Bridges of Imagination
by Gary Phillips
Years ago there was a TV show called My World and Welcome to It. In the show William Windom played a daydreaming cartoonist who utilized his experiences and his imagination to come up with his cartoons for a slick magazine he worked for located in Manhattan. While sitting at a table and staring out the window seems like a pretty a cool job, it’s brutal, I tell you. Sometimes the ideas flow and sometime they don’t.
Fortunately, I’m particularly fascinated about the origin of items we use every day. For instance I have these books on my shelf such as The Evolution of Useful Things and Did Monkeys Invent the Monkey Wrench? They detail how objects like paper clips and those adjustable wrenches, spanners they call them in England, came to be. Great stuff. I like to think I have an eclectic taste in my reading material. That used to mean I’d spend time browsing through various magazines at newsstands like Centerfold on Fairfax at Melrose, the Pico-Robertson newsstand near my neighborhood, or the granddaddy of them all, World Book and News on Cahuenga not far from Hollywood Boulevard. Not an excuse to leaf through the latest issue of Juggs, I want you to know, as, of course, I have no idea what that publication offers.
Like Windom’s John Monroe (based on cartoonist and writer James Thurber, who wrote the “Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” originally published in the New Yorker) a storyteller has to be interested in a lot of walks of life. I spend much less time at a physical newsstand these days, and do more of my browsing on the Internet. So do others I know. Recently a friend of mine sent out an article. Fact pretty much every week day he sends those of us on his list quirky news items and videos like some lucky sumabitch cranking it out in a 12-cylinder Bugatti Veyron, the most expensive production car in the world. The recent piece had to do with in vitro meat—meat grown in the lab from stem cells in a kind of protein bath. So far, the product that’s been produced looks and has the consistency of a gelatinous mass low in proteins and taste.
I’d previously collected information on Frankenmeat intending to use this as a plot device in some way or another in a story. But getting the recent update form the Rev, as we call our friend, spurred me to do something with the update he’d sent out. It also helped my decision, given I was up against it on a short story deadline and needed a hook. That project completed, it was time to stare out the window again.
Ambassador Bridge
Then the Rev sent another missive. Another e-blasted article he recently sent out had to do with ex-mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, and what he’s been up to lately. To jog your memory, Kilpatrick’s tenure as mayor was right out of Elmore Leonard meets Tyler Perry. His antics included a stripper booty shakin’ party at the mayor’s mansion, the Manoogian Manor. The mayor’s lap dance was disrupted when his wife came home early and, allegedly, had to regulate one of the young ladies. Subsequently, this performer, nicknamed Strawberry, was shot dead while sitting in a car. Her family sued the city, claiming this was a hit carried out by official forces.
There were other misdeeds and finally Kilpatrick was busted for lying about sexting an aide he was carrying on with in city hall, and thrown out of office. According to the AP piece the Rev forwarded, hizzoner and the wife are living large in Dallas, in a rented pad said to be larger than the Manoogian shack, in a suburb called Southlake. He commutes back and forth to Detroit to answer ongoing court matters, and is supposed to be making restitution payments of $79,000 a month. A month. He has a job as a software salesman for a firm called Covisint, a subsidiary of Compuware.
Kilpatrick’s lawyers stated, when his lifestyle was questioned by the court, “The clientele he must establish a rapport with are likely to be the privileged and the affluent.” You gotta live big to spend big, baby.
Turns out one of Kilpatrick’s supporters is a man who laid a gift of $50,000 on his wife and kids. This guy, transport magnate Manuel “Matty” Moroun, owns the Ambassador Bridge through his Detroit International Bridge Company. Who knew the bridge connecting Detroit and Ontario was privately held? As a brief check of the Internet has shown, the bridge was privately built in the 1920s by a chap named Joseph Bower. In the late ’70s the Bower family sold the bridge. I guess by then Detroit was too broke to buy it.
More browsing turns up that London Bridge, now in Lake Havasu City in Arizona, was bought by American oilman Robert McCulloch and brought over from Old Blighty and reassembled in the Havasu planned community he’d developed. It was rededicated in 1971. It’s not hard to imagine an individual buying a bridge that is the only feasible way in or out of a quaint hamlet. This person doesn’t have to bring it from anywhere. Could be a structure several decades old, built during the WPA period, but now there’s no money to maintain the thing. Our benefactor steps in; maybe he’s a deposed pol who when he was kicked out of office certain public funds were missing but nothing could be proven.
The town needs that bridge to survive and makes a deal with the only one around to help. The supposed benefactor buys the bridge from the municipality and restores the bridge. Said individual exacts a reasonable toll for passage across this fine conveyance. But then one day there’s guards on the bridge ... cell phone towers are down and jammers used to squelch cell phone signals are on while landlines have been cut. But the benefactor doesn’t want more tolls, no, money won’t do.
You see the bridge owner’s scientists have been experimenting with growing beef and pork in the lab. They discover they need one special ingredient to give the lab meat the real look, complete with the right amount of protein and marbling. Why, it’s human body fat. Welcome to Escape from Mayberry, R.I.P.
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