by Alan Cumming
Alan and Honey’s trans-American road trip!!
This was 2004. Road trips then still involved maps and books rather than Google and Siri. So I bought a guide to doggy-friendly hotels and another that listed cafés catering to vegetarians, and we were off!
SUNDAY
HONEY AND I left New York City first thing in the morning, and over 550 miles later we were snuggling up together in the Quality Hotel in Toledo.
When the man at the desk asked me why I was in Toledo, I felt it was too weird to tell him I wanted to see the place mentioned in the first line of the Kenny Rogers hit “Lucille,” so instead I lied and told him I was driving to Vancouver (which was true) and that it was purely by chance I stopped off there (the lie).
Suddenly the man was fascinated. He couldn’t believe I was driving all the way to Vancouver, and said that because of my pioneer spirit he was going to give me a twenty-dollar discount on my room, taking it down to the princely sum of thirty-nine dollars!!! The drinks were on us!
Honey, however, was not impressed. The last hotel she had stayed in was the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, and though this place was an incredible bargain for thirty-nine dollars—they had free doughnuts and coffee in the morning!! There was a huge pool!!—the Chateau it was not. Honey had been in a bit of a huff all day already, what with having to sit in the car for hours, so coming to a less-than-five-star hotel with not so much as a welcome Pup-Peroni from the manager did not go down well.
That first day I discovered something strange about America: the cups get bigger the farther into the middle you get. I stopped in Pennsylvania somewhere and asked for a small coffee and was handed something the size of a bucket.
And just to be doubly sure there was no danger of my falling asleep at the wheel, I bought a couple of packets of a product called something like “Trucker’s Delight,” which is basically legal speed, so if I got the slightest bit drowsy I’d pop one of those and all was fine … In fact, all was FIIIIINNNNNEEEEE!
Honey and I were in four states that first day: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. And as we were in the Midwest, I decided to try and blend in wardrobe-wise, and I think it worked (see photo on this page).
MONDAY
OKAY, this day was intense. First of all the security man from the hotel in Toledo accosted me when I took Honey out for her morning constitutional and told me that the nice man who gave us the discount the night before shouldn’t have even let us stay at all because dogs were, strictly speaking, not allowed. I told him that I didn’t know what to say to that because I had checked in with a dog and was welcomed AND the hotel was also listed in my Traveling with Your Pet book. He made out that the man from the night before was some sort of weirdy maverick dog fancier who must be stopped.
Luckily he went away, but then later, as we were checking out, he was coming back into the hotel through the glass doors and—karmically—pulled the door the wrong way and caught his fingers somehow (I think there may have been a broken fingernail, it was that serious). Of course, he was a big butch security man who prided himself on cleansing the hotel of errant dogs so he pretended nothing had happened, even when I made a point of saying, “That looks really sore, are you all right?”
As Honey and I walked to the car I thought to myself, “I almost wish I believed in God because that would make me feel that He was looking over me right now.” However, I do believe in karma and that what you give out you get back and your energy on the surface affects your energies inside and all that stuff, so it was very reaffirming even without the God thing.
But talking of God, oh my GOD!! Have you ever wondered where on earth all those right-wing religious nuts who seem to be so powerful in America come from?!
I thought I would try and tune in both literally and metaphorically to what middle America was thinking, so I listened to a lot of radio stations that day. First of all, who knew there could be so many rock songs about Jesus?! I am still in awe of the number of things that actually rhyme with the Lord’s name: seize us / needs us / freed us / beer nuts (I made the last one up) BUT nothing prepared me for the number of religious talk radio shows. It was really discombobulating to tune into something that had the tone of a Saturday Night Live sketch, but with zero of the wit.
But what a lesson to hear things from a different perspective. For the first time I became aware of the term “pro-life.” (Remember it was 2004.) I had no idea that people were really annoyed at being called “anti-abortionists” by the liberal press (oh, and by the way, the press in America is all liberal), when in fact they wanted—and want—to be called “pro-life.” It reminded me of so many other ways the right are better at branding than we are, and we’re supposed to be the arty clever ones who trick people with our insidious messages! “The Clean Air Act,” for example. “No Child Left Behind.” Both of these sound really positive and good for mankind, when actually they’re only good for rich people’s pockets, especially rich people with shares in fossil fuel companies. And there must be quite a few youngish adults still puzzling how they came to be the ones who missed the bus and were left behind after George W.’s oxymoronic education plan was implemented.
The radio hosts also talked a lot about the gay marriage debate, which, thankfully, no longer exists. It’s not that homophobia and bigotry no longer exist, of course—they’re still booming—but everything we had been fighting for in 2004 and those people on the radio had been fighting against is now the law of the land, and, as with many human rights issues, eventually people stop protesting when they see it is not going to mean the end of civilization as they know it and they quiet down until they find some other issue that incurs their ire.
