Miraculous Cure by Optical Illusion
After we bade farewell to the peccaries, the Rio Grande and the Starlight Theater, we headed north. We turned east at a place appropriately called Junction and set our sights on Dixieland. As a tiny child, I’d lived briefly in Virginia, but as an adult, my real-life exposure to the American South was limited to a week in the Smoky Mountains.
It had been a perfect destination. I had just concluded my own civil war, and, divorce final, I wanted the taste of new surroundings. I flew to Atlanta and emerged from the airport in the only vehicle the rental agency had available. A suitable witness to my midlife Appomattox, it was a red sports car. Foot to the floor and radio blasting, I drove north into Tennessee, into a universe of tourist traps and dulcimer music and mountains covered with rhododendrons.
I did it all. I filled my carpet bags at Pigeon Forge factory stores and drank Jack Daniel’s in Gatlinburg night clubs. I hiked through the clouds to the top of Mount LeConte, and I rode a raft down Nantahala rapids. It was a week of glorious reconstruction.
Otherwise, my acquaintance with the south was drawn from Gone With the Wind and the nightly news. If Georgia was ever on my mind at all, she was antebellum splendor, and Mississippi was a scratchy newsreel of civil rights marches. Louisiana was nothing but Mardi Gras, and Florida was where the boys were. Alabama? Arkansas? Red mud and overalls. I’d traveled the world, but I was an ignorant Yank when it came to Dixie.
We came to a halt in Birmingham. The Phoenix One’s brakes had failed, and we spent three days in a Ford truck garage, reading old magazines and talking to Jewel, the bookkeeper, and Mark, a truck salesman. Jewel loaned us her car so we could have lunch at a nearby mall, and Mark told us how Alabama wasn’t as boring as the surface suggested.
“We don’t have much in the way of mountains,” he said, “But we’ve got caves to make up for it.” When he ran out of spelunking tales, he regaled us with stories about people who’d been miraculously healed by looking at optical illusions. Even so, the hours crawled.
“Your mechanic is good, but he’s slow,” said Mark, summing everything up on the third day. “I sure hope you didn’t need to be somewhere.”
“In fact, we don’t need to be anywhere,” I said, but I realized I’d been acting like it, making it clear that anywhere but where I was would be an improvement, and that three days in a Birmingham truck garage was nigh on close to hell. Our hosts had been apologetic, but I was the one who should have been saying I was sorry. Where did I need to be, after all? Nowhere but where I was. Jewel had cleared a table for me in the office lobby. I had my computer, unlimited quantities of coffee, a comfortable chair, and even a good story teller to keep me company.
Suddenly I saw things differently. One minute my surroundings were oil-encrusted purgatory, but when I looked again, danged if it wasn’t the nicest sort of spot. It was nothing less than a miraculous cure by optical illusion, and, almost as soon as it occurred, the Phoenix was ready to roll. Bidding farewell to Jewel and Mark, we drove north on Interstate 65, and turned east at Decatur. We were headed to Huntsville.
A Little Graveyard on the Moon
Huntsville, which before 1940 was merely the “Watercress Capital of the World,” burgeoned in the post-war years to become the home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, and U.S. Space Camp. Redstone Arsenal, the army installation which had built missiles for the war effort, provided the land. No longer a little green hamlet dozing in the hills, Huntsville is Rocket City, and the first thing we saw when we drove in from the west was a life-size mockup of the space shuttle.
The first famous foreigner to be connected with Huntsville was the English poet Alexander Pope, and the town even enjoyed a brief spell under the name of Twickenham, Pope’s English home. Nowadays, Huntsville might well be renamed to honor another European, Wernher Von Braun. Germany’s premier rocket scientist came to Alabama in 1950 and never looked back. Thanks largely to him, Sputnik, and the launching of the space race, Huntsville never looked back either. You can find the remnants of antebellum splendor if you look, but postwar space mania holds the day.
