Off the Rails
Page 3
Travelers are romantics. Lulled by the railroad car, I wonder, will I find all this in New Orleans?
* * *
The best summary can be found in the Lonely Planet guide: “It’s one of the tackiest experiences in the world.” The heart of the French Quarter, where we recklessly made our hotel reservations, reeks of last night’s liquor, hot garbage, and water left over from the street-cleaning trucks. Tourist-trap hotels alternate with cheap restaurants, clubs promise music and fun, and brass trumpets and shapely legs loom large on the neon signs, now dark. The humorist Dave Barry wrote: “The rest of the city is even looser, especially the French Quarter, which is so decadent that if the Reverend Jerry Falwell were to merely walk down the length of Bourbon Street, he would emerge at the other end with an overpowering desire to purchase leather underwear.” The next morning, we board a Gray Line bus for a guided tour of the city. I’m determined to show my son that New Orleans is more than just the French Quarter. It’s a dynamic city that has successfully rebounded from Hurricane Katrina (2005) and is now attracting young people from all across America.
This morning, though, all we see is retirees. They’re wearing shorts, sensible shoes, and souvenir T-shirts from their hometowns (Chicago Bulls, St. Louis Cardinals), from previous trips (Yosemite National Park, SeaWorld San Diego), or announcing their overriding passions (Miller Lite, Bud Ice, Playboy). I list for my son the names of movies made in New Orleans: Pretty Baby, The Pelican Brief, The Big Easy, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. And, of course, Easy Rider. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper)—I explain as the seniors’ bus tour pulls into St. Louis Cemetery—roll into town, wade into the Mardi Gras celebrations, visit a brothel, wander off with two prostitutes, and wind up in the Catholic cemetery, drop acid, take off their clothes, and grapple with the naked girls and the statues. Since then, no other film crew has been authorized to shoot in this cemetery. “Why am I not surprised?” Antonio asks wryly.
In the afternoon, we board the steamboat Natchez. “A truly classic expression of the best of America’s great steamboat tradition,” says a sign. We choose the Harbor Jazz Cruise on the Mississippi. The big red stern wheel starts turning and pushes us through the tobacco-brown water: as we stand watching it, everyone else gets all the best seats. After a twenty-minute ride along the river, we reach the Domino sugar refinery, reverse course, and then it’s time for lunch. Red beans and rice! Coleslaw! Bread pudding! Fried fish! The passengers seem to come back to life. A jazz combo plays “When the Saints Go Marching In” and sells CDs. The bartender, originally from Brooklyn, figures out that we’re Italians and tells us that he once worked for Lidia Bastianich. Why are we standing in the Texas Bar, on a Louisiana steamboat, talking to a guy from New York? Antonio asks me. Because it’s the only place with air-conditioning, I explain.
This evening, the Garden District awaits us, luxuriant with magnolias and flowers, where New Orleans, the heart of the South, approaches the European fantasy. Tomorrow morning, what awaits us is a bus to Dallas, where those fantasies will be rapidly dismantled.
Greyhound to Dallas
Traveling with your children is complicated and literary; and it’s literary because it’s complicated. American authors have a certain tradition when it comes to the subject. Robert M. Pirsig takes Chris, eleven years old, on the back of his motorcycle (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). The protagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road takes his boy out into an apocalyptic America. And, as we’ve seen, John Steinbeck takes his dog with him, for lack of willing offspring (Travels with Charley).
Almost invariably the children (and the pets) wind up being the audience: Papa thinks it over, decides, and announces; the rest of the family listens and obeys. Our children, in books and outside them, are at risk of becoming our walking audience. And summer is the perfect time to put on the performance. Have you ever wondered why my generation, in our sixties childhoods, played games that involved spotting license plates and car colors? And why the kids of today dive into their tablets and video games? The reason remains the same. It’s so they don’t have to listen to their parents’ monologues while on vacation, after being forced to do it all year long.