The biggest shock for me back then, listening to those men, was that they were genuinely hurt to be called anti-gay just because they didn’t support gay marriage. They seemed to want me to believe that they weren’t anti-gay at all (each to his own, etc., though just don’t broadcast it, and don’t go near any children). They just thought marriage should be a man/woman thing, that’s all. And you know what? If that’s what you truly think, I’m fine with it. I don’t actually think the most important thing is for gay people to be able to marry in exactly the same way a man and a woman can. Frankly, I don’t think gay people should be so keen to ape a tradition that is so unsuccessful on a pandemic scale. BUT what I do think is important is that gay people be able to register their relationships legally and get the same rights and benefits for their families and partners that straight people do. And while we’re doing that we may as well have a great big party, so let’s call it a marriage and shut up, okay?
Another man kept blabbing on about separating church and state, and I remember thinking, “Good luck with that.” One of the biggest cons America has so willingly worked on itself is the whole “separation of church and state” myth. It is brought up as one of the greatest and most hallowed of American political tenets. What a load of rubbish!
Every single speech any politician of note in this country makes ends with the phrase “God Bless America!” If he or she failed to do that, there would be an outcry. How could there be a more blatant example of the failure to separate church and state? If Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, or the UK prime minister were to end a speech with a reference to God, there would be an outcry. But for the opposite reason. It would not be tolerated. That is separation of church and state. Wake up, America, you’ve been duped! God is all up in your grill everywhere you go. America’s “separation of church and state” is the biggest con job in history, and we’re all buying it, proud of something that doesn’t exist, and at the same time we’re propagating this myth!
(And also whose God are they referring to? One of the many enlightened deities whom this melting pot of a country of beautiful immigrants struggle to have the freedom to worship and love? NO, of course not. They mean the Christian God, the white one who speaks English and shops at Brooks Brothers. It’s ridiculous.)
Another great American d
iscovery I made that same day was that Denny’s restaurants had wireless Internet access! It’s funny to imagine now, when you can get Wi-Fi even in a park, but that trip then held many challenges in getting online and staying in contact with my real life, and boy, as you can imagine, sometimes I really needed it. Denny’s restaurants’ Wi-Fi cost a whopping fifteen cents a minute, but the very fact that they had it at all I saw as a mark of progress. That, and a religious, right-wing talk show host getting annoyed he might be misconstrued as being anti-gay. God Bless America!
Talking of blessings, later that day I found the perfect US combo: a KFC-Taco Bell drive-through! With my outsider’s eye I have realized that these fast-food places tend to cater specifically for the catchment areas they are located in. For example, a few years ago McDonald’s tested the McVeggie burger only in their downtown Manhattan outlets. Alas, and also hooray, it was never heard of again. Therefore, guess what the KFC–Taco Bell outlet in Newton, Iowa, had to offer a vegetarian? Mashed potatoes, baked beans, and coleslaw. And the baked beans had bits of meat in them.
By the end of Monday we had driven another 550 miles through the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and now Iowa.
We checked in, exhausted, to the Des Moines hotel that the singer Tiny Tim had lived in for thirty years, and where Elvis had spent a night in too!
TUESDAY
AS YOU can see from the pictures on the following pages, Honey immersed herself in the local indigenous culture. I was always so in awe of her for that. As we drove deeper and deeper into the Wild West, leaving Iowa and passing through Nebraska and South Dakota, she successfully managed to shed her sophisticated downtown Manhattan mutt identity and exude the demeanor of a dirty old prairie dog.
In the morning we went for a brisk walk around downtown Des Moines. The Des Moinians are very proud of their skywalk, which links lots of downtown shops and restaurants together, presumably so you can consume more and not get cold. We didn’t go in it (as a protest against capitalism) but, along with my partisan stance on this matter, I have two things that I think are wrong about the Des Moines skywalk as an outside observer:
1) It is not a skywalk. It is on the second level of the buildings. So “skywalk,” strictly speaking, is a capitalist lie.
2) The fact that everyone walks in it instead of on the sidewalks has killed street culture in Des Moines. We walked for about half an hour on the street and we only saw one lady, and she couldn’t hear me say hello because she had headphones on!!
I had had enough of the radio. There was one channel that seemed dedicated to scaring people. Seriously, there were no records or commercials, just a series of dull men warning us about the perils of being alive. My favorite one was about crime on vacation. They advised me to call ahead to my chosen vacation spot and inquire which area was the most crime-ridden so then when I did actually go on vacation, I should avoid said area. Brilliant!
Honestly, now I understand why so many people have guns in this country. Every time you turn on the radio in these parts you encounter a barrage of insidious auto-suggestive messages encouraging you to buy one. Also, can anyone tell me why I kept seeing so many signs for fireworks outlets? Is it just that I was driving so far that, by law of averages, I must pass quite a few? But come on, in all my years of driving all over the world, I don’t think I have ever seen a sign for a fireworks outlet other than in the United States. Do people in the Midwest let off a lot of fireworks? Are fireworks outlets euphemisms for gun shops?
After I turned off the radio I got my iPod out and with the benefit of my iTrip I was able to listen to all my fave tunes. Nowadays, the iTrip seems as antiquated as the Sony Walkman or an eight track, but back in ’04 it was really cutting edge. I remember thinking, “The technology we take for granted!” Later that evening in my hotel room I would plug my computer into the hotel’s phone system and, using a special local number from a list I’d been given when I called up my Internet server, I was able to plug my computer into my hotel room’s phone and eventually communicate with friends all over the world, and only have to wait a couple of hours for my pictures to upload!!
