BMFRTE Day 6: St. Louis

Wednesday, 8/22, 830 a.m., Holiday Inn parking lot somewhere south of Chicago on I-55:

From Ed: "We wake up (in the car, mind you) shortly before 830 a.m., after about 1.5 hours sleep. I am a mess. We get back on the road, and I pass out again. We have to stop every hour or so b/c if not, Gus will fall asleep. We get hungry at about 11 a.m., so we pull off into this little town. The town seems nice, but there is literally no one on the streets- Gus and I both think that this is very Stephen King-ish. We stop to eat at Bearden's Family Restaurant, which is just a trailer on a corner; the restaurant/diner is the trailer. Awesome."


If you're ever in Divernon, IL, check out Bearden's...











My thoughts on the matter: I'm nearly unconsciousness, and definitely starving. I am fantasizing about eggs and bacon. We sit down and look at the menus, and create personalized breakfast heavens. By the time the waiter comes to us, it's 11:07. So when we start to order breakfast, he points out that breakfast is only served until 11. We are devastated. I in particular am flirting with getting up and trying to make it to the next town to try and find breakfast, even if it means risking dying in a fiery wreck. Ed, who has been asleep since we got back on the road, is more calm about it.

A few minutes later, a large guy comes out of the kitchen, and says he's the cook, and asks us if we really want breakfast. I explain that I want breakfast in the same way that a man dying in the desert wants water. He says that although it's past time, since we're the only people in the restaurant, he'll cook breakfast if that's what we really want. I resist a sudden urge to kiss this man full on the mouth, partly because it's really not that much of an urge, and partly because I don't think they like that kind around these parts.

Soon enough, we're eating a breakfast that couldn't be beat: scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon, hashbrowns covered in cheese, toast, juice, coffee (for Ed). We ate like there was no tomorrow. Total bill, for both of us: $12.50. God, I love small-town America. I left $20 because paying less seemed like a crime.

Behold the Bearden family. The dude in the gray shirt earned our undying affection by cooking for us.









After our glorious meal, we gassed up and headed back on the road toward my grandpa's house.
Central Illinois. You can tell it's not Nebraska (later in the trip) because there's corn and trees.









Since we're back on the road, I pop in today's road trip mix- 8/22/07: Always Coming Home

1) Your Children - Pomona College Blue & White
2) Homeward Bound - Simon & Garfunkel
3) On My way Home - Enya
4) Solsbury Hill - Peter Gabriel
5) Cheers - Original TV Theme
6) Home - Michael Buble
7) Down in the Boondocks - Billy Joe Royal
8) Popular - Nada Surf
9) Reunion - Indigo Girls
10) St. Louis Blues - Etta James
11) Happy Home - Paula Cole
12) Silent All These Years - Tori Amos
13) Fast Car - Tracy Chapman
14) Red Dirt Girl - Emmylou Harris
15) White Trash - Southern Culture on the Skids
16) A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall - Edie Brickell
17) House That We Used to Live in - The Smithereens
18) Losing My Religion - REM
19) Show Me the Way - Styx
20) The Whiffenpoof Sons - The Whiffenpoofs

We get to my grandpa's in the mid afternoon, and hang out with him while my mom drives out to pick us up. We're leaving the trailer here for a week while we do the second stage of the BMFRTE. While we're visiting, my grandpa does what he does, which is, tell bizarre but entertaining stories. He's been all over the world. For some reason, he's telling us about winters in Buffalo, NY, where the snowdrifts were so high, they had to use augurs to dig out the roads.

At this point, I'm like "What's an augur?" Ed doesn't know either. My grandpa's explanation: "Well, you know, an augur, you know, it augurs. That's what they do. They augur. It's an augur you see. It just... augurs." He looks at us helplessly.

Now, I'm not the best tutor in the world, but I'm pretty good, and sometimes I wonder why I'm any good at all at it. I mean, that explanation of augur is pretty middle-of-the-road in terms of clarity in my family. And then I think that perhaps it's precisely because of this that I'm any good. You have to work so hard to understand what the hell anyone in my family is trying to say that you learn to break things down into bite sized pieces and then re-assemble them into a coherent picture.

From Ed: "Gus's grandfather is awesome- he's 90 years old and can't walk very well, but he's sharp and hilarious. He loves the Cardinals, and every now and then he let's out a "damn" or "shit" or "sons of guns". The guy is great. Then Gus's mom shows up to give us a ride back to her house where we're staying tonight."

The sign...















... and the river













Back in the home country!










"She is nothing like what I expected, but she is nice. We all sit around for a while, and then we leave for Gus's mom's house. When we get there, I head down to the basement where I'll be staying, and the basement (as I was warned it would) smells like shit- literally, cat shit."

OK, time for an explanation. Cat shit, well, there's a cat. And it shits. Cats shit. That's what they do. 'Cause they're cats. And they... shit.

Sorry. Let me try again. Growing up, my dad hated animals. Really hated them. In his defense, bear in mind that he grew up in the jungle in southern India, in a house that had "doors" in the sense of doorways, and "windows" in the sense of square apertures in the walls, but there were no physical doors or windows, and anything could wander on in at any time. As of 1989, when I was there last, this was still the case (although there was electricity by then, an improvement over our visit in 1979). Consequently, there's always wildlife in the house: lizards roam freely and in large numbers, insects as big as lizards have to be regularly killed or evicted. I think my dad, by the time he had come to America, viewed anything alive and non-human as a plague to be eliminated from the home.

