Good Vibrations (32 page)

Roz, who never sleeps in the daytime, had given up the struggle to stay awake, so I let go and joined her in the Land of Nod, thinking as I faded out that the siesta is the natural submission to the body's demands in a hot climate. For a minute or two, a fault in the ceiling reminded me of a trombone slide, then I was gone. Tonight, we would be ready for anything.

Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, our night on the town in New Orleans proved a wretched let-down after a perfect afternoon. So far, we had been impressed with the way New Orleans caters for its inevitable tourist trade without losing its essential integrity. People who served us in bars were pleasant, men who admired the bikes were straightforward, the guys hustling custom for the burro-drawn carriages were polite, even when we said no, and the quaint buildings themselves had not been desecrated by glitz. All in all, the daytime city had seemed a class act. Walking the late evening streets in search of music, however, we noticed immediately that the tourist factor had risen by several hundred per cent. Instead of black guys wearing two-coloured shoes and slouch hats hurrying from one gig to the next, a procession of undercooked white people trooped by like walking invitations to a communal mugging. We tried our luck for a tune in a number of likely-looking establishments, only to be served canned music and at last discovered our nemesis in the tragedy that is The Preservation Hall. Here, one barman assured us, we would discover the Real Thing. By this time, we had concluded that this had probably taken wings for some other part of town many years ago, but since it was his advice or nothing, and the name had the right ring to it, we gave it a go.

Our first impression of The Preservation Hall indicated that it was either not a large room or was massively oversubscribed, because a long queue of tourists was lined up outside the lobby. Loud brass instrument noises were emanating from inside as we teamed up with an Australian visitor to give some weight to our stance against a bossy German tour guide.

‘It is proper you stand aside, please,' she ordered irrelevantly, attempting to shove the three of us out of her way.

‘Why's that, Sweetheart?' asked the Aussie in a voice that reminded me of my imaginary love bug.

‘What is this ‘Sweetheart'? You must move because my group must be walking in to see the jazz.'

‘But they're all behind me and this lady and gent here.'

‘Ah, but we have come all the way from Germany,' she announced triumphantly and elbowed him aside. She had picked the wrong victim.

‘You can take them back to the Rhine right now for all I care,' said the diplomat from Oz, lifting her firmly by the shoulders and replacing her behind us in the line. ‘We're here first, and that's where we stay.' He then proved himself a thorough gentleman by ironically raising his hat, which was as ‘cobber' as his accent.

Before we could get to know the man from the outback better, the racket from inside the hall petered out and there seemed to be some general inward movement of our group of hopefuls. Making sure the representatives of the Fatherland stayed in their proper place, we trooped into the lobby to be relieved of $4 each. Only then were we allowed to enter the Holy of Holies.

Inside, we were offered a scene of human degradation unequalled throughout all my American travels. My heart sank as I noticed large signs prohibiting more or less everything other than breathing. The ban on video cameras and flash guns I could perhaps understand, but when I saw a prominent ‘No Smoking' sign, I knew we had been had. Big time.

The hall itself was everything a jazz dive ought to be. Perhaps 50-feet-square, it had clearly remained undecorated and even undusted for a very long time. The light was low and the colour of the walls just right, although how the nicotine patina had been achieved in this sterile atmosphere was obscure. Perhaps it had happened long ago in a glorious past. But it was the band that put the final cap on an awful experience. The only good thing about them was that their efforts must even have hurt the ears of the German guide.

The tourists stood in rows, bemused, as the band unimaginatively and tunelessly struck up ‘Hello Dolly', the number with which I shall one day be played down to Hades. The trumpeter we had heard from outside was having major problems with his lip. The trombonist had talent but was hamming it up so much that he simply had to be taking the piss. The piano was not just pleasantly jangly, it was unforgivably out of tune, and the bassist looked as if he'd have been happier back home watching the ball-game on television.

After fifteen minutes of this mind-numbing mediocrity, our group of sufferers was ushered out into the street through a door opposite the entry lobby. As we filed out, having been given our glimpse of the True Cross, the band nipped out the back for a smoke while a fresh bunch of suckers were herded in at the other end.

Croc. Dundee shook his head in despair.

‘What is it with this country?' he said to me, still sidestepping creatively to ensure that Brunhilde remained behind him. ‘They've got the best jazz in the world somewhere here and they offer us this insult.'

‘I suppose if we knew the right people we could find the right joints to drink in,' I suggested.