After we parked in the small campground located in a grove of trees next to the Space & Rocket Center, we hooked Marvin to his leash and set out to explore. The Center was already closed for the day, but it was easy to see the larger artifacts of Rocket Park through the chain link fence. An impressive stand of missiles rose like a stately grove of limbless trees.
We skirted the perimeter, and our attention was quickly drawn away from the carefully preserved specimens inside the fence. All around us were shards and fragments of nose cones and fuselages, propellers and fins, a thousand decaying remnants of the space race, half-hidden in the grass. Some were covered with kudzu vines, soon to be lost under a veil of green. The chariots of the space pioneers rested in this silent cemetery, and we picked our way through their rusting remains as darkness closed in around us.
A full moon rose as we walked back to the Phoenix. “There’s a graveyard up there, too,” I said pointing. “A little pile of human debris that proves to alien archaeologists that the moon once hosted visitors from another world.”
“It seems so long ago,” said Mark, “So long that the machines that made it happen look like the ancient relics of a dead civilization. I wonder what happened. Why hasn’t anyone returned?”
It was a good question. Didn’t we all assume back in 1969 that within a few years humans would be making regular voyages to the moon or even living there? Now that the barrier had been broken, what was stopping us? Soon there would be commercial flights and domed colonies and business ventures and even holiday space cruises. Humans had gone the distance and made it back alive. Anything was possible. Certainly no one dreamed that we’d greet the new millennium with no more than the same little pile of litter on our very own satellite.
But what did we know? Technology doesn’t always grow in a straight line, as I was reminded every time I prayed to the modem gods and thanked the black box for its efforts at cellular data transfer. It’s trimmed and shaped by politics and circumstance, espaliered by fad and necessity. Maybe the conquest of the moon was an ego trip, inspired by nothing more than a rabid desire to be the first to plant a flag on extraterrestrial soil. Maybe it was nothing more than a Cold War campaign, designed to intimidate our enemies and rally support on the home front. Maybe the moon was as frivolous a goal as our desire for true mobile communication. Once achieved, maybe it had been tarred with the lethal brush of “No Viable Commercial Application.”
“Maybe we’ll find out more tomorrow,” I said. “This is the place if anywhere is.”
The next morning, we arrived at the main entrance of the Space & Rocket Center just as the guard was opening the doors. “You were wise to come early,” he said as he waved us inside. “You’ll have it to yourselves until the school buses start to arrive.”
We worked our way through the exhibits inside, and then headed out to Rocket Park, the outdoor museum we’d seen through the fence the evening before. By the end of the day, we’d toured Redstone Arsenal and visited Space Camp. We’d walked through the history of American space travel and admired the latest project at Marshall Space Flight Center, the International Space Station. We’d gazed up at triumphs like the Saturn V that blasted astronauts to the moon, and we’d stared at relics from Apollo 13, the ill-fated mission that nearly ended in disaster.
We’d watched children bounce in seats designed to show them the effects of lunar gravity, and observed others wearing lab coats as they experimented in a “clean room.” We’d peered into the large water tank that provides astronauts a simulated weightless environment, and we’d walked through the forest of missiles, rockets, and supersonic planes.
We expected all that, of course, but we weren’t expecting another curious thing. Behind everything we saw there seemed to lurk the presence of Wernher von Braun, the man who built the rockets that bombed London, the man most responsible for the footprints on the moon. Surrounded by stunning technological achievement, I was struck with the astonishing accomplishments of the man with the camera-ready smile.
“He reminds me of Walt Disney,” I said to Mark as we looked at the shrine to his memory in the museum. “He had bigger dreams than most mortals and the right combination of brains and charisma to pull them off.”
In fact, Wernher von Braun knew Walt Disney, and he even served as a technical adviser for Disneyland’s Tomorrowland and several Disney television productions. Wernher von Braun liked anyone who helped him promote his own penchant for shooting rockets into space, and he liked anyone who would promote space travel among the masses. His was an expensive vocation, and he needed the coffers of a super power and the blessings of its taxpayers to fund it.
