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Nevada and Louisiana
Thursday, April 29 1999
place: San Diego, California
I took the day off, choosing to spend the morning putzing around the house instead of doing whatever marginal useful task I could muster for a stressful high-speed hour in my workplace. In general I've found it's hazardous to go to work unless I have a limitless expanse of time to spend there, otherwise I get swept up in some inane "just a few minutes" project and end up missing an appointment and getting everyone mad at me.
But Kim didn't make it easy on me to just bum around the house. She went off to a yoga class and came home infuriated to find me watching a dating program on daytime cable television. She demanded that I help her clean up the house, windexing the glass coffee table and vacuuming the carpet. Such neurotic cleaning rituals made absolutely no sense to me. I couldn't see anything in need of cleaning and even I had, I couldn't see any reason for doing the cleaning just then, before a five day vacation. But it did no good to rebel, and to preserve a semblance of domestic tranquility, I went through the motions.
We decided to drive to the airport and park the Volvo there, thereby eliminating the hassle of calling a cab and somehow getting poor Sophie to the kennel. Sophie had a glimmer of hope for a moment when, as we were pulling out of the kennel parking lot, Kim suddenly remembered she had to articulate to the kennel people a few extra facts about the peculiarities of her dog. "Yay! They've realized they accidentally left me in this sterile prison!" Sophie crowed. But her hopes were soon dashed, and we were off to the airport.
We were already inextricably gridlocked in the parking lot when we realized that we were going to be charged $18/day to park there. There are hotel rooms cheaper than this, but we didn't have time to argue. All we could do was sulk, or that's what I did at least. For a half hour or so there, the prospect of paying an $80 parking fee threatened to ruin my entire vacation. Seeing me this way irked Kim no end, and she kept chastising and badgering me to just deal with it and move on. But you know how I am. I resent having my money extracted from me in a manner so akin to rape. I am a seed in the middle of a puff of cotton. The cotton is my money and the airport is a cotton gin. (I heard once that Eli Whitney got the idea for his invention by watching a cat clawing at a chicken through a wire cage.)
But there's something about the energy of being quickly, steeply lifted off the ground, up out of the two dimensions of our little world and into the vast intangible depths of the sky that makes one soon forget humiliating monetary violations.
It was a partly-cloudy day over the eastern Pacific. This meant that, while we flew in the immaculate blueness of 33,000 ft., puffy cumulus clouds sat regularly spaced beneath us, with little glimpses of the waves beneath. The shadows of the clouds looked to be almost directly beneath the clouds, as though rendered by graphics software specifically to give an indication of how far above the surface they were living out their lives.
When you're charging along at 600 miles per hour, the world you're passing through seems to sit absolutely still, patiently waiting forever for nothing in particular to happen. The clouds look like very solid, unchanging mountains of snow. And down on the surface of the world, the ocean waves look like permanent ripples cleaved from a vast imperfect slab of obsidian. (For all we know, the ripples on a piece of obsidian are also moving like the waves on the ocean.) Beyond those visible features, the air itself which the jet is passing through is also, relative to the plane and its cargo, sitting completely still. That's why slight pressure differences translate into bumps every bit as real as those one encounters at 15 miles per hour on a mountain road in West Virginia.
place: Las Vegas, Nevada
We headed north up the coast to somewhere near Los Angeles, then turned east over the desert and headed inland to Las Vegas. The remaining layers of clouds thinned greatly with each mountain range we passed, but they never disappeared entirely. Improbably, in fact, by the time we landed in Las Vegas, the city of excess was nursing its afternoon hangover beneath overcast skies.
The terrain around Las Vegas isn't very different from the pictures sent back by various Martian space probes. Mountains are, low, steep, bleak and barren, eroding in ways that can be completely understood without any knowledge of biology. The city itself, on the other hand, looked like a rigourous weed that had somehow found wet fertile soil amid the desolation. Most evident of all were the endless sprawling tracts of suburbs and occasional well-irrigated golf courses. The center of the city was unremarkable from afar. But it, as I said, it was still daytime.
