by Chris Price
'Are you enjoying your visit, sir?'
'Very much, thank you. Although it's not quite like I'd imagined it.'
'Really?'
Well, I know it was the movies, but I thought it would be a bit more like the Boot Hill from The Magnificent Seven.'
'I guess maybe that was one of the other Boot Hills.'
'Sorry?'
'It could have been the one in Tombstone maybe?'
Balls. There was another Boot Hill. But all was not lost. If it wasn't too far away we could still go there and I could fulfil my dream.
'So... There's another Boot Hill then?'
'Oh yes,' she enthused. 'There are Boot Hills in Dead Wood, Cripple Creek, Leadville, Montana, Iowa, Idaho, New Mexico, four or five in California. It's a real common name for a cemetery.'
'Oh. I see.'
Not only had I screwed up, I knew it was exactly the sort of stupid mistake that Chris had saved us from when we nearly ended up in the wrong Wichita. Which made it as annoying as hitting your head on a 'mind your head' sign.
On the mock-up of the original Main Street was a barber, a sweet emporium, photographic shop and restaurant, all of which were closed. I walked a few blocks along the wooden sidewalk listening to the distinctive clack of my own boots on wood, normally accompanied by the jangle of spur. The famous lawmen of their age had once walked this stretch. Lawmen who shot first and asked questions later – or more often not at all. Hell, Wyatt Earp strode through here striking fear into the hearts of the guilty, and most of the innocent too. He might have enjoyed a sarsparilla, a gunfight and some casual misogyny on this very spot. Possibly all at the same time – he was a hell of a multitasker.
My undergarments would be ready, so I passed through the gift shop and ignored the passing desire to spend lots of money just to give Ellie something to do, as I didn't need a Boot Hill licence plate or sheriff's badge. Dodge had taken me by surprise. Having embarked on a trip to celebrate the lives and deaths of legends, it seemed we had extended the brief from individuals to whole towns.
Dodge City hadn't been on the itinerary at first, but was added after the hasty diversion via Wichita County. It had looked on the map like the only town in south-eastern Kansas which was big enough to offer decent accommodation. Plus of course there was the anticipated satisfaction the following morning, with a screech of tyres and the smell of burning rubber, of hollering 'Let's get the hell out of Dodge' and then getting the hell out of Dodge. As Joe delivered the line to camera, the pleasure was fleeting, nowhere near enough to compensate for the dismal experience of a restless night in the dodgiest motel in the dodgiest town west of the Mississippi.
A quick stop for breakfast at McDonalds, pausing only to reflect that in these parts at least a Big Mac was perfectly acceptable breakfast fayre, judging from the forest of shuffling ankles stuffed into sneakers under sagging trays. (Personally I would feel better about myself pouring whisky on my cornflakes of a morning, but I suppose we all draw the line in different places.) Joe overheard a snatch of conversation between two breakfasting ladies, one explaining to the other that she just couldn't do bacon on her burger that early in the morning, which is about as restrained as sticking to pints for breakfast.
Today was a driving day. We aimed to reach Little Rock by sundown, three states away in Arkansas, electing to drive on interstates where we could engage cruise control, sit back, and watch the miles clock up. The weather appeared to be determined by whoever was behind the wheel. Joe took the first few hours from Dodge to Wichita through a cloud of fine rain, followed by a canopy of sunshine for my three-hour southward stint through Oklahoma City. As evening approached we broke just outside Fort Smith, Arkansas to put the roof up. Joe pleaded that we stop in nearby Van Buren, for the purposes of a gag that only fans of finest Dutch trance will appreciate: the opportunity of saying 'I'm in Van Buren.' (Bear in mind this is a man who once dragged a friend – thankfully not me – for thirty-six hours across Honduras into coastal Guatemala so that upon arriving in the region's main town he could say 'Livingston, I presume.' He wasn't about to pass up the opportunity of a similarly futile gesture in honour of the world's number one DJ.) Cue thunder, lightning and rain so torrential it took a combined effort from both Joe driving and me in the passenger seat to stay between the road markings.
