I climb behind the steering wheel…
I drive off immediately without once looking back;
it’s a long journey, but it leads to freedom. – Corinne Hofmann
Change the David Duke reference to Ted Cruz and I am struck by how much the following narration reads as if current.
I left Portland when Clarence Thomas was on trial and arrived in Florida when William Kennedy Smith was exonerated. I was in San Diego in Wahrenbrock’s Book House when I learned Magic Johnson had tested positive for the HIV virus. We arrived in Florida about the time Bill Parcells couldn’t get a date with Teddy Kennedy.
I left Portland asking myself more than a couple of hard questions.
Questions like, what proof did I have there was no recession?
Personally, it felt like a recession, looked like a recession and stunk up my life like a recession. Each time I lost a steadily-paying writing gig, they said it was because of the recession.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration & Governmental Control Group keeps trying to convince me there’s nothing amiss.
By the time I got to Florida the malls and department stores and chambers of commerce were blaming the media for creating the impression of a recession, thus depressing (Don’t ever ever use that word!) consumer morale. Causing the recession which we might as well admit we’re in the middle of.
Even as I write, just a couple of weeks after the worst Christmas Retail Season since 1 B.C., I read somewhere the recession is over.
I left Portland asking myself, How is David Duke different from Dan Quayle? And why should I believe CNN about either one of them? (In LoUiSiAna the local media were blaming the national media for creating the Duke phenomenon.)
I left Portland like a boy leaves home. He knows where home is; nobody has to tell him. Outside those familiar confines, what lies there?
I didn’t have a clue when I left Portland.
***
Leaving the Beaver State, heading into California, one’s first image of the outside world is uniformed armed guards stopping every car searching for foreign fruits.
We drove through the Donner Pass to Reno, “The Smokingest Little City In The World.” At Circus Circus, we emptied our lucky found-money fund into video poker machines: we lost every penny of nearly ten bucks in small change. Nevada tops the nation with 23.2 suicides per 100,000 people. Gambling the kids’ milk money on the Ace of Spades can do that to a guy.
In California they shop for fun. People in leather (under)clothes still park $100,000 sport cars along the curbs of La Jolla. The Chevy dealer in San Diego charges $48 an hour for service work.
Arizona could use more shade.
I drove through New Mexico as fast as I could. New Mexicans are the country’s most dangerous drivers. It’s a fact.
Across much of Texas, entire towns are boarded up. New shopping centers are closed. Corpus Christi was empty. Some places looked like the TWILIGHT ZONE, where every living creature – except seagulls – simply vanishes.
In some neighborhoods there are more FOR SALE signs than mailboxes.
I went to the gun show in San Antonio. GUN CONTROL MEANS USING BOTH HANDS. Looked like a convention of Serial Killers Anonymous. If you’ve got a Texas driver’s license, you can walk out of here with a pistol. Out-of-staters are limited to rifles, shotguns and automatic weapons. I bought a pocket knife about the length of your sleeve.
Now this. More Texans were killed by guns last year than in automobile accident. Between 1985 and 1990, 19,184 Texans died from gunshot wounds.
Rest stops in Texas provide warning signs with pictures of poisonous reptiles and insects.
I came down with the flu. 105 degree fever. It’s one thing to read about those epidemics in the paper, it’s quite another to survive the disease. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to the weak among us. I coulda died, felt so hot.
DANGER. OVERNIGHT CAMPING PERMITTED. That’s pretty much your Western literary metaphor for this trip right there.
People think they have problems. Look up someday to find yourself on a Louisiana roadside surrounded by 4 extras from NIGHT OF THE LIVING SCROTUM SCRATCHERS and suddenly you don’t give a damn about what’s in the Metro section of the daily paper.
In Slidell, Louisiana, at 5 p.m. the day after Thanksgiving, it took fourteen (14) police officers to direct traffic Outside WAL-MART.
In “Nawlins,” that’s spelled New Orleans, I found this message from the street scratched on the wall of a public restroom: “A dollar bus ride is all that separates uptown from downtown.”
In Bourbon Street, in the French Quarter near BIG DADDY’S BOTTOMLESS MUD WRESTLING, sidewalk vendors are selling nitrous oxide, laughing gas. “$2 a hit.”
Along the interstate, there were ten (10) Duke signs for every one for his opponent, the gambler & ladies’ man, Beaux Bubba Edwards.
There’s an empty room in every motel across America. Plenty of folks live in tarpaper shacks.
In Mississippi, even the dirt looks worn out. Here, the state bird is chicken-fried steak.