‘That's going to be true anywhere,' he retorted, ‘but I flew into Dallas a fortnight ago and I've been driving around looking at all the places I've heard about all my life. And the buggers do it every time. They stuff it up. Let me tell you about Dodge City…'

I glanced at Roz and saw her eyes look to Heaven. She knew I had found a soulmate and given half a chance would spend the night raving about the insult of tourism both to the gawper and the gawped at. Somehow, she manoeuvred the pair of us into a small bar and bought us a whiskey to take our minds off the wretched affair. We left Mr Dundee subsiding, but still swearing he'd knife the next cynic who tried to shove tourist trash between him and the reality of America.

As we sagged off down a near-deserted Royal Street we stopped to hear a busker in a shop doorway playing the blues on a flattop guitar using a bottleneck on the frets. The guy had talent, technical ability and originality. I tipped him generously and we walked home to our four-poster, sad in the end only because after an experience sick beyond the telling, Dundee had missed the Real Thing at ‘last orders'.

21
CRAZY AND COOL
IN THE DEEP
SOUTH-EAST

Some years ago, I had a sailing contract in San Francisco. Among a variety of seafaring professionals from all over the US, one of my shipmates was Joe, a thoroughly Americanised man of action from what were once the Soviet Baltic States. Joe runs a sailing school at Darien in the Georgia swamp country and it was towards him that we now turned as we throbbed across a steamy Mississippi State and on through the far south of Alabama. Here were none of the Third World features we had found so striking in up-state Louisiana except for the loathsome love bugs, which continued to make riding a filthy ‘stop-go' business all the way to Charleston, South Carolina.

No doubt Alabama was hiding her down-market zones somewhere else, but as we flashed through at speed limit velocity, we seemed to be in romantic
Gone With the Wind
country, with colonnaded mansions peeping out from prosperous plantations and groves of live-oak trees deeply draped with Spanish moss. Plenty of all-American cars rumbled down our route in these latitudes, often in first-class order, driven by Southerners enjoying being exactly who they were. Patriotic ensigns flew bravely from homesteads, many of which supported the starred blue cross on a blood-red ground of the Confederacy. Several times, we parked beside bikes and cars with Confederate flags beautifully painted on their tanks and bonnets. A powerful gesture, but at this stage of the trip there was no time left to dig into the subtleties of what it means in the modern-day USA. One thing was sure, however. The good manners to strangers we had encountered, with few exceptions, throughout the mainstream of society came to the forefront here. The ‘Southern gentleman', be he farmer, businessman, skipper or garage mechanic is alive and well from New Orleans up to the Chesapeake Bay.

Georgia, which specialises in such paragons, has a comparatively short coastline. The small town of Darien falls about dead centre. As we arrived out of the forest, we were still well short of the sea and it became obvious that, like many of the state's secondary ports, it has developed some distance up-river. A lightweight, tasteful commercial strip of small, wooden business buildings lined a road through tall, long-leaf pines as we searched for the turn-off to Joe's dock. His directions proved admirably seamanlike, and soon we were bouncing down a woodland track. After a mile or two it opened on to a broad panorama of low-lying, green islands and swamp that wavered in the distance as the midday sea breeze kicked in to stir the hot, stagnant air.

I had no idea what to expect from Joe's establishment because many American sailing academies, like David's in California, represent major investments. Others are ‘hometown', specialising mainly in local customers. The off-lying islands provided plenty of shelter around Joe's place, which was well-sited for learners, but it clearly hadn't helped him much recently. The small school with its classroom building, boat stores and mooring pontoons looked as if it had just been hit by a hurricane. Which, in fact, it had been.

Even from the driveway it was obvious that Joe had seen to his priorities. Dangling 15 feet up from the launching crane hung a large motorcycle. It was undamaged, as were one or two of the yachts that must have been hauled out before the storm surge arrived. The sheds and the rest of the floating stock had taken a severe beating.

Joe heard the clatter of the Harleys and came walking towards us, hand outstretched. Above middle height, dark hair thinning a little and grey at the outsides of his beard, still strongly built in his fifties, he wore working pants and, incongruously, a blue pinstriped business shirt open on to a tanned neck. I congratulated him on saving his motorcycle from the mayhem. He smiled ruefully, was introduced to Roz, then led us into a blown-out kitchen.

