Live Fast, Die Young

by Chris Price

  Today, Silverton's mines are closed, but there are still a dozen saloons where you can order a steak and sarsaparilla and feel like a cowboy. We opted for Natalia's 1912 Restaurant, situated in one of the town's oldest bordellos, ordered steaks and sarsaparilla, and felt like tourists. Sated by meat and fizzy pop tasting of Germolene, and fearing snow slides or bouts of pneumonia, we hit the road once again.

  We fell short of reaching Denver by sundown and settled instead for Vail, which competes with Aspen, a couple of hours west, for the title of 'American ski resort most likely to cripple you financially if not actually'. (Aspen holds the record currently; killing a member of the Kennedy family scores triple points.) Excited at the prospect of enjoying a night on the tiles in one of the world's most prestigious mountain resorts, we checked into the least prestigious lodgings we could find in order to conserve pennies for a 'massive night out' in the village.

  In season, Roost Lodge is the ideal place for Vail's youngest and least affluent visitors to sleep off a hangover. Off-peak, it apparently served as a dosshouse for the hundreds of construction workers bussed in to make the place shipshape for the start of the season. And us. We checked in, then immediately jumped in a taxi up to the village in order to avail ourselves of all that's available in Vail.

  Pre-season Vail at night is what Harrods must be like after the doors have been locked and the cleaners move in. It's pristine, unspeakably pretty, but unutterably dull. After a brief look around we found the only place with more customers than staff, an Italian restaurant and bar called Vendettas, and tucked into a pizza just smaller than our table.

  But pizza wasn't why had come to Vail. We were two red-blooded males starved of excitement from days in the desert, and we wanted action. I quizzed the waitress as to the possibilities for stimulation in Vail off-peak. She disappeared and returned a moment later brandishing a card detailing something called a 'Pub Crawl' taking place every Tuesday night in the village. All we needed to do was drink one beer in each of five bars dotted along the main street, and we would be entered into a prize draw by the host venue after midnight. Prizes included tickets to see the Denver Broncos, and a snowboard.

  We did the math. There were approximately fourteen people in the resort at the time, most of whom were either behind a bar or at the wheel of a taxi, so the odds were stacked in our favour. How could we lose? Drink some beer, stay up until midnight and win a prize. This should present no significant problem for two hard-drinkin', street fightin' fellas like us. Bring it on.

  In fact, we turned out to be a couple of softies for whom the prospect of drinking more than three alcoholic beverages in anything approaching quick succession was scarier than a baby with fingers for eyes. We managed one more beer in a bar round the corner, which turned out not to be a participating venue anyway, and retired to bed, pooped. We tried our best to convince ourselves that, well, it had been a long drive hadn't it, and this prissy place probably couldn't handle us anyway. But there was no escaping the fact that we were two grown males faced with near-certain odds of winning a prize relating to extreme sports or football, and neither of them were sufficient incentive to put away a measly five beers. We picked up our handbags and left.

  Dumping our handbags on our separate beds in our separate rooms, we separately flicked on our separate televisions. The men on mine were playing rounders, only not.

  It's all too often said how bemusing and baffling cricket is. But the implication has always seemed to be that all other sports are simple by comparison. Football, bar the offside rule, is almost as simple as it's possible to be, with the possible exception of boxing (or 'hitting' as I've always felt it should be called), but baseball seems every inch as complex as cricket.

  A nd I now had the perfect forum to learn the complexities, the peculiarities, and the delights of a sport that my father first tried twenty-six years ago to get me into. That forum was the World Series. This year the St Louis Cardinals faced the Detroit Tigers. We didn't know that the series was on until meeting up with Punk Rock Mike in LA, where we had watched part of the deciding game which took St Louis to the final. The Mets lost, but if you get the chance to glance at YouTube, look up 'chavez catch mets' and witness the most extraordinary catch you will probably ever see in sport. The ball was not just heading out of the ground, it was out of the ground. Chavez, though, ran to the fence and jumped so high, arched his arm back so far, and tilted his glove so much that he caught the ball despite it being almost two feet over the fence. When he landed he had the same look of disbelief that was on every face in the crowd. If life were the movies they would have gone on to win the game, and then the series. It isn't, and they didn't.

  Which brought us to where we were today. After three games of the World Series, St Louis led two games to one. This, we were told in a barrage of bellowed sportspeak, was a big deal for them. Seventy-two per cent of game three winners in the last nine years had won the series, and sixty-four per cent of away teams with pitchers over 6' 2" had won two consecutive games in Detroit in the last four seasons. And of course ever since Roberto Alomar hit the winning home run for the Toronto Blue Jays back in '92, no avian-themed team with Hispanic lead batsmen had lost in the World Series. I made some of those statistics up, but in the context of the absurdly over-analytical world of baseball stats, they're entirely plausible.

  Baseball coverage has long since crossed over from meaningful interpretation of events to a hybrid of statistics and superstition. And how baseball fans love statistics. It seems they simply can't bear to admit that this might be just a sport, susceptible to human error and – dare we say it – luck. Apparently it is a holy sporting algorithm that one day men with abacuses will be able to predict with total accuracy. At which point presumably the teams won't even have to play – the managers can just announce the teams and the bean-counters will determine in a matter of minutes who the winners would be, thereby saving the messy business of actually having to play the game.

