Maybe it’s even more like a thing that has no outside, a thing which encloses its only possible observer.
(Jonathan Lethem)
(photo: Patrick Brayer)
“They took her away in a Bonneville hearse. All the live long day.
Things couldn’t get better when they’re busy getting worse.
All the live long day. They carried her away.”
We’ll start when my Daphne Alabaman wife and I, with the help of oxen-backed friends, moved to the foothill community of Upland California. It was in the spring of 1998. At this point in time, there was nary a fabled lemon grove to be found. Nowadays if someone found a smudge pot they might think it was a part fallen off the fuselage of a U.F.O. Oh, don’t get me wrong, one might still get the faint sniff of blossom time and again. But these were trees just symbolically planted in the leeched topsoil of sodden vanity, standing guard below a ring-tailed moon. Or it might just be the scented candle broadcast out from the open-jaw window of a pack of temporary steel mill squatters. The area still had its merit though. One could still go up to the humbler heights of Mt. San Antonio, park on the caliche shoulder beside Old Baldy Road, and witness a sugar bowl of human lights. It was as if this might well be where all chandeliers went to obediently die in genuflection before the criminal moonlight.
We moved from Fontana to a hulk of a house situated directly across the street from the Upland Post Office. It was situated such that it could be eagle-eyed from the second story through the pale-ash screened porch of the dove-white Craftsman. It was sawed at some point, in a grab at practicality, into a duplex, of which we rented the upper portion. This neighborhood was what they like to consider the historic district of Upland although it was more so considered a suburb, with houses close enough to hit within the wack of a croquet ball. The homes are rustic but come with politics. A friend of ours had a Spanish revivalistic bungalow on the next block over and they threatened to railroad him out of town at one point because he wouldn’t put up one of the customary eight-foot-high illuminated yule tide candy canes, which showed brightly in an almost KKK heraldry, stabbed into the neighboring lawns, warning of the sweet tooth of Christ’s birthing, viewed from the sky from a jumbo-jet’s flightpath of Ontario Airport like gilded fireflies.
(photo: Patrick Brayer)
The next block over from that was, just across the street from a neon-crying liquor store, one that burgeoning hoodlums often used for stick’em-up practice, or other such ruses, was, there parked, the centerpiece of this article, a 1965 Bonneville Hearse. It was the color of a dirty eggshell, original paint, matt pale, with a black vinyl top, like a two-tone shoe left out in the weather that couldn’t quite make it to the hereafter on time before the gates slammed. The Pontiac was owned, I’d come to find out, by a punk rock youth named Rene Ochoa, of whom I had never met but saw at times in motion, tooling around town in this very gothic contraption, with a quizzical grin, that of belonging to a loose-knit cult to which he found himself, although a lone wolf, in rebellious membership. On my daily walks around the neighborhood, it was often my practice to mull over song ideas in cadence with my jaunt. I was at one point in the middle of composing and recording music for my 31st volume of a CD collection entitled, tongue and cheek, The Secret Hits of Patrick Brayer. This one was to become titled: The Wrong Eye Blues. I was toying around with the idea of using the hearse as a central character in a song. I’m not sure exactly who the lady protagonist was that was constantly getting carried away in the lyric, but I imagine subconsciously it might symbolize, almost dream-like, my mother who passed away in 1975 at the age of fifty-one years of age. It also represents perhaps the dozen other times I followed one hearse or another into nearby Green Acres Cemetery in Bloomington, California. Where, as you might expect, each additional trip landed as yet another punch in the soul. All this as to my memory combing the headstones, a soft chapped wind in gathering chorus, transforming into a delinquent prison choir.
(photo: Patrick Brayer)
Upon the finish of the recorded version of the song, I ran off a cassette version of it to be humorously gifted behind the windshield wipers of the hearse on my next walk. Then just before I left, I happened to glance down at the morning edition of The Daily Bulletin where I spied an article regarding the death of Rene Ochoa, which pictured the rosary-like procession of the hearse club following his last ride into Forest Lawn coffined in the coffin of his own hearse. I was surprised to find that the article was written by one David Allen. I didn’t know David Allen at the time, but we have become friends over the years, and I’ve grown to find him a treasured local scribe, and for us as close as we could get to watching Will Rodgers playing pinochle with Mark Twain.
In my writing world, as in my life, I have no confidence nor ability to methodically instigate anything. I rely entirely on synchronicity and intuition to not only get me to the grocery store and back, but for creating a world that not only myself but others might relate to, or by parallel chance inhabit. I will include a link to the song as it appears streamable on bandcamp if you choose to sample it, and I might even take a listen back myself to that other place in time, although it might well require the help of an obligatory West Virginia hot dog and Sapphire Martini.
Listen to The Bonneville Hearse (bandcamp)
(photo: Patrick Brayer)
Bonneville Hearse by Patrick Brayer (1998)
Well they took her away in a Bonneville hearse / All the live long day
It can’t get better when it’s busy getting worse / All the live long day
Had a little dinner and had a little wine
Compared one piece to another piece of time
All the live long day / They carried her away
They took away her body and they swept away her mind / All the live long day
Buried her in the first dress they could find / All the live long day
Marijuana brownies at a candle-lit wake
Fried chicken and key lime cake
All the live long day / They carried her away
The grave digger drove and the preacher watched the girls / All the live long day
Through the etched window he dreamt of pearls / All the live long day
Bonnyville hearse is a very good car / It’s never been driven very far
To the graveyard, to the morgue and back
Like it was on a railroad track
All the live long day / They carried her away
Then one time some kids stole it from where you’re standing / All the live long day
Took it off to the Grand Canyon / All the live long day
Danced on the hood and played guitars / Chrome all caught up in the stars
In the pencil of the night / they carried her away
But they returned it full of flowers and a tie-dyed shawl / All the live long day
In time for the funeral processional crawl / All the live long day
I’ll just tell you this tale before I sit to eat
There’s a trigger of a moon over a campfire heat
All the live long day / They carried her away
About a long white car with a vinyl roof / All the live long day
That carried sweet souls and the burden of proof / All the live long day
For every day we take one last ride
When you’re in a hearse it’s very hard to hide
All the live long day / They carried her away
You can pray and pray until your blue in the face / All the live long day
but you’ll never ever change your race / all the live long day
Whether your black or white or green or gold
Your race is just a shadow of you when you’re old
All the live long day / They carried her away
You can put who you pray to on a velvet rug / All the live long day
Condemn a blood family that you never hug / All the live long day
But all boils down to white wall tires / And the subtle sound of angel choirs
All the live long day / They carried her away
If you put a book of stories between you and flesh and blood / All the live long day
You’ll smell the gasoline, and the hearse will flood / All the live long day
Pork brains and banana blossoms / Spread out in a big buffet
The moth ball smell of warm embrace / Into the golden day
All the live long day / They carried her away
Patrick John Brayer 