As always, we'll use an outline and chapter approach. I'll list each day of the endeavor, plus a quick overview. Then I'll go into more details on each "chapter:"
I. Thursday October 27: The Interminable Journey
A. O' Mountain, Where Art Thou?
1. The Shades that Didn't
F. The Late Night Dinner at Vickery's
1. Matilda the Hun
A.) O' MOUNTAIN, WHERE ART THOU?
We eventually encountered the Great Smoky Mountains, where most of us with rural origins have visited at one time or another. The daylight hadn't quite started to fade yet, so we could see some pretty inspiring peaks bulking against the sky. I was riding shotgun with Gena at that point, allowing Jennifer to suck a few snores in the back seat. So Gena asked me to take a picture of a particularly vivid mountain that was directly in front of us. How do you hide a mountain? Well, somehow it's possible, because by the time I "Forrest Gumped" my way around the operation of Gena's digital camera, it had completely disappeared! In fact, I kept the camera in my lap for about 8-12 minutes, waiting for that mountain to reappear, but it never did. In actuality, we'd turned a corner somewhere and it had gotten lost behind some trees alongside the road. But one wouldn't suspect a mountain could hide behind a tree. Sheesh, chalk up another one for artistic perspective!
Naturally, a lengthy, 540-mile road trip required periodic stops, so we could part with some liquids and take in others. And I think one could travel to Endurance Crater on the planet Mars and find a McDonald's lurking beneath the iron-oxidized regolith. So we didn't have any trouble finding one partway on our journey. Jennifer and I had been subsisting on water up until that point (more on that below), and decided we were entitled to a large iced tea while we were there. As we went to the cashier's line, we had the misfortune to witness an irate customer, angrily dry-heaving acrimony at one of the employees, because of a botched order. The woman was a landmass. Yes, she was quite geologic in terms of space consumed, a porcine persona of epic proportions. To beat all, she had a set of facial features like a pre-chewed wad of tobacco and the personality of a gas station toilet. As we stood and watched her disgorge her negativity at the harried cashier, we marveled at the depth of life's cruelty, that someone could be rendered so ugly both outside and inside, so angry that her only sense of fulfillment was harassing an underpaid McDonald's employee. Gena had noticed that she had ordered two big-ass, greasy burgers for herself and she had removed the lettuce (the only healthy part) from at least one of them.
Of course, to Bad Pork's credit, we found the cashier to be a bit bovine in his presentation. When we ordered our tea, he gave us a blank look and seemed to have trouble grasping the concept of take money-give order. When we paid, we had a measly two pennies coming back to us, which he didn't bother to give us. I was willing to let it go, but Jennifer persisted in asking him why and he said he didn't have any pennies in the drawer. Well, I had to agree with Jennifer that he could have at least told us that instead of just keeping our money and acting like nothing happened. We didn't know if he had had his consciousness altered by illicit substances, or if he was just plain dumb. Either way, we were glad the location of that Mickey D's was a transition point and not our destination. It does make you wonder though, how many travelers stop in our home city, take a look at us and feel just as thankful they don't live where we live? :-/
As the trip progressed, we became a pretty sorry lot. I had started out with some gut problems, what I suspected was a mild belly flu. It caused a little nausea, but mainly, it had more intestinal consequences that I will not detail here. What it meant was that I didn't want to eat anything while we were on the road for fear of how fast it would bullet through my system. Meanwhile, the closer we got to Charleston, the more Gena's head opened up at the top and party streamers flew out all over the car; she was experiencing eager anticipation of her arrival in the city of her honey, while feeling the increasing toll of the long drive. Jennifer had been up since 5:00 a.m., having worked the early shift at the Richmond Register; even with the snores she sucked in the car, she was beginning to feel like an ice cream scoop left too long in the company of a fat man. It had been a long time since I yearned for teleportation technology as fervently as I did then.
Those who have read these types of narratives before know that Jennifer and I keep a map of the continental United States, on which we stick shiny colored stars over the cities where we've visited. Charleston was a new one to our experience, so we reveled in the fact that we'd soon have a new star to add. Green would be our star of choice.
