For the next couple of weeks, I'll entertain with a chapter from my theoretical, unpublished, road trip, historical non-fiction memoir.
Visiting the Harry S. Truman Presidential Museum:
-President Harry Truman rooted around with 1930s Kansas City gangsters, I said.
-Really, asked my friend Tyson Gough.
I shrugged and hoped my coy ambiguity would let my friend’s imagination go to far deeper and darker secrets than actually surround the nation’s 33rd President. Being a pupil of history academicians, I am endless fascinated by real-life events; and having the moral clarity of a movie producer, I never let good facts get in the way of a better story. Tyson was a recent graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute and so while he had no problem engaging himself intellectually, I knew he was only going to the Harry S. Truman Presidential Museum with me because he expected a certain degree of entertainment. And I just wanted an audience. I think that’s why—oh sonova-!
I looked over my shoulder at the highway exit we just missed, a piece of pavement that had might as well been a sandwich fallen into the dirt. Tyson shuffled the Google Map pages I had printed out hours before and squinted in the blue and yellow road outline. What if we get back onto Swope Parkway, I suggested.
-Swope was some famous guy in the history of Kansas City, Tyson informed me for reasons that escaped me then and now.
Eventually we turned around, got onto some other road and turned around again and ended up at our larger-scale destination, Independence, Missouri—a Kansas City suburb that allows its residents to claim de facto city citizenry when trying to impress other Midwestern, Wonder Bread eaters. Like a cartoon hobo lifted by the aroma of a window-cooling pie, I knew we were close to the museum but also knew I was hungry—not just for presidential trivia, but for food. And food we found first.
Or did it find us...?
(Also, that one in the top-right is clearly bleeding.)
The 1970s are not dead, they’re just shoved into and contained within miscellaneous burger places throughout the Midwest that are just esoteric enough to be thought as “mom ‘n pop” stands, yet have the pre-printed mascots and neon lights of a (former?) chain fast food joint. In this case, Tyson and I ate at Hi-Boy just off Highway 24 and were the youngest customers by at least two world wars. While eating, we absorbed the glances from the Class of 1917, who were ready to challenge us to fisticuffs for the sovereignty of their lunch territory.
Fake wood panels and straws without paper wrapping aside, we enjoyed ourselves enough. Most importantly, the food was actually pretty good. I didn’t have the guts to try a “fried pickle,” but at least the Hi Boy burger beat back my hunger until I could once again be a part of the cosmopolitan culture I have grown more accustomed to.
-So what happens this fall, with no school, asks Tyson.
-I don’t know, I said, my lease is up in July and that’s the edge of the map.
Ever since “The Graduate,” young people having a quarter-life crisis is as cliché as it is real. Recently, I have begun to suspect nobody is actually an adult but rather everybody is just hoping they’ve fooled everyone else. It would then seem the only hope we have to become whatever it is we want to become is to go out and find one-part opportunity and two-parts inspiration. From weeks earlier through lunch to when we finally got to the stone-faced museum building down the road, I was just praying Harry S. Truman could help me out.
The general admission into the museum was $8, though I really just wanted to hand the lady behind the counter a single dollar and say, “The buck stops here!” While getting kicked out of the Truman museum for being belligerent would be a great story, it wouldn’t be my story…today. Instead I gave the lady the money and a “Buy-One, Get One Free” coupon I had found on the Independence, Missouri tourist website that morning. I nodded to Tyson.
-You can buy the first round of drinks later, I suggested.
-I think you’re getting the better half of that deal, said the lady—though I’m still not sure which one of us she was referring to.
Regardless, we went past the counter and I saw brochures for other tourist sites, including several of the other nation-scattered presidential museums. Like some raving Black Friday shopper, I raced nobody over to the stand and started filling my pockets and arms with glossy paper directing me to Springfield, Yorda Linda, Atlanta and other places I’ve never had any reason to ever visit. Tyson, to his end, walked closer to and inspected the absolutely giant mural that dominated the museum’s lobby.
-Is that Thomas Hart Benton, said Tyson with slightly less enthusiasm than when he had ordered a Hi-Boy burger less than an hour ago.
Yes, the mural was, we learned. A mural of Native Americans meeting white settlers, both people seemingly aggressive in their exchanges with peaceful home lives behind them. Tyson told me about Benton and the man’s pupils with such casual expertise I couldn’t help but wonder if he was just making stuff up. Frankly, I still don’t know or really remember enough of the details to keep me from embarrassing myself. The size of the mural spanning the wall offered more scope than the content, but maybe that just makes it more accessible.
I looked off to the side and saw something even more accessible, a movie theater with a short film about Harry Truman starting in about as long as it took us to walk across the lobby. Once inside the maybe 80-person auditorium—with four other people—the doors closed automatically behind us, invoking the fantasy of a historian sliding into the theater just in time, only to reach back to grab his knocked-off fedora and have his hand caught between the doors. As was, Tyson and I took our seats and I hoped this wouldn't be the second Truman show I regretted watching.
Burn on that movie....from 1998.
To be continued...
(Next Week: I make fun of Melrose's Place and Scottie Pippin.)
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