  It was too early to know who the star of the series would be. We couldn't yet know which batsman, pitcher, catcher or baseman would be the hero of this year's contest, but I already had a favourite. I'm sorry to say that he was my top choice not for his skills on the field (though he appeared to be something of a talismanic bat for St Louis), but for his name. Whilst the name Albert Pujols didn't make me laugh per se, I was cheered when he took the field by thoughts of small children across America falling to the floor and choking on their chips when the commentator said (and the phonetics are important here): 'We're in the eighth innings and it's getting pretty sticky at the bottom for St Louis – which means one thing – it's time for poo-holes.' If I listened carefully I could hear moms all over America tutting as they wiped spittle-flecked popcorn from their fifty-six inch plasma screens.

  25 OCTOBER

  WICHITA LINES, MAN

  Next morning over breakfast at a nearby Holiday Inn (Roost Lodge offered about as much in the way of breakfast as it did in the way of comfort), I checked my email. There was a message from our Joshua Tree hostess, Polly Parsons' best friend Shilah.

  From: Shilah Morrow

  Date: 24 October

  To: Chris Price

  Subject: Re: Thanks

  Hello Chris!

  You're so very welcome... I love being the maître d' of Joshua Tree – it makes my

  trips out there more interesting. So, Wichita huh? Let me know if you spot a

  lineman. That's one of my favorite songs. The melody makes my heart hurt. 'And I

  need you more than want you, and I want you for all time...' What an incredible

  line!

  Now... Are you sitting down?

  I spoke with Jack Fripp who runs the studio, and apparently John is out of town

  working on a biography about his mother until Sunday. But he said I could pass on

  his info and he'd be more than happy to show you around even if John Carter wasn't

  there! So if your voyage didn't include a trip to N
ashville then you should look

  at changing your routing asap!

  OK, must go wash the ol' bones now! Keep me posted on your travels and let me

  know how the Cash Cabin Studio thing works out! And remember to call me on the

  cell when you're having an exceptionally good time!

  Love & Rockets,

  m/

  Shilah

  Yee-es! Shilah, you beauty!

  Instantly I felt the scores had evened up a little. Finally Joe would get something more out of this trip than several pairs of reasonably priced Levis and a tanned forehead. Not that I wasn't excited about visiting the Cash estate myself (because boy was I excited), but Johnny Cash is one of Joe's favourite singers and Rick Rubin is one of his favourite producers and the Cash Cabin Studio is where... Well, you can see why I was excited. And relieved too, that this barmy idea might actually end up being as much fun for him as so far it had been for me. I could stop worrying that he was quietly rueing the day he ever suggested it.

  Yes, the trip had been his idea, but still I couldn't shake the feeling that I was on my own little journey of discovery while Joe tagged along for the ride. Deep down I knew that none of this was true – we had been planning it together for three years – but still I wanted him to have a 'Joshua Tree moment' like the one I'd had meeting Polly. If we were really lucky he might even get to rub shoulders with country music aristocracy itself in the shape of John Carter Cash. And if I was really honest, meeting John Carter Cash – the only child in the Cash dynasty from Johnny's marriage to June Carter – would be at least as big as meeting Polly Parsons, if not just a teeny-weeny bit bigger. The progeny of the Cash and Carter families is the closest thing America has to blue blood.

  But I was getting carried away with myself. Shilah had saved my bacon and my conscience, as well as saving Joe from death by a thousand pedal steel riffs, and that was enough for now.

  'Mate, get a load of this!' I squeaked, spinning the laptop around to face him.

  His eyes darted over the screen. A smile started to grow, dipped at first, then full beam.

  'Shilah... you... fucking... beauty!'

  I think we actually high fived.

  'Doesn't sound like John Carter's going to be there,' he said, scanning the email a second time, 'but just think, we'll get to see where The Man Comes Around was recorded!'

  'Do you hate Nashville now?'

  'I fucking love Nashville now. Let's go.'

  But first we had a date with Wichita, Kansas. And finding a lineman, as Shilah had guessed, was our business there. The loneliness of Glen Campbell's 'Wichita Lineman' had been regularly breaking my heart for a decade, and we planned to get a taste of it. Joe called for the bill.

  It was my turn to pay for breakfast. The bill arrived with a 'tipping suggestions' breakdown at the bottom: 'A 10 per cent tip would be $2.38. A 15 per cent tip would be $3.57. A 20 per cent tip would be $4.76.' I put $2.52 on the plate and refused to hand it over until the waitress could tell me what percentage that was. No, you're right, I didn't.

  The road out of Vail to Denver was pretty for exactly half of its length. The first half, winding slowly up into snow-dusted mountain tops, was just lovely. The second half, heading down into Denver under a smoggy sky the colour of skid-marks, was not. The guide book boasted that Denver stands proudly at the foot of the splendid and stoic Rocky Mountains. It doesn't. Denver skulks, embarrassed by its averageness and by the cancer-coloured cloud of car fumes it sits under like a yellowing Tupperware sky.

