Apparently the whole debacle is upsetting many peripheral industries. The tuxedo hire people don’t know whether or not to order in loads of cufflinks shaped like Texan boots, which will, of course, be much in demand if Bush finally stands on the podium. I don’t know what the Gore people would hold their cuffs together with. Giant lips perhaps.
Florida is an interesting place. Each of the fifty states has certain laws which are unique to that territory. In Florida they actually took the time to legislate against anyone having sex with a porcupine. My mother was once arrested and brought back in a police car for taking a walk in Miami while heavily pregnant with my sister. This is not surprising when in a place like Hialeh, Florida, ambling and strolling is a misdemeanour.
We were not going to Florida nor indeed were we all that interested in where we were — Newark, New Jersey. We were merely on the way to the Gladys Wedding of the Year in Atlanta, Georgia. As usual, I had many books on the subject. The Fodor City Guide to Atlanta has been compiled by ‘a diverse group of native Atlantians’. This particular tome finds it hard to believe that ‘as late as 1993’, you couldn’t ‘get a decent latte in town’ but then along came the Olympics and Java jubilation.
There is a certain style of writing that is employed when Americans think they need to be formal. ‘No metropolitan Atlanta jurisdiction to date has enacted a restaurant-focused no-smoking ordinance.’ That’s nice, isn’t it?
Lori joined us at the Hilton and we sat planning our weekend away. Certainly Atlanta seemed to offer some strange dining choices. Why not dine at:
‘Eureka! Sitting on the patio at dusk watching the lights come up and contemplating the peace of Oakland Cemetery may seem a strange way to enjoy a meal, but it works.’
‘Watching the lights come up?’ I said.
They floodlight the cemetery,’ explained Lori. She thought it was odd too. We decided it wasn’t for us. We could cope with the dead people but we weren’t sure about the ‘Calamari Dusted in Cornmeal’, heralded as the menu special.
Lori and I had a Hilton breakfast where a very fat young man called Dave was pleased to serve us. He was thrilled that we had learned his name, which we had been clever enough to read on his left breast. It is amazing how few people seem to connect the name tag they are wearing with a customer’s ability to absorb information. We called Dave’s name a lot and got whatever we wanted. I had flown hotfoot from recording at the BBC and was feeling depressed about my weight. I hate sitting in front of TV make-up mirrors trying to decide who that saggy dwarf is staring back at me. Faced with endless encounters with my past I could see what a middle-aged jowly woman I have become. With this in mind, I told Dave that I would have a healthy omelette (white and fluffy according to the menu) with a little smoked salmon in it. When it came it was healthy. It was white and fluffy. It was also accompanied by a small national park of fried potatoes. They were there so I ate them.
Richard had a cold threatening so I dragged him into the Hilton gift shop to seek out a possible remedy. He didn’t want to come. It is a male thing that half the fun of having a cold is the drip, drip, drip of complaining that goes with it. The shop was an Aladdin’s cave of fine souvenir opportunities, including a pewter picture frame shaped like an apple with the word ‘Greetings!’ embossed on it and many relief pictures of points of interest in Manhattan.
The woman running the place was a small Cuban; indeed she might have sold me a small Cuban but she was too busy discussing cold remedies with me.
‘I read all the magazines, you know,’ she confided, indicating the vast array of subject-specific reading matter on the shelves behind her. ‘I know about the health issues.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘My friend needs a nasal spray to clear his nose.’ She shook her head at my ignorance. ‘I won’t sell them. I read about them and I won’t sell them.’
Richard lost interest and left while I purchased a nasal stick without ‘spray facility’. Having decided for herself that Richard was my husband, the Cuban woman became my confidante.
‘You should tell him, you know. Those nose sprays? They cause sterility in men.’
I was hard pushed to think of a man on the planet less interested in the state of his sperm’s procreative ability than Richard. What kind of magazines had the woman been reading? Who researched these things? Isn’t the nose quite a long way from the testicles — at least in the general course of things? It was a thought that stayed in my mind.
