Lowdown Perception Syndrome

Whereby life begins to imitate art in Tulsa

[This month I’m taking a break from my “miscellany” format to drill down into experiences from a recent visit home, captured in part by the photo above.]

I’ve made no secret of being obsessed with Sterlin Harjo’s latest tv series The Lowdown, set and filmed in my hometown of Tulsa. My recent trip home coincided with production of the second season, and it was thus that I found myself standing three feet away from Ethan Hawke at the Circle Cinema’s monthly “Noir Night” on May 18. I played it cool and did not say hi or ask for a photo, even after Sterlin joined him in the ticket and concession line. This required a lot of self-control as his Reality Bites/Below Sunrise era was a touchstone of my young adulthood. And Sterlin is a actual literal certified Genius per the good people at the MacArthur Foundation.

The movie that night was Phantom Lady, about a man framed for the murder of his wife and the search for the elusive woman who might alibi and exonerate him. The screening was introduced with typical verve by series curator and Lowdown cast member Josh Fadem, who acknowledged Hawke and Harjo in the audience. I did venture a hello to Josh before the screening, as we used to ride the school bus together. He didn’t miss a beat, noting enthusiastically “Yes, I remember you being older than me!!” which is a line I’m totally going to steal.

My parents came to the screening too and told us the next morning that they had also spotted Josh’s dad in the crowd, and my mom recounted a funny story from decades past which involved case of potential mistaken identity because Josh’s dad is [insert ominous noirish duh, duh, DUH!!!!] an identical twin!

It’s funny how art resurfaced this incident from life, since “life imitating art” was was very much the theme of this visit to Tulsa, my first since watching The Lowdown. When watching the series the first time, like other Tulsa natives I was continually driven to distraction trying to parse the locations of each scene, looking for visual clues and doing complicated mental geolocation based on the angle at which certain buildings were framed. I had to watch the series a second time so that I could relax and just let the plot unfold, which was not really a hardship, but still a new phenomenon.

But little did I know that this perceptual overstimulation would carry over into real life. Because I now realize that every time I come home I am going to have to grapple with the condition of “Lowdown Vision.” Or maybe it should be called something stronger like “Lowdown Perception Syndrome,” a localized manifestation of “jamais vu” whereby things that should be mundane and familiar suddenly seem strange.

What I mean is that everywhere I went during the four days I was in Tulsa I kept seeing scenes that were almost like they were lifted straight from the show. Driving north on Lewis Avenue to check out the new queer friendly vintage and curiosity shop Jo and June I kept noticing semi-abandoned buildings with commercial real estate signs posted out front. Who is buying and selling these buildings, I started to wonder conspiratorially—and I’m still thinking about it. It also manifested in more imagistic flashes, with mundane activities suddenly revealed as auteur-worthy b-roll. After meeting my brother and his wife at Pony Coffee on a rainy morning we drove out of the parking lot on what seemed like an intentionally decrepit back alley. In front of the car I watched a squirrel leap over a pothole newly filled with rainwater, only a stone’s throw from the office building where my dad worked for several years of his legal career. My god this is so Lowdown I marveled, as I slowed the car so the alley would not wreak havoc on the alignment of my parents’ borrowed Acura.

But the true Lowdown experience was Sunday of my visit, the night before Noir Night, when my partner and our friend Karl stumbled into to what seemed like an episode of Lowdown fan fiction. Having spent most of our social time north of 11th Street, we had decided that after dinner we should meet up closer to where I grew up, on Harvard Avenue south of 51st Street. Karl had told us earlier in the day that among the things he has learned since moving home is that many people maintain that the part of town where I grew up— and more broadly along the Interstate 44 corridor—was where the vestiges of an older version of Tulsa could still be found, untouched by the genteel civic metamorphoses of the George Kaiser Era.

Casting about for ideas I pulled up Google maps and searched for bars near my childhood home, and suddenly our destination for the evening came into view: the Elephant Run bar at the Trade Winds Inn, just north of I-44 and west of Harvard Avenue.

I didn’t need Google Maps to navigate to the bar, having passed by it literally thousands of times during the 20-plus years that I called Tulsa home in my youth. When entering I-44 West from Harvard you couldn’t help but look at it, especially at night when the bar’s entrance was illuminated by pink neon elephants, which vanished at some point.

