I had no idea The Outsiders was set in Tulsa. The story is timeless, placeless. It could be set in any American city filled with youthful yearning for innocence and honesty in the midst of class warfare and familial dysfunction. Driving through the streets of Tulsa, I saw nothing special. We ate at a chain restaurant, drove past strip malls and post WWII neighborhoods, over train tracks and through good and bad parts of town. Tulsa seemed to suffer from what geographers call placelessness; it is a city that looks like so many other cities. When we visited Tulsa, I was also unaware of the deeply significant and horrifying Tulsa Race Massacre. It’s hard to know a place fully when you are just passing through.
Tulsa almost became just a stop for the night to sleep and refresh until my husband pulled into a drive-in movie theater. Not just any drive-in theater but the Admiral Twin. The very one where Ponyboy and Johnny bonded with the SOCS girls from the good side of town.
Tulsa may not have a sparkling sea or a grand canyon or skyscraper trees, but it does have The Outsiders.
Sometimes places are like people; each with unique hidden monuments and special things tucked deep inside to be discovered with the right time and effort. My husband, Chris, is never afraid to explore places or meet people to discover secrets and wonders no matter how quiet or empty the streets or the souls seem to be.
I know from experience how he can keep the quest going when all seems futile or meaningless. Despite the dead ends he found with me in our early conversations and first dates, he persevered.
I am a skittish conversationalist, exhausted easily by the effort. But he was always telling stories and funny and seemed to have endless patience with me in the early days of our relationship. I learned quickly that Chris has the heart of an explorer and a rambling, traveler’s soul. Restlessness comes easy and wanderlust is strong. But not the straying, solitary kind that leaves everyone behind. He is generous when he knows a place, and he wants to share it with everyone. He always presents what he finds as a gift for us, and I relish the ease of it all.
Tulsa was similar and after some effort, it proved to be the best kind of surprise. Our night there seemed to be over; then suddenly I am at an iconic drive-in movie theater watching Jurassic World with three kids in the back of our Toyota Highlander. I am juggling popcorn and sodas for all, spraying the kids down with bug repellant, seated atop our suitcases, all mixed with a strange nostalgia in the air. It was like I had returned to a place I’d known before and to a boy I’d known before.
I half expected to see Ponyboy just over there trailing his fingers along the fence with his white t-shirt and loose jeans and grease in his hair walking by under a darkening sky. Him, forever 14, and just a boy; me, a woman now with a husband and kids. I had left him behind long ago, but sitting there at the drive-in theater, time tipped backward to 1985 and to my favorite reading spot.
Image from the LA Times (2016)
My teenage room was an island, deserted except for the things that were mine, and I was always happily stranded there turning pages and tumbling into stories like Alice down the rabbit hole or Lucy through the wardrobe. That’s what reading feels like, a sudden shift of place peopled with daring friends and perfect crushes. One day from my bedroom, I wandered unknowingly into Tulsa and fell in love with Ponyboy Curtis.
Our first fictional loves leave lasting impressions.
My oldest son, Jack, names Hermione as his first love, but secretly I think it is Little Ann from Where the Red Fern Grows even though she is a dog. He loves a smart girl, but Little Ann’s desperate love and inconsolable grief and death at the grave of Old Dan left Jack reeling with sorrow. I think we all want to be loved the way Little Ann loves. My daughter claims Edward Cullen, the brooding vegetarian bloodsucker, as her one true first love. Oh, the beautiful boys are heartbreakers. She will learn in real life that best friends are actually the best boys to love. My husband is wistful for Antonia from Willa Cather’s masterpiece, the bohemian foreign girl, of course.
But, melancholy, thoughtful boys like Ponyboy have always been my type. Boys that don’t like conflict, that lived with some dysfunction in their lives, that know how to express themselves and aren’t afraid of poetry and sunsets. Boys that like movies and being alone sometimes. Boys with an unwavering loyalty to those closest to them. Boys who aren’t afraid to feel things deeply and boys that know what it means to stay gold.
My husband was this kind of boy when I met him at 16. And if Ponyboy had lived beyond the pages of The Outsiders, I think he would have been the kind of husband and father that Chris is….kind, loyal, attentive, reflective, full of stories and maybe, even surprises. I am not sure how I learned to spot a good-hearted man, nor how I learned to steer clear of destructive souls like Dallas. A lesson from my folksong loving father, perhaps, or maybe from my books, my songs, my movies.
Sometimes, ink and image move me more than flesh and blood. Chapters, lyrics, and scripts are manuals for how to live, showing us who to love, and how to be in the wide world. I’ve been raised by the poets, the seekers, the philosophers, the minstrels. They play for me, singing their songs, telling their tales, building worlds for me with their little lives and kingdoms of right and wrong, kingdoms like Tulsa with boys like Ponyboy and Dallas.