and the abundant fruits of Gilbreath’s curiosity end up being the greatest gift of this book.”

  —Steven Church, founding editor of The Normal School and author of One with the Tiger

  “Everything We Don’t Know is an electric, funny, and far-reaching collection about Gilbreath’s early loves and misadventures growing up out west. Sometimes ecstatic, sometimes angst-filled, he follows where curiosity leads, anchoring himself in resiliency and feeling, intelligence and humility. The essay “It’s Really Something You Should Have Examined,” about his girlfriend Abby and his ferret Wiggy, highlights Gilbreath at his quirky and tender best.”

  —Marcia Aldrich, author of Girl Rearing and Companion to an Untold Story

  “Aaron Gilbreath writes the kind of essays I’m always crossing my fingers for when I open a new collection. He grabs the threads of history, nature, pop culture, geography, and travel, and weaves a kind of wild web around the personal essay. Honest, open, deft, and able to turn a phrase like a bad ass—Gilbreath is now on my shortlist of go-to essayists.”

  —Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World and May We Shed These Human Bodies

  “Gilbreath is among that rare breed of writer with both a journalist’s keen eye for observation and discovery, and a memoirist’s skill for shining a light on our human foibles, mistakes, and thwarted ambitions. His brilliant examinations expand and contract seamlessly between the outer world and his own inner life—from Googie architecture to the Redwood Forest to his harrowing efforts to kick heroin. Gripping, honest, and endlessly intelligent, Everything We Don’t Know marks the debut of a major literary talent.”

  —Justin Hocking, author of The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld

  “Aaron Gilbreath’s new collection of essays shatters the tenets of memoir, and leaves the shards out in the sun to stew, before putting them back together in ways more frazzled, distressed, hilarious, scarred, and thereby more human, and true. Along the way, Gilbreath’s exhilaratingly cockeyed meditations on the seemingly mundane detritus of our world—when leashed to engagements of friends, jobs, lovers, family, strange music, and stranger architecture—are allowed to dovetail with (in his words), “these mythic notions [that] colonize your head.” I, for one, am grateful to have had my head colonized by these wonderful essays.”

  —Matthew Gavin Frank, author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost

  CURBSIDE SPLENDOR

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.

  Published by Curbside Splendor Publishing, Inc., Chicago, Illinois in 2016.

  First Edition

  Copyright © 2016 by Aaron Gilbreath

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016949234

  ISBN 978-1-940430-92-8

  Edited by Alison True and Naomi Huffman

  Book design by Alban Fischer

  www.curbsidesplendor.com

  CONTENTS

  Dreams of the Atomic Era

  A Secondary Landscape

  The Stoned Age

  Land Speculation

  Ancient History

  The Burden of Home

  Leaving Tatooine

  Tillage

  Tragedy of the Commons

  It’s Really Something You Should Have Examined

  My Manhattan Minute

  'ra · di · kl

  Between Disappearances

  Hey Cowboy

  Every Supper the Last

  Everything We Don’t Know

  A Reckless Autonomy

  (Be)Coming Clean

  Works Cited

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  DREAMS OF THE ATOMIC ERA

  By the time I recognized their gaudy beauty in 1995, the 1950s and ’60s motels along Van Buren Street had largely turned into rent-by-the-hour sex dens and the haunts of junkies and crack smokers. Those buildings that had ceased operation sat fenced and boarded up, colonized by squatters and pigeons, pending future demolition. In the thirty years since its heyday, Phoenix, Arizona’s “Motel Row” had degenerated from class to kitsch, and finally into one of my hometown’s most crime-ridden corridors, a parched vacation-land graveyard desiccating in the same desert sunlight that once drew its customers. I wanted to photograph the vernacular architecture before the ’dozers arrived: the funky fonts, Polynesian huts, upswept flying-to-the-moon roofs and signs that said “Coffee Shop” in baby blue. I’d already shot the fronts of maybe ten motels, both functioning and condemned, and had collected from local antique stores all the vintage postcards featuring their images. The time had come to venture inside. So I jumped the fence one morning at the condemned Newton’s Inn and Prime Rib.

  I was cornered by the time I heard claws on the pool deck. I spun around from the boarded office window I was about to photograph, and there it was: a Dalmatian crouched seven feet in front of me, ready to pounce. The dog inched closer, barking and growling and showing its teeth. It trapped me by what used to be the door to the front desk. Weathered boards covered the windows behind me. A cyan and orange row of rooms stretched to my right. In front of me the kidney-shaped pool, black water stiffening in the bottom, palm fronds and pigeon parts floating atop its skin. To escape, I’d have to hustle past the pool toward the gap in the brick fence where I’d entered—some sixty feet away—then cross the forty feet of naked dirt between it and the two fences I’d jumped. This dog would overtake me in the open. I imagined its jaws clamping on my ankles, lashing its head from side-to-side like a feeding crocodile while
gnawing them to a grizzly pâté of bloody socks and tendons. I shifted to the right to put the pool between us. It scrambled to meet me on the other side, snarling.

