Good Vibrations

by Tom Cunliffe

  ‘Why did you want to come to Baton Rouge?’ I asked Roz, who was floating by sipping a stiff rum and grapefruit juice balanced in a goofy-looking inflatable fish with a tumbler-sized depression where its dorsal fin should have been.

  ‘I can’t believe you don’t know.’

  ‘Why would I? It’s only another hour and a bit to New Orleans. We could have eaten another sixty minutes’ worth of insects and made the trip in one. I think I’m getting so punch drunk I never thought to ask.’

  ‘I’m picking up your trick of hanging on to some stupid irrelevance that happens to grab me.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘Something about being busted flat in Baton Rouge and hitching a ride to New Orleans.’

  It showed how little I knew my wife. I thought it was only me that travelled with inner music rattling my brain. And Janis Joplin of all people. The final word in wild rockers…

  Roz took a long pull at her rum and said, ‘I’m going to hit that highway past Lake Ponchartrain tomorrow with Janis on my buddy seat all the way. She knew how to live, and she found out how to die.’

  Alone in a sorry hotel room, I remembered, head full of God knew what. But what a woman! With her cracked-up, passionate voice calling from the bottom of the pit, she’d never taken her foot off life’s gas pedal; just kept it hard down on the floorboards until her tanks ran dry.

  Over dinner, we talked about how to get the best out of a short stay in New Orleans. The danger was going to be a concentrated attack of tourism because we knew nobody in town to steer us to the right places. Basin Street in the French Quarter, some say the birthplace of jazz, could hardly have survived the onslaught of quick money to be made on the back of its fame. Yet there was no way of knowing where else to head for, and so when the sun rose out of the pollution haze of Baton Rouge we crammed on our gear, made space for Janis, then booted the bikes into gear and disappeared towards Lake Ponchartrain.

  The outskirts of the ‘Big Easy’ were pretty much like any other American city, but the French Quarter, which we found without difficulty, was all it was cracked up to be, at least in terms of its architecture. Although looking ahead to Georgia and Joe, an old friend whose home we had never yet visited, we resolved to treat ourselves to a good lunch, then find a music club much later before turning in for the night. No hurry the following morning. We’d be fresh and fit for the long hard bash through the Deep South.

  By now, we had become so immured to extremes of heat that the 95 degrees of a September New Orleans noontime didn’t hurt at all. In our grandly seedy room, we shook out our best kit and strolled into the sunshine and shadow of Basin Street. Entranced, we explored the chequerboard that was once the New Orleans of the jazz pioneers and the steamboat card sharps. The uniquely French–American streets with their wrought-iron balconies, pillars, shutters and carved barge-boards reminded us more of Martinique than the USA. A background smell of drains mingling with fruit past its prime was faint enough to give the place an exciting, tropical air. Bars on discreet, first-floor levels served exotic drinks while restaurants spilling spicy aromas out on to the sidewalks vied for our custom.

  We seated ourselves at a table with a snowy, white-on-white cloth, chunky silverware and two groups of crystal glasses, carefully haphazard, that promised nothing but the best. Lunching around us were business people. Sharp-looking men and snappily dressed women, some bent on mutual seduction, others on a deal that might just beat working for a living. Mostly it looked like both.

  Our meal was the best of the whole trip. Creole seafood and wine from the section of the list where I normally avert my eyes. You would have done well to beat the victuals in Paris or Dublin, and the service from our waiter, clad in smartly casual pale orange and blue, was from life’s carefully understated top drawer.

  Satisfied and slightly woozy, we wandered back to our room around the corner. There, we made love on the squeaky iron four-poster, mainly because we felt like it, but also in memory of the itinerant gamblers and saloon girls, sailors and whores, and perhaps the occasional pair of nervous newly-weds who must have been doing the same here for a century or more. The hotel was shaded by trees on the street edge and as we lay back on the crisp cotton sheets, totally relaxed for the first time since Billy’s place, a jiggling wicker fan wafted cool air across our bodies. I took a cold shower, dabbed myself half-dry, then lay down again on my towel. The slow-turning whirligig evaporating the last of the water was bliss – perhaps not so efficient or long lasting as air-conditioning, but twice as sensual, less noisy and virtually free. I gazed up at the mature cracks in the plastered, European style ceiling and deliberated on what wondrous patterns the room’s army of ghosts might have made out of their meanderings.

