Good Vibrations (31 page)

‘Welcome to Texas, ma'am… sir. You all have a good day, and keep it below seventy in this county until I've gone off for lunch.'

He touched his broad hat-brim, folded himself back into the Chevrolet and turned off the blue lights. As he drove off, I listened to the music of his car and was glad we'd behaved. The engine sounded like pure Wagner. Trying to outrun him in anything short of a fighter plane would have been plain foolishness.

We crossed the Sabine River into Louisiana with a thousand or so miles under our belts from Santa Fe. If there had been no signposts, it would still have been impossible to miss the change. All the way from that first vague surprise as we entered Virginia from Maryland, we had noted subtle differences between the various states, but there was nothing subtle here. This was something different altogether. Arriving in Logansport Louisiana on our back road from Texas was more like entering a different country than sampling a change of state. West of the river were ordered fields, neat farms and tightly run communities. Immediately over the bridge, the town huddled around a narrow main street crisscrossed haphazardly by the sort of heavy wires I recalled from newly electrified villages in 1970s South America. The sidewalks were crowded with people, almost all black. Shops were boarded up, and the smart, Texan vehicles were replaced by a diverse selection of boneyard bangers blowing blue smoke.

We stopped for much-needed fuel and were relieved of our cash by two hard-faced white women. When we walked out into the sunshine, the bikes were surrounded by young blacks. Anticipating at least verbal abuse or my gear being tampered with, I shouldered my way through to Black Madonna, gleaming and immaculate amongst the crowd. My unease must have surfaced from some deep-rooted and unexplored fear of finding myself at the wrong end of a colour bar. Whatever its origins, however, the apprehension proved groundless. Instead of grief, the bike was the subject only of admiration, while I was treated to a friendly barrage of good-humoured banter. I struggled to tune in to the sweet, Southern drawl while my own accent was being greeted with open incredulity, but as we mounted up, I suddenly felt totally safe. Freed from social anxieties, it dawned on me that the most startling difference between here and Texas had nothing to do with the human inhabitants; the bugs were back.

I had almost forgotten their impact on the early part of the trip. California had been reasonable in this respect, the deserts had been virtually bug-free, always excepting the scorpions who keep themselves to themselves unless thoroughly annoyed, and although Texas did feature a modest population of honest flies, we both felt that nothing more odious than a bluebottle would dare show its face west of the Sabine.

No sooner had we crossed the bridge than we ran into dense black clouds of what, from the biker's sensitive standpoint, are certainly the world's most disgusting bugs. Not content to burst singularly across your bike, your leathers, your teeth or your air filters, these bugs do it in pairs. Perhaps ‘couples' would be a more appropriate description, because they spend their entire day engaged in the most athletic forms of sexual intercourse. After watching them for ten minutes I could imagine the courtship scenario.

‘Fancy a bit, Babe?' asks Mr Bug, probably in an Australian accent, as he struts cockily though the dirt.

‘Only if you're bug enough for a twelve-hour shag,' retorts Ms Bug, outlining a frighteningly demanding schedule.

‘Twelve-hour shag? Nothing to it. Brace yourself, Sheila!'

And with that, he hops aboard. The pair take off, well and truly on the job, then spend their day flying around at low altitude, irretrievably coupled and no doubt having a rare time of it.

Because of this habit they have of public fornication, these essentially nasty creatures are universally known as ‘love bugs'. The name is their only saving grace. They were introduced into the Southern states some years ago by a caring authority who had been led to believe they would eat the mosquitoes. A sound plan on the face of things. Unfortunately, the love bugs found something else even more nourishing and tasty than the mozzies, so the original adversary continues to thrive, the love bugs have gone forth and multiplied in the best traditions of Noah, and the human population has to put up with a brand-new pest.

When any normal bug commits hara-kiri on a speeding motorcycle or car windscreen, it makes a bit of a splat and expires, leaving its recognisable remains for the undertakers to remove at the end of the day. Not so the love bug. These little chaps and their mates do not seem to have an outer body casing at all. They spludge themselves into a filthy grey ooze that spreads across an unbelievable area of clean metalwork, windshield, helmet or face. And because of their inexhaustible sexual energy, the innocent biker invariably gets two for the price of one.