Charleston is one of the older cities in the country, with a large harbor that was once the shipping point for exporting various goods (including cotton) and importing slaves. The architecture and culture are very "Deep South," with bizarre pastel colors on the houses and business buildings. Plus it looked old, with quaint deterioration characterizing the worn stones and cobbled streets. Three centuries of wind, salt water and the occasional spurious hurricane have given good character to what they haven't destroyed. We knew when we arrived that our time would be limited; my employer had agreed to reimburse many of our expenses because I was attending a conference on the use of hypnosis and biofeedback with chronic pain. Ergo, we didn't plan on doing any major tourist site seeing. We basically intended to enjoy the fresh seafood that is characteristic of that area, do some easy walking and spend some social time with Gena and her boyfriend Jim (aka "Mr. Boston" or "Mr. B").
But that's getting ahead of the story....
Arrival at the Renaissance Hotel turned out to be a mixed blessing. Unlike our previous experience of the Drury Inn in St. Louis, this hotel was uniformly annoying and difficult to navigate. From the time of our arrival to the time of checkout, we were plagued by several inconveniences that weren't debilitating, but they made life harder than necessary.
The first example of such an inconvenience was the set of window shades that didn't. Maybe I'm just a podunk Kentuckian, but I feel that something like the operation of drapery should be pretty self-evident. But it took us two days to figure out how to keep the curtains from letting crisp, Southern sunshine into our room while we tried to sleep. Even after we did get the damn things to shut, they still let in a sliver of light that was enough to be distracting. I ended up having to stretch the curtains like canvas across the sun gap, and then using our luggage bag to hold them closed. *Snort*
The bathroom was kind of disturbing in its own right. Oh, it was stocked quite well with unique facial and body soaps, mouthwash, shower caps and so forth. And the tub had a great, deep Southern design, made for long bubble baths with one's significant other. But it didn't have a lock. That's bothersome, as even with one's marital partner as a roommate, there is some need for privacy and security. Jennifer and I quickly agreed to an honor code that if the door was closed, one of us was in there, so don't open it. The problem was that when the cleaning crew departed, they always left it closed. So that made for some interesting potentially awkward moments; fortunately, nothing ever actually happened, so it was worry for nothing. But it made me wonder about the people attending the conference who roomed with work colleagues, rather than spouses. The other major problem with the bathroom was the placement of mirrors. Specifically, it had a full-length mirror right in front of the toilet and the shower. There are some positions where I do not care to see myself and can't imagine there is anyone who would. We ended up hanging a bathrobe over them throughout most of our stay.
Finally, there was the "nickel and diming." We've concluded that probably all ritzy hotels operate for people who are not budget-conscious; in other words, people not as poor as us. We were there on the generosity of my employer, but even still, there were costs to consider. And it did seem like this hotel went out of their way to peck us for coins. For example, there were no indicators as to which supplies in the room were courtesy and which were extra. When we found a bigass bottle of spring water sitting next to the coffee, for example, we assumed it was free, just like the coffee. Wrong. They ended up billing us $4.50 for what would have been $1.75 at Kroger. Worse, for some reason this hotel charged $10/day just to park Gena's car in their garage!! Since it is nigh impossible to stay in a hotel without parking the car one uses to get there (and we saw no other parking options), it makes for a captive price gouge that we felt was unfair. Just like the bottled water, the hotel never mentioned that this was extra until we received the bill on the last day. *Harumph!*
We got our stuff settled at our room and met up with Mr. B, who would act as our local guide to Charleston throughout our time there. His first act as said guide was to escort us to a local eatery known as Vickery's. At last! We'd come prepared for the delicious food, and I for one, had waited more than nine hours to put something in my stomach. Ultimately, the food we ordered was divinely blessed, just as Gena had promised us. Jennifer and I both ordered hacked-up hunks of cow flesh that time around, preferring to hold off on the greater seafood until later on…it was going on 11:00 p.m. by that point and we were also quite tired. Of course, Jennifer couldn't help herself and lobbied for an appetizer of shrimp, which also lived up to its reputation. There is no substitute for shrimp that you know was just recently pulled out of the sea, and that doesn't have that "fishy" flavor that we've now come to associate with age and transportation to landlocked regions. Mr. B recommended some of the regional beers as well and they were unique to our taste, though we didn't latch onto them right away. Then again, there's only one beer in my repertoire that I didn't have to learn to like. I wish now that we had purchased a case and brought it back with us, as I'm sure that I could really have become a fan of some of their choices.
