Sand in the Salad Greens

Nick Wilson and I were headed north on Highway 1. Nick drove his beet-red pickup truck, while I sat in the passenger seat, the window rolled down just enough to let a breeze stream into the vehicle’s compartment and tousle my hair. It was a Saturday morning in February 2000 and we both were ready to get some interviews done. We first planned to interview the public artist and part-time actor Ben Bottoms. After that we’d make our way farther north to Guadalupe, a small town on the northwestern tip of Santa Barbara County.

Ben lived in a rural area somewhere on the outskirts of Lompoc.

“There’s San Julian!” I shouted to Nick. We’d just passed an orange sign that read ‘San Julian’ — the sign that Ben had told me to look for when he’d given me directions over the phone. I’d written his directions down in shorthand, and now I found them difficult to read as I went over my notebook in the truck.

Nick pulled off Highway 1, circled around and turned on to the San Julian road. The path started out paved but soon became dirt. Lucky for us it hadn’t rained yet; if it had, the road would have been tough to travel on. Clouds clustered together in small puffs, looking like shots of whipped cream. The sky itself was a beautiful sharp blue. As Nick drove, my mind began to wander and I started thinking about how nice it would be to live in the country. I thought Ben Bottoms must be pretty happy.

We continued on this dirt road for a while, past fields and farmland, around large oak trees and other types of trees I couldn’t identify, since I’m not into trees, until we came to a big barn and a couple of farm houses. Three cars were parked out front of one of the houses, and a jeep was parked outside the other. We decided to stop here and look around to see if this was Ben’s place. Nick and I walked toward the barn first, since Ben had also told me to look for a big red barn. Well, this was a barn all right, but not the one we wanted. It looked abandoned. Just beyond the barn was a large hole in the ground. Smoke drifted out of the hole. I wondered what was burning down there but didn’t want to stay and find out. Everything was quiet. No sounds of animals. We walked past the house that was beside the barn and over to the other house, going as far as the front gate. The sign at the front gate read ‘Poett’.

“Is this it?” Nick asked.

“I don’t know. He told me to look for a white pickup truck, but I don’t see one. There’s a barn but that’s more black than red, I think.”

We got back into the truck and drove farther down the road until we came to a wide-open pasture. The road ended at a cattle-corral that looked as if it hadn’t been used in years. The fences were rusted and falling to pieces. An ancient piece of farm equipment, weeds growing over it, squatted on the right side of the road. I continued to look to my right and came across something that made me do a double take. I looked to my left, just past Nick, and saw the same thing. Two cows were on either side of us, but they weren’t just any cows — these were prehistoric cows, tall and skinny, like camels, and they had some type of sack hanging from their throats, as if they were rooster-cows. I’d never seen cows like this before. “You see that?” Nick asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s like we’re on the Farm That Time Forgot.”

We figured that Ben wasn’t around here. I admitted to myself that, yes, we were lost and would have to ask for directions. So we drove back the way we came and stopped at the ‘Poett’ household. We asked for Ben Bottoms and the woman who lived there knew exactly who he was, which didn’t surprise me. She explained to us that, although we were in San Julian, there were plenty of San Julians and Ben Bottoms lived on another San Julian — just off the Rancho San Julian exit, in fact.

Oh, that made sense. I’d forgotten to write down the ‘Rancho’ part while taking down his directions in my notebook. We thanked her and got out of that particular San Julian, right back on to Highway 1 where we drove for another three miles before spotting the sign for Rancho San Julian. After that it didn’t take us long to find Ben. As we drove we saw all the details he’d mentioned in his directions — the big red barn, the white pickup truck, the forks in the road, and a sign for De La Guerra Street.

We pulled up to a farmhouse and Ben was out there in the yard, ready to greet us. He wore dirty, not-so-faded blue jeans (with belt), boots, a zip-up green sweater, and what looked to me like plastic-framed glasses. He had dark hair, what I took to be a receding hairline, and inquisitive, piercing eyes flashing behind his glasses. I immediately thought of the actor Henry Czerny, who played a villainous turncoat in the 1996 Harrison Ford film Clear and Present Danger. Nick later told me that Ben reminded him of Bruce Willis.

I got out of the truck and went up to Ben, extending my hand. “Ben Bottoms,” I said, “I’m David Ewald.” He shook my hand. “David. Good to meet you finally.”

