I always wanted to wear the pants
James Dean wore, and Rebel
taught me he was all wick and no wax—
ghost-riding his way off the bluffs—
because you know that he didn’t
make it out of that car wreck,
not really, not in the cold, rehearsed
way his total soc counterpart did,
when he cowered before the onslaught
of fragrant light beams or
fictions, projections on canvas,
but never the real fear, real
darkness, no. Instead: two tons
of steel clasping him like a baby
bird in a broken nest. That day,
pretending to fly off the cliffs,
he gripped tight the wheel—
white knuckles, greased hair,
creased brow and grimace
grown around the stubby butt
of a cigarette—he gripped tight
and slammed the gas as though
the treads could peel back the future,
the Porsche 550 and 49 Mercury,
the lot and US Route 466
playing tug of war like two groups
of children unlikely to ever let
the sun go down. And James,
having seen the future and the past,
bit down hard on the smoldering
tobacco and shut his eyes, because
in that moment he was unsure if
he was about to die, or push through;
and the potential was in the engine,
potential in the pedal, potential in his feet,
in the rawhide stink of leather, in the smoke
and heat of gasoline, in the bristles
of his comb; and now that he no
longer knew which car he was in,
he flinched, and death caressed him
with metallic fingers; and the sun setting
across the desert flats flickered over
the crumpled flesh and steel, and
the bystanders squealed and cried
with excitement, and the ghost of
James Dean walked around the car
and wondered if he were the dream,
or his body. He looked down and thought
stop pretending. Always the actor, always
the hardness of perfection, of dying young
enough to have been everything and nothing
at all—broken bones, crumpled steel,
oil strewn across asphalt and dust, salty
tears, baking sun, acrid smoke, and on
the wind tossed side of perfection,
his cool hair fluttering, timeless.
Noah Leventhal is a gumshoe literary detective. He recently graduated from St. John’s College -Santa Fe, New Mexico where he managed to avoid nasty juniper allergies for three out of his four years. He enjoys dissolving dream into reality, even when he is talking or eating food with his fingers.