That’s why, in 1945, when it became clear that the status quo was no longer an option, Wernher and a hundred or so of his colleagues decided to surrender to the United States. Even though the Americans were happy to find this enormous mass of brain power falling into their laps, things weren’t smooth sailing for the German missile geniuses. Detained for months after they arrived on American soil, they referred to themselves as POP’s, or “Prisoners of Peace.”
By 1950, Wernher von Braun had emerged in Huntsville and launched his illustrious career as an American hero. He had his share of detractors, of course, those who considered him little more than a long-distance war criminal and the worst kind of hypocrite.
But here’s what I think. I think he wanted to shoot rockets into space, and he wanted that more than he wanted anything else, including kind thoughts and flattering epithets. He had not only the skill to design missiles, but the ability to find sponsors with the deepest pockets in the world. Once he’d sold them on his dreams, he knew how to keep them wanting more. Sputnik and the Cold War helped, but I have the sneaking feeling that Wernher von Braun made use of whatever events came his way. His trajectory was truer than a rocket, his destination as clear as the brightest moon. He had a burning desire.
I have no idea whether I would have liked the man, but I do have a weakness for someone who sees his path and follows it, whose laser-straight determination won’t let him be sidetracked by mundane distractions, even big ones like World War II. The obstacles he conquered were enormous, and the money he needed to follow his dream was beyond imagination. He did it anyway, and from his example I drew a second wind.
My ambitions seemed so tiny next to his, my budget so small. I didn’t need to travel to another world. All I wanted was access to this one. All I asked of communications technology was the very thing it promised, a life free of identity with a physical location, an address in the ether. I wanted to roam like Odysseus without being lost, travel without vanishing, sally forth without forsaking community.
It was the first time in the history of the planet that such a life could be contemplated. Before the birth of electronic mail and the rise of the Internet, a truly mobile life required the sacrifice of connection. Living without an address was living on a fringe. It meant dropping out, escaping from the status quo, reneging on the picket-fence security deal Americans have with society. It connoted tax evasion, law breaking and anarchy. Such an existence carried Easy Rider appeal, but those who chose it for more than a summer or two got failing marks in citizenship.
A life of travel was a boy’s life, too. Men were the rovers, the gadabout warriors who only wanted home when the going got tough, when they needed a back rub or a bandage. Girls were the hearth-tending Penelopes who kept the home fires burning, made calico quilts, baked peanut butter cookies. Until my adventuring spirit was released by fire, I’d led a corseted existence, a life of tight stays and shallow breathing. I bought curtains and made chicken soup. I wore panty hose and carried a purse. I hadn’t hated it, but when it was gone, I knew I could never stuff myself back inside the girdle of my former life.
I’d burst forth, but whose path could I follow? Who had gone before me to show me the way? I was no hobo soldier. I couldn’t trade nylons for camouflage fatigues, dishes for mess kits. I liked flowers and comforters and clean hair. I liked books and computers and cozy nights. I was no bungie jumper, mountain climber, jungle tamer. I had a hard enough time loving the cliff side.
But I did have a mission, and as I stood looking at the man who bridged the lunar gap, I saw clearly that I had no one to follow except others who had walked right off the map. It wasn’t trappings that made the mission. It was the path, a path that wasn’t there until the trailblazer defined it.
I wanted to be as close as next door and a thousand miles distant. I wanted the simplicity of life with no purse and the complexities of technology to make it possible. I wanted an all-American life packed up to go. I wanted an office on Flathead Lake, and a bedroom with a view of redwoods. I wanted to dine in the Blue Ridge Mountains and fall asleep to crashing Acadian surf. I wanted packs of wild peccaries and kudzu-covered nose cones. I wanted a back yard with oceans for fences and a family that circled the globe.
I wanted my life’s journey to unroll in space as well as time, and my grail was the technology that would connect all the dots in the world with me, even when I was a moving target. If I could do it, I knew I wouldn’t be the only one to relish the benefits. I couldn’t be the only one whose heart beat faster at the thought of being at work, at home and on the road, all at the same grand moment.