I felt the need to explain to him why we were late to the interview. “Yeah, we got lost a little. I forgot about Rancho San Julian and just went with San Julian. I didn’t know there were so many San Julian signs around here.”

“Well,” he said, extending his arms out to his sides. “You’re in the San Julian Valley, so you’re going to come across that.”

“Yeah. It’s nice land. We saw a lot of it. Uh, how much of it do you own?”

“I don’t own any land. I just live here.”

“Huh,” I said, thinking his statement over. An awkward moment of silence followed — the only time when I felt unsure of what I was getting into. How difficult would it be to get Ben to open up?

While Nick introduced himself, I observed the outside of the house. White flecks of paint were peeling off the walls, leaving traces of a light wood underneath. A large bleached-white skull of some animal — a deer perhaps? — hung on the wall to the right of the front door. Assorted potted plants lay strewn about the porch and small stairway. I felt fur and looked down to discover a black cat rubbing its lithe body against my bare ankles. I bent down to stroke the cat but it ran away too quickly for me to catch hold of it. After Nick and Ben finished with their introductions, all three of us went inside.

“I’m not used to people in here,” Ben said. He leaned over the kitchen counter and made tea and buttered raisin toast, the taste of which stayed in my mouth for the rest of the day (in a good way). Nick and I stood with our backs to the front door, now closed. Also behind us was a shelf that held Ben’s music collection. Opera music played on the stereo system. I looked at the shelf and scanned Ben’s CDs, coming across musicals like West Side Story and singers like Dinah Washington.

Since I still had the lay of the land in mind, I brought up the prehistoric bovines we’d seen on our way to getting lost. “Oh, those are the Brahma Bulls,” Ben said, matter-of-factly. “They have African blood in them.” Although I was curious to know how these Brahma Bulls came to the San Julian Valley, I didn’t push the subject further. The way Ben had spoken made the camel-cow sighting into such a minor thing, as if he was shrugging our news off with a ‘Well, it happens everyday’ attitude.

I asked him how long he’d lived out here.

“Five years,” he said. “But in this house I’ve lived for about two. I have the family home out in Twenty-Nine Palms, where my mother lives. I call it the legacy home…Hey, it ain’t Montecito, but it’s paid for!” I told him I was interested in Twenty-Nine Palms and asked if he could tell me more about it.

“It’s a place that has a lot of cultural anomalies,” he said.

“What do you mean by cultural anomalies?”

“Well, there’s this one guy, all right, and he takes a bunch of his junk, like soda bottles and cans, and pieces everything together to make art. It’s a lot like what I’m doing with the Twenty-Nine Signs exhibit out there in the desert.”

Twenty-Nine Palms got us talking about towns in California, and soon we were on Guadalupe. Turns out that Ben is a big fan. “Sure,” he said. “I’ve been to Guadalupe several times. I know this one guy lives there, Joe Katiama. Joe is the town jeweler. He owns the watch shop that’s right next to John Perry’s automotive store. If you drive down the main street you’ll know it’s Joe’s shop by the old-fashioned clock outside. It’s at the top of a long pole coming out of the street and one day a semi-truck ran into it. Not all the way into it, otherwise the pole would have been knocked to the ground, no doubt. But the truck nicked the pole and so the clock got tilted to one side. It’s that kind of clock; you can’t miss it. Since the accident, the clock doesn’t work so well and that’s why every morning, before Joe opens shop, he winds up the clock from the bottom where there’s this real old control panel. Without him the clock wouldn’t function.”

The buttered raisin toast went quickly. Ben showed us around the rest of his place. We went from the kitchen to his bedroom and into his living room and office, all in about ten footsteps. Those were the only rooms in the house, except for the bathroom. His place was really built for one person. Several paintings hung on the living room walls. The majority of these paintings portrayed ranches and horses — two of the things that Ben said he was most interested in. He’d always been interested in them, it seemed, because when he started telling us about his childhood, he emphasized the fact that he’d always wanted to live on a ranch. That was a dream of his and now here he was, living on a ranch out in the woods, where he could walk outside at any time and become lost in the sense that he could get away from work and people, keeping to himself, alone but not lonely.

