These boys, with their untested adulthood. Comfortable in their dirty jeans, shirtless, riding a skateboard from one unit to the next. The long, narrow buildings, facing each other like opposing armies. We, the citizens of this complex, glide down the blacktop territory between, moving from the auto shop to the metal fabricators to the machine shop. The music gets a little louder when the young people all gather in the glassblower’s studio. The gurgling of the waterpipe and the vortex of smoke are easily detectable. They are allowed. If I can eat a pound of blackberries right off the vine in the basking summer sun, then these boys can get a buzz on and spread their cobbled cars into the parking spaces in front of my shop.
I’m from an era when cars were carved from a single piece of Detroit iron and brought to life with leaded fuel. Tail fins and bucket seats with chrome trim. Window cranks and radio knobs. These days it’s Asian coupes that are tuned with a laptop. The cars are different but, people? Not much changes. Forty years ago that was me. Just as young. Just as sure days like these, these summer days were the way it was always going to be. I was just as ignorant that these days, these summer days would become so very, very precious when there are fewer before me than there are behind.
I’m the old guy with the motorcycles. Maybe this is the part I hoped I’d play when I got to be where I am now, willing to pull myself out from under my project and show a kid how to tickle a bearing out of a race with just a little heat or to exhume my engine hoist when they get to the point where the damned engine just needs to come out. I keep my distance for the most part. Those of us out there closing in on the last third of our lives tend to wander about each other’s shops, looking at airplane parts or hammered copper with an eye toward the young ones. But, the boys are right next door so I’m underfoot.
I know the panic. The sun is going down and the manager’s rule is that no cars can be left outside units after 10pm. The gates close and everyone has to go home. But, if the front wheel is not going on and this is their only way to get to work in the morning and parts are spread all over the blacktop ... Yeah, panic. They’re so grateful because they are good kids. I realize there is no way I can communicate to them that I am the one who is grateful. Every moment I’m squatting on the ground with them and dirtying my hands, I’m given the gift of seeing myself and my friends as we once were. Is it better to be young and living as a young person, oblivious to its value, or to be three times 20 and grateful for having been young enough to be that ignorant? The real gift to them is believing it’s always going to be summer days. As the malignancy of adulthood crashes the party, the seasons change. We trade in a little of our summer sun for a car that won’t need fixing in the dead of winter. Sometimes old injuries prevent long motorcycle rides so we get our sunlight by gorging on wild oregon blackberries on the vines behind the shop. Not the bushes where we pee.
I was 37 years old when I built the first art cinema in Corvallis 21 years ago, the Avalon Cinema. I sold my 1969 Norton Commando Roadster to help finance the project. It had a yellow fiberglass tank and wasn’t as fast and didn’t handle as well as I thought it did, but it remains the most beautiful motorcycle I ever owned. I bought that bike when I was 21, but before that—when I was just 19 years old—I bought a 1962 Impala Super Sport for $750. Roman red with a red interior and a 327 under the hood. Never as nimble as the fun-sized cars my now-neighbors consort with, but worth the compromise for elegance. Today that Impala sits in my shop. Harleys and Nortons have come and gone, but that old Chevrolet never left me. During the building of the Darkside I did entertain offers from interested parties. There were times when Lainie and I were grappling for any way to throw a few more bucks into the kitty just to keep the doors open. We closed and rented out an auditorium and I was doing construction jobs during the day and working shows at night while Lainie kept the bills paid with a real job. Here we are now, fifteen years gone, with the Darkside still open and my 1962 Impala still in my shop. The paint is dead and the engine block rests bare waiting to be tested for cracks. With a wide brush, that same description could paint a picture of me and my old motorcycle and car buddies.
Recently auditorium two was returned to us at the Darkside and I’ve spent the last couple of months tearing out years of other tenants’ modifications and returning the room to what it was. (Hope to have it open again by the holidays.) This time I have a 20 year-old helping me who manages to cover herself in sheetrock dust no matter the task. These young people, they’re everywhere. She loves getting her hands dirty as much as I do. When she takes off her safety glasses and dusts off before running off to English classes, I stand on a rickety scaffolding grateful to remember being 20 and swinging a hammer before I ran off to class.
Corvallis is not a place that embraces automotive culture. We love our bicycles and Co-op. And the Darkside Cinema. It was the love of cars that gave me the skills to keep the cast iron and clattering gears of film projectors operating, so there is some humor in the fact that car culture allowed the Avalon/Darkside to bring art and foreign film to this community. Now projection is all digital with touch-screens and internet connections. Not much grease in the projection booth these days. Hours of massaging the movie making machinery has been traded for a few seconds of button pushing. That’s good. It means the kids keeping the goods moving across the Darkside counter can spend more time in the sun and with their families. It also means I have to get the grease under my nails from under the hood of an old GM product or from the sprocket and chain of a newer Honda.