by Chris Price
Nothing. Another prod, a little harder than the first.
Still nothing.
Grabbing him by the shoulder, I shook him as hard as I could. 'Joe – wake up!'
'Wh-wha —?' he grunted. 'Sorry, was I snoring?'
'Yes. But that's not why I've woken you up.'
He rubbed his eyes. 'Ri-ight. Then why exactly have you woken me up? I was having a lovely dream about helicopters.'
'The itinerary's changed.'
'What?'
'The itinerary's changed.' A pause for effect. 'We're going to Nashville.'
22 OCTOBER
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
'We're not going to Nashville.'
'What?' croaked Chris, his first word of the day.
'I know what you're like. For the past few hours you'll have been working on a cunningly worded 'invite' coercing me to go to Nashville. So I'm not bothering with cunning wording. We're. Not. Going. To. Nashville.'
'Why not? How bad is it, really?'
'You want to know why I hate Nashville?'
'Yes.'
I should have started by saying that Chris must appreciate the context of my contempt. That I've been lucky enough to travel a bit, from Camden to Calcutta, Gretna to Guatemala, and Nashville is the most dismal place I've ever been. I should have explained to him in sesquipedalian detail that Nashville is the dreariest place in all born-again-Christendom. That to visit the US and go to Nashville is like being invited to the Playboy mansion and spending the evening with Brett Michaels from Poison. There are thrills, spills and jaw-dropping views everywhere you look, but you're stuck with the most boorish company in the room. Its glory days are long gone, it's falling apart despite extensive retouching to its decrepit exterior. And it's wearing a cowboy hat.
What I actually said was: 'Because it's really horrible.'
Way to go Seinfeld.
'Well, how can I disagree with that reasoned and rational appraisal?' Chris tutted, heading out of the door to grab some breakfast.
Defeated, I thumbed through the room eight guest book – an embossed and leather-bound notepad for Gram fans to pen a line or two about what he means to them. I felt like a fraud because of my slightly false motives for being there. Everyone else in the book had been truly moved by the work of Parsons, whereas I still think of country music, with a handful of exceptions, as the soundtrack to fertilising your sibling. And the whining of the pedal-steel guitar – one of Chris' favourite sounds in the world – makes my ear canals contract. With this in mind I didn't want to write something disrespectful or phoney. So I decided not to put pen to paper and trailed after Chris to the breakfast room.
Breakfast dispatched, we packed the car and reluctantly bade farewell to the ladies who had made the previous night such an exceptional experience. Shilah was as effusive with a hangover as when she was acquiring it, Mary still smiled with the consistency of a synchronised swimmer, and Polly was quiet and sweet. A quick photo, then it was into the car to get some proper mileage away. Today was day five of the trip. Nearly a quarter of it done and so far we had covered precisely 150 miles. 4,000 still to go. There was a balance that needed redressing.
Chris took us along 62 through Twentynine Palms, the scene of our brutal shearing the previous day at the hands of Barber Judi, and then out through some equally brutal scenery. Reddish-brown crumbling hills rolled in like great stone waves breaking and receding just short of the roadside – geological tides for mile after mile. After a couple of hours we stopped at a petrol station to switch drivers. It had Portaloos for toilets; four plastic booths full of trucker shit baking at ninety degrees. Not even vultures were circling.
Onwards from the befouled Portaloos to the interstate through Arizona. We put the roof up to prevent our scalps turning to crackling, and made the slow journey towards Grand Canyon. While we do that, a few words about my travelling companion.
Chris is the smartest guy I know.
That's not to say he's my most 'intelligent' friend, statistically speaking. That title probably goes to Big Jim, a man whose party trick is to ask you to name any date in the last two thousand years, or any in the next ten thousand, and then tell you what day of the week it is.