  Roz, who never sleeps in the daytime, had given up the struggle to stay awake, so I let go and joined her in the Land of Nod, thinking as I faded out that the siesta is the natural submission to the body’s demands in a hot climate. For a minute or two, a fault in the ceiling reminded me of a trombone slide, then I was gone. Tonight, we would be ready for anything.

  Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, our night on the town in New Orleans proved a wretched let-down after a perfect afternoon. So far, we had been impressed with the way New Orleans caters for its inevitable tourist trade without losing its essential integrity. People who served us in bars were pleasant, men who admired the bikes were straightforward, the guys hustling custom for the burro-drawn carriages were polite, even when we said no, and the quaint buildings themselves had not been desecrated by glitz. All in all, the daytime city had seemed a class act. Walking the late evening streets in search of music, however, we noticed immediately that the tourist factor had risen by several hundred per cent. Instead of black guys wearing two-coloured shoes and slouch hats hurrying from one gig to the next, a procession of undercooked white people trooped by like walking invitations to a communal mugging. We tried our luck for a tune in a number of likely-looking establishments, only to be served canned music and at last discovered our nemesis in the tragedy that is The Preservation Hall. Here, one barman assured us, we would discover the Real Thing. By this time, we had concluded that this had probably taken wings for some other part of town many years ago, but since it was his advice or nothing, and the name had the right ring to it, we gave it a go.

  Our first impression of The Preservation Hall indicated that it was either not a large room or was massively oversubscribed, because a long queue of tourists was lined up outside the lobby. Loud brass instrument noises were emanating from inside as we teamed up with an Australian visitor to give some weight to our stance against a bossy German tour guide.

  ‘It is proper you stand aside, please,’ she ordered irrelevantly, attempting to shove the three of us out of her way.

  ‘Why’s that, Sweetheart?’ asked the Aussie in a voice that reminded me of my imaginary love bug.

  ‘What is this ‘Sweetheart’? You must move because my group must be walking in to see the jazz.’

  ‘But they’re all behind me and this lady and gent here.’

  ‘Ah, but we have come all the way from Germany,’ she announced triumphantly and elbowed him aside. She had picked the wrong victim.

  ‘You can take them back to the Rhine right now for all I care,’ said the diplomat from Oz, lifting her firmly by the shoulders and replacing her behind us in the line. ‘We’re here first, and that’s where we stay.’ He then proved himself a thorough gentleman by ironically raising his hat, which was as ‘cobber’ as his accent.

  Before we could get to know the man from the outback better, the racket from inside the hall petered out and there seemed to be some general inward movement of our group of hopefuls. Making sure the representatives of the Fatherland stayed in their proper place, we trooped into the lobby to be relieved of $4 each. Only then were we allowed to enter the Holy of Holies.

  Inside, we were offered a scene of human degradation unequalled throughout all my American travels. My heart sank as I noti
ced large signs prohibiting more or less everything other than breathing. The ban on video cameras and flash guns I could perhaps understand, but when I saw a prominent ‘No Smoking’ sign, I knew we had been had. Big time.

  The hall itself was everything a jazz dive ought to be. Perhaps 50-feet-square, it had clearly remained undecorated and even undusted for a very long time. The light was low and the colour of the walls just right, although how the nicotine patina had been achieved in this sterile atmosphere was obscure. Perhaps it had happened long ago in a glorious past. But it was the band that put the final cap on an awful experience. The only good thing about them was that their efforts must even have hurt the ears of the German guide.

  The tourists stood in rows, bemused, as the band unimaginatively and tunelessly struck up ‘Hello Dolly’, the number with which I shall one day be played down to Hades. The trumpeter we had heard from outside was having major problems with his lip. The trombonist had talent but was hamming it up so much that he simply had to be taking the piss. The piano was not just pleasantly jangly, it was unforgivably out of tune, and the bassist looked as if he’d have been happier back home watching the ball-game on television.