  Garbage littered the pool deck: gravel, cinder blocks, roofing material, beer bottles. I picked up the long metal base of what might have once been a stop sign. Banging it against the ground I yelled, “Go! Get out of here!” The dog crouched, barking louder. The thought of hurting an animal nauseated me, but if this one charged, was there a choice? Head down and snout out, its arched back echoed the shape of the sweeping roof at the neighboring Sun Dancer Hotel, a Googie parabola poised for launch.

  Brittle chips of gunite flew as I pounded the rod over and over. Puffs of dust drifted between us. People once vacationed here, I thought. Families en route to California swam, sunbathed, and digested big steak dinners while watching Ed Sullivan in their refrigerated rooms. Newton’s original yellow brochure said, “Modern as tomorrow . . . Yet based on a proven reputation for hospitality.”

  When the dog made quick steps forward, I stomped my feet and stood my ground.

  The forces that draw hobbyists to their favorite things are often inexplicable. Whether the hobby is golf, porcelain angels, or chopper bicycles, why these and not something else? Even when I was twenty my interests were eclectic. Throughout childhood and adolescence I’d gone through what my parents accurately called phases. “Aaron’s going through another phase,” they’d say without a hint of disapproval. As a kindergartener I’d fixated on trains. Mom and Dad took me to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks in Flagstaff to search for rusty ties. They hung reproduction oil lamps in my room back in Phoenix, bought me a model electric train set to play with, conductor’s overalls to wear. Then it was Star Wars. Everything had to be Star Wars: toys, t-shirts, sleeping bag, sheets, shampoo, birthday cakes, Pez dispensers, silverware. Then I went gaga for GI Joe toys, then comic books, then anime, skateboarding, southern California beach culture, Vintage Hang Ten shirts culled from thrift stores, European beer, surf instrumental music, antique A&W root beer mugs, loose leaf tea. One year I wanted to replace my brown bedroom carpet with beach sand and sleep in a hammock between two fake palm trees; the next year that bedroom was decorated with Depeche Mode posters and bootleg vinyl. The world was new and fascinating. Everything held potential interest, yet my attention focused intensely on one thing at a time. Obsessions were how I processed information.

  Sometime in 1995 I discovered architect Alan Hess’ book Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture. I found the title in the index of another book, or maybe I spotted it on a bookstore shelf. I can’t recall, but the effect was profound. It wed my eyes to the pastel majesty of the fifties and early-sixties, catalyzing a reaction as mysterious as the chemistry of pheromones yet as binding as marriage, a love affair that outlasted all future phases.

  Googie was a bold, innovative style of commercial architecture born in post-WWII Los Angeles. Often called Coffee Shop Modern, sometimes Populuxe, Jet Age, Space Age, and Doo-Wop, Googie can be traced to a coffee shop architect John Lautner designed in 1949. The shop was called Googie’s. It stood on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights, a dissenter in a sea of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne. When Yale Professor Douglas Haskell was driving north on Crescent Heights with an architectural photographer in 1952, they came upon Lautner’s creation. “Stop the car!” Haskell yelled. “This is Googie architecture.” While Haskell was uneasy about what seemed its flamboyance, he did recognize the design’s uniqueness and acknowledged experimentation’s role in birthing new architectural forms. To him, Lautner’s coffee shop epitomized a new style, which he called “Googie architecture” in an article in House and Home magazine. No longer referring simply to the coffee shop but to Lautner’s pioneering work, the term Googie spread though architectural circles nationwide. So-called serious architects dismissed it as garish, using Googie as a slur for design excess, sloppy workmanship and lack of discipline. But others soon refined and reinterpreted Lautner’s concept, most notably the LA firm of Louis Armét and Eldon Davis. During the fifties and mid-sixties, Googie spread throughout California and the US, not only in coffee shops but bowling alleys, diners, motels, car washes, and car dealerships.

  While difficult to define, Googie was highly recognizable. Its landscapes were tropical and lush. Buildings frequently contained indoor gardens. Other architects later mixed in idealized Polynesian elements such as coconut palms, thatched huts and Tiki heads and torches. Buildings were composed of organic forms, highly abstracted, that seemed to defy gravity. Boomerang shapes infused every aspect of the design, from the roof to the corners, including Formica countertop decorations, steel beams and butterfly chairs. Amoebas were also popular motifs, found in logos, signage, pools’ shapes and menus, as were with the intertwined loops of the stylized atom. This was the Atomic Era, the Jet Age, later the Space Age. As scientists explored the inner space of the atom, astronauts explored outer space, and UFOs held America’s attention. Googie incorporated simplified visual elements from both space exploration and molecular science. Concrete dome-shaped buildings took the form of flying saucers. Others more subtly evoked the Martian cities and space stations then appearing in movies and on the covers of sci-fi books and magazines. Spiky starburst decorations resembled Sputnik. Twinkling asterisks looked like stars.