As we squinted our way along I40, the car headlights were rendered virtually useless. On full beam they reflected in the sheet rain like a torch shone into a mirror, blinding us with white light. Dipped, they lit a section of road approximately four feet in front of our noses. I turned the music down and shouted instructions – 'bear left, bear left!' – over the drumming on the roof and the flapping of wipers frantically bailing oceans from the windscreen. Mile after mile it continued, barely another vehicle in sight.
Somewhere around Clarksville another set of headlights appeared behind and tailed us for several miles.
Joe adjusted the rear-view mirror. 'I was starting to think we were the only ones stupid enough to be out in this.'
'He's probably sitting on our tail so he can see where the road is.'
'I don't blame him. I can't see a fucking thing. Where the fuck are we?'
I turned around in my seat to retrieve the road map from the back seat. As I did, a pirouette of blue light danced above the car behind us, accompanied by the whoop of a police siren.
'Fuck.'
'Fuck.'
'You'd better pull over.'
Quite what went through the mind of the patrolman as he stepped up to the car I can only guess at. Joe whirred the window down.
'You was gittin' kinda close to the ve-hicle in front sir,' he began, bending to look into the car. He double took upon seeing two men sporting horseshoe moustaches and a look of quiet terror on their faces, the strains of Sweetheart of the Rodeo softly a-honkin and a-tonkin' on the stereo. It must have come as quite a shock. (Or perhaps this was normal in Oklahoma: 'Hi honey, I'm home. Oh, the usual – fightin' at the Broken Spoke, couple o' fags out on forty sniffin' tailpipes.')
'Vehicle, officer?' said Joe. 'We can't even see the road.'
A quizzical look as he tried to compute what he'd heard. Perhaps it was the accent. Certainly the cockdusters taxed him some.
He leaned in a little closer. 'Say, yew boys're brertherrrs, ain't yew?'
The rain dripped from his Mountie hat, whose broad rim was protected by a neatly fitted, ruched and elasticated rain cover. As he scanned the car and its contents it felt like cross-examination by a prissy headmistress who had just stepped out of the shower.
'Brothers, officer?' quivered Joe. 'No, not brothers.'
He tipped his head to one side as if to get a better look. 'Yew boys ain't brertherrrs?'
'N-no officer, we're just good friends!' I stammered, trying and failing to make the situation look less weird than it already did.
'Well, yew shurre do fayvurre each utherr.'
Now we were confused. Favour each other? Was he speculating as to our sexual orientation? Terribly forward don't you think, officer? Whatever he meant, we were so terrified by now that we would happily have revealed every tiny detail of our personal lives just to make him like us.
Joe bit his lip. 'Favour each other?'
'Shurre. Yew lerk jerst laaake each utherr.' Favouring someone in Oklahoma evidently means resembling them, which came as something of a relief all round. 'Say,' he went on, 'whirr yew boys frerm?' The words 'where are you' elided gloriously into a single, elongated diphthong – whirreeoo – the same collision of vowels that for years had me thinking George Bush was asking us to join him in the fight against tourism.
'London, England, officer!' we chorused.
'Lerndon, Eeenglund, huh? Aaah shurre laaake yurre akseeunts.'
'Thank you, officer! Yours is jolly nice, too!' squeaked Joe.
'Kinda stormy to be out in a convertible ve-hicle, doncha thank? Whirreeoo headed?'
'We're trying to get to Little Rock. But we might just find a motel at th
e next exit and get out of the rain.'
'Good thankin'. Yew boys draave sayfely now.'
Documents verified, we edged back onto the highway and carried on our way.
Forced by the rain to overnight sooner than our scheduled Little Rock stopover, we sought and found comfort at a Comfort Inn in Morrilton, feasting on a TV dinner of Subway, Michelob, Letterman, Leno and O'Brien. Fat on chat and a foot-long Spicy Italian Melt, I blogged while Joe watched baseball on TV.