I looked again at the man whom even a world war couldn’t deter. He had known that his task went far beyond mere technological know-how. He’d been the salesman for the Apollo program, the cheerleader of the space race. It wasn’t enough to design machines to do a job. Part of the innovator’s task is to create the market, to ignite enthusiasm, to fan desire.
Why are there no new footprints on the moon? “Too expensive” is one answer we heard that day. “No need” is another. They were the same reasons Mark and I might logically have chosen to sell the Phoenix and rejoin the ranks of commuting suburbanites from which we’d sprung. What was the point of pursuing a truly mobile existence? Why try to fashion a complete life on the road? It’s too expensive. There’s no need. The ends of rainbows are for songs and simpletons.
If the pursuit of dreams is folly, then I was a first class fool. I’d spent a year learning how to survive on a roll, and, having achieved an acceptable level of competence in that arena, I’d progressed into genuine living. My former life had been centrifuged into compartments, each with a timeline, a wardrobe, a separate address. How could I return to that life of pigeonholes and labels when I had only begun to plumb the possibilities of an unsliced life? I liked having my whole life with me wherever I went. I’d learned the power of here and now. I’d caught a glimpse of the possibilities the virtual universe held for wanderers and dreamers and a woman without a purse. Expense and practicality be damned. I wanted a black box that really worked.
Mark jolted me out of my reverie. “I almost forgot to tell you,” he said. “You know that little pond we discovered out where the space hardware is scattered in the grass? I took Marvin there for a walk this morning, and we discovered something amazing.”
“What?” I asked, thinking immediately of lunar landers and rocket fins.
“The frogs who live there scream,” said Mark. “They hear you coming, and they shriek. Then they jump in the water and hide.”
Did I mention that I also want screaming frogs? I do. I want it all.
The screaming frogs of Huntsville were my first taste of the biotic ebullience of the American south. The mosquitoes in Arkansas were so big the natives celebrated them with an annual festival. I would have celebrated the fireflies, myself. They put on a nightly light show that beat any Sugar Plum fairy I ever saw. Woodchucks sat with twitching whiskers by the sides of roads, and squirrels the size of badgers darted in the pines.
At the other end of the spectrum were chiggers and tiny flying insects known as no-see-ums. The former lurked in shrubbery until a warm body passed nearby. Then they’d jump aboard, burrow under epidermal layers, and continue a life cycle that could be interrupted only by a thick application of nail polish to the affected areas.
“Ya gotta suffocate ’em,” an Arkansan told us with the grim authority of experience. “Otherwise they keep secreting acid to dissolve your flesh, which they then slurp up. That’s what itches.” The nail polish remedy worked, although I’m happy to say I know this second hand. Mark had colonies in seven places after he climbed on the roof of the Phoenix while it was parked under a low hanging tree.
Chiggers were available any time, and mosquitoes emerged at dusk. No-see-ums and spiders attacked under cover of darkness, all of which meant there wasn’t a moment in the summertime South when we stopped swatting or slapping or scratching.
But we didn’t stop watching, either, and the fauna grew ever denser the farther we got down the long thumb of the Floridian peninsula. By the time we got to the Everglades, the water boiled, the land crawled, and the sky was dappled with birds.
One day, at that crepuscular hour that beasts love best, Mark, Marvin and I took a walk near Cypress Lake, not far from Orlando. In the gathering darkness, we caught sight of an armadillo in the grass. He was trundling along in his little suit of armor, oblivious to everything but the ground in front of his little pointed snout. Two humans and a dog were less than fifteen feet away, but the armadillo noticed not.
Marvin strained and struggled against his collar, eager to make the acquaintance of this plated oddity. The armadillo kept ambling along. He had the air of a carefree whistler, a creature on a safe, familiar path. He snuffled right up to our toes.