It’s as dark in Alabama as it is in any other state you drive through at night. And just as beautiful.
***
Tourism is down in Florida. In the height of THE SEASON there’s vacancies everywhere you turn. Last year it was jamming.
Nobody’s building.
If the interest rate was zero, 35 million people still wouldn’t have health insurance.
In Venice, Florida, the local paper lists only thirteen (13) positions in the PROFESSIONAL column of the classified unemployment ads. Six of those are for Hair Stylist.
Experienced preferred. But they don’t want to pay for it.
You see 50-year-old white men walking around in grey suits and white shirts muttering, “I can’t be laid off from IBM, because Big Blue never lays off employees. My boss said I wasn’t being laid off, I was being retired.” Right about then, they realize they are retired.
Next thing you know, his boss is also prematurely enjoying those sunset years.
About the same time they decide to keep the shiny black shoes, but wear them with red-plaid Bermuda shorts.
They’re the lucky ones. They can afford shorts.
Times are tough.
Not even our Senior Citizens are happy. As interest rates decline, those living on fixed incomes feel the squeeze. Health costs continue to rise, while the government continually reduces health services and financial assistance.
Make a note. We might be able to solve two problems simultaneously if we renamed cockroaches and prepared them as a nutritionary source. Might help the taste of grits.
I hadn’t been home for the holidays in twenty years. Frankly, I expected a warmer greeting. There was one rational explanation.
Only one scenario made any sense at all.
My parents’ bodies had been taken over by aliens from another planet. Yes, creatures from a world where they eat their young.
It was either that, or there’s a recession.
When I finally convinced my father I wasn’t moving back home, we got along much better. Mom wanted a grand daughter and I brought her a German shepherd.
Do not expect a consumer-led recovery. Most people don’t have any money. Those who do have money have exhausted their wish list. Perhaps the rich should hold a national garage sale. The poor could have whatever they can haul away.
Alligators live in ponds of trailer parks. Inevitably, that’s where I’m supposed to walk my dog.
My landlord Ray became the owner of one of the town’s five auto body shops when he started his business in Venice some 30 years ago. Today there are 38 such shops, many affiliated with the large national franchises. With low, low prices. And the big, big ad budgets. Ray is talking a lot about customer satisfaction and survival.
Trust me on this. PHILOSOPHERS ARE THE CANARIES, THE INDICATOR SPECIES, FOR THIS CULTURE.
***
I can tell you everything you need to know about Miami in two words: kosher fajitas.
Things are different in the country’s fourth most populous state. I wonder sometimes why we all don’t live in Florida. Enjoy foreign travel without leaving the country.
Try to find a parking space at the beach during Season, seems we all do. But, for dog’s sake, don’t go in the water. Man of war, riptides, sea lice, schools of black-finned sharks reported this week. [This week’s paper had a couple of stories about some-fleshing microbe or something worse in the Gulf. – ed.]
Florida – State Motto: “Connect The Liver Spots” – is by nature basically unfit for human habitation, especially foreign visitors. A popular t-shirt hereabouts: IF IT’S TOURIST SEASON, WHY CAN’T WE SHOOT THEM?
The State Game & Fresh Water Fish Commission issues 7,000 permits annually to licensed trappers to destroy gators who have become a nuisance. “They’re lightning quick,” says one expert, and he doesn’t mean the trappers. “No other animals or human beings can outrun them in an ambush-type or frontal charge. They have the largest brain of all living reptiles.”
Adds the education director of the local Wildlife Center, “Alligators can’t distinguish between food and small children or small pets. Whenever you’re in an area with alligators, always look around you. Be aware of your surroundings.” Advice like that why she’s paid the big bucks.
How big are the insects here? This from The News. “A Boca Raton woman called police Thursday night after she spotted a large spider in her den. Police responded to the woman’s Northwest 20th Street apartment, located the spider and killed it, reports said.”
The newest resident of South Florida is the citrus leaf miner, which likely rode the winds of Hurricane Andrew to Dade County from the sub-Saharan desert in Africa. This is worse than another boatload of Haitian attorneys. The leaf miner sucks out all the juice from new foliage, so the tree stops growing. “No trees, no fruit. No fruit, no juice,” explained the industry’s spokeswoman, so everybody could understand. “And no juice, no money.” A task force funded by the fruit folks has been forged to fight this winged pest, no bigger than a speck of dust. With a voracious appetite. So small you can inhale’em.