I started typing. Then deleting. Then typing again. And deleting again. Reflecting on the last few days' events, I realised that, brushes with the law excepted, I didn't have an awful lot to say. There was huffing.
Joe was transfixed by the baseball. 'Doesn't sound like it's flowing for you tonight.'
'It's not. What have we actually done in the last few days?'
'Loads. We've done... loads.'
He was right. We'd had some exceptional, extraordinary and exhilarating experiences; I had lived out the lyrics of 'Wichita Lineman' on the Wichita County line; Joe had virtually walked between the lines of his favourite western movie script in Silverton. But none of this came close to the experience of Joshua Tree; meeting Polly and Shilah, Cap Rock, room eight, Pappy and Harriets. Yes, the trip was about tying music to places. But so far it was the people, not the places, who had made it. We needed more people.
I'd had an idea during the planning stages that we might use the website not just as a way of meeting people but of keeping costs down too – by staying in their houses. How cool would it be, we thought, to cross a continent relying entirely on the kindness of strangers? Coast to coast, couch to couch. Cool idea perhaps, horrible reality. But it was an idea which, long since abandoned, had helped us make a number of cyberfriends, many of whom were now following our progress and providing welcome commentary to our blogs. I reached out to them:
Date: 26 Oct, 11.21 p.m.
Folks,
Thanks for your comments! We wanted to let you know the itinerary for the next few days. We're loving that people are tracking our progress and suggesting we hook up. But as the blogs are usually about 24 or 48 hours behind by the time we post them, we're missing each other.
So – today is Thursday 26 October.
Friday 27 – Little Rock to Memphis
Saturday 28 – Memphis/Clarksdale
Sunday 29 – Memphis/Clarksdale to Nashville
Monday 30 – Nashville
Tuesday 31 – Nashville
Wednesday 1 – Waycross via Atlanta? Charleston?
Thursday 2 – Arrive Waycross
Friday 3 – Waycross
Gets a bit sketchy after that, but the plan is to be in Winter Haven, Florida on 5 November. Do get in touch if your plans coincide with ours at all. We've met some great people and want to meet more. Chris & Joe
I closed the laptop and flopped against the headboard. With batting averages and pitching stats swirling in my head I started to drop off. Tomorrow was a big day. We would make our way to Memphis on the trail of two men. One was the most famous dead person in the world. The other released one album, went paddling in a Memphis river and was never seen alive again.
27 OCTOBER
EFFING AND JEFFING
No prizes for guessing the most famous dead resident of Memphis. And whilst we would obviously do some Elvis business in town, Memphis was on the itinerary for a quite different reason. It was where another of our musical heroes died – or if not exactly where he died then certainly where he last drew breath on solid ground. This one, unlike all the others so far, had been equally central to both our lives and was, importantly, dead. At a slightly older age than the fashionable rock star innings of twenty-seven, he took a swim in Wolf River at the age of thirty-one and was spotted three days later by a tourist on a riverboat.
But before we get into that, I'd like to get something off my chest. For most of my adult life I've had to deal with an embarrassing problem. It's a condition which is difficult to bring up even among close friends, let alone in the pages of a book, so this isn't at all easy. It never used to be a serious problem – God knows after twenty years I've learned to cope with the staring and the tutting from passers-by – but today the symptoms got much, much worse. I know I'll feel much better if I just get it out in the open.
I'm a slow driver. Always have been. Being overtaken is as much a part of the driving experience for me as changing gear. Milk floats, street cleaning vans, children on bikes, wheelchair users – they've all whizzed past me at some point with my 'every day's a Sunday' approach to getting from A to B. I've grown accustomed to it. But I have never, so far as I can recall, been overtaken by a house. Or, for that matter, a shed.