As he sniffed our toes, he drew back with the slightest of double takes. “Hmm,” he seemed to comment to himself, “I do believe that’s an unusual smell.” Slowly, slowly, he turned his pointed face upward. At last he made eye contact, and for a split second, man, woman, dog, and armadillo communed. Then a look of consummate terror exploded over his face. He turned, nearly rolled over in his fright, and fled.
We continued our walk and soon arrived at the edge of the lake. The surface was gray and opaque in the gathering dusk, rippling around the air boats and dinghies tied to the dock. We walked the length of the wooden structure and stood at the end. The air was still and humid.
“But the water keeps moving,” said Mark. “I thought it was a breeze at first, but there isn’t the slightest breath of one.”
The water boiled and rippled with a life of its own, a secret submarine ecogalaxy that broke the surface every minute or two with the flick of a tail or the flash of a fin. Once, with sinister silence, the two saurian eyes of an alligator rose in front of us and just as quietly slipped back under the oily surface.
Near the bait shop was a pay phone lit by a single bulb. The light had attracted a fuzzy cloud of gnats so large and dense it rendered the telephone all but useless. “Unless you want a mouthful of insects every time you say something,” I commented as we walked past.
And then I noticed the other tiny pilgrim at the telephone Mecca. It was a small frog, dazzling in its green iridescence, it was sitting on top of the telephone, and sure enough, every time it flicked out its tongue, it reeled it back in studded with a satisfying load of gnats.
“He doesn’t even have to aim,” I said. “He doesn’t even have to try.”
“He’s got real estate with the three most important qualities, all right,” said Mark. “Location, location, and gnats.”
“I’m very grateful I don’t have to use that telephone with my computer,” I’d said. “I’d be debugging it for the rest of my life.”
In the morning, the frog was gone, and a pile of dead gnats lay in a soft drift under the telephone. That night, the frog was back, amid an even bigger cloud of gnats. I like to think that shiny frog is still there every evening, huge now, a giant jewel of a toad, bloated on a lifetime of easy feasting.
We’d just come from Disney World, where gnats are anathema, and the alligators are made of plaster and fiberglass. When Walt and his cronies came to Florida to carve out a fairy land in the jungle, their goal was to beat back the fauna as thoroughly as an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.
We spent a whole day in Epcot Center, and never once did I see so much as a fly. In the evening, back at a campground just outside the Disney ring of fire, we were blanketed with mosquitoes, and a pygmy rattlesnake struck at Mark and Marvin when they went for a walk off the pavement.
The plants are different inside the enchanted zone, too. In real Florida, there are strangler figs and tropical vines and grasses that cut through skin. In the Disney universe, everything is Cotswold borders and marigolds, velvet lawns and pink carnations. The imports love the sun, and all their enemies are kept at bay by battalions of uniformed gardeners and sophisticated insecticide delivery systems.
Disney keeps expanding the borders of its better-than-real-life enclave. We went back in 1997, and a town called Celebration had just opened. It’s a manufactured city built on land reclaimed from swamp and marsh, just like the rest of the Disney empire. Its perfectly proportioned streets were lined with American dreams, storybook houses where Beaver and Donna Reed might spend happy days with a father who knows best. It had a darling main street, too, and a post office right out of Mayberry.
And no bugs. Not a one. No creepy vines, no snakes, and every hint that alligators once ruled had been erased and replaced with apple pie atmosphere imported from Kansas. I can’t say it wasn’t lovely. The houses and shops were so Johnny-comes-marching-home perfect I wanted to come back for Christmas and the Fourth of July. Celebration is a Norman Rockwell painting in three dimensions, and if you never stepped outside its boundaries, you could easily forget that it was built in a swamp.
And the swamp hasn’t been beaten. It lurks around the edges of the Disney realm like an ever-wakeful Argus, waiting for its chance to send in a snake or dispatch an alligator. Celebration, like all the other Disney colonies in Orlando, is an alien fortress built on hostile ground. My eyes took pleasure in the happy verandas and jolly lawns, but they also saw the tropical wilderness lurking at the perimeter. Appearances to the contrary, the swamp things have made only a superficial retreat.