  We hurried through, making a brief pit stop at Radio Shack to buy some cabling for the laptop, then pressed on, wondering quite what nothingness lay ahead of us. Several people, upon hearing of our planned route through western Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma, had warned 'Man, there's nothing there… Except fat people.' Let me take this opportunity to set the record straight. There's nothing out there – not even fat people. Several times we drove for over half an hour without seeing another vehicle. That might not seem odd in some parts of the world, but in America it makes you wonder if you're the only two people left alive on the continent after a devastating nuclear catastrophe.

  We had hit the Bible Belt, and judging from the radio stations the car stereo was scanning, it was buckled up reeeeal tight. East of the Rockies the dial seemed suddenly to offer up a smorgasbord of Christian radio listening catering to all tastes along the musical and denominational spectrum. There was gospel music, pop, rap, country obviously, and a genre which one station referred to rather vaguely – if a little tautologically – as 'inspirational'. (If you're making Christian music that's not inspirational, then perhaps you ought to be looking for a new career.)

  Christian radio, of course, is all about keeping the Lord first. And keeping the Lord first was the number one priority for Colorado's KTLF – can you see what they've done there? – whose Light Praise afternoon show we now tuned in to. (Light praise during the week I imagine, and save the heavy stuff – the really serious praise – for Sunday.) KTLF was a music network which served up a hale and hearty diet of God-fearing modern rock with titles such as 'Just to Know You Lord', 'Above All', 'Salvation is Here' and – my favourite – 'Our God is an Awesome God (Much Better Than Buddha or Any of Those Other Ones)'. It was, in every possible sense of the word, awesome.

  Alongside KTLF on the dial was Air One – the 'Christian alternative' (that's Protestantism surely?) – followed by K-LOVE, whose sole raison d'être was apparently to provide you, dear listener, with an endless list of ways to part with your hard-earned cash. Why? To keep the station on the air. That way, they will have the funds to carry on telling you how to raise more funds. It's ingenious.

  There were many ways to make a pledge. Every link detailed one of the myriad opportunities for filling the K LOVE coffers, suggested starting pledge forty dollars. Call 800-525-LOVE and have your credit card ready. Make your pledge online. Shit, crack open the kids' piggy banks and haul your arse down here with the small change, we're not fussy. But do make a pledge. Who knows, you might even get a mention on air, and surely that's worth forty dollars of anyone's money. And if God has blessed you, be generous.

  In case it wasn't enough just to know that our hard-earned moolah would keep K-LOVE in the lovin' game for a few more minutes, the excited presenter kindly furnished us with a number of other reasons why donating was a good idea. It was a positive influence in our lives and the lives of our children. Hundreds of suicides were prevented every week because lonely people wouldn't feel so lonely any more (which is as foul and cynical as it is unprovable). And don't forget what you get for your forty dollars. Not just great music, but the satisfaction of knowing that you're 'helping people out there who are really in need'. This last point made me feel slightly less nauseous – at least they were using the money to support the needy and desperate. I was beginning to think it all ended up in K-LOVE's pockets.

  But no, it turned out the needy didn't see a penny. K-LOVE apparently helped these people simply by being on the air, because desperate people can listen too. And what better way to cheer them up than with an endless stream of anodyne, soulless MOR.

  The difficulty with Christian music is that, if praising the Lord is your thing, then surely all of it, regardless of artistic merit, is good by definition. Or praiseworthy at least, and definitely good in the sense of 'not evil'. So even if, say, rock music isn't your thing, 'Wings of Change' by hard rockin', strong-believin' David Lee Williams must have some appeal for Christian music lovers, because that rockin' has a higher purpose. Those axes are being wielded in the name of the Lord, and that has to be good, right?

  And there's the rub. As a genre, and therefore as a radio format, Christian music is utterly meaningless. It is no more a genre than 'songs about California' might be considered one, or love songs. I'm a sucker for an honest tear jerker – 'The Power of Love' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood I could comfortably listen to all day – but not all of them are great, are they? 'One More Night' by Phil Coll
ins, to pick just one example of many, is shit. So is 'The Lady in Red' by Chris de Burgh. And so, unfortunately, is 'Above All' by Women of Faith, even though it deals with a very different kind of love, a higher love if you will – the love of the Lord.

  Don't get me wrong, I don't hate all Christian music. Or even all music made by Christians. There's plenty of great stuff – try virtually anything by Johnny Cash for starters – which has soul and a higher purpose. But they choose not to play it on K-LOVE. Christ knows why. Perhaps we should ask him.

  We pressed on through the infamous and disquieting Tornado Alley, whose named turned out – today at least – to be inaccurate on two counts.

  When I was a kid there was a lane behind the cornershop near my house known to locals under the age of fifteen as Piss Alley. For a narrow thoroughfare between two buildings which stank of piss, 'Piss Alley' strikes me as a very apt name. But an expanse of central North America including Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, South Dakota and Colorado – a land mass roughly ten times the size of Great Britain – to my mind stretches even the most generous definition of the word 'alley'. And happily, today there turned out to be nothing but cloudless skies and the curvature of the horizon to concern ourselves with.