Consequently, we didn't have pets in the house. Fortunately, my grandma had a farm, and I got to have nice childhood experiences running around with cats and dogs, catching frogs, lizards, preying mantises, etc. on the farm. But my mom, who had spent a chunk of her childhood on that farm, I think always had a desire to have a pet. So, when my dad had his stroke in 1996, he lost not just the ability to speak, use the right side of his body, etc., he also lost the ability to veto shit like pets. So my mom got herself a cat, a female cat named Hobbes.

As you probably already know, cats are all a little crazy. Your average cat has a certain level of craziness to it. Using that average craziness as a baseline, "normal" if you will, my mom's cat is fucking nuts. I mean, totally sociopathic. Sometimes you'll just be lying on the sofa reading, and she'll come into the room, come over to you, stare at you a while, then start to make little purring noises and arch her back like she wants to be petted, and then, without warning, suddenly throw herself to the floor and look up at you hissing, with all her hair standing on end. So far you've done nothing at all, possibly not even acknowledged her at all. Naturally, she has interpreted this indifference as an act of overt hostility, and will stalk off, giving you a murderous stare and growling loudly.

"But Gus," you say, "why not just acknowledge her? Cats just want attention." Oh, you naive thing. My mother's cat, like all neocons, has an aggressive doctrine of pre-emptive military action, and acknowledging her, or worse yet, making any move toward her, identifies you as a clear and present danger that will be met with her full feline might.

But the real drama occurs between the cat, and my dad. They hate each other. I mean, they really hate each other. Their mutual hatred is so passionate and deep that it makes Zionist-Jihadist hatred seem no more serious than when Nacole and I would argue about whether we were going to watch Desperate Housewives or Law&Order. (Just to be clear, I was arguing for Law&Order). As long as my mom is home, they settle for murderous glances at each other and occasional hissing. But as soon as my mom leaves, they settle into their most cherished pattern:

The game begins when the cat comes into the dining room and jumps up on the dining room table, in clear view of the chair and table where my dad sits either watching TV or doing puzzles. Immediately, my dad notices and waves his cane at her and hisses. She ignores him. He does it again. She ignores him. So my dad starts to get out of his chair. Since my dad has almost no ability to use the right half of his body, he accomplishes this by slowly rocking back and forth on the edge of the chair, until he has enough momentum to use his left hand to give the final push to a vertical position, leaning heavily on the cane (one of those canes with the 4 feet on it). This process takes more than a full minute.

Now vertical, my dad turns toward her and hisses again. She ignores him. So my dad starts heading over her way, quickly reaching his top speed of about 6 inches per minute. She ignores him. Slowly my dad approaches, bearing inexorably down on her like a murderous glacier. She calmly starts to wash her fur. Eventually he gets close enough to whack her with the cane. To do this, though, he has to achieve the balance necessary to use the cane as a blunt instrument. Which, by the way, is extremely dangerous for him to be doing, since if he falls over and no one is there, he will be stuck there on the floor until someone comes home and finds him. But whatever, he'll risk an ignominious death on the dining room floor if it means a chance to finally kill that damned cat.

But sadly for him, in the time it takes him to achieve balance and start to lift the cane, she will look up from her washing and pretend to notice him for the first time, and then jump down off the table and take up a position about 4 feet away. And so begins a cycle where she will ignore him again until he can almost whack her, and then move off again.

Unfortunately for my dad, he's too slow to ever catch her. Unfortunately for her, she's a cat, which means sooner or later she gets tired and needs to take a nap. But there's no place safe on the upper floor of the house. If she naps anywhere, my dad will close in and whack her. So eventually, she's forced to retreat to the basement (my dad can't do stairs) to find a safe place to nap. That's when my dad will shuffle over to the basement door and close it, leaving her trapped down there for the rest of the day, until my mom comes home and liberates her.

The problem for me, and Ed, and anyone else who's ever stayed in the guest room, which is downstairs off the basement, is that the cat bitterly resents being imprisoned every day by my ogre of a father. And she expresses that resentment by pissing and shitting on everything in the basement that she can. Except, of course, for the litterbox. And that's why our basement smells like cat shit.

Cousin Anne comes over, and we all have homemade chicken curry, and then it's off to the Cardinals game.

Busch stadium- the finest Busch you'll ever have the pleasure of getting inside.











Tonight's game is the St. Louis Cardinals versus the Florida Marlins. Or, put another way, my team against Ed's team. On my home field. One of us is definitely going home tonight seriously bummed out. And one of us is going home rubbing the other one's face in it.

My old friend Kate and her husband Jimmy meet us at the stadium, and we make our way to our seats...

It's a beautiful night for a ball game. And look, the scoreboard shows us up 2-0 in the first, on Albert Pujols' home run.











It's an exciting game, up and down the whole way, but in the end, the good guys prevail, 6-4, as you can see here:


Note Ed's chagrin. But it's OK; I am a gracious winner. I probably won't rub it in for the entire trip...










After the game, we walked around downtown for a bit, and then off to Ted Drewes, for the best frozen custard on earth. In Ed's words, "fucking delicious".


Ah, the hometown...












Important note: seeing the Adams Mark Hotel in the background of this pic reminds me to remind you never to use hotel ice machines unless they're dispensing freshly made ice. When Kev and I were 16 and bored, we would roam around the city doing stupid shit, including going to the Adams Mark and getting into trouble. One of our favorite pastimes was pissing in the ice machines. Whatever reaction you're having right now, all I can say is: certain things make sense when you're 16 and bored that make a lot less sense when you suddenly think of them again 19 years later.

Finally, to bed, in the cat-shit-smelling basement. But it's nicer than sleeping in the car. We have to get up early tomorrow, for our morning flight to... Vegas!