Unfortunately, the service at Vickery's was not the equivalent of the delectable cuisine. Mr. B let us know that he had never been treated so poorly there, and he speculated that it was probably because of the lateness of the hour. I referred to our dumpy, less-than-amicable waitress as "Matilda-the-Hun." She wasn't out-and-out rude, mind you, but she was very distant, perfunctory and didn't want to hear our entire order before running to the next table. Maybe she was just tired and ready to go home.
Before we left, Gena pointed out a young Asian girl who seemed to be dressed for "night-clubbing." She was wearing what appeared to be tight-fitting vinyl shorts under which we could see her black undergarments. The young Empress likewise wore those calf or thigh high boots with the heels the size of a bread loaf. Gena, Mr. B and I watched her as much as we could, while Jennifer envied the fact that we could watch her at will while she couldn't turn her head to stare without being obvious.
We ended the first night by going our separate ways. Jennifer and I stayed up a little while at the hotel, had a few more of the drinks we brought with us, then went to bed.
A. 540 Miles to Find a Hick
Jennifer and Gena met me during the conference lunch break and we journeyed to a restaurant called the King Street Grill. What was amusing about the encounter was that our waitress turned out to be from Huntington, West Virginia, which is about 30 miles from where I grew up! Yes, my mother works there, I bought many a comic from their local mall...it was funny to travel so far only to find someone who was basically from the same area as me. It had been a long time since I could tell someone I was from Grayson, Kentucky, and feel confident they would know where that was. Usually, I just say Ashland, since it's the nearest city and borders the Ohio River (a recognizable landmark, even for someone out-of-state). The meal itself was delicious, but boring for a story. I should mention, however, that when it comes to iced tea, no one has the perfect recipe like the Deep South. We tried it in the North, specifically Chicago, but they just don't have the same flair. In the South, the tea is like me...bitter, but smooth, with a great body.
Neither Jennifer nor Gena get much opportunity to do "girly" things with other women, so while I returned to the conference, they had plans to go out and do some shopping. I know they planned to hit the local Victoria's Secret, for underwire products, et.al, but have no details on the rest of their day. I'll turn this chapter over to Jennifer to fill in:
Jennifer: After we dumped Thomas back at his conference, Gena and I looked at each other with glee in our eyes. Finally, we had a few precious hours to ourselves, without our men, to wander around the shops, gaze at clothes we couldn't afford and perhaps buy a thing or two we didn't really need (but that our men would enjoy watching us show off later). Because Gena visits Charleston somewhat regularly to spend time with Mr. B, I let her be my guide.
We walked down to a lingerie store called "Bits of Lace." It had lots of dainty things, but with not-so-dainty prices. Then we walked down to Victoria's Secret to buy some things that were actually within our budgets. We laughed, we giggled, we tried on sexy bras, and we both bought some. We wandered around other shops, too, and managed to find some Christmas gifts for various relatives.
An interesting thing I noticed was that everyone was dressed stylishly. I just wore jeans and a short-sleeved shirt to wander around the shops on a Friday afternoon, but I saw women with high heels and skirts, jeans and boots, scarves and leather jackets. I saw men with the jeans, turtleneck and jacket look. And I noticed how healthy everyone looked. Many people were actually dressed to work out or were out for a run, and many others looked like they worked out regularly. It was quite unlike what I see in Kentucky. It was definitely a nice city to take in some eye candy.
I finished the conference and joined Jennifer for the rest of the afternoon. Then we reconnoitered at Mr. B's place. He had several good experiences lined up for us, the first of which was our experience of sushi, Charleston-style.
