The Tallow Works

The Tallow Works

© 2009 Dave Archer - All rights reserved

After an "ordeal" of working on my Uncle's Angus ranch ( let's just say I did not make much of a poop puncher) including a stint in the dormitory at Santa Rosa Junior College studying art, even with the considerable encouragement of fine art teachers, I became discouraged in the arts.

When dad died, on Father's Day, right after I gave him a plaid shirt, I finally became, officially, mentally ill. Recently I was talking with Steve Martin, helping him with memories of our North Beach days for his book, Born Standing Up, and told him, "Ah ... actually Steve, Dead Men Do Wear Plaid". This admission, funny as it was, finally healed me from a life long aversion to plaid. Well, I won't be picking up a Pendelton soon, not even to wearing around Portland. You see, subconsciously, I actually thought that shirt killed my father. I did. Soon after dad's passing, I lived with my uncle Rudy Truesdale, an original pilot for Howard Hughes, after Hughes formed Trans World Airlines. My uncle used to say about my paintings, "Why are you wasting your time on modern art? Shouldn't you be studying how the old masters painted in oils?"

To be fair, when I was eighteen he also sent me on a trip to see the great art of the world. A trip that included among other sites, the Louvre, the pyramids at Giza with no tourists (including being alone in King's Chamber with an Arab man burning magnesium ribbon for light) and the Temple of the Gold Buddha in Thailand, for which I am eternally grateful. My painting hero however, remained Jackson Pollock. The problem with having Pollock for a role model was, I had come to believe that in order to make it in the arts, I had somehow to "top" him. Or Picasso! I mean, to discover something NEW, like an explorer finding a new continent. At least, an island. By the late 60's, I was beginning to think everything in painting had already been found and done. How could I "top "Pollock's painting directly out of the can? Dread was in my shoes. If I was too dumb to find something new, (which I was pretty sure I was) I would never be accepted into the "real art world", and, well, if that proved so, I had absolutely nowhere to be, completely unemployable as I was.

My uncle's world trip whetted my appetite for adventure. When I returned I talked two friends I'd grown up with, Ken Benell and Bill Thompson, into forgoing college, then bicycling six thousand miles --- from home in San Luis Obispo to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America.

Arriba!

Nothing obsessive about me.

I'd read one too many adventure books. Ken and Bill's parents, no doubt, never really forgave me. And just forget no bike lanes in the Amazon, not to mention, headhunters, crocodiles, anacondas, piranha and impassable mountain ranges. We'd make due by train. We figured there must be a train. We would find it when we got there.

To skirt California freeways we shipped our brand new Campagnolo equipped Italian Ideor' bikes to Tucson, Arizona, then uncrated them in the parking lot of the shipping company and took off. Ta da! Ah, those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer --- July 1960 to be exact --- in the blazing heat of the Sonora Desert. So much for careful planning. The choice of "racing" over "touring" bikes played havoc with our journey about then too. Sitting in the blistering sun with no spit, trying to locate a cactus thorn in a racing tube was a special hell.

Bill, and I began miffing each other out over minor irritations.

Following behind me I'd hear, "... just stop it David! I can't stand it anymore! It's a derailleur bike, you don't stop peddling every time you shift a derailleur!"

"Hey, screw you!"

"Oh yea, get off your bike right here!"

Looking back it is hilarious to me now.

To our credit we made it through the Sonora Desert to a beach at Guymas, where we took over a hotel cabana, covering it with parachute material to make a little house and had one hell of a lot of fun there.

There was a singer at the hotel named Enrique. He performed Mexican standards mostly. Watching Enrique rip into "Guadalajara" dressed in a suit of lights and a sombrero the size of roulette wheel, complete with two shiny pistolas strapped to his sides, was ... impressive. On the beach however, in a pair of skimpy briefs, Enrique was not impressive. He came around our camp every day wanting to show us something down the beach and would always squat in such a way that his two little balls fell out of his trunks. We humored "the man" because he struck us funny as hell. One day, in a pitiful attempt to impress us, Enrique waded into the surf up to his knees, where, using his skinny arms, tried to showoff by doing standing presses with a boulder he'd picked up off the beach. At one point, the mossy rock slipped out of his hands, fell on his head, and knocked him out cold. We pulled him out of the ocean by his feet.

Finally, after weeks of begging, all three of us followed Enrique down the beach to see whatever the hell it was he wanted to show us. About a hundred yards past the hotel, he motioned for us to follow him up a sandy ravine, where he finally stopped under a railroad trestle. Enrique then turned toward us, dropped to his knees and said, "Pleeeze ... pez on me", while patting both hands around his head and shoulders.

