Leaving Barstow

One late afternoon in 1989, on my way from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, I stopped for gas at what we used to call the ‘halfway point,’ a small high-desert California town named Barstow.

As it happened, I got a sandwich, too, and sat to eat it in the sandwich shop attached to our usual gas station…  It would be a big day for me once I got to LA, so I didn’t want to get there hungry.  Cars were lined up outside the window, one or two at each gas pump, since it was the cheapest station in town.

For some reason, every time I passed through Barstow I had a recurring semi-secret shame:  An episode of the long-gone TV series “L.A. Law”, came into my mind, in which the lawyer, Arnie Becker (played by Corbin Bernsen), is kidnapped at gunpoint and taken to Barstow by a bereft husband who blames him for the demise of his marriage because his wife listened to the lawyer’s divorce tape.  Arnie Becker was a sleazy sort of lawyer, well-played by Bernsen.  The episode was called “Barstow Bound”, and Barstow itself didn’t come off very well in it, since other lawyers in the firm described it as about the worst place on earth to be kidnapped to, just plain sleazy, but maybe okay for Becker, since he ought to feel at home.

The reason for my solo drive across the desert to L.A. that afternoon - and probably the reason that “L.A. Law” was on my mind - was that I’d been contacted by an old Peace Corps friend, Bruce Lawhead, a movie location manager by then, who had pitched my novel, Festival For Three Thousand Maidens, to a director friend of his.  Bruce was one of the unforgettable people in my life.  He was eccentric, sartorially inventive, soft-spoken and eternally delightful to be around.  He was on the staff of Peace Corps Korea, its fiscal officer, yet he let volunteers stay at his house in Seoul if his occasional parties got too late for us to venture out again before curfew.   We all loved Bruce, and he loved us, is what I’m saying.

I was to meet Bruce's director friend that very night, at Dodger Stadium, of all places, and I don’t mind admitting I was excited; a novel of mine might get turned into a movie!  With my first two books there’d been little chance of that, I supposed because they abounded with foreign locales and characters.  Festival, as I called it, wasn’t even out yet, but Bruce read it pre-publication and wanted to use it as his own springboard out of location managing and into producing.

I left Barstow with my gas tank and my belly full, getting to Dodger Stadium well after dark.  It was October, I remember, World Series time, but the Dodgers weren’t in it that year.  We had to meet there because the director Bruce wanted me to meet was wrapping up his latest movie, a baseball film called “Talent for the Game,” starring Edward James Olmos and Lorraine Bracco.  It was the story of a great new phenom pitcher, whom the “California Angels” had just signed.

Only one of Dodger stadium’s many entrances was open, but I found it, and soon enough found Bruce, who was running around doing whatever location managers do.  He told me to wait, so I found a place where a small TV had the World Series on.  Edward James Olmos was watching it, too, so I said, “If we were here a year ago tonight, we’d be watching the Dodgers play.”

When he replied, in a friendly way, “Hey, yeah, that’s right,” I thought, ‘maybe there’s a roll for this guy in my Peace Corps movie…  I will mention it to Bruce.’

Well, as bad luck would have it, the director, a guy named Robert M. Young, whom I finally did meet, had NOT read my novel, but he said he’d get to it and get back to me.

Alas and Alack!  Gadzooks and Zounds!  But I had come all that way!

I hung around for the rest of the Dodger Stadium shoot, spent the night at Bruce’s house in Van Nuys, then went to Santa Monica Beach with him the next morning, where more filming was to  take place, and where I picked up two ‘extra’ jobs on the movie, each paying forty bucks!

In both of my ‘extra’ jobs I was a bum.

In the first, I was suppose to walk down the beach while Edward James Olmos and Lorraine Bracco passed me going the other way.  I did it superbly, with my head bent in remorse over the fact that Robert M. Young hadn’t read my book.  That, I am here to tell you, was method acting, for the bum within me had remorse, too… if only for the fact that he was a bum.

In my second ‘extra’ job, I was to sit at a bus stop while a bus came by with an ad on its side for the young pitching phenom, whom Edward James Olmos’s character (an agent) had discovered.  I was to stand up when the bus stopped, and then climb onto it.

I had a styrofoam cup of coffee, given to me by Bruce, which I used to good effect, for before getting on the bus I tossed it with real bum-like weariness, into a nearby garbage bin.  Method acting again! I hoped that someone might discover my talent for the game before I went back to Las Vegas.   

The movie came out the same year my novel did, in 1991, but after a short run in Florida, it went straight to video.  I rented it from Blockbuster a few months later, hoping, of course, to see myself.  But both my scenes were gone.… no doubt laying on some editor’s cutting room floor.

Bruce Lawhead died at the age of 80, in November of 2020, in Spokane, Washington, his hometown.   Here is a photo of Bruce that everyone who knew him loves.  I wish we had been able to make a movie together… Who wouldn’t want to work with this guy?

Post-script….

More recently when leaving that same Barstow service station, again by myself, I texted “Leaving Barstow,” to my wife. My trusty autocorrect, however, decided that “Leaving Barstool” was what I intended to type.

Bruce would have loved that.