Inside the airport, Las Vegas smelled strangely like potatoes. Amongst the usual rows of waiting room chairs, ticket counters and other airport necessities were aisles and aisles of slot machines. More than a few seemingly happy people were blowing money on them too. Eventually, if only to find out what this whole Las Vegas thing is all about, I walked up to one of the machines and fed it 75 cents. I pushed a button, some wheels spun and then it stopped. "Now what?" I asked Kim. "That's it," she said. "Oh," I said, and we moved on. That was my big Las Vegas gambling experience, and I can't say I'm exactly addicted yet.
Far more entertaining was the ride on the little trolley car that connected Terminal C with the Main Hub. Kim and I rode it back and forth twice for no reason at all, and I took the following picture:
We ate our lunch in an overpriced Sports Bar right there in the terminal. I hadn't been outside of California since September and it came as a little bit of a surprise to smell cigarette smoke and see ash trays in the restaurant. This may sound dumb, but I suddenly realized that I wasn't in California anymore! This was the wild west, or some bastardized form thereof. In my mind, and on the ground this seems to be the case, Nevada has all the wanton, arbitrarily bizarre craziness of California without any of the social responsibility. Las Vegas is the urban equivalent of sociopathy, its excesses tempered only by the altruism that can, to the naïve, appear to grow in the fertilizer of capitalism. Bearing out this point, our waitress offered us $1 shots of tequila with our beers. The waitress might well have assumed Kim was a hooker I'd just picked up; in Kim's ultra-urban outfit she sort of looked the part.
(Further bearing out this point - but more along the lines of our contribution thereto - was a discrete sexual act Kim and I committed in a deserted swath of seats in the waiting area.)
The vast fly-over space that lies between Las Vegas and Houston, Texas contained little worth nothing except a robust line of thunderstorms. Our pilot expertly took us nearly as high as the tops of the thunderheads in a bid to fly over them, but they were so tall he ended up passing through a gap between them instead. The lightshow within them was most impressive, though it wasn't anything George Lucas couldn't do.
From Houston to New Orleans, we passed over a corner of the Gulf of Mexico. There were a great many lights down in the water and I have to assume they were a combination of fishing boats and offshore oil drilling platforms.
place: New Orleans, Louisiana
We weren't in the New Orleans airport very long before, on the way back from the pisser, I spied the sort of girl who'd normally mingle in my social circles. She was tall, with high (though vaguely folksy) heels, carrying herself with a certain rustic urban sophistication I find appealing. I was tracking her with casual interest until she ran up to Kim and gave her a big hug. It was Lindsay, the girl with whom we'd be staying during our New Orleans vacation. Her connection with Kim began when they both attended Loyola here in the Big Easy.
At the airport bar upstairs, we rendezvoused with others in Lindsay's entourage: her boyfriend Jay and a couple of friends who'd flown in from Los Angeles. Jay had a wonderful warm wryness about him that, in concert with his back-slapping New Orleans accent, gave a certain unexpected profundity to everything he said.
Lindsay's apartment was on the first floor of an old stucco building. It featured a pleasant courtyard metastasizing into nooks and improbable expanses of ancient concrete slowly shedding layers of paint and taking on instead a mantle of creeping, fragrant jasmine flowers. Drinks were served and pot was smoked. Jay had us view a wonderful video-documentary of the tragicomedy that is redneck life in West Virginia. (It had been produced by West Virginia public television.)
The big adventure for tonight was to head down to the French Quarter to see a show put on by a guy named Adam Duritz, the lead singer for the Counting Crows. Evidently Adam was planning on putting on a concert for just his friends and had taken pains not to advertise the event. Fortunately for me, several of Adam's friends either went to college with Kim or live in apartments directly adjacent to Lindsay, so we were all, by extension, on the guest list.
