Oyklahoma

If you like piles of rusting metal and open fire pits, you are gonna love Oklahoma.

Because you can drive for miles and miles through what feels like empty space. A place where, in an instant, perhaps after a wrong turn, you can go from being a traveler to an ethnographer or a criminologist. You speed through the Cherokee nation and other nations along the emptied out landscape. This last nation I drove through had only a casino and a “Cigs 4 Less” store. The roads are shitty but you feel like a rebel in a game of cowboys and Indians.

Hartmut Bitomsky made his first and my favorite documentary film about the United States along these roads, specifically Highway 40 West. In the very early 1980s, the nation was riding a wave of moralistic self-entitlement and inwardly living a melancholic lie of economic stagnation. It’s possible to imagine when you see Bitomsky’s film that nothing ever transpires here in Oklahoma. I don’t mean it like it’s somehow liberating. I mean like Fassbinder in Der amerikanische Soldat, when tells his American cousin in 1970 that “nichts passiert in Deutschland” in one of the most sluggish takes in a moving car I have ever seen on film.  The music and the car go in slow motion and the blurry lines from the out of focus lens feel like the soporific, jaded ending to a ’68 social revolution.  That’s what it was like in 1981 in the middle of the United States. We were just holding it together and so nothing could ever happen.  That feeling is still alive, right this very moment on this stretch of road.

Bitomsky traveled on 40 West and Jesus wandered the desert while fasting for 40 days. And I am traveling along highway 69. That’s not a joke. There’s a “fabric-free dance club” called Whispers that I would never enter even if I were into that sort of thing. A sex shop advertising “fleshlights” for sale.  Of course I am curious but I have got places to go and people to see. Then there’s another titty bar where, according to the sign, “ladies can drink free” (if indeed they can get out alive). No, thanks. I am not tempted but supposedly Jesus was tempted three times by Satan in his 40 days. Despite the roadside debauchery I see here, I think I am meant to believe this is still God’s country, sort of a tumorous outgrowth of Texas.  As if they will any day now build that megachurch as soon as they can get away from their minimum-wage jobs and kick their meth habits.  I know what I am saying is unfairly prejudiced and that’s exactly the way I feel when I must drive through here. Is it something in the air? It would be amazing to find a Nature Theater here, of course, if only there were any nature left. Instead there are oil fields with open flames like scandalously huge, bright red hell flowers.

Often I find myself holding my breath when I travel through OK.  I laugh to myself that it should be called Oyklahoma because “oy” is how I feel when I realize I have to travel four more hours through its territory. Oyklahoyma, even. I imagine this is funny because there’s nothing urban or Jewish about it. Until I inevitably see the an oil field named Sholem Alechem.  I read the sign and whisper, loud enough that the dogs traveling with me can hear, “Aleichem Sholem!”