The first pickup truck I fell in love with belonged to my Uncle Abe, a carpenter, who let us kids climb all over it. It was powder blue, as I recall, with a kind of scaffold built over the bed that served us as monkey bars.
The first pickup truck that crystallized the menace of the vehicle for me was the one in Easy Rider, with the gun rack. I was in college, and though several years younger than the character Dennis Hopper played, my hair was just as long and my sensibility similarly countercultural, as we called it. The shotgun blast out the window of that pickup truck, wiping out Hopper’s Billy the Kid, remains one of the grimmest and most shocking moments of violence in American film of that time, more so than the protracted and anticipated fusillade that turned Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway into macabre spasmodic marionettes at the end of Bonnie and Clyde.
So, for starters, in my frame of reference, we have pickup truck as playpen and pickup truck as, so to speak, hearse.
To end on a lighter note, in the upper right corner of this photograph you can see a bit of the rear entrance of Grasshopper off the Green, the popular Morristown pub, where we sometimes go for lunchtime story meetings (iced tea or Diet Coke all around). After hours, I’ll have a Guiness draft. Best bangers and mash with gravy I’ve had this side of Liverpool. But that’s another story.