Therefore, the first rule of traveling with Antonio is this: limit the chatter. Silence, between two people who know each other well, can be a symptom of malaise—or solid proof that they understand each other without saying a word. I have no doubt about it. When he and I travel together, we don’t talk much, because there’s no need to talk much. He knows, I know, and we know. We know that sometimes I listen without hearing, while he doesn’t listen but—I can’t say how—always hears everything. We know that we both overdo it with our iPhones, for different reasons: I use mine for work; he uses his for play. Whereupon Antonio retorts: “Your work is fun for you, so it’s as if you were playing, so quit griping.”
Four years ago, when Antonio was sixteen, we rode along the coasts of Sardinia on a pair of motorcycles. Days at the beach can be lovely even when the cold mistral wind is blowing out of the northwest, and we’re waiting for a summer that refuses to come: the morning at the water’s edge, with red flags warning us to stay out of the water and beached jellyfish on the sand; the evening in front of the television set, watching a rerun of a soccer match. You look out the window, you admire the holm oaks and juniper trees defying the wind, and you think to yourself: I remember when I was here at his age, and everything seemed shiny and new, and the motorcycles were parked out front like horses tied up outside a saloon, and we ate too much bad food between meals, and the girls from Belgium had the nicest laughs. Now it’s their turn, our kids’ turn, and every so often they’ll let us watch them as they head out into open water, new sailboats heading out of port. There is nothing we’re supposed to do. Just wave, with one hand, careful not to let anyone else see.
The great challenge in travel is not arriving at the glamorous foreign city, but solving the departure problem, finding a way out of it, without flying. Buses are usually nasty, and bus stations the world over are dens of thieves, cutpurses, intimidators, mountebanks and muggers.
With these reassuring words by Paul Theroux in my mind, we leave the hotel to catch our bus for Dallas at the Greyhound station. The important thing, I explain to Antonio, is to get there on time. “Well, let’s not overdo it,” he says.
We overdid it. The only people besides us at the bus station are a couple of security guards just getting off their shift. Shops are shuttered, benches and seats empty. To make up for it, I point out that the station is lit up like broad daylight. “That might be because it’s daytime,” points out my son, who chooses the least useful moments to emerge from his generation’s morning lethargy.
And in fact, it is daytime. And we’re here very early. We came by cab, and the driver had a heartbreaking jazz dirge on the radio and the air-conditioning turned down to sixty degrees: cool enough for a couple of corpses in summertime, but not suited to a couple of Italian tourists showing up early for a bus. In America, air-conditioning in summer, like central heating in winter, is brutal. The equivalent devices in Italy may show a certain restraint, as if they are embarrassed to alter the pattern of the seasons, but American air-conditioning systems are unashamedly efficient. Not only here in the South; everywhere. “Hot” here does not mean “tepid.” It means “searing.” And “cold” has nothing to do with merely “cool.” We’re talking “arctic.” Americans who go into a waiting room or an office, a theater or a museum, are looking for a violent shock, not a caress. An extreme experience. The worst are supermarkets, where the goose bumps on the customers provide an attractive complement to those on sale in the poultry section. But criticism is an expression of interest. Air-conditioning is, for Europeans, at least, an obsession, a favorite theme of conversation at dinner parties . . . and on trains, of course. In fact, I am sure people actually avoid sitting next to me so as not to be subjected to my complaints about air-conditioning.
It’s two hours before the bus leaves for Dallas. The ticket counter isn’t open yet. Waiting with us is a couple who certainly has a right to the senior discount. He is wearing a pair of pink overalls, and he looks like he just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell illustration; she’s loaded down with packages, her hair needs fixing, and she has lots of things to say. None of them especially agreeable, to judge from the look on his face.
Evelyn Waugh wrote: “One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one’s life.” That’s true, but there’s certainly a great deal of material here. The America of long-distance bus travel is an assortment of astonishment, somnolence, and displeasures united by a condition that is basically humiliating: that of not owning a car. No car-owning American would shut himself up in a Greyhound for twelve hours, crossing Louisiana, from southeast to northwest, and Texas. Antonio looks at me: Then why are we?