Growing up and even into adulthood, the Elephant Run was never a place I thought about going into, even though it had always been there. As we piled out of the car and walked towards the entrance, we still felt a little unsure about actually going in—with me at least experiencing the nervous deja vu of entering a gay bar for the first time—but reminded ourselves that we could always just leave if it felt off.

Upon entering we were greeted by a familiar but surprising smell. “Wait is someone smoking in here?” my California-born partner exclaimed almost rhetorically, because by the time he could finish the question it was answered, as we realized that almost every other patron seemed to be smoking. Karl confirmed that this must be one of the small number of bars in Tulsa that had retained this grandfathered status.

But the more notable greeting was by Kim, who after we had been carded by a burly barback came up to introduce herself. “I don’t work here, I’m just here all the time” she explained, and welcomed us in and asked if we were interested in doing karaoke. “Oh he’ll definitely sing something” my partner replied pointing to me, and we found our way to a table and ordered some bourbons and beers. Kim would come back to our table several more times during the next hour to check in on us.

As we relaxed into our drinks and took in more of the scene, I remarked once again about Lowdown Vision, but eventually realized that the three of us as middle aged gay white men and Elephant Run virgins (as clocked by Kim) were perhaps the most conspicuous characters in this particular episode. I mentally reviewed my karaoke go-to list and determined that “Time after Time” or a number by The Monkees would too safe for this special moment, but doing “Popular” from Wicked might be a little too Glee for the scene. I signed up instead to do “Pink Pony Club,” a song I had never sung publicly but had been belting in the car over the last few days, and figured it was a nice way to test the waters of the crowd, and perhaps an unconscious nod to the bygone neon sign.

The song went over well, as did a subsequent duet performed by me and Karl. “Wait what’s the song?” I asked as we climbed onto the stage, and when he stated the title I told him I didn’t know it and was he sure it would be ok? “It’s got a lot of repeats—you’ll figure it out” he assured me. And indeed our unrehearsed premiere of “In Spite of Ourselves” did go over just fine, and by the final choruses I even ventured some rudimentary harmony.

Overall, the Elephant Run felt just fine. And during the evening as the bar filled up, we realized that we were definitely not the only queer people there, and that in fact we had perhaps stumbled into a previously unknown safe space. There was only one fleeting moment of conflict in the course of the evening, originating ironically at a table occupied by what we assume were two queer couples.

One woman at the table called me out shortly after they arrived, thinking that I had been staring at her. I assured her that I had just been looking towards the karaoke stage and didn’t have any issue with her or her friends. “Sorry, man, but people who look like you give me a lot of shit,” she explained.

She seemed surprised and unsure of what to say when, channeling the newly strengthened connections to the city of my birth—or maybe my newly acquired California mindfulness, or some combo of the two—I replied with uncharacteristic assuredness: “Yeah, you’re right—guys who look like me really can be the worst.”

I’m still struck by how powerfully The Lowdown has changed the way I see Tulsa, clueing me into all the strangeness that was always hiding in plain sight. And it has made me realize how rare it is for television or film to be so truly grounded and rooted in particular places. The Wire famously managed to do this with Baltimore, and I often describe The Lowdown as like The Wire but with healthier doses of camp and and the perfect amount of surrealism. The show has made me realize how fundamentally homogeneous so much the shows of our so-called Golden Age of Television are, with Los Angeles or Atlanta or Toronto standing in for dozens if not hundreds of cities with their own details and particularities. “Content” really is the appropriately generic term for most of this fare.

The morning after our Elephant Run excursion, my mom informed us at breakfast that the night before our visit someone had been murdered in the parking lot of the Trade Winds Inn. With secondhand cigarette smoke still clinging to my shorts and clogging up my nasal passages, I paused to reflect on whether this would prevent me from returning, and quickly determined that it would not.

What will be interesting upon my next visit to Elephant Run is to see what the price of a gallon of regular gas costs at the QuikTrip next to the Trade Winds. This location was considerably smaller in my youth, boasting eight or maybe a dozen pumps, and has since been super-sized to keep the looming forces of Buc-cee’s at bay.

Because nothing brought us back to reality upon exiting the Elephant Run than to see what would have been truly unimaginable only months earlier, and even more incomprehensible in my youth: gas in Tulsa priced above four dollars a gallon. Life these days is indeed so much stranger than art could ever imagine. Thank goodness we have folks like Sterlin to keep pace with this level of crazy.