Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean…. Man, am I imagining it or have you mellowed out a bit in the last 28 years? The reason I ask is that last weekend I went back to your hometown of Fairmount, Indiana, and I sensed a Jimmy more at peace with himself, less angry and eruptible. Would it be fair to say you’ve settled down a bit, demons are falling away a bit? You’re spending more time in coffee shops with Elvis, I bet, chewing the fat over your days in the Hollywood gulag. But hey, Jimmy? Stay away from those strawberry crullers, dude.

When I first set out to write your biography in 1973, you were a little bit more, uh, guarded. You were still mad probably, and I don’t blame you. Wondering whether it was auspicious to write a book about you, I ingested some peyote and waited for the spirits to talk to me. An image arose of a vast, impregnable walled citadel. A sort of neo-medieval cyber city, like the one in Hendrix’s version of "All Along the Watchtower." At the center of this fortress was your tomb, a magic object made of translucent jade that pulsed with an eerie light. Guarded it was by the Custodians, an alien paramilitary, parapsychology clan who kept all seekers outside the gates. Like poor Bob in Dylan’s dream of St. Augustine, I put my head against the glass and cried. The walls, did I mention, were of solid crystal—hey, this was Señor Peyote talking, where everything is symbolic and yet somehow solid at the same time.

Not exactly encouraging as "should-I-embark-on-this-quest?" visions go. It occurred to me that where I lived at the time might have something to do with the ominous cast of my apparition. I lived in a rickety building at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel in New York City, the very entrance to Hell itself, and opposite the sinister windowless phone company skyscraper—a Bulgarian apparatchik’s baked-brick version of Kafka’s castle.

Or it may have all been in my troubled mind—where else? Still, I was undeterred. I was out to breach the fortified city of the Sacred Dean. I wanted to talk to the boy inside. And, really, as it turned out, the quest wasn’t that sinister in the end. Okay, there was the time you tried to electrocute me in the bath while I was staying in your room at the Iroquois Hotel. And how about the time my girlfriend totaled my car in an exact duplication of your crash at Cholane? But there I think you were just trying to tell me that she wasn’t the girl for me—and, boy, were you right about that. Let’s face it, neither of us was ever that crazy about patchouli.

Anyway, Jimmy, you wouldn’t believe Fairmount—not that it’s changed that much. Payne’s grocery store is still there, it’s a pizza parlor, though. They’ve fixed up the old Citizen’s Exchange Bank, painted the cupola with new gold paint. Even the Fairmount State Bank with that fifties gold grille on the front (locally known as "the cheese-grater") looks kinda retro and cool. They’ve retro-fitted the old hardware store, too. It probably looks more authentic now than it did in your day. The whole of Main Street has gone retro, just about. You can buy fifties records and poodle skirts and classic guitars.

And, man, as you swing off the thruway or Route 9, they’ve got huge billboards saying, "FAIRMOUNT, HOME OF JAMES DEAN." Forget about Charlton Heston and James Whitcomb Riley and her other native sons, Indiana’s gone Dean—big time.

I get the feeling your ghost is somewhat at rest, you’ve achieved what you set out to do. You said—in so many words—"I need creatures who resemble me!" And you found them, millions of them. You did what even the most ruthless dictator could never achieve—you remade the world in your image.

And about this mellowing-out business? Maybe it’s just us, the fans, who have mellowed out over the years? I went to Fairmount to speak at the Fans’ Weekend, organized by David Loehr, the Dean of Deanabilia—and a very good-natured occasion it was, too. Very sweet, like you could be, Jimmy, very simple and warm. Down-home folks from Texas and Arkansas and Chicago and San Diego, as well as a couple of infamous celebrities—but we’ll get to them in a minute.

Friday night there was a dinner for the fans and a cool rockabilly set by Paul Watson in the basement of the Lion’s Club. At noon the next day we played James Dean Jeopardy. Sample questions: For $300: In Rebel, Natalie leaves what behind at the police station? For $600: What Hoosier starred in The Blob in 1958? Top prize, $50, went to Mark Kinnamen for the second year in a row. Saturday night there was a banquet and I gave a speech about you, Jimmy. Rufus Wainwright and his cohorts (opening for Roxy Music) blew in and added a touch of rock ’n’ roll insanity to the evening.

Pam Crawford from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, told me that when Jimmy died, she and her sister—she was about eight at the time—took turns sitting out on Highway 65 ("You know how you think your highway is the highway to the whole world?") a-waitin’ for Jimmy to pass by in his white convertible. They didn’t believe this baloney about him being dead. They figured he’d just gotten fed up with all that nonsense in Hollywood and decided he’d go hide out among the razorbacks in the Arkansas hills—who’d ever look for him there? They sat and sat on that road for days until finally their momma came out and said, "Come on in you girls, it ain’t gonna happen."

Pamela Des Barres was there with her friend Kip Brown who’s been working on his book, James Dean: Day by Day for some twelve years now. He’s recently uncovered a recording of Dean singing Eddie Arnold’s "Cattle Call." Not quite the rockabilly Dean we’d like—but still…. Miss Pamela, as I’m sure you all know, is the author of the great groupie memoir, I’m With the Band. Her seventh visit to Fairmount, Jimmy!

She told me a childhood conversion story herself: "I’d just turned nine and I was trying to fall asleep on my mother’s lap in our ’49 Ford when news came on the radio that James Dean had died. I asked my mother who that was. It was just so sad and mysterious that from that day on I became obsessed with him. For a long time I carried around a picture of his tombstone in my wallet. I bought Bill Bast’s book about him and took it to high school with me every day where all the boys compared pretty unfavorably with Jimmy. That’s how I got into rock stars, and most of them didn’t match up too well either, I can tell you."

Miss Pamela recently wrote a screenplay about the one-legged jazz singer Toni Lee Scott who was a friend of Jimmy’s. In the process of writing the screenplay, Pamela had Toni hypnotized and asked her to go back in time and tell her what Jimmy smelt like. "She said he smelled like a baby—mixed with motor oil."

I met Kurt Hemmer, an English professor at Harper College who teaches a course on James Dean in his cultural studies program and uses my book, The Mutant King, as a textbook in his class. Well, like I always said, you is cultural history, kid.

My friend Paul Mones, the writer/director and lunch-counter hipster, said to me the other day: "If it hadn’t been for Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan, there’d be a lot more people in mental institutions." And if it hadn’t been for you, Jimmy, there’d be a lot more people in suits.

 If you’re looking for the Dean conversion experience, you’ll get another chance this year to walk in the footsteps of the mutant. From September 28-30, 3,000 enthused Dean fans and hot-rodders will descend on Fairmount for the annual Remembering James Dean Weekend. Check it out at www.JamesDeanGallery.com where you’ll also find the text of my speech, "Hail, Fellow Mutants!"