* * *
The silvery bus—greyhound on the side, tinted windows—finally leaves the station, practically full. On board, there’s a Wi-Fi signal and the smell of toilets, and it’s not possible to choose between the two. In Baton Rouge, just eighty miles away, a five-minute stop is announced, which turns into a forty-five minute layover. No one, except for yours truly, asks for an explanation.
In the Baton Rouge station, we get a cup of coffee in the shop-with-tables run by an Indian from Gujarat. He sells practically everything. Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew, Trident chewing gum, Benadryl, Advil, and aspirin in single-dose packets, maps, cookies, padlocks, razors, nail clippers, earbuds: the full spectrum of American on-the-road self-sufficiency. We get back aboard and the bus pulls out.
Grand Cane, Grosse Tete—the place-names in Louisiana are quite curious.
We continue north. After Lafayette, Opelousas and Alexandria lie before us.
The Greyhound rolls on; Antonio plays; I observe: inside, more than outside. A mother and son: she can’t be thirty yet; he’s already a teenager. A husband and wife: they never speak, just stare straight ahead. And then there are aged hippies, bewildered youngsters, unspeaking giants. In the seat ahead of us is a pregnant young girl, with two sons beside her. She has small tattoos on her face, and a larger one on her neckline: Fast Money. Something that, evidently, never showed up.
A guy with red hair and a high blood-alcohol reading tries to pick up our seat neighbor, a woman in her early forties of Italian descent, from Savannah, Georgia. “I’m running a day late,” she explains to me. “I love my husband,” she tells her drunken suitor. In his disappointment, he pulls out his cell phone and starts calling everyone he knows. He practically shouts into the phone when someone finally picks up: “What a crappy thing! I woke up sitting next to the biggest asshole on the bus!” Since English, unlike Italian, doesn’t specify gender in these cases, the woman and I exchange a glance, trying to figure out which of us is the recipient of the compliment.
The Greyhound rolls on. By afternoon, the faces are starting to look familiar. Small instances of courtesy toward other passengers begin to spring up. In Shreveport, we get stuck waiting for our connection to Dallas, which is running an hour late. A young woman in the waiting room is reading The New Yorker; it’s incongruous, to say the least. Why did she choose to take the bus? I ask her. “It’s cheap,” she replies without bothering to look up.
A colossus carrying a skateboard comes over, clearly upset: “Hey you! You aren’t eating my potato chips, are you?” No, why? “Well, you know how it is, people are ruthless around bus stations,” he says, justifying his assumption. Then he notices Antonio’s majestic Maori tattoo, from ankle to knee. That’s what my son brought back from a recent trip to Australia, instead of a bottle of Vegemite. He leans over, observes it closely, studies it. “That’s . . . awesome! Man! Where the fuck you do that?” Language aside, I understand that the colossus is impressed. I tell Antonio, in Italian, to take charge of the public relations job.
I look at him. Smiling and nonchalant, he’s the center of attention. He’s chatting with two matronly women, low necklines and buxom; two young people who started out from Jackson, Mississippi; a skinny guy in an XXL T-shirt, with tattooed eyebrows. A young man dressed in a basketball uniform looks up from his copy of The 21 Most Effective Prayers of the Bible and joins the knot of admirers oohing and aahing over the tattoo. It’s a chorus of Give me five! and compliments for the young European traveler. Even his elderly traveling companion takes on a degree of interest in the eyes of the other travelers. “The sexiest calf in Texas!” a young blond woman whispers to me, as she combs her wet hair. No doubt about it, I tell her. Never mind that we’re in Louisiana.
At last, we pull out. There’re still three hours and 188 miles to go along I-20 West. We enter Texas at last: we’re going to pass through Marshall, Longview, Tyler, and Mesquite. A Latino couple, arms wrapped around each other under a single blanket, show no signs of being in a hurry. “By the grace of God, we’ll get there!” the reader of biblical prayers declares enthusiastically.