American roads are bigger than British drivers are used to, and so, it follows, are the vehicles that travel on these continent-spanning highways. Having become used to the trucks, the monster trucks, the articulated lorries, the reticulated lorries, the ship-sized RVs towing Range Rovers and the trucks towing trucks carrying four other trucks, it was going to take something pretty remarkable to jolt us from our cruise-controlled calm. A two-bedroomed house passing in the inside lane did the trick. A huge wooden bungalow, split down the middle with its two halves placed side-by-side on a massive yellow flatbed truck, rumbled past announced by flashing yellow lights. In its wake blew a shower of chipboard which tumbled onto the road and then bounced over the windscreen of the Grievous Angel. The house was followed a minute later by a shed, complete with rakes and lawnmower jangling away inside. It seems the phrase 'moving house' isn't as simple a concept as I once thought. (Boom, and if you will, boom.)
Last in this curious line of passing traffic was part of the lorry itself. With a barely detectable shudder from the house on top, one of its wheels flew off and raced down the outside lane. It had been going for well over a minute by the time we finally overtook it, and was still doing around fifty when we turned off the interstate. As you read this it should just about be reaching the Appalachians. Be sure to give it a wave if you see it pass.
There, did it. And I do feel better.
While we're in the mood for confessions, I'd like to put something out there too. (You don't mind, do you?) Mine involves a petty crime I committed in my early twenties. I've been haunted by it ever since.
As a student in the early nineties I supplemented grants and loans working as a returns clerk at a distribution plant for Sony Music. Based in glamorous Aylesbury near where I grew up, every day this enormous warehouse packed and shipped thousands of Celine Dion and Bruce Springsteen CDs to music retailers nationwide for purchase by the record-buying public (younger readers please ask mum or dad). Some of the CDs – either because they were faulty, sale or return, or by Kula Shaker – would be sent back to Aylesbury and either scrapped or returned to stock. My job was to process these returns and decide what should be salvaged and what should be recycled. As holiday jobs went – especially for a music fanatic in need of money – it was something of a boon.
The most exciting part was processing returns from the Sony sales force. Firstly, their stock was almost always 'new release', which meant being able to rifle through all the coolest new tunes available. Secondly, large portions of them carried the coveted 'Promo Use Only' sticker, meaning that even if the product was pristine in every other respect, it had to be scrapped. Those were the rules.
My, how it pained me to throw those CDs away. Hundreds of perfectly good albums by perfectly good bands headed for the scrapheap every day. It just didn't seem right. Stealing them wasn't an option of course. Aside from the fact that Sony security was tighter than a papal visit to Fort Knox, stories abounded of extraordinary rendition and water boarding for anyone caught taking so much as a stapler. So my very good school friend Thomas and I had played it safe and negotiated a weekly allowance with the manager, a quiet and thoughtful man by the name of Andy, who agreed we could each take home a handful of promo CDs at the end of the week if we worked very hard and tried our best to stop crashing the p
allet trucks into the walls. Well, from that point onwards finding a promo stickered album was like pulling an iPod out of the lucky dip at a village fête.
Imagine my joy then, when one day in September 1994 I opened one of the sales reps' submissions, pulled out a stack of Kula Shaker singles and glinting up at me from the bottom of the box was an entire roll of promo stickers. It was almost too much excitement to bear. Glancing furtively in both directions, I slipped it into my pocket and carried on with my work. I had found a goose that laid golden eggs.
Over the next month, I'm sorry to say that I milked that goose – if you'll pardon me while I play fast and loose with avian anatomy – for everything I could. One day, in a fit of daring uncharacteristic of a boy who had never had so much as a detention, I stickered the entire Byrds back catalogue and convinced Andy it was new release promo product destined for the scrapheap. (It was actually sale or return destined for HMV Bracknell.) High octane thrills. But soon my conscience, the beginning of the autumn term, and fear of deportation to a country with a slipshod human rights record got the better of me. By then maybe twenty albums had been liberated. Hardly The Italian Job, but enough to make me feel very naughty and ever so slightly ashamed.