Why Alice
Alto Guthrie’s anti-war masterpiece Alice’s Restaurant ended up in the Spotify mix I was listening to. It’s been a year since my father died right around Thanksgiving which was possibly the best gift he could have given me in some ways. See I never liked thanksgiving because it meant dealing with my grandmother and uncle who were both flaming narcissists. They weren’t the fun kind either where it was all charm and love bombing. While my uncle did force us to listen to him croon Elvis, I suppose faking the charm of a superstar was some kind of experience, his comments about my mom and my native aunt bought no affinity in my book. All made worse by his mother unashamedly talking about how desirable he was while making snide racist comments at my mother. I never knew how my aunts survived this family and always admired their tolerance for absolute bullshit.
This is about Alice now! See on the drives up from San Diego to Someplace else California we would eventually hit this song on the mix tape. My mom did not like this song because it just went rambling on until Harry Chaplin had us all singing about Bananas, maybe he was an undercover clown and I never knew. The best cover for a clown would be a g-man. It would make some amount of sense given his checkered past in the most illicit place in the country during the 60s, Eugene Oregon, where at one time he sold candles and played the guitar.
Now the thing is despite being the son of a Hughes Aerospace accountant and having served in the Military during the war. To be noted at this time he also voted for Regan my father was a conundrum. This was also the man who worked for Ralph Nader attempting to rent apartments with black women trying to prove housing discrimination was happening. He was an anti racist activist way before it was cool. My first computer that I had bought from Gateway,cow print and all, I proudly wrote this machine kills fascists! There we were on the hairpin curves listening to Arlo Guthrie shouting kill kill kill and talking about the 27 8 by 10 glossy photographs that the judge was never going to see. Here I am on these hairpin turns in Colorado at the university he told me about all those years ago after that time in New York, of course the canyon eats the signal and it’s now the only song I can listen to on the drive up.
This marks the first years passing of a man who gave me all these strange conflicting ideas as if he were somehow priming me to be braver than he ever was. I’m not saying my father wasn’t brave he was called a race trader his whole life because he married my mother. He gave one daughter a Muslim name and the other one the most wonderbread shit ever. He raised me on Ram Dass and Sudbury School stories while sucking down endless hours of Fox News. He became angry and then apoplectic and there was some part of him that wanted to plant the idealism of his youth in us. Like sleeper cells of hippie idealism wrapped in a layer of objectivism so that the straights didn’t find out.
Little did he know jihad was coming for this country and my sisters teacher was on the planes that fateful September morning. Where was I? working at Citibank where we got a memo about how we were to say Bin Laden did not have accounts with Citibank which led me to do a deep dive in Citibank’s Middle East operation and there was no way that was true. Meanwhile my coworker was petrified her husband was going to be shot out of the air since he had taken off at the same time and she hadn’t heard from him. I led a walk out after an anthrax attack on our mailroom and was promptly fired. That’s when I found out about Nader my dad was so proud that as a young woman I stood up to the machine. He told me did sing a bar at the recruiting office but he still got the Navy.
All of this to say that maybe more people should have showed up to that draft office and sang a bar, with feeling, about Alice’s Restaurant. 50 people a day going in to the shrinks and saying they could get anything they want, cepting Alice of course, at Alice’s Restaurant.