There is Dallas, and it announces its existence with a lake of lights in the distance. A young Mexican boy, in the seat in front of us, explains in an undertone that he’s going back to see his grandmother. At the bus station exit, there’s a guy waiting for him with a souped-up car, stereo blasting. The little boy waves good-bye to us from the car window, and then vanishes into the heat and darkness.
A Toyota Across the West
Renting a car in Texas is easy. All you need is a credit card, a driver’s license, and the ability to speak Spanish. The people behind the counter don’t always seem to have a full mastery of the English language.
The car is a Toyota RAV4, black. We pick it up in downtown Dallas, and we’ll drop it off in front of a hotel in San Diego, California. The price, because we made our reservations well in advance, is trifling. But it lacks a GPS navigator, and Antonio insists we need to buy one. We find a Best Buy, where I stand openmouthed before the miles of aisles of monumental refrigerators. “They’re too big, no way they’ll fit in the car,” says the designated driver, a practical-minded young man. We buy a TomTom for eighty dollars and leave.
Guided by a small, piping, authoritarian voice, we decide to explore the city before heading west. We visit the site of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, on November 22, 1963, though we decide to politely decline the offer to take the “JFK Assassination Tour”; we also avoid the guided tour of the Southfork Ranch, the television home of J. R. (on Dallas); we do, however, enter the museum of nature and science named after Ross Perot; we also gaze at the stiletto heels and miniskirts on McKinney Avenue. The Dallas Morning News informs us that Governor Rick Perry is proposing that truancy become a criminal offense.
It’s always nice to get back to Texas.
From Dallas to San Diego is 1,184 miles as the crow flies, or 1,363 miles (2,193 kilometers) by road. But we have a number of detours planned along the way.
We drive through Irving and Fort Worth, heading for Abilene. The radio keeps playing a song by George Strait called “Run.” We like it. I remember when I was Antonio’s age and I drove through these parts packed into a motor home with five friends. It was 1977, Jimmy Carter had just entered the White House, and Elvis Presley was going to meet his maker. There were two big songs that summer, both by Fleetwood Mac: “Don’t Stop” and “Dreams.” The first helped to pump us up; the second helped us to dream about girls. Both are things that have come easily to twenty-year-olds throughout history.
As we head west—my boy is driving, one way of tearing him away from his iPhone—I realize that the choice of radio stations is quite limited: stations that play music, stations that preach, and not much else. I pick the ones playing music, and I start to notice how repetitive the music and lyrics are. By combining the following expressions, I announce, we, too, could become songwriters around here. In alphabetical order:
baby
trust me
best friend
blue sky
desert highway
just close your eyes
out of town
pickup truck
stand by me
The TomTom cheerfully informs us: “Follow I-20 for four hundred fourteen miles.” I translate mentally into European distances: 666 kilometers, which is almost always long enough to take you out of any given country. Here, that doesn’t even take us out of the state of Texas.
* * *
The American interstate system is a fair representation of the national mentality: it’s a logical system. An even number, say I-20, runs east–west (the numbering rises from south to north: our I-20, as I look at the map, lies above the I-10 and below the I-40). An odd number (I-35), on the other hand, indicates a north–south route. If it’s a triple-digit number, and the first digit is odd, then the route leaves the highway, never to intersect again (520). If it’s a triple-digit number and the first digit’s even, then the route runs to the city or around it and then back out to the highway (820). “It’s interesting. Just think about it,” I suggest to the driver. “Do I have to?” he replies.
Antonio speaks without taking his eyes off the road. A wise choice, because the way people drive here is different from what we’re used to in Italy. There is a level of predictability that you’re not allowed to buck. The highways are already convoys, even before driverless cars are officially introduced: everyone goes one behind the other, no one jumps ahead, and above all, you need to get into the right lane in plenty of time! If you’re looking to irritate American drivers—in big cities or on long stretches of highway—then just cut across lanes without warning to take an exit. Yielding is considered a form of weakness. Interfering with your attempt to merge: righteous retribution.