I'd grown up in the "Boys Adventure Book Club," reading about Jivaro headhunters, anacondas eating children, witch doctors killing people with dark spells. Nothing however, had prepared me for this. Ken looked at Bill. I looked at Ken. Bill looked at me, puzzled. I will never forget my friend's curious faces. I think it was Bill, laughing, embarrassed, who finally said, "I think Enrique wants us to pez on him?"

"Pleeeze ... pleeeze ... pez on me here ...," Enrique continued.

We turned to leave. The last we saw of Enrique that day (believe me, he was back at our beach shack the next day) the piteous creature was worming his way over the bottom of the sandy ravine on his belly, crawling like one of those guys in desert cartoon, crying out in a squeaky voice, "Ple-eeze ... pez on me ... plee-eze ... jus pez on me right here ...!" Ah yes, an Amazonian adventure for sure. Hell, right there on the sands of time, perhaps we should have just lined up and whizzed all over the guy. Of course, with "shy kidneys" I would never have been able to pez. Well, that, and it only would only have encouraged the weaselwort.

I'll say this for Bill Thompson, he went on to become one of the best photographers in America, with photos of his great adventures in such far off regions as hanging with the Pygmies in Africa. We are in touch again now, and it's a great pleasure to see his work in e-mails. Can't wait until I can be at one of his openings.

Find Bill's work here: http://www.thompsonphotography.com/

Ken Benell became a family man and fine account. Ah, the smart one. An artist's life is feast or famine. I try not to recommend the art's to young people unless: they cannot NOT make art.

Finally we ran out of money and hitched a ride out of Guymas and back to California with our bikes disassembled in the trunk of some Good Samaritan's car. I returned to my mother's house in San Luis Obispo, needing a job, confused. As mentioned before, very depressed for such a young guy. Nowadays we call it that. Back then, we just felt like crap.

I called the California Men's Colony thinking I might be a prison guard, with no idea it housed a thousand sex offenders, inquiring to see if they had any openings --- for guards. I think I was trying to commit suicide by prisoner. A personnel officer asked me a few questions then suggested I look elsewhere, barely containing his laughter. How I longed to disappear over some mythic horizon, like Rimbaud giving up poetry for Africa. I figured I had one chance left at finding a job in San Luis Obispo. There was a place on the edge of town called the Tallow Works. It was set well back off a country road behind a row of eucalyptus trees. In childhood my father had explained the place as we drove by one day.

"What's that smell dad?"

"That boys, is where all the scrap from butcher shops goes", he said, "plus if a farmer's horse or cow dies they'll come out and pick up the carcass for free. I hear they even toss in dead dogs and cats". The place consisted mainly of a large barn of corrugated tin with all the dark charm of Buchenwald. Tallow, my father explained, was the rendered fat of animals and was used for making candles and cosmetics. Our father took an almost perverse delight in dropping the occasional grotesque bit of information on us brothers. You might say he nurtured our inner-vampire-children. I remember his ghoulish joy that day telling us about the Tallow Works' legendary horror machine, the dreaded, Dead Animal Grinder, a mechanical maw laced with steel teeth for ripping and mashing. With great relish dad said, "I'm told that thing will take a whole dog at once. Big one too. You just toss it in and 'zzzzzzzzzzzzt', dog-burger, bones and all."

Dad loved saying stuff like ... "Zzzzzzzzzzzzt, dog burger". He added, "They have this big pot full of gore in there, like a pressure cooker or something, for rendering fat, and how anybody could work in a place like that is beyond me.

At age twenty, possessing all the charisma of a folding chair, my hope in the arts shattered, a career in lard rendering actually seemed attractive. A step up. One reason I suppose, after many job rejections in town, the thought of being rejected by the Tallow Works seemed somehow, out of the question. I could not imagine anyone being turned down, let alone a nice young chump like me, assuming the Tallow Works would readily hire any idiot damn-fool enough to wander in off the street. I would give up art forever. My swan song would be, "so long Picasso, it's been good to render you".

