Renata Adler - After the Tall Timber

A few hours later, the delegation and its petition were turned away by Governor Wallace. At the airport, where there had been some difficulty during the preceding days (an uncanny number of suitcases belonging to marchers were mislaid by the airlines), new flights had been scheduled to get the marchers out of Montgomery. Still, many marchers had to wait at the airport all night long. They rested on the floor, and on the lawn outside, and as often as the police cleared them away they reappeared and fell asleep again. Word came that Mrs. Viola Liuzzo had been shot. Some of the marchers went back to Selma at once. Others boarded planes for home. At the Montgomery airport exit was a permanent official sign reading “Glad You Could Come. Hurry Back.”

The New Yorker

April 10, 1965

Originally titled “Letter from Selma”

ON A LITTLE patch of land just outside the city limits of Los Angeles, on that portion of Sunset Boulevard which is called Sunset Strip, there is a large billboard that advertises a casino in Las Vegas. Set on top of the billboard, dressed in red boots, long red gloves, and black-and-white striped panties attached across the midriff to a red bikini top, is an immense, pink plaster chorus girl. One of her arms is bent, hand slightly forward and upraised, at the elbow. Her other arm extends, fingers outstretched, behind. One of her knees is raised. The other leg is the one she stands and slowly, continuously rotates on. Diagonally southwest across the street from the girl, much nearer the ground, on a little pedestal, another figure in red gloves, striped panties, and red top rotates in a similar pose. It is Bullwinkle the Moose. Somewhere west of the girl and east of the moose, the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department ends and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s territory begins. Since the Strip was for a good part of its history a center of gambling and prostitution, it has always remained part of the “county island” of West Hollywood, and resisted incorporation into the City of Los Angeles. For tax reasons, and perhaps because of rumors that the gambling, at least, will be allowed to return, it resists incorporation now. Very near this border outpost, on a recent Saturday night, a small band of Dickensian characters — two tall, pale women with thin, reddish hair; one short, stout, bustling brunette; and four men, rather unsteady on their feet — set up a portable loud-speaker system on the sidewalk and began to preach. Several boys and girls who had been sitting quietly on two of the benches that line the Strip at bus stops, and several others, who had been leaning against the white picket fence that surrounds a small pink-and-yellow café called Pandora’s Box — closed, like several other rock-’n’-roll and cherry-Coke establishments, by the police, on account of some recent disturbances — gathered around to watch. One of them wore a kind of harlequin cap with many floppy, green earlike appendages, from each of which there hung a silver bell. Another wore blue jeans, a suede jacket, an undershirt, a mauve tie, and a top hat. Two wore gray Confederate jackets. Several wore wooly vests over shirts with leather laces at the collar — open to reveal striped turtleneck jerseys underneath. Nearly all wore slacks cut quite low at the hips, and one wore a lumberjacket. Although the night was quite cold, three were barefoot, and one had on apparently homemade red-and-black slippers turned up at the toes. The rest wore boots. All of them stood in a loose but attentive cluster a bit to one side of the preaching band.

“My happiest moment,” a man who was missing a front tooth was saying, with a practiced homiletic quaver, into the microphone, “was when I saw myself a sinner. I traded in my sins for Jesus, and, believe me, I got the best of the deal.” The teen-agers drifted a short way off, and the speaker raised his voice. “I know you young people,” he said. “You talk dirty and your minds are dirty. You don’t want no one to have a claim on you. You don’t want to be obligated. But you’re obligated, sinners, because there is a God above.”

“How do you know?” asked the boy in the top hat.

“Because I love God,” the man said hoarsely; and as he continued to preach, one of the tall, pale women went about nudging the teen-agers and offering them inspirational tracts — among them a green one entitled “7 Communists Go Singing Into Heaven.”

A Los Angeles patrol car, containing two helmeted policemen staring straight ahead, cruised by.

“Why don’t they ask these hypocrites to move along?” a barefoot girl in a shaggy sweater, slacks, and yachting cap said, in a bitter voice. “They’re blocking the sidewalk. They’re trying to incite us to riot. They’re obviously winos. How come The Man never hassles anyone but the longhairs?”

“I want to listen to this,” said a short, plump girl beside her. “I haven’t had such a treat in years.” Suddenly, she slung her large leather purse over her shoulder, pulled a few strands of hair over one eye, and, raising the other eyebrow, began to walk slowly and suggestively back and forth in front of the speaker, who turned sideways.

“This bearded sinner tells me he is Jewish,” the speaker said, pointing to a young man wearing black slacks and a black shirt, with a pair of what appeared to be calipers hung on a string around his neck. “Well, I want to tell you about the greatest Jew that ever walked the earth….”

“Yodel, Billy,” the barefoot girl in the yachting cap said to the young man in black. He began to yodel. The gap-toothed man continued to preach. The tall, pale woman continued to distribute pamphlets. The short, plump girl continued to walk back and forth. A bus pulled up in front of the benches, and a gray-haired, stolid-looking couple, evidently tourists, got laboriously out.

“O Lord, O Lord, O Lord, here they are, Henry, will you look at them,” the lady said, smoothing down the skirt of her dress and looking directly at the girl in the yachting cap. “I’m glad I raised mine right.”

“What are you looking at, you old bag?” the short, plump girl asked, standing still for a moment.

The couple began to walk away.

“It’s Sonny and Cher,” the boy in the top hat said as they passed him. “I’d know them anywhere.”

The gap-toothed man had leaned away from his microphone and was now addressing the group in a rather intimate tone about “your dirty, filthy sins and your unclean habits.”

The boy in the lumberjacket, who had been looking for some time at the girl in the yachting cap, suddenly walked over and took her hand. He led her wordlessly to a point directly in front of the man who was speaking, and kissed her. When, after several minutes, they looked up, the gap-toothed man (although he watched them with apparent fascination) was still preaching, so they kissed again and remained in each other’s arms until the sound of a guitar farther down the street — in front of a café called the Fifth Estate — caused the teen-age group to disperse and drift toward the music.

“Before you go to bed this very night …” the speaker was saying, as the young longhairs walked away. And several of them tried — with such phrases as “turn on,” “freak out,” and “take the pill”—to complete his sentence for him.

What seems to have brought the Strip to its present impasse — it is practically deserted but for these little evangelical bands of elderly squares and young longhairs, bent on mutual conversion — was an economic battle with, and over, teen-agers; and what apparently drew the teen-agers to the Strip in the first place was a musical development. In the late fifties and early sixties, by all accounts, the Strip was dull. The old, expensive restaurants, left over from the golden days of Hollywood, were in a steep decline. Near the middle of the Strip, there was (and still is) an attractive stretch of clothing and antique shops called Sunset Plaza, but the rest was lined (and is) with hot-dog stands, car-rental agencies, and billboards — changed with the rapidity of flash cards — advertising casinos, airlines, films, and mortuaries.