‘Three hurricanes in two years, I've had,' he said, brewing up a pot of European-strength coffee. ‘Each time I get sorted, the weather just blasts the shit out of me again. This one passed close offshore on its way up to Carolina ten days ago. Blew ninety knots. The surge lifted my pontoon clear up the bank.'

It was three years since we'd met, and I'd forgotten that any traces of his Eastern European origins had vanished from his Southern accent. I'd been fascinated to see his spread ever since he told me that things were so ‘back to nature' that some mornings he had to chase the alligators off the docks before the customers arrived.

‘Depresses the life out of the students to see those hungry motherfuckers sunning themselves beside the boats,' he'd said. I hadn't been able to work out if he was joking or not. Now I saw he wasn't. The place was as near as you could get to jungle in continental USA.

A combination of storm damage and the resultant temporary dip in the local economy meant that today Joe had no takers. After we had shared a sandwich and more coffee he suggested taking one of his remaining whole boats out for a sail around the rivers inside Blackbeard Island. This nature reserve was named for the most famous pirate of them all, Edward Teach, who had plied a lively trade here, terrorising his victims by boarding their ships with his huge inky whiskers apparently blazing from sticks of ‘slow match'. I could imagine Joe as his first mate.

As we sailed the inlets in Joe's lively little day boat, I was struck by how alike, yet at the same time how totally dissimilar, the waterways were to the Norfolk Broads where I had learned to sail thirty-five years earlier. The swaying reed beds were pure East Anglia; the heat was tropical. A lone fisherman angling from a drifting punt could have been floating down from Norwich on a Sunday afternoon, but the occasional thrashings at the riverbank, as some monstrous reptile tucked in to its luncheon, were more like the upper Nile or darkest Queensland. The tang of the salt wind over the marshes was a memory of Horsey Mere, but the ever-increasing howl of the mosquito squadrons as the sun dipped towards golden evening could only have been North America again.

One more time, I found myself speculating on the extent of the horror of this low-flying hazard to the first English-speaking Georgians, arriving innocently from relatively bug-free Britain. Living precariously huddled together in a wooden fort, under siege from the insects, they also had to repel organised Spanish raids from across an ill-defined and disputed border with Florida. The death rate was high. A few succumbed to enemy action, but far more gave up the ghost in the face of the diseases rampaging before modern medicine and clean drinking water. Some of these were insect-carried and there is no shortage of evidence to confirm that flying bug activity was at least as great in previous centuries as it is now. When a late August hurricane drove a pair of pilot schooners far up into the marshes in 1881, even the hard-bitten local contractor hired to extricate them commented on the bloodthirsty clouds of bugs. Since the blow, he stated, their numbers and virulence had made it intolerable to live anywhere near the marshes and virtually impossible to survive out on the sedge. For some reason, the general disorganisation of nature caused by a storm and its associated tidal wave has always encouraged massive mosquito activity.

As the evening fell, the wind died earlier than expected. We were without engine power, so it was dark as we drifted home on the tide in a calm interrupted only by a zillion insects, a million frogs and the occasional splash of something more sinister deep in the reeds. A monstrous yellow moon rose through the live oaks, giving the Spanish moss an ethereal look, but it was not yet high enough to illuminate the dock as Joe asked Roz to hop ashore with a line.

‘What if there's an alligator drying his feet on the woodwork?' she asked.

‘Take the spinnaker pole with you,' he advised, referring to a 6-foot length of aluminium extrusion. ‘If you see any shadows, give them a shove around about midships with the business end. They thrash around a bit, but generally they slither off. Works most times.'

‘What happens when it doesn't?'

‘Often wondered that myself. You stay put, Ma'am, and I'll step off.'

Like a knight of old, Joe picked up the gleaming lance and, as I steered the boat, he hopped nimbly on to the darkened jetty. A few seconds later we were secure with nothing heavier on the dock than a king-size cockroach taking a late evening paseo.

We locked up the bikes and drove to the house of Joe's girlfriend, Gwynne, in an ancient Cadillac hearse which Joe and his mates used to trail their boats to regattas. At the top of the windshield, where a less imaginative owner might have inscribed his name and that of his loved one – ‘Sid and Joline' – Joe had contrived the legend, ‘Stiff Competition'. I doubted whether many of his rivals had seen the joke.

Gwynne's house was a wooden antebellum classic in a shady square. Joe and Gwynne were half-way through the restoration, but they had begun as lovers should, with the front bedroom. Selflessly, they gave this treasure up to us and slept goodness knows where.