The whole trip was turning into a lesson in service and the modern myth that it is somehow being provided. The Hilton had thoughtfully laid on a shuttle bus from the hotel to the airport. Just a word of warning to any potential travellers — it doesn’t go to any part of the airport anyone actually wants to go to. Lori took charge as we got on.
‘We need to go to E,’ she told the driver.
‘I go to B,’ said the man.
‘E,’ said Lori.
‘No, not E. B. Where you want?’
‘E.’
‘I don’t go there.’
‘How do we get there from B?’
‘You used to take the monorail,’ said the man.
‘Okay, good,’ said Lori, and prepared to sit down for the journey to B to catch something else to E. The man waited till she was settled.
‘But it ain’t working.’
Lori looked at him. ‘So how do you get there?’
The man sucked on his teeth. ‘I believe there’s a bus.’
‘A bus from B to E?’
It was my turn to lose interest. I was beginning to think we should take a taxi. I mean, I knew the bus was free but it was a curious service that dropped you somewhere you didn’t want to be.
‘I guess I could take you,’ said the bus driver finally. This seemed kind but not wildly out of his way. When I had opened the curtains in the morning I’d realised that the hotel had practically been built on the runway. Some other people got on the bus. They wanted to go to E as well and the driver didn’t say a word. We had saved our companions hours of amusing banter.
We got to E, where a fantastically helpful man with a desk on the pavement said we could check in before we even entered the building. Richard and I were impressed with this and thrilled at the speed with which he got rid of our bags. We moved off to go inside for some retail therapy but Mr Helpful stopped Lori.
‘It’s normal to give a tip,’ he said, suddenly less helpful and rather cross. He forced some unwilling dollars from us. Why would you get a tip for doing the job you are paid for? No one has ever offered me a tip for anything except to suggest I might do something else for a living.
I had told the others I wanted to go early to shop. There were no shops. Newark airport was under construction. Curiously it was also run by BAA — the British Airport Authority. This struck me as an irony. Britain, the country from which freedom seekers fled in the seventeenth century, was now helping to make their travel arrangements. The place was a modern maze of hoardings proclaiming how fantastic it was going to be. How many dozens of shops there would be at ‘mall prices’. You could tell it was all British because there was no work going on whatsoever. The shops would come but in their own good time.
We flew Delta Airlines to Atlanta. Delta now has a commendable policy of having ‘mature’ stewardesses. These matronly aunts are supposed to look after you. We were very tired and had been given Eva Braun for our needs. How she survived the bunker to harass us I’ll never know. Still, the flight was cheap. You could tell it was cheap when you boarded the narrow plane and saw a trolley with dozens of white paper bags containing our in-flight ‘snack’. Eva threw a bag at me, which contained an apple, a bottle of water and a very wet white roll with one slice of tomato, half a lettuce leaf, a see-through piece of ham and a fantastically yellow piece of cheese. I extracted the cheese and ate that. I least I think it was cheese. I dropped the bag in front of me and on my way to the loo I stepped on it. Dining at a cemetery was beginning to look like a viable option.
&n
bsp; Atlanta airport, by contrast to where we had flown from, was enormous. We seemed to walk back to Newark to find our luggage. The signs for baggage reclaim were a little confusing so we spent some time wandering around the concession stands representing foods of the world. It was an amazing place. You could live there for some time and never visit the same country’s cuisine twice.
We finally picked up our stuff and jammed it into the red convertible Lori and I had planned to hire the moment we knew we were heading South. It was a fine car and it would have been fun to drive with the roof off. We set off in the pouring rain. The city was obscured by fog and mist but the conference centre we were seeking appeared in no time. It was a pleasant, modern place done in something Lori called ‘prairie style’. Wooden squirrels and woodland creatures crawled over a giant wall. The staff were genial and jovial. Gino, a handsome young black man, showed us to our rooms. He had some genuine ability at providing service but then he was not a real bellhop but a pre-law student at the university who really wanted to be a television ‘anchor’. Yet another job that never came up when I was a kid.