That night Honey and I found ourselves in the Thunderbird Lodge in Mitchell, South Dakota. It was very nice, but the reason Mitchell lured me was the promise of its much-vaunted Corn Palace. It would have to be good to beat the giant cows and the medium-size dinosaurs that we’d seen outside various hostelries en route, or indeed our own Thunderbird Lodge’s rather weird rabbit with one antler that Honey is posing in front of in the picture on this page.
WEDNESDAY
THAT MORNING we were up and at it at the crack. The lady at the hotel gave me a map and I knew I was in the vicinity of the Corn Palace when I saw hundreds of old and infirm people being helped off buses. Old people make up the bulk of the palace’s visitors, apparently. This was confirmed by the plethora of articles in the gift shop with mottos like “If We Knew Grandchildren Were This Much Fun We’d Have Had Them First” inscribed on them.
And there it was. The Mitchell Corn Palace. I have to say it was pretty impressive. At first one of the elderly men in caps outside wouldn’t let me in because of Honey being nonhuman. He said she might upset the animals inside the building. I thought he might be slightly confused but, as it transpired, the Corn Palace was an entertainment center and there was a circus going on inside it (think Madison Square Garden covered entirely in random vegetables and you get the hang of things). But then another, nicer man in a cap said I could go in with Honey and if anyone asked me about her I should pretend to be blind. Luckily, nobody did, though I’m sure I could have pulled it off.
We pushed our way through the walkers and took a look. It was fascinating. In the 1890s the few citizens who had settled there tried to think how they could lure more people to Mitchell, and the idea to cover an entire building in corn came to mind. And it worked! People were so intrigued they came in droves and Mitchell is now, well, Mitchell.
Also they re-cover the palace every year with new corn, and they had pictures of every single year on the wall. Honey and I looked long and hard but couldn’t really tell the difference.
After days and days of flatness we hit the hills. And I was gobsmacked by the beauty of them. First of all the Badlands. Wow!! Superwow!
As we were approaching the Badlands I needed gas so we came off the highway and found a tiny little hamlet with a gas station and this insane building. It was like the set of a western, but it was for real. Just as I took the picture a man with a hoe came running toward me saying he wanted to take a picture of me. I didn’t want a picture of me—there are, frankly, too many of them in the world as it is and I told him so—but he was very persistent and the hoe was featuring heavily as he gesticulated and I thought to myself, “This is like one of those awful Jeepers Creepers movies and before I know what’s happening I’m going to be skinned and tanned and covering the walls of his basement.” So Honey and I hurried back toward the car.
He was still some way off but I walked briskly and started the engine and locked the doors. He still didn’t give up and was actually running alongside me for a few seconds as I turned onto the track toward the road to the highway. Phew! He probably just wanted to earn a dollar for taking my picture, but hey, hadn’t he ever heard of public relations?!
Crazy Horse was fab. It will be even nicer when it’s finished. And Mount Rushmore was great too. Honey and I walked along the Presidential Trail and took it all in.
Did you know that Roosevelt is wearing glasses? You can only see the rims as, obviously, if they’d done the whole spectacles you wouldn’t see his eyes. So the rims give a suggestion of specs. Then we drove for miles and miles through the national park and saw buffaloes and deer and funny things with horns. It really was an amazing day. Honey had walked more that day than she had done all week and collapsed onto the bed as soon as we checked into our room at the Holiday Inn Express in Spearfish. We were still in South Dakota!! I wish I’d had more time there because there were tons of tacky
things to do advertised for hundreds of miles all along the highway, like petrified gardens and insect farms and an 1880 village that was in Dances with Wolves and a place where you could pet prairie dogs. I should point out I have not, nor never will have, any desire to pet a prairie dog, but I’d quite like to watch others do so. There was also a shop called Wall Drugs that had me so intrigued. I heart South Dakota.
Except that night, when we were looking for a hotel. We had stopped off in Deadwood (you know how I love a town that has been a song lyric) and a couple of the hotel people were unnecessarily bitchy about Honey, I thought. I hadn’t really liked the vibe in the town anyway. All the hotels and bars had slot machines at the front of them. I think it had something to do with Deadwood being near the border of Wyoming, where they don’t allow gambling, so Deadwood has become a sort of mini Las Vegas. Actually a poverty-stricken, unglamorous Las Vegas with people who are bitchy about dogs. You see, money had corrupted them. But then we went to Spearfish, where there were no slot machines, and met another bitchy man so that theory doesn’t really hold up. Finally we discovered the very welcoming Holiday Inn Express! Honey and I were so excited to stay in a hotel that had ROOM SERVICE, but then crushed to discover the room service had closed down that night at 7:00 p.m., as there were only twelve rooms filled in the entire building. So we ordered in, and—guess what—the options in that neighborhood were slim. I have never longed for the arrival of a Domino’s pizza so much in my entire life.
THURSDAY
THE ROCKIES!! Wow!! We finally left South Dakota, crossed through Wyoming, and entered Montana, where we bunked down for the night in the Blue Sky Motel in Bozeman.