A HOUSE IS NOT A MOTEL
In Search of Reata et The Marfa Pinball Effect. I Hear You Calling My Name.
I was told to stay clear of the ranch where George Stevens shot Giant back in 1955 just outside of Marfa. The owners had a reputation for being problematic over the decades, with sightseers trying to visit the ruins of the Reata set. My mind wandered thinking about the Texas gun laws that protected your average trigger-happy Cabela’s patriot rancher from the average L.A. interloper meets cinephile looking to walk the hallowed grounds that Hollywood had invaded for a brief moment a lifetime ago. Fuck em. “It was as good a place to die as any other.”, I thought. So I went there.
Like James Dean, my half-sister had lived her last moments behind the wheel of a small sportscar on a stretch of lonely highway in her early twenties. It shocked me at twelve years old, and I still have trouble discussing it. And quite possibly for karmic reasons that run down the bloodline, I have been in my share of nasty car wrecks (all of which I walked away from), and mostly during my early twenties, which haunts me and fucks with me till this day. And while Dean is an undeniable acting icon and genius, for me, he primarily represents that fragility that goes with that territory we call living. Dying during the final weeks of filming Giant back in L.A. would make it his third and final film. It's an epic with an all-star cast, but he’s probably the image most think about when it’s mentioned, even though he’s a supporting “antagonist” or maybe the anti-hero. Dean’s character, Jett Rink, is the guy who struck it rich in the oil game yet was unable to get the woman he loved. A defiant oil-covered hand on the white column of the powers that reigned supreme, disrupting the pecking order who seemingly thought they’d be running things for eternity when he made his move. And they were wrong.
In Marfa, my overcooked egg and biscuit arrived twenty minutes after everyone else’s compliments of the overly zealous kitchen crew in chef sweatbands and bandanas, whom I imagined were cobbled together from various failed first attempts in Echo Park, Bushwick, and that one Ramen place with the squid ink black noodles in that one neighborhood in Portland before hitting the outside gutters of the culinary pinball machine landing in these baron flatlands used to graze heads of cattle. I wonder what they'd do if Donald Judd or Chill Wills could see Marfa now. Maybe the giant wall around Judd’s old compound was selected by him as a place to hole up like the Alamo from something like this. I imagine Wills would lasso the Russian art dealer in Louboutin’s seated next to me. At the same time, Judd fires long-range SCUD missiles from the roof of his home to take out El Cosmico’s restored trailers and artisan tents stocked with mineral water. Lucky for me, karma seemingly always breaks both ways. As I push this sad breakfast away, I start to feel better when I notice one particular former obstructionist from my creative life back in L.A. now has relocated here and downgraded to selling Botanics and vintage Stevie Nick’s concert t-shirts out of the back of a converted delivery truck adjoining this restaurant. Sure, call me sadistic, but I find that ending epic as the sun beats down like hell on Earth here. Never forget that that cosmic road sure has a way of serving up a better breakfast. I can go home tomorrow morning.
Garcon, check, please. And, no, I don’t want that 200-dollar cactus.
Where was I? Oh yeah.
After I left, I wandered the nearby neighborhood a few blocks from the main drag, nearly empty of people around noon on a Thursday — lots of beauty in the ruins of what was and is here. I think about Jett Rink drunk at his banquet, mumbling to himself in his tux before I drive to Reata.
And I’d like to think that someone nicknamed Snakes wrote that warning on the plaster over the crumbling adobe as I finally get in the car, realizing it will be a while before I eat. The other restaurants keep odd times here, and there’s something Bunuel about that whole endeavor. Should I still feel scared about trespassing in a place like this?
I wonder how many old Buicks and Cadillacs overheated on the side of the highway with California plates in 1955 as we made our way to the ranch boundaries and then onwards to the non-descript entry with cattle guard, then drove in on the private road sans permission. And as the thought of a ranch hand sending a thirty-aught-six round my way entered my brain, the remains of the grand Reata mansion stood off in the distance. The car stopped, and a black cow looked my way as I pulled the Hasselblad and set the exposure.
While most of the things that made it look like a home were blown off during a wind storm in the late sixties, the massive telephone poles that held the whole thing together were still there; that was all I needed.
Because I believed in what I was looking at.
“By the time that I'm through singing
The bells from the schools of wars will be ringing
More confusions, blood transfusions
The news today will be the movies for tomorrow” - Love
All photos by Nick Ebeling *except Jack Lewis’, where credited.