Lindsay and Jay.
The bar where the show was to happen was a madhouse of pushing and shoving. Staffers were forced to get around using unorthodox procedures (climbing up columns to the balcony, walking down the bar, etc.). Both Kim and I were struck by the fact that, for the most part, people at the bar were "beautiful people" Hollywood types, all decked out in fashionable urban evening wear. There were almost no guys in baseball caps and virtually no hippies either, although dyed hair was in some abundance. Mind you, the Counting Crows are a big pop act, the kind that derives its strength from a strong base of support in the wandering pseudo-hippie deadhead world as well as the obnoxious baseball-cap wearing collegiate scene. Though Adam and his band might owe a lot to these musical constituents, he hadn't seen fit to let them in on tonight's secret performance.
There was an awful lot of build-up to the event. Word had leaked out, at least among the fashionable people, and expectations were running high. Self-proclaimed VIPs were marching through the crowd arrogantly demanding that us lesser people step aside. Just for a little break from the craziness and pressure of the crowd (if nothing else), Kim and I took a walk down to another bar for just a little while. I marveled at how narrow the streets were, like a backdrop for a medieval depiction of Christ bearing the cross. Above us, iron porches put a lacy frame around the narrow rectangle of the moonlit sky.
In New Orleans it's perfectly acceptable for people to leave a bar with a plastic cup of beer and walk into another bar (or even a coffee shop) some blocks away, still drinking. As Kim puts it, "it makes for wonderful transitions." I remember when New York used to be that way, back before Guliani cleaned up up the city.
By the time the Adam Duritz show began, Kim and I had latched on to a girl named Olivia. She was a cute little dark-haired chick, a next door neighbor of Lindsay's, and she was well-connected to Adam of the Counting Crows and to tonight's guitarist as well, a long haired guy who used to play for Camper Van Beethoven (Olivia had slept with him just last night). All she had to do was say that we were with her, and we got into the show for free.
I've never been a fan of the Counting Crows. It's always been "fly over music" for me whenever it came on the radio. I was always happy when a Counting Crows song would come to an end because it meant another song that wasn't the Counting Crows was about to come on next. Okay, I take that back a little bit. "Mr. Jones" is alright. But I never can make out the words and the words sort of seem to be the point. Other than that, I wouldn't say Adam Duritz has especially charismatic stage presence. Here's a white guy with dreadlocks impulsively doing air guitar between long-winded bouts of bellowed rapid-fire stories in a whiny annoying voice to which modern rock radio has made me so numb. But the show was free, and I tried hard to enjoy it all. Olivia, meanwhile, was attempting to be considerably more punk rock about the situation, whispering in my ear what a sellout Adam was and even heckling him now and then.
The beer that Kim and I were drinking was Lone Star, "the National Beer of Texas." It was virtually the only thing to remind us that there's a world outside of New Orleans.
A few corrections from Kim:
1. Jay is from Pensacola and has more of a slow drawl redneck riviera
accent mixed in with an intellectual earthinesss.
2. Adam's connection to us is not through Loyola but through Henry Griffin [see note below]
whom Adam met long after he graduated when Henry was writing
scripts and performing with the Klezmer All Stars. (Henry was also good
friends with River Phoenix when he was a film student at Loyola) The
only two people who went to Loyola in the elegantly decaying French
compound are Lindsay and Henry, who have been best friends for ten
years. Lindsay and Henry have lived there for at least four years,
although Henry's permanent residence is Beverly Hills (where he lives
with Adam and a few of the guys from New Orleans who took off to
LA on a whim and are shacking up with Adam in the Beverly Hills compound).
note (from me): Henry (right) is a successful film script writer. He's a peculiar-looking guy with big, wild red hair. I saw one of his short films about a small group of traveling musicians and it was both hilarious and superbly acted, though its actors were all just Henry's friends.
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