  After fifteen minutes of this mind-numbing mediocrity, our group of sufferers was ushered out into the street through a door opposite the entry lobby. As we filed out, having been given our glimpse of the True Cross, the band nipped out the back for a smoke while a fresh bunch of suckers were herded in at the other end.

  Croc. Dundee shook his head in despair.

  ‘What is it with this country?’ he said to me, still sidestepping creatively to ensure that Brunhilde remained behind him. ‘They’ve got the best jazz in the world somewhere here and they offer us this insult.’

  ‘I suppose if we knew the right people we could find the right joints to drink in,’ I suggested.

  ‘That’s going to be true anywhere,’ he retorted, ‘but I flew into Dallas a fortnight ago and I’ve been driving around looking at all the places I’ve heard about all my life. And the buggers do it every time. They stuff it up. Let me tell you about Dodge City…’

  I glanced at Roz and saw her eyes look to Heaven. She knew I had found a soulmate and given half a chance would spend the night raving about the insult of tourism both to the gawper and the gawped at. Somehow, she manoeuvred the pair of us into a small bar and bought us a whiskey to take our minds off the wretched affair. We left Mr Dundee subsiding, but still swearing he’d knife the next cynic who tried to shove tourist trash between him and the reality of America.

  As we sagged off down a near-deserted Royal Street we stopped to hear a busker in a shop doorway playing the blues on a flattop guitar using a bottleneck on the frets. The guy had talent, technical ability and originality. I tipped him generously and we walked home to our four-poster, sad in the end only because after an experience sick beyond the telling, Dundee had missed the Real Thing at ‘last orders’.

  21

  CRAZY AND COOL

  IN THE DEEP

  SOUTH-EAST

  Some years ago, I had a sailing contract in San Francisco. Among a variety of seafaring professionals from all over the US, one of my shipmates was Joe, a thoroughly Americanised man of action from what were once the Soviet Baltic States. Joe runs a sailing school at Darien in the Georgia swamp country and it was towards him that we now turned as we throbbed across a steamy Mississippi State and on through the far south of Alabama. Here were none of the Third World features we had found so striking in up-state Louisiana except for the loathsome love bugs, which continued to make riding a filthy ‘stop-go’ business all the way to Charleston, South Carolina.

  No doubt Alabama was hiding her down-market zones somewhere else, but as we flashed through at speed limit velocity, we seemed to be in romantic Gone With the Wind country, with colonnaded mansions peeping out from prosperous plantations and groves of live-oak trees deeply draped with Spanish moss. Plenty of all-American cars rumbled down our route in these latitudes, often in first-class order, driven by Southerners enjoying being exactly who they were. Patriotic ensigns flew bravely from homesteads, many of which supported the starred blue cross on a blood-red ground of the Confederacy. Several times, we parked beside bikes and cars with Confederate flags beautifully painted on their tanks and bonnets. A powerful gesture, but at this stage of the trip there was no time left to dig into the subtleties of what it means in the modern-day USA. One thing was sure, however. The good manners to strangers we had encountered, with few exceptions, throughout the mainstream of society came to the forefront here. The ‘Southern gentleman’, be he farmer, businessman, skipper or garage mechanic is alive and well from New Orleans up to the Chesapeake Bay.

  Georgia, which specialises in such paragons, has a comparatively short coastline. The small town of Darien falls about dead centre. As we arrived out of the forest, we were still well short of the sea and it became obvious that, like many of the state’s secondary ports, it has developed some distance up-river. A lightweight, tasteful commercial strip of small, wooden business buildings lined a road through tall, long-leaf pines as we searched for the turn-off to Joe’s dock. His directions proved admirably seamanlike, and soon we were bouncing down a woodland track. After a mile or two it opened on to a broad panorama of low-lying, green islands and swamp that wavered in the distance as the midday sea breeze kicked in to stir the hot, stagnant air.