M'Wow!! The Japanese restaurant was known as Tsunami, a highly ritzy place with a fish tank that had exotic fish swimming around in it. The lighting was dim, the waitresses elegantly (and sometimes erotically) dressed. The fresh seafood again made an appearance, as our sushi dishes were absolutely fantastic. Jennifer in particular was smitten with their brand of shrimp egg roll, with which she would have had sex if she could; yes, she did love them that much. As has become my ritual, I ordered some of the edamame, the steamed soybeans that can be eaten straight out of the shell. Naturally, we had a couple of good Japanese beers, since strong food requires strong drink.
Mr. B had suggested we attend a play being put on by one of his friends. The show took place in an old building that had once been a cigar factory and which now housed both a theatre and law school. Maybe it's only in the South that such an incongruous juxtaposition could be possible. Anyway, the play itself had a simple structure, basically three actors, five characters, about 5-6 acts and very surreal transitions. The dialogue was characterized by a bunch of sentence fragments, as the characters were grappling with a deep, controversial issue, one that stirred within them a stymieing emotional ambivalence. The plot involved a young man who encounters an exact twin of himself in public one day. When he confronts his father about it, he learns that he is in fact a clone of that very twin, who is four years his senior. Ultimately, without going into other plot details, it is about a father's guilt for past wrongs, one son who was victimized by those wrongs and the innocent clone whom the father commissioned to replace him so he could start over. It was a simple show, yet elegantly managed on what appeared a shoestring budget that still managed to stir one's own deep uneasiness on the topics of identity, continuity and existence itself. Well worth the $15 fee.
After the show, we joined the cast and a group of Mr. B's work colleagues for another go at Vickery's. Matilda-the-Hun was there again, but we were fortunate in that we didn't end up with her this time. Instead, we had a much more animated waiter, who regaled us with stories of other customers who made him the butt of their jokes by saying they were trying to pick him up and take him back to their place. We had another couple of drinks and asked for our respective checks. That's when we learned that because we had sat close to the group table, they had lumped us together as a party and attached an automatic 18% gratuity to the bill. Mr. B found this to be an unfair charge, since each of our checks only had two people on them, but we ultimately let them have it and left. Everyone was tired that night anyway, so the evening broke up. We went back to the room and fiddled around with the movies-on-demand feature until we found the movie, Kingdom of Heaven. We watched that, had several more drinks and went to bed pretty late.
A. Call Me Cornholio
A.) CALL ME CORNHOLIO
I made it through the second part of the conference by purchasing a coffee at the resident Starbuck's, located within the Renaissance Hotel itself. I think I made a mistake in ordering, because I first asked for a large iced latte with an extra (fourth) shot of espresso. They told me they only had the mid-size, which comes with only two espresso shots, so I agreed to that size with an extra shot. That should have been three shots total, but I suspect she still put four in there, because when she filled the cup, there was only room for a splash of skim milk. The concoction was slate gray, which should have cued me that something was afoot.
Zoing!! My tongue met a wall of bitterness that felt like I stuck it into a dead tree stump. My caffeinated eyes leaped open of their own accord and had a dryness like I was standing up with my head out the top of a speeding dune buggy, grinning into the wind like a loon. With great willpower, I prevented myself from pulling my shirt over my head so I could walk around the hotel screaming, "I'm Cornholio! I need TP..."
After the conference was decisively over, Jennifer and I decided to walk on our own down to a Mexican-style restaurant called Moe's for a big, fat lunch burrito to cram down our esophageal passageways. The place had cuisine much like Qdoba or Chipotle closer to home. Unfortunately, getting the food meant braving the teeming throngs of humanity that were stuffing the streets and hemorrhaging out of every shop front. Jennifer and I are neither one fans of large crowds, especially not in the downtown region of any city on a weekend. Charleston is a quaint little settlement, with a long history and generally beautiful seaside weather; ergo, it is a draw for crowds, because it is easy to walk, has lots of tourist attractions and plenty of shopping. And this was a Saturday afternoon.
I thought I was going to die.