Chris is smart, but he isn't the most forward-thinking person I know either. That one goes to a friend of mine by the name of Jesus Jim, who was using the Internet before it was even called the Internet, when there were about as many websites as most people have names in their mobile phone. (It was so embryonic, in fact, that in late 1992 Jim managed to bring the entire Internet down for a day by telling his friends – who all told their friends – that they could download a game called Castle Wolfenstein from his computer. The next day he was escorted from his university lodgings by the local constabulary, who had been told from on high that this young lad had done something very wrong indeed, but weren't entirely sure what it was.)
So, to get all Top Gear about it, Chris may not be the fastest or the loudest, and he may not have a flappy paddle gearbox, but he is the smartest, wittiest, wryest, most withering, best read, most musically-gifted person I've ever had the privilege to call a friend, and there's frankly no one else I would have wanted to do this trip with. He was the first person to tell me on hearing their debut album that The Darkness were amazing, and the first to tell me on hearing their second that he was wrong about the whole 'The Darkness are amazing' thing. And he was the first to tell me that James Blunt was total shite, as well as the first person to tell me seconds later that he was definitely right about the whole 'James Blunt is total shite' thing.
Christopher Price also has one other extraordinary quality. He can focus. Chris can focus like – well, in the absence of an appropriate human simile – he can focus like a microscope. In his mind there is no point doing anything unless you're going to give it everything you've got and try to be the best in the world. If he buys a guitar he'll play it until his fingers bleed. When he runs his stride is precise, his breathing regular and his pace swift. And when he does DIY it has to be nail-for-nail perfect or those shelves he's just spent three days erecting are coming straight down. Which to my mind makes him a pretty exceptional chap and, one imagines, an absolute nightmare to date.
Oh, and he's really, really hairy. He might not be able to grow a beard in anything less than one revolution of the earth around the sun, but he makes up for it in almost every other department. Sit with him for a while in a soundproof radio studio and you'll notice a slight squeaking noise. That's his hair growing.
Most of all, Christopher Price is a good man. And I like him very much.
In his determination for the ghost of Gram to be around us at all times, he had christened the car the 'Grievous Angel'. This was in reference to the lyric:
Billboards and truck-stops passed by the Grievous Angel
Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down
And they all led me straight back home to you.
The car, however, was a touch more grievous than angel. It had two peculiarities worth highlighting. The first was the CD player. It skipped a bit. This didn't particularly bother me, not least because it seemed to skip songs that featured pedal steel. This meant that either (a) the CD player had my taste in music; (b) I was kicking it from under the footwell whenever a song came on that I didn't like; or (c) the machine struggled to play slightly scratched CDs. Which were invariably the ones that he liked most. Which of course were the ones that featured pedal steel.
Whatever the truth (and I think he suspected my footwork to be at play somewhere) Chris was fabulously and ragingly agitated by this. When it skipped, he would fast-forward the track, hoping this would fix the problem. When it didn't, he would go to the next song. And when that continued to jump, skip and click, he would let it play for up to a minute to try and outstare the CD player. All of which I found highly amusing. Which, of course, annoyed him even more.
The other grievance with the Grievous Angel was the electric shocks. Whether it was bad wiring or just
static build-up in the nylon carpets we knew not, but each time you got out of the car and closed the door, you were guaranteed a little electric livener. Sometimes it was no more than a delicate nip, other times it sent enough voltage up your forearm to make your fillings glow and cause you to swear out loud in public, thus ensuring that in one brief moment any passer-by knew two things about you – one, you were English, and two, you were talking to your vehicle.
In the car, however, we were oblivious to the static built up on the seemingly endless tarmac. Mile upon mile, the road towards the centre of the continent pounded on with rumbling predictability. The monotony was relieved by the occasional and welcome diversion – always greeted with a wave and a toot of the horn as we passed – of sighting a 'truck mullet'. Truck mullets – and if that isn't their proper name then it really ought to be – are pretty much as the name suggests: a vehicle-wide, two-foot-long hairpiece that clips under the rear bumper of a pick-up or RV and brushes along the ground like the mane of a proud mullet-wearer over the collar of his overalls.