Here’s what really bugs me. The task force paid to send a university entomologist to visit Australia – apparently the plane fare was cheaper than a flight to Africa – with orders to return with a leaf miner predator: two species of wasps, as small as no-see-ums, which, we are assured, pose absolutely no danger to humans. Cause that never happens. Meanwhile, back home, Dr. Jorge Pea, yet another college bug expert, is racing to raise tiny wasps by the millions. According to reports, “He hopes for a mass wasp attack next spring.” Sounds like a little too much like a bad Japanese movie.
The Exotic Pest Plant Council has given Hawaiian Lather Leaf a “Category 1″ ranking on the most unwanted list. The aggressive shrub, which suffocates domestic flora, joins some 30 other horticultural killer-aliens, like the dreaded Brazilian Pepper and Australian Pine.
A local school board may fire an elementary music teacher, probably a percussionist, for carrying a loaded .357 Magnum with his lesson plans. Meanwhile, lawmakers are so busy arguing over two bills – one which will okay chemical castration and another bill which will prohibit public nudity – they can’t agree on the state’s annual budget.
Oh, by the way, the jail time’s the same here whether you beat your dog or your wife. Although the fines are higher for animal abuse.
Every day is like the best day in the middle of August. First day of Spring the mercury reached 89 degrees. Last night’s low was 77. HOT. Jasmine in bloom. Gardenia and hibiscus, too. Picked strawberries the day before Easter.
Went out to dinner the other evening, with my aunt and uncle. The taut, nubile, young waitress took one look at me and charged me the senior citizen rate. Remind me to dye my mustache.
My car exploded.
Parked it out in the sun one sunny summer afternoon alongside a XXX pornographic movie theater in south Sarasota. Same place Pee Wee Herman, celebrated children’s show host and public masturbator, decided to escape the torrid heat. I only stopped there to cool off. My air conditioner wasn’t working and I don’t like the mall. Honest.
I did apply for a job as Associate Editor for a prestigious yachting magazine.
What’s yachting?
***
The relatives all get up at 6 a.m. and go to breakfast together. I went with them once. By 7:30 in the morning, I was done eating, the sun bright and shining, the temperature over 80 degrees. Felt like high noon, and a very bad dream.
When I was a child, I asked my father for some money. It was then he told me I was adopted, having been abandoned by England’s royal family. Until now, I thought he was kidding.
One day I was sitting at the beach, just watching, like an iguana in the sun. Two dolphins swam by, split the surf southward like two joggers in no particular hurry. A copper-colored snake slithered across the sand into the saw-grass by the women’s toilet. I have seen smaller anacondas at the zoo.
Didn’t want to leave Florida [ this statement does not ring true -ed.] but I did. Barely.
Has to be a different trip, ’cause now I’m flying.
As is their style, my parents got me to the Tampa airport four hours before my flight was scheduled to lift off. The flight was postponed six (6) times because of faulty equipment and mechanical malfunctions. Nothing serious. Safety stuff, like doors blowing off in mid-flight. There was no other plane. Then midnight came, and went. There was a shift change; union rules require mechanics from one airline to work on emergencies of another carrier, but not until after one hour’s duty. Wait.
It gets worse. Reaching Las Vegas finally, not that I had ever asked to go there, I found I had missed my connection and I’d have to layover a few hours after all the airline shops and restaurants had closed. (Read: cocktail lounges.) Which gave me plenty of free time when a couple of cops confiscated all my I.D. and charge cards and airline tickets. Before holding me for questioning. Seems somebody fitting my description – wouldn’t you love to hear just what “my description” actually is? – had assaulted some woman on another concourse. The bad boy was somebody tall, I suppose, with a new GQ hairstyle and a black leather jacket. A devilish glint and a dashingly silver mustache with an uncanny resemblance to the young Tom Selleck.
Luckily, due to FAA regulations, I was not carrying my usual pocketknife. The one the size of your arm. This being the fourth time I have come under official law enforcement interrogation since Nov. 22nd. A personal record, I believe.
Turns out – once again – I wasn’t the guy they were looking for. Confirming my own suspicions.
Of course not. The guy they were looking for was getting away, while they circled me in custody.
I next flew in the direction I’d just come, to Phoenix, where I switched planes again. After another lengthy layover in another empty, closed-down airport.
On the descent into Portland, as we dropped in altitude, I felt a pain above my left eye like somebody was driving a ten penny nail into my head. You should complain, a good friend advised, you’ll probably get some compensation, and she’s right.
But I am worried.
The last thing I want in this world is a discount certificate for my next flight on AMERICAN WEST.