I was nervous that we might suddenly run into Leslie. I couldn’t think why we had decided to do this. I felt fat and old; I was worried that she wouldn’t know me or that she would be shocked by me or something. Leslie had left us a note that she and her groom-to-be, David (surname Pratt — I hope she doesn’t change her name), had organised a bus to take us to the wedding later.
We had sort of missed lunch so we had quesidia and buffalo wings (it’s chicken — I don’t know why) as a snack in the club lounge. Lori now thought she was getting a cold and wanted some boiling water to take a hot lemon powder. The bartender was grumpy, probably because he was an actual bartender and not someone in career transit.
‘I have coffee only.’
‘Don’t you make that with hot water?’ I asked.
‘I don’t have hot water. The food comes from the kitchen.’
‘Presumably they don’t have hot water either. I mean, that could come with the food … from the kitchen … which we ordered …‘ I tried and realised I was being annoying. ‘Do you have tea?’
He eyed me with irritation. ‘I don’t have water for tea. I have coffee.’
We all had coffee and sat watching a giant TV. Some woman was espousing hateful and homophobic viewpoints. Apparently, she is called Dr Laura and is famous in America for doing phone-ins where she solves the world’s problems. Reap and you shall sow. It seemed she was having problems. She has come down hard on the gay community in the past and now they were coming down on her. She is not a medical doctor at all but has a Ph.D. in physiology, which I think is a bit like knowing a lot about gym. The largest religious group in the state is Baptist and much is made of its historical escape from religious intolerance. The TV also covered the fact that the Georgian Baptist Convention was taking place in town. They too were full of anti-gay rhetoric. It seems that religious freedom is only for those who agree with the establishment. Religious intolerance may have been something to escape from but it was also something to pack in the bag and bring along for the ride.
I turned my attention to my maps. Atlanta is located cheek by jowl with Athens, Rome and Birmingham. You do wonder how difficult it would have been for them to think of a name of their own for a new town. Perhaps the many pilgrims had other things to worry about. The only original name I had found was Cabbagetown which, the guidebook told me, got its name after an amusing incident when a cart carrying cabbages overturned in the street. Must have been a heck of a slow news day.
After all, tomorrow is another day.
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
Georgia was the last of the thirteen founding colonies of the United States. Named after King George II, it became a state on 2 January 1788 and has many claims to fame. There is, for example, Blakely, Peanut Capital of the World and home of the last remaining Confederate flagpole; Ashburn, where you can see the largest peanut in the world; Athens, home to a one-of-a-kind double-barrelled cannon, designed in 1863 to fire two balls connected by a chain; Brunswick, ‘World Center for Processed Seafood Dishes’; Gainesville, Poultry Capital of the World and Calvary, where every autumn they celebrate Mule Day. I was quite keen to head out to Sandersville, ‘Kaolin Center of the World’ but only if it were twinned with somewhere leading the world in morphine. Some of the places had given a little more thought to their new name such as the small town in the County of Bulloch called ‘Hopeulikit’.
Following my lessons on New York from Rita’s daughter, I can tell you the following;
Georgian State bird — Brown Thrasher
State Tree — Live Oak
State Mineral — Staurolite (Fairy Stones)
Flower — Cherokee Rose
Insect — Honeybee
Fossil — Shark Tooth
Fish — Largemouth bass
Wildflower — Azalea
Gem (1976) — Quartz
Game bird (1970) — Bobwhite Quail.
This last one presumably doesn’t apply in Albany, Georgia, which is the self-styled ‘Quail-Hunting Capital of the World’.