Ben searched through a drawer in his office and came out with a single sheet of paper dated June 1966. “This is from when I was a kid,” he said, handing it to me. I read the report from Santa Barbara’s Starr King parent-child workshop, written by Sarah Foot. Miss Foot wrote, “At five, Benjamin is very skillful and sure in all his peer inter-relations. He has mastered the art of one-upmanship; is competent as a co-equal; is full of resources for play alone. His language, his reasoning, his ability to plan and think ahead are superior. His ability to conceptualize is mature.”

A smile crept up the corners of my mouth. I got an unlikely picture in my head of how Ben might have looked and acted at the age of five, as a little scientist and thought-processor. I saw him solving difficult math problems on a chalkboard before a panel of professors. I saw him experimenting in his lab with potions and complex, volatile materials. I saw him frying ants with a magnifying glass. Without looking up from the paper, I glanced in Ben’s direction. He watched me with a puzzled expression on his face. He must have seen my smile; I hoped he hadn’t mistaken it for a smirk. I read on, especially enjoying the following excerpts:

“As graceful as an elf, he moves beautifully to music. A tease and boy-style tormenter…open and honestly in touch with his own emotional reactions, having not been required to mask, pretend or conceal….

“He is ready for considerable challenge. He builds large extended structures, either with floor blocks, packing boxes and planks…can dictate a presentable story, if not carried away with the sillies.”

A boy who found himself caught between the adult world and his own childhood. I read the last line, “He is fairly small and slight — a beautiful and charming child,” and handed the paper back to Ben. He watched me with curiosity. “That’s from a while ago,” he said, unapologetically. “She used to call me her Little Benjy Bottoms.”

“I believe it,” I said. “From what it sounds like you were very special to her.”

“You want to know when I was born?” he asked me. I said yes and he rattled off the information: “December 3rd, 1960, 3:05 in the morning. Cottage Hospital.” He went on to talk about a dichotomy that took hold of him early in his life. He grew up in Santa Barbara and attended Santa Barbara High School, yet remained dissatisfied with city life. He had a kind of childhood dream that captured his imagination to the point where he desperately wanted to leave the urban sprawl and become a rancher in the country.

As he talked, I went around the room looking at his paintings and photographs. There was one photograph that really struck me; it was in a frame standing on his dresser. It showed a dog sitting on the back of a white pony. I pointed out the picture to Ben and he said, “Yeah, that’s my dog, Dicky. He’s on top of the pony.”

“It’s a nice picture,” I commented. “How long did the dog stay on your pony there?” I found it fascinating that someone could even set a dog on top of a pony, let alone take a picture of the two animals in what must have been a tenuous position.

“Oh, he was up there for a pretty long time,” Ben said. “The pony was old by then and so he was slow, you know, and he didn’t mind the dog so much. That picture over there…” and he pointed to a painting hanging in the corner, high on the wall. “That’s something I painted because of my pony, something like a catharsis you’d call it.” I asked him if he could elaborate on this and he did. “I had to shoot him when he was too old to go on, and so when the bullet entered his brain it was like my life flashed before my eyes. That moment. My life. I saw the time when my father first picked me up and had me lean over the railing to his stall and I looked down over this railing and there was my future pony, just like that. That was when I was six and here I was shooting him when I was twenty-six. So twenty years flashed in front of me when I pulled the trigger.”

After Ben had finished his story, we each took a seat in the living room. I got the couch. Ben and Nick took chairs. “You want to know about my family?” he asked. “My father…” he began, “is James Bud, the Dolphin Guy. That’s because he made the dolphin fountain out at the end of the pier in Santa Barbara, plus he set up plenty of other dolphin statues elsewhere. My mom’s Betty Elizabeth and she supported my dad when he was going to school, after he got fired from General Motors.”

“What did he do there?”

“His job was in the think-tank at GM. He was an artist who designed economical cars of the future. My father was eco-minded. What I mean by that is he exposed us to environmental issues, but by today’s standards he’s a low-key environmentalist. The majority of this generation isn’t as eco-minded, but there are some people out there who really make it the only thing in their lives. But you see, even though he was into the environment, my father still took time off to go duck hunting around where UCSB is now. That was when your campus was at the Riviera. I remember during my junior high years that Dad formed GOO — that’s Get Oil Out. This was about the late ’60s, early ’70s, when offshore drilling became a big thing. He set a historic precedence in Santa Barbara with first-ever oil spill awareness.

“You know I also mentioned my mother. She was very supportive. My parents divorced when I was eleven but she and I remained close. I remember the best thing was when I became an actor and had enough money to go downtown to Otts Department store — where Paseo Nuevo mall is now — and I loved buying her a coffee pot for her birthday. That was just great.”