As we negotiated the broken road out of Logansport bound in the general direction of Baton Rouge, still 200 miles away, we began to pass cars and trucks coming towards us that were barely recognisable on account of the bugs plastered all over their leading edges. Faces peered through opaque windscreens only partly kept clear by overworked wipers and washers. Every gas station was overflowing with drivers filling their washer bottles and wiping off their lights and screens. What happened to our Harleys almost broke our hearts.

I am realistic when it comes to keeping machinery clean. It's a fine enough thing to maintain your motorcycle immaculately if you never take it anywhere other than the pub, but if you're making 1,000 miles and more in an average week, you do your best and don't get too upset by the odd splash of mud. Either that, or your life is a misery. Most evenings I would go over the bikes and shine them up a bit. I enjoyed that. What man with a pair of pliers tucked away somewhere in his soul wouldn't have fun laying hands on two of the loveliest motorcycles he could ever own? And every night I left the windscreens covered with a damp cloth to soak off any bugs that had done themselves to death during the day. This policy paid off and as we roared across Texas, the bikes looked almost as smart as when they'd left Baltimore. Louisiana and the love bugs changed all that.

Within one hour at most from a standing start, my windshield was totally opaque; the forward curves of Madonna's sumptuously painted black tank, with its perfectly executed coach stripe, were spattered all over with grey, acid death; the leading faces of my boots were more bug than black and my chrome and steel engine was merrily baking the fornicating little swine deep into its perfect finish. If anything, Betty Boop was faring even worse because she only had a small windshield of the type ludicrously described in accessory catalogues as a ‘fly-screen'. Roz's leather riding jacket was literally soaked in dead love bugs. Her visor was impenetrable to daylight and poor Betty, who surely deserved better, looked ready for the knacker's yard. It was small consolation that the whole population was suffering the same misery.

The imperfect solution was to fuel up every hour and to slosh down the bikes at the same time, giving ourselves a spray-off for good measure. Nobody minded, and we met some nice people in the queues for the water hoses.

‘Ain't never seen nuthin' like this before in the way of bugs!'

‘You sure have. They was here in early summer too!'

‘Yeah? Well, last year they only came once. How come it's twice this time round?'

‘Those little guys, they jus' love makin' babies. Perhaps next year they won't stop at all.'

‘Step aside there, an' let the lady hose down her bike!'

‘How do you stand it, Honey? You poor thing. Why doesn't your man buy a car?' This from a large lady, looking at me as though I were individually responsible for the whole vile show.

‘Same way as I do, I suppose,' I butted in, picking a broken head out from between my top teeth.

‘Well at leas' it'll teach you to keep your mouth shut!' The woman slapped her huge thigh and laughed. Her chum was even larger and blacker and was showing a magnificent amount of cleavage as she rinsed buckets of water over her ancient Pontiac's windscreen. She winked disgracefully at me and said loudly,

‘At least they die happy!' I was so wretched I tried not to see the joke, but the rest of the people waiting about certainly did. The big, healthy-looking lady was quivering like a jelly and I saw that I was suffering from a sense of humour failure.

‘Sort of like an airborne snuff movie,' I said, brightening up. The women screamed with mirth.

There was obviously no spare money here, nothing much in the food stores, the supermarkets in the country towns were ill-stocked and the bugs were a serious tribulation. Compared with most Americans we had met, these folks seemed to have plenty to complain about. At least, in theory, they were far more disadvantaged than the Sioux on their Dakota reservation, yet strangely the country people hereabouts seemed to have worked out how to make the best of a poor hand of cards.

We dodged on southwards down a selection of minor roads, but the surface was so bad and the bug cloud so dense that in the end we capitulated to the delights of Interstate 49. The trucks were as awesome as usual and the cars did themselves proud with bad behaviour, but the flying menace definitely backed off. Plenty of them still meandered lecherously around the lower atmosphere, but the turbulence of the traffic seemed to push their adventurous couplings a few feet higher. We could now manage two hours between bug-stops if we had a mind to.

By the time we rolled across the swamps and into Baton Rouge we were exhausted by the heat and humidity, once again growing in volume, and by the sheer nausea of the insect genocide. Now, cruising weightless in the private swimming pool of the excellent hotel I had splashed out on to make up for our grisly day, life began to look almost normal. Palm trees surrounded the blue water, the sun dipped into their green fronds, the love bugs had ‘fucked' off and nobody else came for a swim.

