Day Six, Dallas, TX
Dee takes us on the commuter light railway to downtown Dallas. Like many American cities, downtown is a collection of tall office buildings and little else. We’re headed for the sixth floor of the book depository on Dealey Plaza.
We pay our admission, $10 each, and take the elevator up. We spend the next two hours peering out onto Elm street and reading the history of JFK’s assassination. The museum is good, but there’s one big omission. Despite selected stills, the famous Zapruder 8mm movie of the assassination isn’t present. According to the late comedian, Bill Hicks, the Zapruder footage shows Kennedy’s head snapping back and to the left at the moment of impact. If he was shot from the book depository window his head would have fallen forward.
Ignoring the grizzly mechanics of who shot him and from where, it’s indisputable that he was shot, and fairly well accepted that he died as a result. What has never been discovered is why he was killed. The museum offers up all sorts of theories: the right wing, the mafia, pro-Castro factions, anti-Castro factions, but all of them have been disproved. Lee Harvey Oswald was not mad. The man who shot Reagan did it, Dee tells me, to impress Jodie Foster. There was no woman who Oswald desired to impress by killing the president.
The museum strives to provide so much information that the lack of resolution to the story is disguised – or to saturate the visitor so that she no longer cares. But getting your money’s worth isn’t quite the same feeling as knowing the truth.
A couple of blocks away is the JFK memorial, and just across from that is the John Neely Bryan cabin, the first dwelling in the city of Dallas. Dee tells me that its current position is not its original one, and that the city has moved it several times to make it more accessible to tourists. "We like our history portable in Texas." Further inspection proves that this isn’t even the original Frank Nealey cabin, but a replica, so what we see below is completely inauthentic. I try to imagine someone in Stratford trying to convince people that moving Shakespeare’s birthplace would be a good idea, but I can’t.
After the delights of downtown, Dee takes us to Half Price Books, an enormous bookshop specialising in remaindered and second-hand books. She says it’s impossible to leave without armfuls of reading matter, and it’s quite true. Courtney rushes about picking up decent paperback editions of Virginia Woolf novels, a first edition Underworld by Don Delillo and a couple of first American edition A.S. Byatts. Dee restrains herself and comes away with a couple of hardback Margaret Atwoods and Byatt’s Possession at our recommendation. I’m tempted by J.G. Ballard’s Cocaine Nights in hardback, but concede that all Courtney’s purchases are as much for me as they are for her. We now have seven Virginia Woolf novels in the passenger compartment of the car.
Dallas’ cleanliness and efficiency feels somewhat Germanic to me, but there’s something very non-European about it too. I suggest to Dee that there doesn’t appear to be very much art and culture in town. She agrees. Most people in Dallas measure quality of life in terms of how presentable the neighbourhood is, how far they have to drive to work or to the mall, and how often they can see the Dallas Cowboys play. The nearest place where there’s good opera, she tells me, is in Santa Fe, which is a ten-hour drive away in New Mexico. Texas is unlike anywhere I’ve ever been before, and I can’t help feeling it’ll only get stranger the further away from Dallas we go.
Today’s mileage: 0m
