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Chapter 4: Boyd
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Boyd I under fair pretence of friendly ends, A nd well plac't words of glozing courtesie Baited with reasons not unplausible Wind· me into the easie-hearted man, And hugg him into snares. i -JOHN MILTON, A Mask Presented at Ludlow-Castle Until the winter of 1970 Boyd F. Douglas, Jr., had never owned a car. He had commandeered a few. A red station-wagon had once caught his fancy. Leaving a bank in haste, the boundaries of private property dissolved and he leapt into one, then another, trying to start them. He wanted to disappear. Cars are magic. Boyd did not have the proper spell. A voodoo ring of FBI and Wisconsin sheriffs surrounded it with a hex. He was arrested. Boyd is a child of a disposable culture. He conspicuously con sumed rent-a-cars, motel rooms, airplane seats. Vague commercial space that is leased, rented, reserved, occupied, but then is gone without title. Boyd was leaving a legacy of receipts. An automobile nomad, Boyd had never owned a car, just as Oedipus was a motherless child. Our car universe is burning out; Los Angeles is its Nirvana, junkyards its Hades, and the highways, the arteries of the last generation of bleeders. The dynasty is advised not to spawn. But it is October 1 970 and Boyd writes, in a simple sentence, "I 140 BOYD have never owned a car." It is forthright. And perhaps it is true. Boyd's veracity is not an unbroken chain. Amid the totems of puberty a car is special. You get a car when you graduate from high school, or become sixteen, if your parents can afford one. You get one yourself if you are indus trious. You sign up for your first stretch of parasitism if you borrow one, use the family car. You steal them if you are an urban hoodlum; you take one for joy rides if you're from the suburbs. Every region has its imperatives and the great distances of the Midwest demand a car. A back seat is an adolescent's nuptial bower. General Motors has had more to do with the varieties of sexual intercourse than the Kama Sutra. Boyd had never owned one. Perhaps, one can speculate, a 1 952 Ford might have been in his possession, legally, for a while; but that was a rundown car, too much the soul's mirror, and if we have anything to do with our shells we don't want to be burdened with chassis rust and no finish. So many things speak for us there is no quiet on the earth. Each evening in Harrisburg, aristocratic Front Street, running beside the path of the Susquehanna, becomes a racetrack. Cars, reshaped in the search for individuality, to divest a Ford of its fordness, or a Chevrolet of its chevroletness, these raised and lowered, chopped and rechanneled mutations canter up Front Street, snorting and downshifting, the occupants bad-eyeing any passers-by. The laying of streaks of tire rubber is as important a remains, to them, as the faint wings fossilized in sandstone. Let us not diminish cars, even though they are baled and on display in progressive museums. Detroit designers are true Dar winians and there is no Monkey Trial for them. Did Boyd lust after a car? Did he burn? Hardly; that he assaulted a few, ransacking their charms for a clandestine trip, is testament not to passion, but to need. The cars were acquiescent. No, Boyd waited for the car, and the time and place. Boyd has a sense of economy. What will do in a pinch will not do when the time is unconstrained. I have never owned a car. He might as well have said, I have never felt the sun, never seen the color of the sky. Before coming into what Leonard Boudin referred to as "the orbit of this trial" Boyd was drawn to our major epicenters of 141 [54.84.65.73] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:04 GMT) BOYD hustle: Miami Beach, Las Vegas, Acapulco. Boyd's father, peer ing through the gray clouds of newsprint, said, this is my son Boyd, in whom I am not well pleased. We are all prodigal sons; Boyd sent his father home his .38. No note accompanied it. Con sider Mr. Douglas's somber reflections as he examined that parcel. Boyd's .38. "I like guns," Boyd says. Take away guns and only criminals will have them. The federal marshals...