With the possible exception of furry dice, British drivers are much less enthusiastic about automotive adornments than our American counterparts (our rear bumpers, for instance, are viewed more as an aid to parallel parking than a place for stickers advertising how funny, Christian or Republican we are), so at first we were flummoxed by the truck mullet. We wanted to believe it was about pimping your ride so that driver and wheels hummed in perfect fashion unison, but that was almost too perfect to be true. Was it the latest innovation on the rubber travel sickness strips that once hung ineffectively from the back of Escorts and Allegros in the late seventies? Surely not that
either.
After much debate, and the sighting of a mullet used for its proper purpose, we finally worked out that they are in fact used to stop the back wheels of the 'lead vehicle' showering gravel over the vehicle it is towing. (Forgive the rather vague terminology there, but this is a country in which trucks tow trucks and caravans apparently pull cars. Serious motorhome fanatics often tow a car for greater freedom of exploration once they've dropped anchor in a trailer park. The first time we came across this arrangement on the interstate I winced and told Joe that the guy in the sports car was dangerously close to the RV in front.)
The glory of the Grand Canyon comes from its facility for catching you unawares. High up in 'Marlboro Country', the Colorado River has spent six million years (some say considerably more) carving, grinding and sculpting a blasthole in the earth; clapping eyes on it for the first time is one of the rare occasions when the American fondness for the word 'awesome' is entirely justified. The surprise is due in no small part to the slow incline that most visitors – the ones who don't arrive by helicopter – drive up to get there, a climb which takes you unsuspectingly to around twice the height of Ben Nevis. A very slow rise, over a very long time, which we now embarked on.
There was a problem, and I had no choice but to tell Chris.
'Mate, I think we've got a fuel leak.'
'What?' came the panicked response.
'We've gone through a quarter of a tank in the last twenty miles.'
'Really? Are you sure?'
'The backs of my calves have started sweating, so yeah, I'm pretty sure.'
'How much have we got left?'
The needle on the fuel gauge was pointing menacingly and inescapably at a capital letter: E.
'Well, not to be melodramatic about it, fumes.'
'What do we do?'
With a fuel leak you have two options. Keep moving and hope, or stop and try to fix the leak. The former is potentially foolhardy and runs the risk of losing power just when you don't want to in, say, the outside lane of a contraflow, where we were now. The latter is probably just as risky and definitely just as foolhardy in the outside lane of a contraflow.
Chris sized up the situation. 'Let's keep going. Maybe we can make it to a garage.'
Ten miles later the reassuring red T of Texaco hove into view. Soaked in a sweat of panic and relief, we pulled off the road and freewheeled up to pump number seven. Chris got out to fill up. He reached for the nozzle, then stopped as he caught sight of the display, his jaw sagging with disbelief.
'Pricey is it, Pricey?' I jested.
'Come and have a look.'
I got out. Where you would normally expect to see the price per gallon, a very different message blinked at us in tones of L, C, and D:
GOD BLESS AND SUPPORT OUR TROOPS IN IRAQ.
After fifteen years listening to politicians tell the world that the war in the Middle East had everything to do with human rights and nothing whatsoever to do with oil, the unmistakable truth had popped up in the unlikeliest of places. Pump number seven at a Texaco petrol station in Ash Fork, Arizona had 'fessed up. We thanked it for its honesty. Then we crossed our fingers and looked under the car. Nothing. Not a drip. Confused as to what to do next, we filled up and chose to keep moving and keep hoping, rejoining I40 as the low sun cast long shadows over cornfields stretching as far as the eye could see.
After ten miles the fuel gauge had noticeably declined.
'It's doing it again,' I tried – and failed – to say without fear or frustration.
'How far do you think we can get on this tank?' replied Chris calmly.
'To the canyon and maybe a bit further,' I guesstimated.
'Let's just get there then,' soothed Obi-Wan.
Whether to ease the rising fear of being stranded in the dark, or perhaps because he just wanted to hear some familiar tunes, at this point Chris did something rather brave.
'Have a listen to this,' he said, and slid his own album into the CD player. By that I don't mean one that he owned, but one he wrote and recorded himself with his friend Simon. They call themselves Missing Parsons.
