MICHAEL MARTONE / X
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In 1913, Gideon Sundback, working as head designer for the Fastener Manufacturing and Machine Company in Meadville, Pennsylvania, invented the modern zipper. The name “zipper,” however, was trademarked by B.F. Goodrich Company, which coined the term when it added the fastener to its rubber galoshes in 1923. Seven years before that, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, stitched this advertising message onto the clear blue skies over Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. In 1916, the Fastener Manufacturing and Machine Company, having changed its name to Talon, was now aggressively marketing the device, commissioned our skywriter to cryptically affix this tattoo over larger cities—especially those with military installations, armories, and quartermaster depots. Talon’s thinking was (what with the war raging in Europe and with the America’s intervention there seeming inevitable) the expeditionary forces would need new modern efficient closures for their kits and caboodle. Art Smith designed the display himself having been mesmerized by the new, yet unnamed “zipper” zipper now installed over his heart on a slash pocket of his double-breasted leather flying jacket for safe storing of his folded oilcloth maps. He pulled at the pull tab, running the slider up and down, admiring the sound of the contraption—its controlled tear, its rasp and ratchet—knitting and unknotting, a miracle, each tooth fitting into its diastema, a suture, laced fingers. He worried the design like a prayer and sewed up the sky in smoke.
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Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was also known as The Crash Kid. There had been many crashes leading up to this afternoon spent knotting up the sky over El Paso. Not that he felt in any way in any peril that day. The aeronautics were relatively benign—the lazy figure 8 with the smoke extinguished through the radii of the wide banking turns. And his airplane that day the reliable Curtis JN-3 an infinitely more stable platform than his homebuilt spit and baling wire Pushers. They had, more often than not, stuttered and stalled and slammed into the corn-stubbled ground or a canopy of unforgiving trees, a litany of being let down. He’d come to after a crash, the smoldering bamboo and balsa just beginning to catch and burn, and see his personal catastrophes—the gashes, the slick lacerations, the protruding tibia or fibula, looking to him, in shock, like the control sticks of his splintered aircraft. Ha! It would be something if the skin came equipped with such cunning little fasteners, slide the slice right up. A part of him wanted desperately to fly in the impending war, take off into the leading edge of experimental flight. Dogfights! Immelmanns! Tailslides! Hammerheads! But the fix was already in. The shattering and re-settings of his legs and arms, his back, his fingers, his toes in all those crashes would wash him out of the Air Service when the time came. His feet would be unable to reach the pedals on the “Tommy” trainer. His arthritic hands would be unable to grasp the throttle on the Avro. But, in 1916, another war was knocking on the door—the Mexican Revolution across the border. In his landing approaches, he would swing out and around effortlessly through that alien airspace, banking over Juarez as the Revolution was entering its final phases below. And here he was on the border advertising new fangled notions for notions in an unraveling world.
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It hadn’t been that long, a little over a year, that his companion in the celebrated aerial elopement and marriage, the love of his life, Aimee Cour, had left him in California and returned to the Midwest. Now, here on this extreme border, still smarting from that crash, he sought solace on the outer edges of what had been his known world. This was Art Smith’s, The Bird Boy’s, migration to mitigate those nagging injuries. He thought of his assignment here as a kind of banishment, forty days of wandering alone in the wilderness, the desert—the deserted desert itself and the wide deserted sky that seemed even wider than usual, endlessly cloudless, ever expanding, empty even of empty. After his daily skywriting, introducing to the quartermasters of Fort Bliss below the modern mechanism of closure, Art Smith would set a course along the international boundary, expending the last of his calligraphic fuel, tracing the sovereign demarcation, making visible, in his mind, an “us” and a “them,” hoping to purse up all those feelings that constantly percolated within him. Oh, but even as he drew the drawstrings closed, irrational geography, he knew. He wasn’t fooling himself. He knew he was not of one place or the other but constantly between, in between the between. Heaven and Hell. America and Mexico. Day and Night. Flying and Falling. He left in his wake, always, a stuttering and impermanent imaginary geometry, a porous border made up of tenuous threads of fleeting gossamer, the gauziest of insubstantial clouds.
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Eighty miles due west from El Paso, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, flew along the border to Columbus, New Mexico. It was March 19th. Ten days before, Pancho Villa and the remnants of his failing Army of the North had crossed the border, raiding Columbus, burning the train station and other buildings, killing seventeen Americans. Now, Columbus would become the rallying point for the Army’s 1st Aero Squadron, eight JN-2s and eleven pilots, as they kicked off the Punitive Expedition in support of General Pershing’s force of 6,600 already deep into Mexico searching for Villa. The planes, unarmed and underpowered for the high desert, were ordered to rendezvous with the ground forces in Casas Grandes 90 miles south into Mexico. Art Smith in his skywriting “Jenny,” circled, watching as the Army’s airplanes lumbered into the air, too late in the day, into the gathering dusty darkness. They would be gone a year, looking for Villa and his raiders. Smith by then would be long gone, back up north, would hear of the spectacular failures of the airplanes and airmen—the wooden propellers delaminating in the dry heat, the crash landings in shifting sand, the radiator explosions spewing blood red water into the open cockpits. In Chihuahua City, Lt. Drague would be fired upon by four Mexican policemen with Winchester rifles, the first recorded attack on a U.S military plane. But all of this would be forgotten. All of it eclipsed. The War in Europe would intervene in this intervention, calling Pershing and his troops over there instead. The Mexican Revolution would end in amnesty for Villa and his men. Villa himself would be assassinated years later driving home in his Dodge touring car to the hacienda in Canutillo by a pumpkinseed seller shouting “Viva Villa!” But all of that was from a different country, the undiscovered country of the Future. The next morning in Columbus, New Mexico, after the 1st Aero Squadron had disappeared into old Mexico, Art Smith headed back along the invisible border to El Paso, landing at Fort Bliss to share the news of the Expedition’s incursion. Along the way he closed the door behind him, so to speak, posting something like a fence wire warning along the way, a patriotic gesture, he believed then, adorned with a few menacing Xs, barbing the line in the sky. They were, he hoped, of such scale, such majesty, he imagined, no one would ever want to cross this way again, now or in that unknown future.
Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His forthcoming books are The Moon Over Wapakoneta and Brooding. The contribution here is from the book The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone.