When people describe the “happy, content, Middle America,” Branson is the first place I will think of from now on. It’s clean, it’s family friendly, it’s a really great time and a fun vacation destination. Seriously, I mean it. I ended up having just as interesting an experience in Branson as I did in Las Vegas.
As we finish up our last night in Branson and end up drinking yet more Bud Lights and singing random songs yet once again, it all starts feeling like a little family. This book, these people—Michael, Stephie, and Cousin John—we are all on this weird, crazy trip together in the dead of summer and none of it feels accidental. I think we are all starting to feel like we are on a mission together. At the end of the night, Michael bashes his knee into a snare drum as he steps onstage to join the band and sing. Stephie and I laugh so hard tears start rolling down my cheeks. Just good clean fun. Good clean fun in Branson, Missouri.
What a country.
Memphis, Tennessee
Black and Blues
Meghan: If you do not believe in climate change, or that our planet is in any way having extreme weather issues at all, I suggest you take a road trip in an RV without substantial air-conditioning across the South next summer. This summer isn’t just hot, it is steamy. It is muggy. I am sweaty to the point where the underwire of my bra is soaked with sweat by midmorning. I am from Arizona and have a high tolerance for heat; however, the heat is so oppressive this summer it is bordering on tragically funny.
Michael, Stephie, and I are all constantly perspiring—many days Michael has visible sweat stains everywhere on his T-shirts. Makeup seems more and more pointless because it just comes off halfway through the day. Stephie’s cheeks are an adorable rosy red pretty much the entire time. And Cousin John, forget it. That boy is just glistening from morning to night, are ya’ kidding me? It is absurd. Any decorum regarding any of us attempting to look presentable has officially gone out the window as we crawl deeper into the South.
Though let’s be honest, Michael doesn’t care about looking presentable when he goes on late-night television shows, let alone while cross-country touring in an RV. But I am now following his slovenly lead, rewearing my clothes, or more specifically, the same pair of jean shorts with rotating tank tops. Part of me likes it. There’s something liberating about giving up on caring about one’s personal appearance. I resisted as long as I could but it is absolutely egregiously, gnarly hot. Memphis in July may just be the peak point of heat saturation.
Michael: We arrive in Memphis after about a six-hour drive from Branson. Meghan’s big idea was to stay at the Heartbreak Hotel, right across the street from Graceland. For weeks, she’s been after Stephie to make sure we’re booked there. Yes, yes, Stephie assures her. Meghan insists it’s going to be amazing. As we get close, though, she is having second thoughts.
“It might be a dump,” she says. “Sorry.”
And it kind of is. Not North-Little-Rock-Red-Roof-Inn dumpy, but not that much better. The small lobby is all purple and gold, and a couple of blown-out TVs play old Elvis movies. Cousin John seems particularly transfixed by Blue Hawaii, in which the King sings and surfs while sixties hottie Joan Blackman shakes her coconuts at him. There’s Elvis stuff everywhere. There’s an Elvis gift shop, Elvis music plays nonstop, and the hotel bar is called, of course, the Jungle Room. It’s almost as bad as Yakov’s gift shop. Despite their best efforts to disguise it with memorabilia, the whole place is dingy and beat up, more Fat Elvis than Thin. I can deal with it for a night if it makes Meggy Mac happy.
She looks around and says, “Gross.”
So nobody’s going to be happy. Whatevs.
We’re visiting two Tennessee towns, the black one and the white one. Memphis and Nashville. Memphis is the blues. Nashville is country. Yes, Elvis lived in Memphis, but he was more of a black performer than a white one. That’s why so many black people hate him: he stole his whole act from them. To quote the great Chuck D.: “Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me.”
Black-white racial tension is an impossible, unbridgeable fact of being American. It just is, and pretending otherwise is delusional. There’s nothing mysterious about its cause: white people enslaved black people for a few hundred years. That’s a difficult speed bump to cross on the road to racial harmony.
Most Americans like to think of themselves as open-minded, tolerant, and free of bigotry. I think most Americans are full of shit. I include myself in that statement.
First of all, I always have racial awareness. If I meet an African American, my first conscious thought of that person is his/her race. The thought is unbidden and unwelcome, but it’s there. I notice a person’s race before I notice anything else, even before their boobs! Second, I tense up when I meet black people. The tension is due, I think, to a special social phobia, the fear of doing or saying the wrong thing. Which, of course, I have done.
A perfect example: I once hung out at a restaurant with the former New York Knick Charles Smith. Smith was a six-foot-ten power forward during the Knicks’ 1990s heyday. At that time, I zealously followed the team and was thrilled to meet the guy. I had a vague memory of Smith being involved in the NBA Player’s Association and asked him about his time there. He told me that, yes, he had been a regional representative, which led to me ask if he’d ever considered getting into broadcasting because during those times when I’d seen him speaking for the Player’s Association, I’d found him to be very “articulate.”
As soon as the word fell out of my mouth, I wanted to run. “Articulate” is one of those loaded words white people patronizingly deploy as backhanded compliments to blacks, as if a person’s skin color would make them less likely to be able to string together a thoughtful sentence. Charles graciously ignored the remark and continued to engage me for a few more minutes, after which I ran into the public restroom and gave myself a swirly.
Of course I didn’t mean anything: he was articulate. But my fear of falling into those sorts of rhetorical potholes feed that tension I have, the fear of doing something wrong or insensitive, and, underneath it all, the fear that I might be an actual bigot.
As a result of this tension, I find myself overcompensating around African Americans, being deliberately kinder and more giving of my time than I would with whites. If a black dude wants to hang out with me after a show, for example, I am far more likely to do that than I would be with a white dude. Honestly, I’m not that friendly: I don’t want to hang out with anybody after a show, but when a black guy shows me some approval, my heart does joyous backflips. Isn’t that just as racist as feeling the opposite?
Call it “white guilt,” call it whatever, but it’s there and I hate it. I suspect African Americans experience this tension too, although I have never spoken with any about it. Race is the most difficult topic for us to discuss as Americans, harder to talk about than politics, money, or religion, because it cuts to the core of who we are, the foundational, unkept promise of America: that all men are created equal. No they’re not. Not here.
White guilt is maddening because I feel implicated for crimes I had nothing to do with. None of my ancestors even arrived in America before the twentieth century. Yet I still feel lingering guilt for slavery. Hell, I feel guilt for Columbus! Why is that? Why do we drag the sins of our forefathers around with us like Marley’s chains? At least I’m not German. I have no idea how they deal with that.
Meghan: It was my bright idea to stay at the Heartbreak Hotel right across the street from Graceland in Memphis. My good friend Piper recommended it. She’s an Elvis superfan to the point where she paid five thousand dollars for a lifelike Elvis ceramic statue that now sits in her living room. On different holidays she dresses Elvis in matching festive décor. She also has a line from an Elvis song, “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You,” and the date of her wedding anniversary tattooed on her forearm.
I have been to Graceland numerous times throughout my life, but I have never stayed at the Heartbreak Hotel. It was Piper’s excitement
over the heart-shaped pool that made me insist we stay there. I mean, a heart-shaped pool; who wouldn’t want that?
To put it nicely, the Heartbreak Hotel could use a facelift. It’s pretty run-down. I was expecting more of a Disneyland Hotel experience: sparkly and clean with shiny gold ceramic floors shaped like a gold album and Elvis impersonators greeting you in the lobby. No such luck. The Heartbreak Hotel is basically your average motel with a cool purple-velvet couch in the lobby, Elvis movies playing on an old television, and, yes, a heart-shaped pool.
My room is a little run-down as well, but there are pictures of Elvis hanging above my bed and working air-conditioning, so I’m not going to complain. I guess I had just gotten spoiled staying at the Chateau in Branson.
We all check in and go into our routines—shower, check email, possibly tweet, change clothes (which at this point means a non-sweaty tank top); Michael puts on his Crocs, Stephie calls her fiancé, and we all meet back in the lobby. There is rarely any time for anything else. It’s like taking a break in your bunk at camp, with no chance to actually wind down.
There’s been a lot of talk from Michael about Memphis being “the black” city we’re visiting in Tennessee. Yes, from my experience, Memphis is more culturally diverse than a lot of cities we have visited and, yes, there are a lot of black people here, but I’m surprised that it’s something Michael keeps talking about and obsessing over.
That said, it’s crazy to think that it’s only in the last sixty years that the civil rights movement took place, resulting in the election of the first black president in 2008. This is the thing: talking about race makes me uncomfortable. I don’t mean in the “I want to turn the other cheek and pretend racism doesn’t exist” way. I mean in the “I think it is still, even today, an incredibly loaded and sensitive subject.”
Have I had any real experience with racism? The only thing I can claim fully is that my little sister, Bridget, was adopted from Bangladesh in 1991, and her skin color is a lot darker than mine. I barely have any memories that come before Bridget’s arrival. As clichéd as this may sound, I truly have never seen her skin color as any kind of barrier or even really that much of an issue. In fact, the only time I can recall being specifically aware of it was when we went shopping for baby dolls as little girls and my mother bought Bridget several dolls of different skin colors to play with. And there was a time once when we were at a hair salon and I asked someone to get my sister and they came back saying they didn’t see her, and I had to clarify that we do not look alike and that she has black hair. Stuff like that, but nothing that was ever a hugely large incident growing up.
I don’t even know how to properly explain this other than my mother says that when she brought Bridget home we just accepted her as our sister. The only questions seemed to deal with Mom’s stomach not getting bigger. Bridget and I shared a room growing up, and we loved and fought as all sisters do. We used to play tricks on my brothers and fight over who had to get up earlier to use the shower first because we also shared a bathroom. I would tease her for having such tiny hands and she’d tease me about being so short. We would have dance-offs in our room and sing along to the Cranberries. Normal sister stuff.
There is no way to explain it other than Bridget is my sister, she’s always been my sister, and I believe God brought her to my mother and us as the final missing piece in our family. I love my sister in every way, and I simply cannot imagine my life without her. She is my partner in crime, the equalizer against my two brothers. She is a piece of me and I of her. I always get angry when anyone makes her race an issue and, of course, from time to time people have.
The one time that really mattered, that left an everlasting painful mark on my and my family’s lives, though, was during the 2000 presidential race, when Karl Rove started an underground whisper campaign about my father, alleging that Bridget was “his illegitimate black love child.” Yes, sick, fucked up, a disgusting and embarrassing scar that will forever remain on presidential politics and South Carolina history. I was furious, upset, and heartbroken when it happened, and even now if I think about it, it makes me want to vomit. Karl Rove is a pathetic excuse for a human being and has never publicly apologized for his cowardice and culpability for what was said about my little sister in South Carolina during the 2000 race. So am I aware of and have I had experiences with racism and race baiting? Yes, I can honestly say that I have. That incident will forever be a part of my family’s narrative and my little sister’s life. It is a permanent reminder to me about the dark and evil side that politics can sometimes have and that, unfortunately, our country can sometimes feed into.
Michael: Memphis sports a modest strip of bars and restaurants running about five blocks along Beale Street. It’s got a festive look, lots of neon signs, and wailing harmonicas blasting from bars, but the area is pretty dead. One of the bars is offering walk-up Jell-O shots, so I order one for everybody. Stephie doesn’t want hers so I take it. I’ve never had a Jell-O shot before because it seemed like something only sorority girls did, but I knock mine back and then gulp Stephie’s. I think about ordering a third but Meghan seems to think I’ll collapse.
“That’s some serious shit,” she warns me, and I think I detect in her tone the barest trace of awe. Yes, friends, I double-fisted strawberry Jell-O shots because that’s the kind of hard-living man I am.
Across the street, a blues band is playing a set outside. It’s not a formal concert space, just a concrete area between two bars. The audience comes and goes and is fifty-fifty white tourists and black locals. The two groups self-segregate, with the whites closer to the sidewalk, the blacks closer to the band. I don’t know if they’re aware that they’re doing it; it just sort of happens like that, the way salad dressing separates if left alone too long.
There are a lot of Republicans, and at least one prominent Democrat (Geraldine Ferraro), who argued during the 2008 election that the primary reason Obama was gaining so much traction was because of his race. It was a strange argument to make: that a black man was succeeding in his quest for the presidency precisely because of his race and not in spite of it. Furthermore, it’s an argument I happen to agree with.