It was that tropical wilderness I found fascinating, not its momentary conquerors. The Disney dynasty is a temporary artifice, and it’s not difficult to imagine the day when its ersatz mountains and plastic pirates will lie ruined in the swamps and marshes from which they rose, a fascinating conundrum for the archaeologists of the future.
A day at Epcot Center and two nights at a campground ruled by a monolithic statue of Yogi Bear were enough to sate my appetite for cartoon-inspired environments. I was ready for a taste of what lay beyond the plaster and pavement. I was ready for alligators and anhingas and mangroves and manatees, for all the denizens of that intermediate zone that isn’t really land and isn’t really sea. We headed for the Everglades, even though it was the time of year when most people head north.
We skirted Lake Okeechobee, a giant circular depression with a perimeter defined by an endless border of trailers and motorhomes. There were gaps now and then created by the summer exodus, but a thick phalanx of breadbox dwellings remained, their wheels having long since rolled to a permanent halt. It was hot and quiet and moist, and we stopped overnight at the edge of Loxahatchee National Wildlife Reserve.
Actually, we stayed at Lion Country Safari, because theme parks have well-appointed campgrounds, and after a steamy day, I was ready for the cool, mosquito-free cocoon that 30-amp power could provide. Resort campgrounds usually offer cable television hookups, too, and industrial strength ice machines. Some have whirlpools and billiard tables in air-conditioned clubhouses.
It’s not surprising. They’re built for retirees and vacationers, people who’ve earned the right to loll and bask and listen to Neil Diamond tapes in Polynesian bars. What right had I to take advantage of such amenities? At best I was a working stiff, and to many eyes, I looked like an undeserving dropout who hadn’t bought enough nylons to merit a place in the sun.
But you know what? As much as I enjoyed my air conditioning that night, as much I liked lapsing into television-induced catatonia with an icy drink at my elbow, it wasn’t enough. It was refreshing after a steamy day on the edge of the Everglades, but it was no rainbow’s end. It held no motivational power over me. It didn’t make me want to go to New York and get a fifty-year job with retirement benefits. My life just wasn’t for sale on the usual terms any more. The big payoffs, house, car and golf course retirement now seemed less appealing than purse and panty hose.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t want to work. I just didn’t seem to have the heart to labor for lucre and luxuries alone. I couldn’t seem to get out of neutral for anything less than the real thing, work that made my heart sing. If I’d been a donkey, my master would have scratched his head. “That carrot on a string trick always worked with her,” he’d say, “but it just doesn’t get her going any more. Don’t know what’s come over her.”
The next morning, we rolled on down Interstate 95, which follows the coast through places with names made famous by the movies: Palm Beach, Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale. We sailed right by Miami and on down to Homestead, the last big town before land gives way to ‘glade.
We had entered the zone where time isn’t measured in years and decades, but rather in intervals between havoc-wreaking winds. Hurricane Andrew had ripped through Homestead in 1992, and residents had erected signs to mark spots where he displayed unusually vehement shows of force. If they aren’t there today, it’s because another child of Aeolus has blown them away and created new landmarks.
Trailer resorts abounded, and we parked in a spot recently vacated by a northbound snowbird. The park catered to tanned retirees wearing Hawaiian print shirts and rubber flip-flops. We looked pasty in comparison, and the Phoenix stood out like a crown roast at a vegetarian buffet.
It didn’t stop us from joining the throng at the establishment’s bar that night. Its Polynesian decor set a high standard. The roof was thatched with palm fans and inside the walls were festooned with weathered nets, cork floats, plastic leis and desiccated marine life. Carved coconuts and rustic totems filled every available surface, and the drinks all came with little paper parasols, even the beers.
The bartender was a friendly blonde woman who rang a ship’s bell every time someone gave her a tip. The bronzed sixty-ish couple next to us were wearing Hawaiian shirts and rubber flip-flops. Their smiles revealed that they were friendly, too.