Being as our relationship is founded on music and – crucially – the honest appraisal of it, this was a very ballsy move indeed. All the more so when you factor in my ever-increasing disquiet over the fuel situation. It was never going to get a fair hearing.
A pedal steel chimed in. I looked at Chris and raised a brow. His eyes narrowed. Strumming, more steeling, and more narrowing. Then a rich, slightly twangy vocal filled the car. I laughed, at which Chris looked rightly annoyed. I wasn't laughing at him though. I was laughing because it was good. Really good. It was also, to my immense relief, country music of a sort, which meant that when the inevitable moment came for him to ask 'What do you think?', I would be able to say, hand on heart, 'Well I really can't give it a fair appraisal. You know I don't like country music.'
We raced the setting sun towards Grand Canyon, listening to Missing Parsons. The vast crop fields all around turned from yellow to gold to grey and then to Stabilo-Boss pink as the sun sped towards the horizon. The music was working. Our minds were lost in Missing Parsons' quirky tales of love lost and found. As the road wore on, Chris flipped through the car manual for 'how to fix a fuel leak', while doleful final album track 'Half-Remembered Memory' – a break-up song about a girl we both knew – distracted me from my weapons-grade sore throat. As the song drew quietly to a close, we entered Grand Canyon National Park.
And Chris did a wonderful thing. He didn't ask me what I thought. Instead, he just carried on leafing through the manual. 'It says here that fuel consumption varies according to altitude.'
'OK...'
'You know what that means?'
'What?'
'For the last two hours we've been driving at something like five thousand feet. We don't have a fuel leak at all.'
'What have we got then?'
'A car. At altitude.'
23 OCTOBER
DOES MY BUTTE LOOK BIG IN THIS?
'What have I got then?'
The analgesic throat spray, menthol lozenges and salt water were no longer doing their job. I had been left with no option but to enter the realms of the US health care system and pay for a consultation at the Grand Canyon Medical Centre.
'Herpes.'
'In my throat?'
'Yes sir,' chirruped a white-gowned lady doctor.
How was this possible? No, I didn't want to know. Actually, yes I did. If only so I could explain to my wife how I went on holiday with a mate, shared a motel bed with him, and came back with a sexually transmitted infection down my gullet.
'Herpes isn't always an STI.'
'Thank God. I mean, thank Chris – Christ! – er, thank goodness.'
'It can be transmitted through air or contact with hard surfaces. Which is probably what happened to you.'
'Is there any treatment available?'
'Sure. Here's a prescription. Take it for a week, you should be fine.'
Outside in a convertible sports car sat a lightly sunburnt Englishman in a snug Fred Perry shirt.'What is it, honey?' he camped from the driver's seat.
'I've got herpes.'
Chris' face strained with competing desires to panic and take the piss. Flumping into the passenger seat I answered the question posed by his wide eyes and slack jaw.
'Apparently it's a viral throat infection related to the herpes virus. No biggy.'
'Is it contagious?'
'Very,' I coughed. 'Let's go.'
Joe had seen the Grand Canyon before, a few years previously on holiday with his partner Nicola. I hadn't. This presented something of a problem.
When two male friends do something fun or exciting together – climb a mountain, see a band or go to a comedy club perhaps – and one of them has done that thing before, there is a protocol which must be adhered to rigidly. Man A (who has done the thing) must first spend several hours explaining to man B (who hasn't) that he cannot possibly imagine how life-changing the experience will be in order to impress upon man B how impoverished his life has been up to now for not having done the thing already. Man A must also pre-empt every response man B could possibly have to doing the thing ('You're going to shit/cream/wet yourself') so as to divest the experience of any newness or novelty in the actual doing. Lastly, once the thing is done, man A must make plain to man B just how much funnier it was the first time, how comparatively clear the sound or tough the climb. Throughout, man B must try at all costs not to have a good time, so as to deprive man A of the satisfaction of seeing him enjoy something that man A enjoyed last year, last month or last Tuesday.