‘How do you come to be in the US, Joe?' asked Roz over a barbecue dinner.

‘I'm an American, that's how!' he answered without cracking a smile.

‘I thought Tom said you were originally from Latvia or one of those Baltic States.'

‘Lithuania was my home.'

‘Were your family economic migrants?'

Joe smiled. ‘I don't think you'd quite put it like that,' he said slowly. ‘I came out of there in circumstances you might call awkward. It was in the early sixties and after I'd seen my uncle and cousins shot by the Communists for not toeing the political line, I decided that I had to get back at them somehow. So I escaped and came to the Land of the Free.

‘I signed up for Vietnam as soon as I could. There were plenty of folks over here didn't like that war, but I had a different perspective. I knew what we were fighting for. I'd seen it and I'd felt it. They hadn't.

‘I did OK out there, and when it was all over I found myself on a civilian plane back to California looking after a young officer in a wheelchair who'd gotten himself shot full of holes. We're in the immigration line with our uniforms and campaign medals and all, and I need to take a leak. So I leave him and go off. When I come back five minutes later, there's all these draft-dodging bastards slapping the poor guy around, calling him a ‘baby-burner' and a ‘rapist'. I couldn't take that. The boy had bled for his country, right or wrong, and these people weren't fit to wipe his nose, so I laid into them.'

‘How many were there?' I asked.

‘Maybe four or five, but I was combat-hardened. I'd been at war for years. I don't know where they'd been. I had three of them on the floor when the cops dragged me off and the next thing you know I'm in the cooler.'

‘I can't believe that didn't put you off America,' said Roz. ‘No, Ma'am. It didn't put me off. Every country's going to have bad apples, and I knew how little almost everyone understood about the Commie business. Anyhow, I left the military then and became a civilian. Land was cheap over here and I bought my place and set up my little business. It ain't flash but, Jesus, Georgia's a great place to settle. Low bullshit factor hereabouts.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘I'll show you tomorrow night at the restaurant.'

Far down by the deepest swamp in town was a rickety shack that had survived the storm against all the odds. Outside stretched the night-time marshes where the mysteries of life and death were unfolding in secret. Inside, it was heaving with people.

‘Hiya, Joe! Howyah doin'?' the barman greeted our host, hustling us to a prime site from where Joe could hold court to as many fellow diners as possible.

‘I like this place,' he said as we scrabbled our chairs up to the rough wooden table, ‘but it ain't what it used to be.'

‘Nowhere ever is,' said Gwynne, an interior designer, ‘but anything would have been an improvement.'

‘I'm not talking about the decor,' said Joe. ‘The food's so good nobody cares about that anyway. What I'm saying is that folks miss the animals they used to have in cages round the outsides. They had lions and tigers and all sorts. The big ones could stare in at the people eatin'. There was a hairy gorilla too, but he escaped.'

‘What, at dinnertime?' I blurted.

‘It was getting on to closing-up time,' replied Joe in a matter-of-fact sort of way. ‘The boss said he just smashed his way out of his cage, took one look at the menu and marched clear out into the woods. Nobody ever saw him again. But that was nothing to the pair of chimps they had. Used to dress 'em up in dinner jacket and black tie and sit 'em down at table in the corner. Regular customers used to buy them drinks.'

‘I just don't believe half the stuff you come out with,' said Gwynne, ‘but you did get it right when you told that journalist our ex-sheriff wasn't so bad as some folks made out.'

‘That made me sick, the way they was missing the point,' Joe was saying as the waitress came to take our order. No endless list of ‘specials' here. Just the best seafood money could buy, beer, water, and a short wine list for those of the avant-garde who really wanted it. We ordered oysters, flounder and Becks.

‘What was it with the sheriff?' I asked, curious that Joe should side with law and order after his experience in San Francisco.

‘Somebody wrote a book that concerned him,' interrupted a beefy, red-faced character on the next table. There was no protocol here about privacy of conversation, and Joe did have a rather loud voice. ‘It was one of those modern piles of rubbish. Said he was a nigger-hater, and so on. I don't know about who he hated and who he didn't, but he sure kept order round here.'

‘He was some mean-lookin' man, Chip,' began Joe, but he had met his match in our neighbour.

‘Tall as a stick, he was, and twice as thin,' continued Chip, now holding centre stage. ‘But he was a wiry sonofabitch. Nobody messed with him more 'n once. You remember that hole he had in his ear, Joe?'