The Civil War between the South and the North still rankles with the locals. Like many Southern states, Georgia used to depend on cotton production for its livelihood; a production made possible by the many slaves owned throughout the state. When in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln declared the emancipation of all slaves there was bound to be trouble. Seven Southern states, including Georgia, seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. Soon there was war, the Civil War, known to Southerners as The Great Unpleasantness’, in which 125,000 Georgian troops fought. Huge and bloody battles raged at Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga and Gettysburg.
Lincoln was killed two years later — shot to death at the Ford Theater in Washington, DC, by an actor called John Wilkes Booth.
Typical actor’s question — ‘Yes, Mrs Lincoln, but what did you think of the play?’
Since that time and the loss of the war, Georgia has been mainly Democratic but is still an odd mix of political beliefs. It brought America Jimmy Carter, the Democrat too principled and I think good to be elected twice. It was the first state to extend full property rights to women (1866) yet it fêted men like Lester G. Maddox. Maddox, a successful Atlanta restaurateur, closed his business in 1965 rather than comply with a federal court order to serve blacks. Instead of being reviled, he went on to become governor two years later. Then, two years after he left office, Atlanta became the first US city to elect a black mayor. Make of all that what you will.
Atlanta, itself (the correct pronunciation is to drop the last ‘t’ and say ‘At-lanna’), is the capital of the state. It lies in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a few miles south of the Chattahoochee river. (Boy, the Native Americans knew how to name things.) It exists entirely because of the railway. It was like this. Back in the early 1800s there was a small city called Zebulon. It lay about fifty miles south of the present capital. Here lived one Samuel Mitchell, a leading light of the community. One night a stranger, Benjamin Beckman, stopped at Mitchell’s farm and was offered shelter. As is often the way with house guests, Beckman became ill and stayed on. When he was better he declared a liking for one of Mitchell’s horses to help him continue with his journey. Now Mitchell wanted Beckman out of there but he didn’t want to trade the horse. So Beckman said that in the recent ‘Indian Lottery’ he had won Lot 77, a piece of land in the wilderness near Fort Peachtree, fifty miles north, which was worth $41. Beckman traded the land for the horse.
Meanwhile, the Western and Atlantic Railroad was expanding. They wanted to join up in the South with the line from Savannah. According to the engineers the perfect spot for the terminus was in the middle of Lot 77. Sam Mitchell, who could have made a fortune, gave the land to the state in 1842. He declined to have the place called Mitchellville but there is a street named after him.
The terminus had no name. At first they tried naming the
place after William Lumpkin, who had been state governor and head of the railroad. But Lumpkinville didn’t roll off the tongue, so they tried Marthaville, after his daughter Martha. It was officially adopted but it seems the people didn’t like it. Two years later it was called Atlanta. It appears no one knows why. Maybe it was a feminine part of Western and Atlantic.
The South lay before us and Richard, Lori and I were deter-mined to explore, so the next morning we headed out. The day began as an odd exercise in non-communication. Gino, the nice bellhop who is pre-law but wants to be a television anchor, had been trying to help me but it was hard. Our back left tyre on the rental was slightly flat and we needed to pump it up before heading out.
‘Do you know where the nearest petrol station is?’ I asked..
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘Are you taking the bus?’
I could not think why anyone would take a bus to a petrol station. There was surely nothing, not even on special offer, that would make the journey worthwhile. He had misunderstood me. We did not speak the same language.
There was much landmark history in the area but we decided instead to drive forty minutes north to The Largest Flea Market in the South’, It was a tough call as we could have visited The World of Coca-Cola and amused ourselves as suggested in their leaflet by ‘guessing how many bottles there are on the assembly line’. Instead we headed for the Pendergrass Flea Market. Their leaflet had a sure ring of success about it as the place was advertised as providing both ‘Heating’ and ‘Air-conditioning’, although presumably not at the same time. For those of you who want to travel in our footsteps, it is ‘conveniently located on I-85 at Exit 137, US Hwy 129’. Apart from Highway 129,1 have no idea what it is convenient for.
Gladys Reunited Page 13