“Where y’all from?” the man asked, a question I can’t answer smoothly to this day. It’s easiest to say, “Los Angeles,” and let the conversation progress to drive-by shootings, smog, and O.J. Simpson. It’s simplest, but it makes me feel like a liar. I’m not from L.A. any more than I’m from Illinois, where my mother happened to be when I was born.
Mark filled the vacuum left by my pause. “We’re always on the road,” he said.
“Oh, full-timers,” said the man, happy to find a pigeonhole that fit. “We are, too. We spend the winter down here, and then we pull our trailer up to Maine for the summer. We have a spot in a park near Freeport.”
So Mark’s answer is no better than mine, and maybe it’s worse. Nothing is quite so irritating to him as to be labeled a “full-timer.”
“I hate the term,” he says. “If you live in a house, you’re a person, but if you live in a motorhome, you’re a ‘full-timer.’ I can’t stand being defined by my domicile.”
But the conversation in the tiki bar had already wended its way down a familiar path, and the tanned couple was eager to chat. They loved August in Acadia, and Christmas among the palm trees.
“I pinch myself sometimes,” said the woman. “I love my life so much I get to thinking I must be dreaming.”
“I like Florida better than Maine,” said the man. “For me, this is heaven, including this bar. And the music hasn’t even started yet.”
Here I was thinking that paper parasols and freeze-dried fish were treat enough, and there was more. I hardly had time to wonder whether we were in for a Don Ho look-alike or a Blue Hawaii Elvis when a short, fat man in black shorts and red suspenders appeared at the end of the bar.
“That’s Ronnie,” said our neighbor. “He’s fantastic.”
Ronnie was wearing a set of headphones with an attachment that positioned both a microphone and a harmonica in front of his mouth. A keyboard stuck out at a right angle from his waist, attached to his shoulders with a sturdy nylon harness. He was perspiring heavily, and his mass of black hair clung to his flushed forehead in damp tendrils.
Ronnie spoke, and no one within a forty-foot radius could do anything but shut up and listen. He was — how do the sound guys put it? — amped to the max.
“HELLO,” he bellowed. “AND HOW ARE WE ALL TONIGHT?”
He repeated his question until we all shouted “FINE” loud enough to suit him. Ronnie was slowly making his way down the bar, and I knew where he was headed. He was obviously an audience participation kind of entertainer, and we were the new kids on the block.
“WHERE Y’ALL FROM?” he blasted when he slowed to a halt in front of us. This time I didn’t pause. Bar singers with headphones don’t want Zen answers. They want place names, pure and simple.
“California,” I said. “Los Angeles.”
I’d answered well, and Ronnie beamed. He released a salvo of coast-versus-coast jokes and then launched into a lounge lizard arrangement of “I Love L.A.”
“Isn’t he great?” asked our tan neighbor when he was done. And he was great, a truly wondrous marriage of talent and technology. He could even be a deejay without standing in a booth. Just by pushing buttons on a little box attached to his keyboard, he could cue up CDs and insert sound effects. Ronnie gave utterly new meaning to the concept of ‘one-man band.’
We stayed for hours in the tiki bar, chatting with our neighbors and listening to Ronnie’s endless repertoire. Ray and Pat, our tan neighbors in the flip-flops, were full of hurricane tales and alligator yarns, and Ray was dead right. Ronnie was fantastic.
All of which goes to show. Retirement resorts and tiki bars and mechanized musicians may not be my carrot or my cup of tea, but what does it matter whose favorite treat they are, whose beverage of choice? There’s an ancient rule that’s been known to travelers since Odysseus plied the waves. If a new dish is put in front of you, taste it. You don’t have to get the recipe, and you aren’t even required to clean your plate. Just open your trap a little, let somebody else’s ambrosia slip by your epiglottis. Sure there’s a risk. You might choke, puke, go into anaphylactic shock. Chances are, though, you won’t. Chances are you’ll end up pinching yourself. You won’t be able to believe it’s really a wide-awake you enjoying another Mai Tai at a tiki bar with Ronnie on the virtual ukelele.