‘Why did you want to come to Baton Rouge?' I asked Roz, who was floating by sipping a stiff rum and grapefruit juice balanced in a goofy-looking inflatable fish with a tumbler-sized depression where its dorsal fin should have been.

‘I can't believe you don't know.'

‘Why would I? It's only another hour and a bit to New Orleans. We could have eaten another sixty minutes' worth of insects and made the trip in one. I think I'm getting so punch drunk I never thought to ask.'

‘I'm picking up your trick of hanging on to some stupid irrelevance that happens to grab me.'

‘So what is it?'

‘Something about being busted flat in Baton Rouge and hitching a ride to New Orleans.'

It showed how little I knew my wife. I thought it was only me that travelled with inner music rattling my brain. And Janis Joplin of all people. The final word in wild rockers…

Roz took a long pull at her rum and said, ‘I'm going to hit that highway past Lake Ponchartrain tomorrow with Janis on my buddy seat all the way. She knew how to live, and she found out how to die.'

Alone in a sorry hotel room, I remembered, head full of God knew what. But what a woman! With her cracked-up, passionate voice calling from the bottom of the pit, she'd never taken her foot off life's gas pedal; just kept it hard down on the floorboards until her tanks ran dry.

Over dinner, we talked about how to get the best out of a short stay in New Orleans. The danger was going to be a concentrated attack of tourism because we knew nobody in town to steer us to the right places. Basin Street in the French Quarter, some say the birthplace of jazz, could hardly have survived the onslaught of quick money to be made on the back of its fame. Yet there was no way of knowing where else to head for, and so when the sun rose out of the pollution haze of Baton Rouge we crammed on our gear, made space for Janis, then booted the bikes into gear and disappeared towards Lake Ponchartrain.

The outskirts of the ‘Big Easy' were pretty much like any other American city, but the French Quarter, which we found without difficulty, was all it was cracked up to be, at least in terms of its architecture. Although looking ahead to Georgia and Joe, an old friend whose home we had never yet visited, we resolved to treat ourselves to a good lunch, then find a music club much later before turning in for the night. No hurry the following morning. We'd be fresh and fit for the long hard bash through the Deep South.

By now, we had become so immured to extremes of heat that the 95 degrees of a September New Orleans noontime didn't hurt at all. In our grandly seedy room, we shook out our best kit and strolled into the sunshine and shadow of Basin Street. Entranced, we explored the chequerboard that was once the New Orleans of the jazz pioneers and the steamboat card sharps. The uniquely French–American streets with their wrought-iron balconies, pillars, shutters and carved barge-boards reminded us more of Martinique than the USA. A background smell of drains mingling with fruit past its prime was faint enough to give the place an exciting, tropical air. Bars on discreet, first-floor levels served exotic drinks while restaurants spilling spicy aromas out on to the sidewalks vied for our custom.

We seated ourselves at a table with a snowy, white-on-white cloth, chunky silverware and two groups of crystal glasses, carefully haphazard, that promised nothing but the best. Lunching around us were business people. Sharp-looking men and snappily dressed women, some bent on mutual seduction, others on a deal that might just beat working for a living. Mostly it looked like both.

Our meal was the best of the whole trip. Creole seafood and wine from the section of the list where I normally avert my eyes. You would have done well to beat the victuals in Paris or Dublin, and the service from our waiter, clad in smartly casual pale orange and blue, was from life's carefully understated top drawer.

Satisfied and slightly woozy, we wandered back to our room around the corner. There, we made love on the squeaky iron four-poster, mainly because we felt like it, but also in memory of the itinerant gamblers and saloon girls, sailors and whores, and perhaps the occasional pair of nervous newly-weds who must have been doing the same here for a century or more. The hotel was shaded by trees on the street edge and as we lay back on the crisp cotton sheets, totally relaxed for the first time since Billy's place, a jiggling wicker fan wafted cool air across our bodies. I took a cold shower, dabbed myself half-dry, then lay down again on my towel. The slow-turning whirligig evaporating the last of the water was bliss – perhaps not so efficient or long lasting as air-conditioning, but twice as sensual, less noisy and virtually free. I gazed up at the mature cracks in the plastered, European style ceiling and deliberated on what wondrous patterns the room's army of ghosts might have made out of their meanderings.