“What about acting? Could you tell me more about that?”

“Sure. What do you want to know?”

“Like…when did you start?”

“When I was fifteen. I got my first big break playing Huck Finn for the Denver Center Theatre Company. That was in Colorado. I had a great time out there, and I made the role of Huck in that production.” He took out a large box filled with files and manila folders. From one of these folders he gave us a couple of pictures of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1975. I saw Ben Bottoms as Huck, side-by-side with his buddy Jim, as the two of them traveled along the Mississippi River. Ben looked cute; I think I saw dimples. Then Ben took out a copy of the play and started to read from the first page. His accent was dead-on. “How did that sound?” he asked. “See, I can still remember the lines even years from now. It never leaves you. Acting never does, I mean. I may need the opening lines of the part but after that I can remember it clearly.”

Nick noticed that another of the actors in one of the pictures had the last name of Bottoms as well. He pointed this actor out to Ben, who identified the slightly older boy as his brother. “I have three brothers, actually,” he said. “Timothy, Joseph, and Sam, all in that order. All of them are older than me, and they’re all actors too. They’re actually, well, they’re the ones who got me my acting start. I owe it to Sam really. He started out when he was a teenager and then the other brothers just followed suit, I guess you could say. The theater people saw that I was the youngest and they must’ve liked me because they said, ‘You want this part as Huck Finn?’ And I said sure. What are you going to say if they offer you an opportunity like that? You’re going to take it, obviously. For me, it was either get into acting or go back to Santa Barbara High, which I wasn’t ready to face again. For me it was just too stifling.”

“Uh, what about your films? Tell me about those.”

“Like I said on the phone to you, they’re nothing you would have heard of. I was in the sequel to American Graffiti, called More American Graffiti. Voice in Exile was a pretty good role. I was the lead in that movie. But theater work is so much more interesting. I might have told you already, but in my late twenties I worked at the Ensemble Theatre Company, downtown Santa Barbara. I really liked that time in my life; the work was so satisfying. Work on stage is always more satisfying for me than what I do in the movies because with theater you’re entertaining two groups of people — not just one. In theater, you have to take care of the audience, meaning you have to entertain them with what’s in the script, and that’s fun because you can change things, make things up and come up with something new, impromptu or spur-of-the-moment. But there’s also each other to take care of, and what I mean by that is that an actor is able to entertain the other actors backstage behind the curtain. We entertain ourselves that way. So we get something more out of it than audience satisfaction. With film it’s…”

And here Ben dropped his voice low, taking on a dismal tone, totally abject.

“…Okay show up to the set. Here’s the script. What’s in the script, Mr. Producer? Well, it’s been changed thousands of times since yesterday, Mr. Bottoms. That’s right. We’ve changed all your lines and let’s see…now there’s an explosion here, something else big goes there…”

He reverted back to his normal voice.

“Plus there’s the ‘budge’. You got your usual budge….” He held his hand up high, palm flat. “…And the producer budge. Oh, now that’s a big budge so that’s got to be up there. Really big now.” He held that same hand up even higher, palm still flat. “And now we have the Ben Bottoms budge, little eensy-weensy Ben Bottoms comes along here and wham!” He stuck his other hand out, palm flat, and kept this hand very low to the ground. “That’s the Ben Bottoms budge all right. You see, I can’t play that level. With what they make these days, it’s all about a pre-prescribed formula; they think, ‘Well, if it worked before then it’s gotta work again, right?’ Wrong. It got so bad that this one time I tried to break things up with this cowboy role I had. I was supposed to be a cowboy but I took on a lot of different personalities, just to make it entertaining. I really overdid it — with the props the most. I drove my pickup truck on to the set and in the back of my truck there were a bunch of things, like rope and barbed wire and boots, and I don’t even know what anymore. They asked me to leave.”

There was a pause that turned out to be longer than I felt comfortable with. I quickly thought of something to say but Ben started talking again.

“I think,” he said, “the way the Hollywood scene is right now goes along with the time we’re living in, in some ways. We’re at a time of this incredible wealth and growth in the stock market. We’re a corporate society. Brand name stamp…Face the facts, man. There should be a new law. Call it the Quality of Life Aesthetics Law. We have the eco-minded moms with their not-so eco-minded kids, driving around in four-by-fours all over LA….”

