White Hat Down

art by frank mccarthy

White Hat Down

“As a kid, whenever a guy got killed

in a Western movie, I always wondered

what happened to his horse.”

--George Carlin

Quite the journey, that juxtaposition

of the buttoned up Miss Kitty being visited

slyly and regularly by Matt Dillon,

to the more realistic cum-stained raunchy

cleavage-revealing saloon whores

of Deadwood and Hell on Wheels;

from the pig-tailed two-gunned Gail Davis

wearing her drugstore white leather frilled finery

to the mercurial Robin Weigert vomiting rot gut

onto the chest of her sweat encrusted leather blouse;

from the days of Duncan Renaldo giving

The Cisco Kid perfectly pressed black vaquero

Hollywood Latin accent and charm,

to Eli Wallach’s gold-toothed cringing ugliness

in that Sergio Leone spaghetti epic;

from Hugh O’Brien’s tight-lipped prancing dude

marshall, always fingering his Buntline barrel,

to Kurt Russell’s blue-eyed mustached killer titan

riding down and blowing away his adversaries

while just seeming to step out of several

Remington canvases--much like laconic Lee

Marvin did in that battered hat as Monte Walsh;

from the skinny kid Cheyenne with the painted chest

that Anthony Quinn played in The Plainsman, 

standing rigid in front of a De Mille diorama, 

to the huge Will Sampson as Ten Bears saying,

“then it will be life” to Clint in Outlaw Josey Wales,

or the believability of Graham Greene’s Kicking Bird

as patriarch to Costner in Dancing with Wolves;

From Roy Rogers as William Bonny in Billy the Kid Returns,

sidekicking with Smiley Burnette to those flawed sociopaths

played later by Paul Newman, Kristofferson, Kilmer, 

& Michael J. Pollard, mixing in 

the politics of the roughshod cattle barons

and the ragtag squatters and small ranchers;

from the Depression dignity in handsome Tyrone Power’s

Jesse James, passing by Robert Duvall’s raging

raving Jesse in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid

to the naked preening arrogance of

Brad Pitt’s complex unsympathetic version;

from the sweet natured Paul Newman’s 

Robert Leroy Parker riding a bicycle

to the silly strains of raindrops dropping

awkwardly from the Bacharach score,

to the taciturn aging Butch Cassidy

that the brilliant Sam Shepard played

in Bolivia in Blackthorn;

From John Wayne lip-synching Singing Sandy,

to his bloated brilliant departure Rooster Cogburn, 

to the wiry bearded lethal hooligan 

bounty hunter that Jeff Bridges

played for the Coen Brothers.

Personally,

I preferred Keith Carradine’s Will Bill Hickok

to the silliness of Guy Madison’s,

Ellen Barkin’s lusty Calamity Jane

to Doris Day’s scrubbed songbird,

and I do enjoy the full nudity

and the proliferation of the F-word

in modern Westerns. I am pleased to acknowledge

the powerful presence of black cowboys & Indians,

but, 

we definitely have lost the joy

of those long Saturday matinees

at the Orpheum cheering Tex Ritter,

Audie Murphy and Randolph Scott,

resigning one’s self to their remastered

flicker on Encore’s TWC, lost the cleanliness

of American pioneer white hat charm,

seeing it vanish into parody, nostalgia,

and frantic internet image searches;

some mornings I just want Jay Silverheels

to awaken me to the oder of kemo sabe coffee,

or have Dale bang the Double R Bar triangle

for some happy trail pancakes and eggs

as old Roy strums an expensive guitar

while harmonizing with the Sons of the Pioneers

who always seem to be out in the front yard,

take a ride in Nelly Belle,

throw a real bone for Bullet,

being genuinely sad that I never

had a son to give my Davy Crockett

coonskin cap to.

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets OLN

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