Yes, for 15-20 minutes, we swallowed other peoples' elbows, walked up ambling, herd-like buttcheeks, swerved into the streets of oncoming death-on-wheels, ducked, rolled and avoided, and finally shoehorned ourselves into the door of the restaurant. Inside, it was even more hectic, with long lines, people mashed like wet mice in a bag against each other and orders flying back and forth over our heads. We ordered two of something called "Joey Bag of Doughnuts," which were not doughnuts at all, but burritos. It took forever, we felt rushed and compressed and ultimately, like we'd been rolled in a flour shell ourselves and then bitch-slapped with a snow shovel. The trip back to the room was more of the same, though by that time, a Zen-like sense of inevitability had settled over me. We watched a woman almost kill her kid with her indifference, while waiting to cross the street...the little bastard didn't have patience for the light like everyone else, and traffic was zinging through that intersection. After each car, he would say, "after this one" and then make motions like he was going to run across the street. Mom stood there holding three boxes of pizzas up her butt while yakking with a friend. Eventually, the kid went right across, with a car coming straight at him. Our mother-of-the-year's response? "Oh, honey, don't do that, they can't see you." Soft spoken voice. Pleading. Distracted. Return to previous conversation. That kind of parenting allows kids to be a corpse when they grow up.
But you know what? After all of that headache, Jennifer and I stuffed our faces with tri-athletic dedication. It turned out that the crowds, the headaches, the multiple desires for death to end the suffering...all worth it. The burritos were astoundingly tasty, spicy and fortifying. They put hair on our chests. Once again, the South didn't disappoint, for the assload of tea we procured was rich and strong like all the rest. Really, methinks you can't get a bad tea down there.
With our guts stuffed with Joey Bag of Doughnuts, Jennifer and I decided to settle in for a nap before we rendezvoused with Gena and Mr. B for dinner and Halloween celebration. The caffeine coursing through our systems was telling at that point, because it took forever to fall asleep, and then...OINK!! We slept for 3-4 hours, sucking more than our share of snores. Someone, somewhere must have had insomnia trouble from all that sleep we stole. But it did rejuvenate us and allow us to enjoy the rest of the evening.
And that evening had something special scheduled. It was time for our seafood dinner! Yes, we'd dabbled in some various dishes at this point, but this night was set aside for true, fresh seafood, Charleston-style.
We went to a restaurant called A.W. Shuck's, where Jennifer and I split a bowl of she crab soup (apparently a specialized delicacy that one can only get in that area), along with a fish fillet, a few oysters, shrimp and fries. Everything was delicious, except for the shelled oysters. Mr. B went another step and ordered a plate of fresh oysters...and when I write "fresh" I mean fresh. Not right out of the fishing net fresh, but close; they were cooked briefly and put on a plate while still in their lumpy, gray shells. He pried them open with great delight, sucking out the goo inside with orgasmic relish. Jennifer's and mine weren't in the shell, but we thought they tasted like fishy mucus, with a slight hint of what it might be like to lick the bottom of the ocean. They weren't bad, mind you, and as Gena said, the earthy flavor really did give you a sense of being close to the planet. But that texture was just too far outside our comfort zone. As with every other meal, though, this one was exquisite. We'll never look at fish the same way again; or mucus (ew!)
No, we weren't out to score any illicit street drugs, but rather one of the well-known crafts of that region. Some of the locals weave these neat baskets out of "sweetgrass," and then offer them at various prices at the local city market. One of my work colleagues was telling me about them before I left, so I decided one of them might make a good Christmas gift for her. The market was a pretty hustling place, though by the time we got to it, the crowds were dying down (yes!) They offered everything from buttloads of those baskets to bead necklaces, crystal knickknacks, rugs and various forms of clothing. I found the perfect basket, which was $35. The vendor told me that she'd sell it to me for $30 if I would take it right then, to which I agreed. Unfortunately, when I offered my credit card, she hiked the price back up $5, because she said the fee for using credit would amount to that. So I pillaged my cash supply and got it at the cheaper price. I suppose I can't really blame her for that. The basket is high-quality workmanship, though of little practical utility. Then, one doesn't buy crafts for their utility anyway; they're purely aesthetic.
A moment of reckoning came when we discussed Halloween plans. Jennifer and I, especially Jennifer, had put quite a bit of time and expense into this year's Halloween costumes. Mr. B had worked frantically to find some sort of costume venue going on in the city and things had looked bleak until the day we arrived. But we were all tired and it was getting colder outside. The venue cost $20/person. It began to look increasingly more daunting to go through with it. So we took a vote and decided it made more sense just to hang out, have some drinks and see the city at night.