Ben tilted his head all the way to one side so that his head lay at a horizontal angle. He stared into space, held both his hands up at the ten-and-two position, and made car-driving sounds. “Whoosh whoosh,” he whispered. He made steering motions with his hands. “Fast car. Whoosh whoosh.” He suddenly sat upright and his voice was back to normal. “It’s difficult to talk to people anymore. Just slide your card, you know. Don’t go inside and pay. Slide your card and it’s settled.”

After that, we went outside. The wind had picked up and the sky was now cloudy and ominous with the approach of rain. Ben sat on a bench and lit a clove cigarette. Nick and I sat on a bench near him.

He took a drag from the cigarette and blew smoke through his nostrils. “I was a cowhand on the Santa Rosa Island at one time, shoeing horses. That was about ten years ago, I think. And you know, horse etiquette just isn’t known anymore.”

“Do you own any horses now?” I asked.

“No, but I own a mule. And a desert dog. They’re living with my mother in Twenty-Nine Palms. It’s not just my pony, you see. I like relating to all animals. Communicating with dogs and mules is necessary when you’re working with them on a close personal basis. It’s like training sheep dogs with a whistle. It’s important to have that connection with your animals, like I have with mine. They begin to talk to you — the animals, they do, or think to you, and pretty soon you understand what they’re thinking. I’m not sure but the way a sheep dog would tell his age would probably be, ‘I am four generations of dogs old.’” He looked up at the sky. “Moon was bright last night.”

Nick agreed that yes, the moon had been bright the night before.

“That reminds me,” Ben said, turning his attention from the sky over to us. “Reminds me of the druids and the pyramids. I mean, how’d those guys build that stuff when they had none of the resources we have now? I love wondering about this stuff; it gets more interesting as I get older.”

He pointed to his forehead. “We’re really just an experiment, I think, evolving, becoming less human and more like the culture that came before us, a culture that’s even more technologically advanced than we are, and that means we’re playing catch-up. Now they — this previous culture I mean — they genetically engineered us, so we’re half of what came before, you could say. What if there’s a cross-back? We’re completely different than everything else on the planet. Monkeys come closest, but we’re even different from them. The last frontier is here.” He paused. “This is based upon many years of thinking, and my mind-connectedness to animals helps.”

Nick said he had to make a phone call and went back inside the house. He told me later that yes, he had to make a call, but another reason why he wanted to go inside was that the cold had got to him.

Ben and I sat in silence for a few minutes, thinking. Then he said, “I told you earlier that I don’t own any land, but I am interested in it. You know the land’s changing. That’s obvious, what with the Gaviota debate going on, people saying what we need to do to protect our land from urban sprawl and all that. But what the developers don’t know is that even when they do build their houses out there, the beach will get ’em. What I mean by that is the shore’s expanding inland and the beach is slowly overtaking the Gaviota coastline. It’s happening, mixing the surf with the turf, the sand with the salad greens. Then there’s the cattle. Cattle’s a tough business to make a living in and with the way things are going it’ll be even more difficult to make a living in the years to come. They closed the cattle yard in Buellton so now there’s more time spent shipping cattle, and it’s not just milk, meat, and manure any longer either. The one million dollar home is becoming the norm.” Another drag from his cigarette. Smoke through his nostrils. “Take a look at this place. Proximity to towns can be devastating, but this place is far enough away that it hasn’t seen the explosion that Santa Ynez has seen. It’s land started up by Italian immigrant families; this place has 120 years of history to it. The De La Guerra family owned it for so long — now look. Fourteen thousand acres and one groundskeeper to take care of it all. Where’s the money going to come from to fix the roof to that barn over there? Leaks in that roof, leaks in all these roofs, really. The relationship of money connects it all. What I want to know…what I want to know is where the housing spread stops. When I was young I thought it was an evil thing. I liked it quiet, no cars, no gas stations. Now I want to know, where does it end?”

I looked away from him and out into a nearby field. I didn’t mind the silence between us this time. It felt natural, calming.

Nick came out of the house and I figured this would be a good time to wrap up the interview. We said so long to Ben and piled into Nick’s truck. As we pulled out and turned around, I waved to Ben. He waved back. Then Nick and I headed for the highway.

(Originally published summer 2000 in Santa Barbara County’s Changing Urban Seen)