KILROY WAS HERE

Kilroy Was Here. The big bald head. The two gripping hands. The big elephantine nose hanging over the old 1940s board fence. Loomis still saw the symbol around, with the slogan and without, in various places as he traveled. In a bathroom at a Denny’s near Lawrence, Kansas. On the lone surviving wall of a wrecked building in Chicago. Carved into a tree along the Madison River in Montana. Spray-painted on a brick wall in an alley in Seattle. Along a pier on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Magic-markered onto a leaning light pole on the outskirts of the Mojave Desert. Scratched onto the trunk of a junked Ford Falcon by the roadside near Kingman, Arizona. Carved into the paneling of an oyster joint off Iberville Street in New Orleans. He even found it carved into a rock near the summit of the Matterhorn in the Sierras after a grueling climb. A tribute to the rambling, shambling, aw-shucks Huck Finn spirit that still lived in the land. A giant guffawing middle finger to the notion of American Upward Mobility, a visual goose, an armpit fart, a Harpo Marx honk, a cocky repetition of the old Woody Guthrie line: I ain’t dead yet. Though it was done by many anonymous hands, Loomis began to feel like he was on the trail of one ubiquitous person, constantly on the move, staying a few miles, a couple weeks ahead of him, who was doing it, giggling up their sleeve and leaving their mark when no one was looking. When the traveling was rough, wet, rideless, grinding, Loomis would come on the symbol in some remote place and say aloud to himself, “I’ll get you yet, you devious cocksucker!” The mystery lived. The big bald head. The two gripping hands. The big schnozzola hanging over the old 1940s board fence. Kilroy Was Here.