Tales of the Southwest: The Art Truck

The actual factual Art Truck at a beach campground on The Gulf of California 

at Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico...June 1998.

  My buddy Ken* drove from Roswell, New Mexico to visit me out west in Bisbee, Arizona about 20 years ago.

  We spent an evening hanging out at a couple of the bars in the town’s famed “Brewery Gulch” before calling it a night.

  We were headed back to the hacienda when we came to a stop sign.

  Here came a car from the left.

  It had the right of way so it sailed through the intersection right in front of my headlights.

  It was one of Bisbee’s art cars.

  This particular one was a Nissan station wagon with all kinds of dolls glued to the car’s body and top:  Cabbage Patch kids, Kewpie dolls, run of the mill dolls, Barbies & Kens, Betsy Wetsy, GI Joe….all glued to the car.

  “What the hell was that?” Ken practically yelled as he watched the tail lights fade off into the distance.

  “Art car,” I said.  “Town’s full of ‘em.”

  “This is a weird damn place you live in,” Ken said.

  Well that’s why I moved to Bisbee from Phoenix.

  I had gotten tired of the traffic, the intense heat and the angry vibe in general in “The Valley of the Sun,” that’s what they call the Phoenix area.

  I really wanted to move back to Roswell but I had heard there was a hippie utopia about 200 miles to the southeast of Phoenix, just a rifle shot from the Mexican border:  Bisbee.

  I was still at that stage in my life where I thought SURELY there was a place where everyone lived in happiness, peace, music, art and harmony.

  And while Bisbee had the art and Bisbee had a different vibe going on, it still wasn’t utopia.

  But that’s another story.

  I don’t know, maybe there were one or two dozen “art cars” that called Bisbee home.

  Unlike my buddy Ken, I wasn’t shocked by the first art car I saw.

  It was covered in some kind of spongy material and shaped to look like a flying eye.

  I thought it was cool.

  I wanted to make my own art car.

  The thought that came right to mind was to take a bunch of CDs (compact discs) and silicone glue them to the exterior of my little red Subaru.  The radio station where I worked got in all of these excess CDs….music we didn’t play….non-hits, Mexican music that wasn’t our format.  We had boxes and boxes of ‘em just waiting to be glued to my car, label side down, shiny side up.

  I thought it was a good idea.

  But like a lot of stuff I think of in life I didn’t think the idea through.

  “I bet the first time an Arizona State Trooper sees it they’ll give you a ticket,” said a Bisbee pal.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “All those shiny compact discs glinting in the sun?  They’ll say you’re a road hazard.  And will the CDs stand up to the heat?  Will they turn into little warped circles all over your car?”

  So I nixed the CD “art car.”

  But I had a truck.

  My truck was a good ol’ dependable 1983 Ford F-150 pickemup truck.

  I wanted to do SOMETHING “cool” with it but nothing crossed my mind.

  I’m really not a decorating kind of guy.

  For instance, my interior decorating skills were still stuck in college.  Give me a bean bag chair, some cinder blocks and boards for shelving and some random posters to slap on my living room walls and I’m good.  Artistic decorating visionary I am not.

  Then then art came to my Ford F-150.

  It was time for one of the many festivals held in the hippie town of Bisbee.  The town dance teacher approached me with an idea.

  “What if during the Spring Festival you park your pickup truck at the dance school’s booth and people just paint what they want on the truck?” she proposed.  “I have the paint.”

  “I love it!” I said.  “I dig the randomness, the spontaneity!”

  And so one Saturday in April during The Bisbee Spring Festival my truck sat parked with buckets of paint nearby along with brushes and festivalgoers…mostly kids, some adults…randomly painted upon it.

  When I came back to pick it up in the evening it was glorious…yellow streaks, fuchsia strokes, white wavy lines, sky blue stars, an orange sun and a topless mermaid.

  “I didn’t know if you could handle the topless mermaid,” said the dance teacher.

  “Well…I….I don’t know what they might say at my work,” I said.  I worked 30 miles away at a radio station in Sierra Vista, an Army town.  I could just see my boss calling into question the wisdom of driving around the conservative burg with a topless mermaid…a BUSTY topless mermaid…painted on my truck.

  “Hang on,” she said.

  Dance teacher reached into a box and produced some silicon glue and some quarter-sized spangles.  One by one she pasted the spangles over the mermaid’s boobs and….VOILA!  The mermaid now had a spangly bra…or bikini top…or whatever.

  From time to time my pickemup truck got driven around town.  In Bisbee nobody gave the wildly painted F-150 a second glance.  In Sierra Vista or Tombstone, well, folks just knew that I must’ve come down the mountain from Bisbee.

  Like that time I was headed into work in my pickemup truck.  My speedometer was broken so I just stayed with the flow of traffic….it had worked for me so far.

  Except for this one time.

  I was the last in a line of about 5 cars rolling toward Sierra Vista.  It didn’t SEEM like we were speeding.  Then an Arizona State Trooper passed going the other direction.  I just checked in my rearview and saw the trooper slam on the brakes and make a u-turn.

  “Oh hell,” I thought to myself, “My day for revenue enhancement.”

  Sure enough the trooper was soon on my ass with lights a-flashin’.

  I pulled over, turned off the truck, put the keys on the dash, rolled the window down and sat awaiting my fate.

  “Good day, sir,” said the lady trooper.  “Do you know why I stopped you?”

  “No ma’am,” I said.  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “You were doing 65 in a 55 zone,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I was just going with the flow of traffic.”

  I wasn’t going to admit to having a broken speedometer, that probably would’ve gotten me in even more trouble.

  “You’re from Bisbee, aren’t you,” she said.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  She cast her eyes on my truck body, looked from front to back then looked at me.

  “I could tell,” she smiled.

  Ms. Trooper took my license and registration, went back to her car, did whatever they do back there then came back, handing my stuff back to me.

  “I’m just giving you a warning, slow it down,” said the trooper.  Then she smiled, “And good luck selling this thing when the time comes.”

  Then the time came to go to Roswell to visit my friends.

  It was summertime so my Subaru wouldn’t be making the trip…it had no air conditioning.  The “art truck” AC worked.

  I would be driving my “art truck” to southeast New Mexico.  I would be amongst ranchers, a few oilfield workers and such.  No longer would I be amongst the artistic types of Bisbee.

  I was more concerned about the lousy gas mileage I’d get driving a full-sized pickemup truck than I was about the reaction I’d get in Roswell traffic.

  As it turns out there wasn’t much of a reaction at all.

  Some old guy who looked like he was made up of tanned leather and spring steel turned by me at an intersection and said loud enough for me to hear:  “Damn waste of a perfectly good truck.”

  Another guy spoke when he pulled up beside me at a traffic light on Main Street Roswell:  “Why’d you cover up the mermaid’s boobs?  That’s just sad.”

  A year or so later the time came to leave Arizona and return to New Mexico.

  And the art truck?

  I gave it to the dance teacher.

  After all, the truck really belonged in the little hippie burg just a rifle shot from the Mexican border.

-30-

*Name changed