Robert Greenfield - True West : Sam Shepards Life, Work, and Times

I n the opening scene of the movie of Sam Shepards life, which he would most certainly have written, directed, and perhaps acted in as well (no doubt portraying his own father) while also possibly contributing several original songs to the soundtrack, a tall, thin nineteen-year-old man stares hungrily through the plate glass window of a White Castle in the heart of Times Square as a cook fries hamburgers in sizzling puddles of molten grease on the griddle.

Fresh off a bus after spending the past eight months touring the Midwest, the South, and New England as part of a repertory company that has been putting on plays like Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Frys A Sleep of Prisoners and The Boy with a Cart in churches and any other venues they could find, he has left his mother, two younger sisters, and father, with whom he can no longer get along, three thousand miles away in California.

With no money and no prospects and no idea where he will sleep tonight, he is not just a stranger in a very strange land but also the kind of gangling, awkward country bumpkin who has always come to Manhattan in search of wealth and fame only to go back home again dismayed and defeated by the city.

The Times Square in which nineteen-year-old Sam Shepard stands in 1963 is dominated by a large billboard from which the painted image of a mans face blows smoke rings (actually steam) into the air above a logo reading Id Walk a Mile for a Camel . Surrounding the billboard are smaller but equally garish neon signs for Admiral Television Appliances, Canadian Club imported whisky, Castro convertible sofas, Planters Peanuts, Coca-Cola, and Scripto pens. Huberts Museum and Flea Circus, where luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, Diane Arbus, and Bob Dylan have all come to see the freaks, is still open to the public and doing business on West Forty-second Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues.

And while this stretch of Broadway has already become enshrined in American popular culture as the Great White Way and the Crossroads of the World, you can still get a prescription filled at Whelans Drug Store or sit down for a meal at Hectors Cafeteria, Howard Johnsons, or the Horn and Hardart Automat. You can also buy yourself a snappy suit at Bond Clothiers and then spend the night at the Hotel Astor.

In 1963, the Times Square in which Sam Shepard stands is much like all of New York City and the rest of the country: still squarely rooted in the 1950s. Although Bob Dylan has already played his historic debut concert at Town Hall, and Andy Warhol is painting multiple images of Marilyn Monroe, America will not really start to change until President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, just seventeen days after Sam Shepard (then still known as Steve Rogers, the nickname he was given by his family and the surname with which he had been born) turns twenty years old.

For what truly dies on that day in Dallas is the gleaming promise of a New Frontier as well as a particularly optimistic vision of America. Pretty much before anyone knows what hit them, the seeds of anger and discontent that have for so long lain fallow beneath the surface of everyday life in this country suddenly burst forth into full, riotous bloom. It is then that the dream really goes sour and the sixties begin in earnest.

And while all this will not become apparent until the decade itself is well under way, one of the first shifts in this great cultural upheaval is the utter destruction of the long-standing image of the American nuclear family as a happy, caring, and completely functional unit. Not surprisingly, in time this will become the subject of the most meaningful plays Sam Shepard ever wrote.

None of this, however, is apparent to Shepard as he stands watching a grill cook shovel mounds of fried onions above a row of sizzling hamburgers and then top them all off with a layer of white cheese slices that begin bubbling and popping like Elmers Glue. As Shepard would later write, he has never before seen hamburgers cooked this way. Utterly clueless, he also thinks the girls in New York City must be incredibly friendly, because they all keep hitting on him as he stands there. In fact, they are working for a living and want him only to pay for their services with money he does not have.

Dead broke and hungry, Shepard remembers the advice he was given by another actor in the troupe about the easiest way to make quick money in New York. Heading down the street, he sees a big white sign in a storefront window with red letters reading Give a Pint of BloodGet $5 Cash . At the top of a flight of stairs that smells like garbage, with an iron handrail that sticks to his fingers, he finds a woman in a white uniform who looks like a nurse sitting behind a wooden desk in a little office. After he has filled out a form, she takes him into a back room and sits him down on a metal chair behind a green plastic curtain. Tying off a vein in his left arm with a thin rubber hose, she slowly fills her syringe with his blood. Having completed her work without ever once looking him in the eye, she hands him five dollars.

He then goes right back down the stairs and walks inside the White Castle. Sitting himself down on a chrome stool, he proudly orders a cheeseburger with fried onions. As Shepard will later write, it is one of the best things he has ever tasted.

From such humble beginnings, over the course of the next fifty-four years, Steve Rogers would go on to create an incredibly impressive body of work in theater, film, poetry, and prose while also inventing, more or less from scratch, the enduring American legend known as Sam Shepard. And while no one in New York City then even knows who he is, the beginning of his epic journey can best be described by the title of Norman Mailers account of how John F. Kennedy came to be nominated for president at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. For, insofar as the burgeoning downtown theater scene known as Off-Off-Broadway is concerned, Superman has in fact just come to the supermart. Before too long, virtually everyone involved in it will know Sam Shepards name. As, in time, will the world.