  Another architectural signature was the parabolic, boomerang-shaped roof. These gave the impression of movement, suspended animation, a building preparing for takeoff. Sweeping roofs announced the building’s presence to approaching motorists from a great distance—a necessity since car travel had become a key component of commerce. The added room these roofs created accommodated large sheet glass windows in the front and sides of buildings. This broke down the barrier between inside and outside, allowed sunlight to pour into a bright, festive interior, and gave passing drivers a view of all the fun they could be having if they stopped in for a meal.

  Part Jetson’s, part Disney Tomorrowland, Googie’s aim, as with most vernacular architecture, was to efficiently utilize roadside commercial locations while capturing consumers’ attention in a highly competitive marketplace. Unlike other designs, Googie embodied the era’s vision of a utopian future, the promise of atomic science, space exploration, a booming economy. It pointed the way to progress.

  The Googie aesthetic appealed to my sensibility. The fonts. The cheeky allure of pink next to yellow next to powder blue. Red and white Terrazzo flooring infused with gold flecks and the gaudiness of flagcrete. It gripped my attention as vigorously as the face of a beautiful woman, yet it embodied what, in his song with that title, Thelonious Monk called an “ugly beauty.”

  I had long been a sucker for the nostalgic. I went through a Medieval period as a kid, reading everything I could about knights and castles, followed by a WWII period filled with tanks, grenades, and the Western Front. I watched Happy Days, Leave It To Beaver, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Brady Bunch. Clichéd as it sounds, the fifties and early-sixties seemed so quaint, so contented. It was an impression my father confirmed. Dad called it “a wonderful time to live.” He described how girls on roller skates delivered burgers at the Phoenix carhops he and his buddies frequented. He talked about the now demolished drive-in theaters where they took dates. “There was something about reaching in to a sliding top cooler at a fruit stand and pulling out an ice cold bottle of Coke,” he said. “Everything seemed colder in those days.” My parents were kids then, entertaining big dreams like everyone else about the big houses, families, and careers they’d have. Dad wanted to play boogie woogie piano in a country swing band like Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys. Mom wanted to do social work or join the Peace Corps. I wanted to experience the Eisenhower Era’s culture. The post-war optimism. A world where everyone shimmied ’n’ shaked, did the hop, then the bop, then they swapped and did the stroll. A time when milk was still wholesome, bacon wasn’t bad for you, and root beer arrived in thick frosted mugs.

  Once I saw the black and w
hite photos in Hess’ book, these notions gripped me with an evangelical force. I fantasized about walking into a coffee shop, waving to the waitress and saying, “Hey Peggy, howya doin’? Cup of coffee when you get a minute,” and having her wink and say, “Sure thing, sugar,” as I seated myself at the Formica counter between a guy in a checked fedora and a woman in cat eye glasses and a rhinestone cardigan. There, in view of a parking lot filled with finned cars, I would read the paper. I was twenty years old. I never read the paper, not even for school work. But planted in that shiny metal swiveling chair I would feed myself pieces of fried eggs and ham without taking my eyes off the newsprint.

  This was the other part of Googie’s allure: I associated the aesthetic with my parents, and the older I got, the harder I clung to them against the ravaging current of time. Even though I wasn’t aware of it back when I was taking photos, I seemed to think that by experiencing old drive-ins and diners, I could experience my parents as they were at my age. I’m glad I never realized this back then, because it seems more delusional than romantic: thinking that the taste of a lime Ricky, or even knowing what one was, could facilitate such intimacy. Yet that’s exactly what I wanted.

  The movie Short Cuts came out in 1993, Pulp Fiction and Reality Bites in 1994. When I watched them again sometime in ’95, I noticed certain scenes were set in Googie coffee shops. In Pulp Fiction, Travolta sits opposite Samuel L. Jackson in a pink vinyl booth and offers him bacon. “Pigs are filthy animals,” Jackson says. “I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got enough sense to disregard its own feces.” I did some research. The shop was called the Hawthorne Grill, originally named Holly’s. Armét and Davis designed it. And it sent my mind racing: if these places were still open, my little dream was doable. I had to find them.

  With my native Phoenix a mere three hundred and seventy-five miles from Los Angeles, Googie had spilled easily into the city. Once I started searching, I found numerous examples: Christown Lanes bowling alley on 19th Avenue and Bethany Home Road; the Herman & Sons Pianos store on 20th Street and Camelback; a Methodist church behind Los Arcos Mall; a Tiki Dairy Queen on 70th Street and McDowell. There were scattered Googie car washes and car dealerships too, and a tall white building on Central Avenue that resembled a giant punch card. But it was East Van Buren that housed the densest cluster.