Left my 'art truck' behind in a little hippie burg

There aren’t too many “art cars” around these parts.

What’s an art car?

Well, there was that time a Roswell pal saw an “art car” when he visited me in Bisbee, Ariz., back in the ’90s.

This particular one had all kinds of dolls glued all over it: Cabbage Patch kids, Kewpie dolls, run of the mill dolls, Barbies & Kens, Betsy Wetsy, GI Joe … all stuck to the car.

“What the hell was that?” he practically yelled as he watched the vehicle trundle down the road.

“Art car, town’s full of ’em,” I said.

“This is a weird place you live in,” he said.

That’s why I moved from Phoenix to Bisbee, “Where weird is normal, and normal is weird.”

I really wanted to move back to Roswell but I had heard there was a “hippie Utopia” about 90 miles southeast of Tucson, just a short distance from the Mexican border: Bisbee.

I was still at that stage in my life where I thought SURELY there was a place where everyone lived in happiness, peace, music, art and harmony.

Alas, Bisbee still wasn’t Utopia.

But that’s another story.

The first Bisbee art car I saw had been formed into a giant eyeball.

I thought it was cool.

There were all kinds of art cars: Painted, reformed, stuff stuck on them.

My first thought to make my own was to silicone glue a bunch of compact discs to my little red Subaru. 

“I bet the first time an Arizona State trooper sees it they’ll give you a ticket for SOMETHING,” a Bisbee pal said.

“Why?” I asked.

“All those shiny compact discs glinting in the sun? And they’ll probably warp big-time in the heat.”

So I nixed the CD “art car.”

But I had a truck.

My truck was a good ol’ 1983 Ford F-150 pickup.

I wanted to do SOMETHING “cool” with it but nothing crossed my mind.

Then art came to my truck.

A business woman approached me with an idea for an upcoming town festival.

“At Spring Festival, why not park your pickup truck in front of my store and let people just paint what they want on the truck? I have the paint,” she said.

“I love it. I dig the randomness, the spontaneity,” I said.

Those were “art words” I learned in Santa Fe.

So my truck became rolling art when festival goers randomly painted on it.

At the end of the day it was glorious … yellow streaks, fuchsia strokes, white wavy lines, sky blue stars, an orange sun and a topless mermaid.

She later got a bikini top after that addition was “strongly suggested” by the mayor of nearby Tombstone.

Then came the time I drove my “art truck” to Roswell to visit friends. 

I wondered about the reaction the art truck might get.

There wasn’t much of a reaction at all.

 Some old guy who looked like he was made up of spring steel and rawhide turned by me at an intersection and said loud enough for me to hear: “Waste of a perfectly good truck.”

Another guy spoke when he pulled up beside me at a traffic light: “Why’d you put a bikini top on the mermaid? That’s just sad.”

The time came to leave Arizona and return to New Mexico.

And the art truck?

I gave it to that store owner where it got painted.

After all, the truck really belonged in the little hippie burg not far from the Mexican border.

Grant McGee writes for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him:

[email protected]