I don’t think Barack Obama, freshman senator from Illinois, two years removed from being a state representative, would have been elected to the presidency if he were not a black man. A similarly qualified white man would not have gotten the nomination. My question: is that a bad thing? Americans wanted so much to put our troubled racial history behind us that we were willing to hand the presidency of the United States to a guy who, no matter how smart and—I’m going to say it, ARTICULATE—was probably not ready for the job.
That said, I don’t think we would have elected him if we did not feel him capable, or had he not spoken to our deepest desires about who we wanted to become as a nation and how we wanted to portray ourselves to the world after eight years of a Brooks Brothers cowboy in the Oval Office.
For the record, I voted for Obama both in the general election and the primaries, and I would be lying if I said my vote didn’t have anything to do with race. It did. Electing Barack Obama was an important step for the country, an affirmation of our hope (and change) for ourselves. It was something we needed to do, and I’m glad we did it even when he acts like a total wuss.
Meghan has wandered off by herself so she’s missing the band, who are great. The singer is one of those classic bluesmen, growling and shouting and mopping his head with a white rag. The band behind him churns away, the white people keep time vertically, the black people horizontally, swaying instead of bopping. It’s a small thing, I guess, but I can’t help but I notice. When the band passes the hat I put in ten bucks, then Stephie and I wander off to meet Meghan for dinner. (I would like to point out that Stephie doesn’t put any money in the hat because she is obviously a racist.)
Meghan: Downtown Memphis or “Beale Street” is kind of like a weird hybrid of Bourbon Street in New Orleans and the Broadway strip in Nashville, except sma
ller and with blues bars instead of country bars. We have been doing our fair share of drinking on the trip, or more accurately, I have been doing a fair share of the drinking on the trip, and eating pretty much total crap the entire time. The best it seems to get is pulled-pork BBQ and pretzels, so I am starting to feel really bloated. That combined with the heat, and I don’t know how I am going to brave another night hitting the Jack Daniels. Michael kicks off the evening by buying Jell-O shots, and slamming two.
“You should be careful they aren’t filled with Everclear, because that stuff will knock you on your ass,” I sort of half-yell at Michael as we slowly start walking away from the outdoor stand selling the shots.
“They aren’t filled with Everclear,” Michael answers without even turning around, then looking at me dismissively. I secretly hope they are, as I have yet to see Michael really wasted, and I’m getting sick of him and Stephie just watching me get tipsy by myself. It’s starting to make me feel self-conscious, and besides, it isn’t that fun to get my buzz on alone.
As we make our way farther and farther down Beale Street, we stop to watch a blues band playing on a small bandstand in an open concrete area. We are not the only tourists there; in fact, there are quite a few standing around listening to the music, bobbing their heads, and sort of half dancing. The band is really good. They display the sort of raw, entrancing talent that may be common to places like Memphis, but a rarity everywhere else. The three of us stand around, also half dancing, clapping a little, and listening to the music.
At some point Michael wanders off to the other end of the area and dances by himself, completely fixated on the lead singer of the band. I wonder what is going through Michael’s mind. Don’t get me wrong, the lead singer is extremely talented, but Michael looks so fixated, I wonder if he’s never seen a live blues musician before. This is the thing about Michael: traveling with him is kind of like traveling with a kid at Disneyland who wanders off if you don’t watch him or keep him entertained. He complains about me texting too much, but most of the time I’m just killing time, waiting for him to wander back around to find me. He also lacks a little bit of chivalry. I am incredibly spoiled; my father, my brothers, my grandfather, ex-boyfriends, agents, friends, friends’ boyfriends, they are all pretty much chivalrous men. I love men who treat me like a lady: opening doors, ordering drinks, offering me an arm when I’m wearing high heels. Michael isn’t really like that. It’s neither here nor there, but I have a tendency to get very nervous in large crowds. I chalk it up to spending an entire childhood at political rallies and encountering a few too many crazy people at them. When Michael wanders, my anxiety spikes, especially if we’re someplace I’ve never been. I’m sure he doesn’t do it on purpose, but it drives me absolutely crazy. I’m not saying I need looking after like a child, but if I’m going to go on the road with a full-grown man, I prefer he be a little more considerate of the two ladies traveling with him.
America, You Sexy Bitch Page 22
