The Girl in the Flatbed Ford

Joanie: I wrote this last summer in the wake of my separation from e, a slightly fictionalized snapshot of our life together... the wounds were a bit fresh back then for me to share it, but the fact that i was able to even get it down was probably an indication of recovery...

It indulges my obsession with the tiny burg of Winslow, AZ, as immortalized in the Eagles' song, "Take it Easy"... and the one thing that was - and probably always will be - a bond between me and my soon-to-be ex-hubby: rock and roll...

The Girl in the Flatbed Ford
Or
Why I Should Have Left You Standing on the Corner in Winslow, Arizona

by Joanie Harmon

My editor told me that you would be standing on the corner of 2nd and Kinsley in the town of Winslow. I remember seeing a sign by the road one summer on the way to the Grand Canyon that read, “Winslow, 2 mi.” I thought, it couldn’t be, not the town in the song. As a kid, I never thought of it as a real place, just a random word that could be forced to rhyme with “standing on the corner.” I also thought, what a loser the guy in the song was, shouldn’t he be the one driving around in the flatbed Ford?

I pulled off at the exit and followed the arrows. I saw rundown houses that looked like the ones in an R.E.M. video, kids playing on Slip N’ Slides on dry, yellow lawns. The rough pavement gave way to roads that were in slightly better repair. I had read your books and heard your show on K-DIK when I was just a 15-year-old in my dad’s Malibu. Now I was going to meet you, ask you all sorts of pithy questions and write the story that would win a Pulitzer prize, assuming the award committee was aware of periodicals like Turtle Bay Today.

I arrived at the four corners, which was apparently the center of the town. Conveniently located on two corners were a couple of souvenir shops, one of which was blasting an Eagles soundtrack. The third corner was graced by the Winslow Tourist Information office. Finally, I saw the “Standin’ on the Corner” park, replete with bronze statue of the aforementioned vagabond with a guitar slung across his shoulder. Behind him was a mural on a crumbling wall of a desert, some horses and a blonde smiling from the window of a pickup truck. You were sitting on the lone bench in front of the mural with your eyes closed, your hands lying palms up and open on your knees. Your eyes were shut and apparently you were meditating. Or asleep.

I nervously checked my camera battery and the microphone on my Ipod. I clambered out of the rental truck, nearly missing the running board in my self-conscious attempt to seem calm. I sauntered over to you and introduced myself. You smiled your indulgent smile and gazed at me with those aquamarine eyes. Yet, something was amiss, as if you had knowingly served me some pork tamales from Trader Joe’s whose serve-by date had expired.

You asked me if I wanted to talk over drinks at La Posada and I said, why not. So we jumped into my tourist-white rental and drove down the block to the rustically decrepit hotel. I don’t know if it was the wrought iron candelabra, the two mojitos or the chance to meet one of my girlhood idols, but I lost my head that afternoon. The bar proved to be too impersonal a venue, so we checked into the Douglas Fairbanks suite and the rest is history. I got the story, you got the girl. Everything was going to be great.

It’s hard to know when it started to go so wrong. There were so many times that I could have walked away, but didn’t. You lied to me about the strange sunglasses in the car, the night you didn’t answer your phone just minutes after we hung up when I let it ring about fifty times. If you were there, wouldn’t you have picked up and told me to knock it off? I didn’t know any better and thought that everyone with a drinking problem slurred his speech, danced around the room with a lampshade on his head and wove in and out of traffic when he drove. You never did any of those things.

You simply lost all civility if you didn’t have your first glass of sauvignon blanc by 4:35 p.m., stared over my bare and perfumed shoulders at the redhead behind me at the Brasserie on New Year’s Eve and jovially asked my old boyfriend if you could compare notes sometime. I nearly killed myself on the nights that our lovemaking was scheduled, driving like a madwoman trying to get home before your twist-top bottle of Australian syrah took away the possibility of marital bliss.

The most innocuous questions about where you were all night or why you didn’t answer your phone for hours would get me an angrily roaring response that I would try to quell unsuccessfully by backing down out of desperation. No one had ever gotten that angry at me in my life, about so little. I even stopped drinking my own measly glass of merlot, which I had taken up mainly to keep you company. I had started to think it was my fault and my amateur drinking caused the fights to get out of hand.

But the uncontrollable rage continued, as did my now-routine retreat and attempts to calm you by just backing down. The only thing that would end it would be your eventual collapse into bed, where you lost consciousness as soon as your head hit the pillow. The next morning, as long as I didn’t speak to you before rushing off to the gym and as long as you got to meditate before I got home, everything was back to normal, even great, until the following evening.

The only thing that held us together sometimes was the music. I thrilled to your stories at first, about your early days as a party DJ in the disco-soaked 70s, your distinguished career on K-DIK as “The Lone Pony,” the time you partied with Linda Rondstadt and Stevie Nicks. When I was falling asleep with my ear to my Fred Flintstone radio, you were doing god-knows-what to the same songs I dreamt my pre-adolescent dreams to.

We each thought we had hit the jackpot, you with a bright-eyed young thing who knew what the Summer of Love was, me with a charming and distinguished Pygmalion who thought everybody should Wang Chung tonight. But maybe time can’t be transcended that way. Maybe I was too young, you too old, and both of us unable to understand what lay under the chords that created who we were inside. A seemingly shared history of what passed over the airwaves couldn’t hold us together when you didn’t want to sing a new song with me.

Last summer, I went back to Winslow to cover the “Standin’ on the Corner” Festival. As I threaded my way through the beer-swilling crowds, I saw an old couple sitting on the bench under the mural. As they watched the revelers, they would occasionally turn and gaze at each other, heads bobbing to some internal rhythm. As I got closer and nodded a polite greeting, I saw that they were both plugged into the same Walkman with two sets of earphones. His eyes were an aquamarine blue and he held her withered hand snugly in his own.