Column Without a Cause

This is not about O.J. A request was forwarded to the brain for something even halfway clever and fresh to say about what apparently will go down as the most significant milestone in law since the Magna Charta. The brain made an awful grinding noise, rattled, hissed and then went silent. No more O.J. up there.

This also is not about Pete Wilson. Yes, it’s tempting. There’s something like punishment in the way his presidential campaign fell apart. It’s as though the Gods of Politics finally got wise to his act of pitting the middle classes against the lower classes, and then they got even. In any case, there will be plenty of time to ponder Pete Wilson. He’s not going anywhere.

No, this one comes from a place far from the Los Angeles County courthouse, from a lonely crossroads that sits on nobody’s path to the presidency. It comes specifically from a roadhouse called Jacks Ranch Cafe, a low-slung wooden building 30 miles east of Paso Robles, out where Highway 41 intersects with Highway 46.

In the parking lot of the roadhouse a party is in full swing--bluegrass band, barbecue, balloons, the works. This is neither birthday celebration nor wedding feast. Rather, the purpose of the party is to mark the 40th anniversary of a car wreck.

California.

*

On Sept. 30, 1955, James Dean was headed for Salinas in a silver Porsche 550 Spyder. It was almost sundown, and the autumn sun would have transformed the brown hills into something golden and beautiful, the same as it will do later on this day. The magnificent landscape would have been about the last thing Dean saw. Then a Ford turned left into his path . . . .

They’ve been coming here to observe the day ever since. Some years the observance is more elaborate than others. This, being the 40th, is a big one. A couple of hundred people mill about the dirt parking lot. All have points to make about the absent guest of honor. There are fiftysomethings who remember Dean as the rebel who first articulated the postwar restlessness that gnawed at their souls. Younger ones in jeans and T-shirts talk of the timeless Dean cool. And there are the locals who come as wreck buffs, schooled in the forensic nuances.

Let’s meet one. Harry Canby’s the beefy man in the feed store cap sitting under the ailanthus tree that shades the roadside monument to Dean. Canby was here 40 years ago, and he has an artifact to prove it. He unsnaps the pocket of his cowboy shirt and pulls out a piece of crumpled aluminum.

“I was working for Valley Paving,” he begins. “We had a job over in Avenal. On the way home, we stopped here at the cafe for some coffee and pie. The waitress told us James Dean got killed right here about an hour ago. So, after I finished my pie, I went over to where they had put the car, in the shop they used to have out back. I took this piece off the left door of James Dean’s car. It’s the only piece of the car left in the world. I never showed it to anyone before today. We keep it hidden around the house.

“See this spot right here,” he says, turning the metal slightly in his hand. “I think that spot is James Dean’s blood.”

And as the crowd leans in, Harry eases the artifact back into his shirt and snaps the pocket shut.

*

Humphrey Bogart once observed that Dean died “at just the right time. . . . He’d never been able to live up to his publicity.” One question the party-goers debate is what would have become of Dean if he had missed that Ford. A personal theory is advanced: James Dean today would be a tangential witness in the Simpson trial, a former husband of Elizabeth Taylor, and the television spokesman for an oil filter company.

The true believers are not amused. The truest of the true don’t even want to concede Dean’s death. The stories they tell, with half-believing chuckles meant to disarm the uninitiated, are of a Dean afterlife--the legends that Dean limped away from the wreck, or was never in the car in the first place, or still wanders the hills here, a phantom.

“Well,” says one young woman who came dressed in black, “all I will say is that I have been to his grave in Indiana, and strange things happen there all the time.”

Well, some people will believe anything. It’s an old truth that never fails to lift the spirits of Hollywood myth-makers, and also of trial lawyers and political candidates. But let’s not get into that today.