As I drove to the Tallow Works that day I remembered Mr. Blodget, my junior high biology teacher, and our class field trip to a local slaughterhouse, a large building surrounded by holding pens and covered with corrugated tin. In fact, the slaughterhouse was not far from The Tallow Works. Blodget was pudgy, with a mustache and thick glasses that made his eyes look like a Japanese carp. He believed in "hands on" biology, and Mr. Blodget loved the slaughterhouse. In fact, he reveled in it. Leading a tribe of cringing students, this man would fairly dance over the bloody floors in high rubber boots, probing piles of hearts here, mounds of intestines there, all with the heady excitement of a child opening Christmas presents. I too had found the slaughterhouse intriguing, fascinating. And I took comfort in the memory of Mr. Blodget, ankle deep in steer livers, holding out a big one to the class, yelling, "Students, students! Gather round and see, it's our lucky day! Look here, --- liver flukes! Parasitic liver flukes!"

After all, I recalled, I'd been one of the few students to wade over to Blodget that day, to see the parasitic liver flukes. Actually, the flukes confirmed my suspicions once and for all, that life on earth was utterly hopeless. I identified completely. I felt like a liver fluke. Hell, I was a liver fluke. So with that sort of experience under my belt, grinding up dead animals all day would be a cinch.

LIFE CYCLE OF A LIVER FLUKE: ahem, a cow with flukes poops ––– the first intermediate host, the terrestrial snail (Cionella lubrica in the United States), eats the feces, and becomes infected by the larval parasites. The larvae (or cercariae) drill through the wall of the gut and settle in its digestive tract, where they develop into a juvenile stage. The snail tries to defend itself by walling the parasites off in cysts, which it then excretes and leaves behind in the grass ––– The second intermediate host, an ant (Formica fusca in the United States) uses the trail of slime as a source of moisture ––– the ant then swallows a cyst loaded with hundreds of juvenile lancet flukes. The parasites enter the gut and then drift through its body ––– a high percentage of ants may be infected ––– the fluke takes control of the ant's actions by manipulating nerves. As evening approaches and the air cools, the infested ant is drawn away from other members of the colony and upward to the top of a blade of grass. Once there, it clamps its mandibles onto the top of the blade and stays there until dawn ––– afterward, it goes back to its normal activity at the ant colony. If the host ant were to be subjected to the heat of the direct sun, it would die along with the parasite. Night after night, the ant goes back to the top of a blade of grass until a grazing animal comes along and eats the blade, ingesting the ant along with it ––– oh joy to the world. And now you know the rest of the story.

Yes Virginia, there is a Creator, obviously with one amazing sense of dark humor. Later, I would write my now famous bumper sticker, "Nature IS Kinky".

Rounding a row of eucalyptus trees in my VW bug, I parked some distance from the buildings, next to a couple of red dump trucks with the words, "Tallow Works" painted on the sides. During my boyhood I'd often seen these trucks in downtown San Luis Obispo picking up mounds of trimmed fat and bones from butcher shops.

I walked toward the largest building and a wide open barn door in the front. I could see rusted machinary inside. Just outside, several older black men in bib-overalls sat on wooden boxes in front of the building eating sack lunches. My attention was on the men. I thought, "Well, this isn't so bad, I don't smell anything, not like dad said", completely forgetting how bad it could smell from the road, depending on the wind.

They watched my approach with puzzled looks, as if thinking, "Now what the Sam Hill ...?"

From twenty paces I called out, "I'm looking for a job ...".

Then it hit. And I mean BAD! A reeking stench so putrid it nearly felled me to my knees.

Calvin Klein - 666.

I froze in place, stunned to silence.

The workers smiled, glancing between each other, then back at me. I simply could not breathe and began to wobble. They laughed. Suddenly, only a fifteen feet away I noticed a pile of bloated farm animals mounded up in a pile in the hot sun. How I had managed to miss this mass of abject horror until that moment I will never know, an unholy heap covered with flies. The largest corpse was a brown horse, mouth agape, legs jutting over a grossly bloated belly.

Guernica!

I glanced toward the men. They all broke up roaring with laughter, slapping their thighs and pointing at each other. I panicked and ran. And the faster I ran the louder they laughed. Leaping into the car I sped back down the lane in dad's VW, hanging my head out the window gasping for air. I jammed the accelerator seven miles to Avila Beach, craving the clean sea breeze. Nothing helped. The ocean spray I normally loved resembled a dead sea serpent. The stench of the Tallow Works layered the inside of my nose and lungs like wallpaper paste and stayed there, psychologically at least, for weeks.

Even the roses in my mother's garden made me gag.

After that, the idea of making art didn't seem nearly so depressing. This time, I would go by myself to Baghdad by the Bay, and live there as a painter. When I got to North Beach, thank goodness the entire Italian neighborhood smelled of roasting coffee beans. Soon I met Janis Joplin, Hoyt Axton, Steve Martin, all doing their first shows.

My career was launched.

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