  I had no idea what to expect from Joe’s establishment because many American sailing academies, like David’s in California, represent major investments. Others are ‘hometown’, specialising mainly in local customers. The off-lying islands provided plenty of shelter around Joe’s place, which was well-sited for learners, but it clearly hadn’t helped him much recently. The small school with its classroom building, boat stores and mooring pontoons looked as if it had just been hit by a hurricane. Which, in fact, it had been.

  Even from the driveway it was obvious that Joe had seen to his priorities. Dangling 15 feet up from the launching crane hung a large motorcycle. It was undamaged, as were one or two of the yachts that must have been hauled out before the storm surge arrived. The sheds and the rest of the floating stock had taken a severe beating.

  Joe heard the clatter of the Harleys and came walking towards us, hand outstretched. Above middle height, dark hair thinning a little and grey at the outsides of his beard, still strongly built in his fifties, he wore working pants and, incongruously, a blue pinstriped business shirt open on to a tanned neck. I congratulated him on saving his motorcycle from the mayhem. He smiled ruefully, was introduced to Roz, then led us into a blown-out kitchen.

  ‘Three hurricanes in two years, I’ve had,’ he said, brewing up a pot of European-strength coffee. ‘Each time I get sorted, the weather just blasts the shit out of me again. This one passed close offshore on its way up to Carolina ten days ago. Blew ninety knots. The surge lifted my pontoon clear up the bank.’

  It was three years since we’d met, and I’d forgotten that any traces of his Eastern European origins had vanished from his Southern accent. I’d been fascinated to see his spread ever since he told me that things were so ‘back to nature’ that some mornings he had to chase the alligators off the docks before the customers arrived.

  ‘Depresses the life out of the students to see those hungry motherfuckers sunning themselves beside the boats,’ he’d said. I hadn’t been able to work out if he was joking or not. Now I saw he wasn’t. The place was as near as you could get to jungle in continental USA.

  A combination of storm damage and the resultant temporary dip in the local economy meant that today Joe had no takers. After we had shared a sandwich and more coffee he suggested taking one of his remaining whole boats out for a sail around the rivers inside Blackbeard Island. This nature reserve was named for the most famous pirate of them all, Edward Teach, who had plied a lively trade here, terrorising his victims by boarding their ships with his huge inky whiskers apparently blazing from sticks of ‘slow match’. I could im
agine Joe as his first mate.

  As we sailed the inlets in Joe’s lively little day boat, I was struck by how alike, yet at the same time how totally dissimilar, the waterways were to the Norfolk Broads where I had learned to sail thirty-five years earlier. The swaying reed beds were pure East Anglia; the heat was tropical. A lone fisherman angling from a drifting punt could have been floating down from Norwich on a Sunday afternoon, but the occasional thrashings at the riverbank, as some monstrous reptile tucked in to its luncheon, were more like the upper Nile or darkest Queensland. The tang of the salt wind over the marshes was a memory of Horsey Mere, but the ever-increasing howl of the mosquito squadrons as the sun dipped towards golden evening could only have been North America again.

  One more time, I found myself speculating on the extent of the horror of this low-flying hazard to the first English-speaking Georgians, arriving innocently from relatively bug-free Britain. Living precariously huddled together in a wooden fort, under siege from the insects, they also had to repel organised Spanish raids from across an ill-defined and disputed border with Florida. The death rate was high. A few succumbed to enemy action, but far more gave up the ghost in the face of the diseases rampaging before modern medicine and clean drinking water. Some of these were insect-carried and there is no shortage of evidence to confirm that flying bug activity was at least as great in previous centuries as it is now. When a late August hurricane drove a pair of pilot schooners far up into the marshes in 1881, even the hard-bitten local contractor hired to extricate them commented on the bloodthirsty clouds of bugs. Since the blow, he stated, their numbers and virulence had made it intolerable to live anywhere near the marshes and virtually impossible to survive out on the sedge. For some reason, the general disorganisation of nature caused by a storm and its associated tidal wave has always encouraged massive mosquito activity.