Our decision made, Mr. B resumed his role as guide for the city by taking us at last to see the ocean. By this time, it was almost completely dark and seeing the eastern coastline was an unreal experience. Mr. B pointed out that we were not, in fact, seeing the ocean directly, but the harbor. He pointed to a blank, dark spot off to our right where no electric lights were in evidence against the blackness, and said that the ocean was that direction. It was a pretty phenomenal, to be near the sea in the dark. The stars were brighter by several orders of magnitude, the planet Mars was beaming on the horizon and a couple of dolphins frolicked and blow-holed nearby. In the technological vein, a gigantic decommissioned supercarrier sat quietly on the water, while the distant lights of Fort Sumter flickered against the waterline. Toto, we weren't in Kentucky anymore. That was a brief, but magickal time, when everything seemed to stop and we were all just at peace. Om, om....
B. Bad Pork at Mickey D's
C. Gut Flutters, Slap Happy and Gritty-Eyed
D. The Blue-Star City-Arrival in Charleston
E. Renaissance Hotel-Rebirth or Afterbirth?
2. Bathroom Blues-Mirror, Mirror Before the Throne, Show Me Why I'd Like to Go Home
3. Pay Us Twice for the First Time
2. The White-Hot Asian Empress, or, It Takes One to Tanga
Gena, Jennifer and I took off from work early in order to get ourselves on the road as quickly as we could. This was going to be a 540-mile Odyssey, one that would consume nearly nine hours of travel time. Fortunately, the trip was basically uneventful for the first few hours, though Gena did remark that she never feels like she makes any progress until she crosses the Kentucky state line into Tennessee.
B.) BAD PORK AT MICKEY D'S
C.) GUT FLUTTERS, SLAP HAPPY AND GRITTY-EYED
D.) THE GREEN-STAR CITY-ARRIVAL IN CHARLESTON
E.) RENAISSANCE HOTEL-REBIRTH OR AFTERBIRTH?
E.) THE LATE NIGHT DINNER AT VICKERY'S
II. Friday October 28: Stagger and Sway
B. Giggling Girls with Sexy Smallclothes
C. Tsunami Down the Gullet
D. Clones, Clones, Bob-Bop-a-Dee-Bop
E. The Ungracious Gratuity
Okay, perhaps "few more drinks" amounted to more like "several," or maybe it was just that we arrived so late, went to bed even later and I had to be up before 9:00 a.m. for the first conference on chronic pain, hypnosis and motivational interviewing. But I climbed painfully out of bed, feeling like a sack of potatoes that someone left out in the sun too long and then urinated on. I was tardy to the conference, but despite how I felt, it did teach me quite a bit. Such lore would only be interesting to another person with a psychology background, so we'll skip it and move to the rest of the day.
A.) 540 MILES TO FIND A HICK
B.) GIGGLING GIRLS WITH SEXY SMALLCLOTHES
C.) TSUNAMI DOWN THE GULLET
D.) CLONES, CLONES, BOB-BOP-A-DEE-BOP
E.) THE UNGRACIOUS GRATUITY
III. Saturday October 29: Woozy, Boozy Thoughts
B. Joey Bag of Dumb-Butts
C. Hibernation Oinks
D. Orgasmic Beach Snot
E. Buying Grass Off the Streets
F. Enchantment at the Harbor By Night
G. $2 a Swallow!?-Pedantic Chatter, and Me Telling You This
H. Clubbing with Ed Norton and Johnny Depp
Did I say "several" drinks? Perhaps I should have said "too many." I awoke the next morning feeling even worse than the day before. Jennifer told me she'd had to manhandle me to my place on the bed. I think it was exhaustion as much as alcohol, as I really don't drink the way I did in college...
B.) JOEY BAG OF DUMB-BUTTS
C.) HIBERNATION OINKS
D.) ORGASMIC BEACH SNOT
E.) BUYING GRASS OFF THE STREETS
F.) ENCHANTMENT AT THE HARBOR BY NIGHT