So, here's a modern-day slacker version of the Faust story*, which I hope my friends will appreciate:
- Dude is standing around, probably at the mall waiting for his girlfriend to get off work at the food court.
- Dude gets to thinking about his life, living over his mom and stepdad's garage, working part time data entry for the telephone company. Dude concludes that life, which sucks, is both annoying and boring.
- Dude's girlfriend totally shows up with some other dude who has a mullet and a bicep tattoo of some stupid dragon, and is all like, "We're totally over."
- Dude is seriously bummed. On the way back to his mom's garage-top hideaway, his ride, a Delta '88, breaks down. A Scientologist approaches, maybe it's even whatever his name is, Xenu, or whoever. Xenu is all like, "I've got something that'll turn your life around." Dude is like, "Will it cure my learning disability?" Xenu's like, "Whatever, get in the back of my spaceship."
- Pact is sealed in blood, because Xenu's a freak like that.
- The next day the dude is discovered on the street and in six months time, his name is Tom Cruise.
- Tom Cruise marries Nicole Kidman, is at the top of his game for a couple of years, gets too full of himself, divorces Nicole, calls Matt Lauer and Brooke Shields a pair of dicks, jumps on a couch and shouts at Oprah, converts a nice little Catholic girl to Scientology and outs himself as being a bag of mixed nuts.
- The rest of us wait for the Scientologist (who in this version is actually Satan) to come and get his due from the big-headed, hurricane of hubris that is Tom Cruise. (That could totally go on the back of his robe, if he ever becomes a lightweight boxer: "Hurricane of Hubris")
So down here, as I've touched upon a number of times, the ultimate tale of a failed pact with the devil is Robert Johnson, whose grave is either in Greenwood, Quito, Clarksdale or Morgan City. And everybody claims him as their own, so that makes the facts more than a little hard to come by--but legend reads better than facts, don't it?
Anyway, so I'm back in Greenwood, is more or less what that long interlude was trying to suggest.
*Kind of.
**
I only drove a couple of hundred miles today, between Little Rock and here, the Alluvian Hotel in the middle of Greenwood. Greenwood is more or less the opposite of Clarksdale, and most of it is due to the Viking Range Corporation, which is one of our advertisers in my other life at the magazine. Viking, which is headquartered here in Greenwood started a hospitality arm that includes a Spa, the Mockingbird Bakery (where I had truffled fries, marinated green salad and an out-of-this-world gourmet grilled cheese for lunch), a restaurant (more on that in a minute), the Viking Kitchen Store and this beautifully appointed hotel, which I feel lucky to stay at.
(Did you catch that? The hotel is owned by the Viking Corporation? Viking?)
A plug for the southern Delta: I know Greenwood's not really much of a destination if you're from the north, but I have to say, it's such a quaint, picturesque place I could imagine spending more time here in town. If you're not familiar with the south, this seems like a good place to start--a couple of hours between Memphis, Gulfport, Little Rock and Atlanta, just down Highway 49 from Clarksdale, and full full full of that famous Southern Hospitality.
So tonight I ate at Giardina's, the restaurant attached to the hotel, which was opened in 1936 (the year of Robert Johnson's first recording session in San Antonio, TX, which is completely unrelated, but come on, work with me here). Forget what you know about Italian pronunciation; down here they say it "Gardenias," which is kind of quaint to my Girolamo-influenced ear. I had a king's meal, and for significantly less than I did at Craftsteak in Vegas, but with far, far more atmosphere. For example, I could hear myself think. Terrific.
I had made a reservation because the extremely lovely people at the desk had told me in passing that the restaurant only had 14 booths, which is more or less the size of Salsa Salsa back home. Although it's Wednesday, I don't fool around when it comes to fine dining. I started with crispy oysters, served with a jalapeno tartar sauce. I had been asking about trying crawfish, but I chickened out at the last minute; when the waiter came back to bring my salad, he also brought a small plate with three crawfish tails on it, "on the house," which was awesome. They're like shrimp but with some other aftertaste, kind of like... I dunno, mussels? The little tang that steamed mussels have? Kind of like that.
Then I had a green salad with "Comeback" on it, which is like a spicy Thousand Islands dressing. Then came the 8 oz. ribeye, which was lean and flavorful and topped with sauteed mushrooms. I also got a baked potato on the side, and managed to finish like half of it, surprising even myself. Anyone can tell you that while my palate is wide and my tastes are adventurous, my stomach is small and I never finish a meal, unless it's a bowl of soup.
But tonight I splurged because they had my favorite dessert: bread pudding drizzled with an aromatic Bourbon sauce. They even had my favorite kind of tea, a second-flush muscatel Darjeeling. I left completely stuffed, a feeling that's been alien to me on this trip, but completely satisfied.
Oh! But the coolest part! The restaurant was moved into the hotel from its original location a few blocks south of here two years ago. The 14 booths are separated by seven-foot-high beadboard walls and curtains--I was in 9A. A few restaurants in the south still have this; it's a holdover from the moonshine days during Prohibition, and it was totally helpful as I plowed my way through Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guaralnick, which I picked up at the bookshop across the street when I got into town today. The privacy was nice. I eat alone at restaurants a lot and sometimes you just don't want people staring blankly at you while you try to read. That happened in a faceless town in Oklahoma, in a Pizza Hut that was apparently the place to be, when I was starving and exhausted and still 150 miles from Amarillo. I was finishing Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road and it was like they'd never seen anybody read and eat at the same time.
Misc.:
- Crossing the Mississippi in the daytime was awesome.
- I saw a dog in the median of Highway 65 today, looking both ways, waiting for cars to pass. After they passed, he trotted safely to the other side. I saw the same thing in Oklahoma yesterday. Weird?
- Hurray! It's really Christmas now, because Adult Swim is playing "A Very Venture Christmas" right this very moment! Nothing says "birth of Christ" like the Venture Brothers. ("Why didn't he wish me a merry Christmas?... Nobody wants a Dean-in-the-Box!")
- It was 65 degrees when I got here today. Cloudy, but beautiful. I didn't even wear a jacket when I explored the main streets around town. Gonna make Long Island's 30 degrees quite a transition.
- Shin Chan on Adult Swim is possibly the most disturbing show in their lineup.
- This may be a day late and a dollar short in terms of insight but: While I was away, Roger Clemens was confirmed as a 'Roid Rager, as I always suspected, that jerk. As the offspring of a natural bodybuilder, I have this incredibly complicated negative view of steroids and the people who think they enhance anything meaningful. In fact, I have considered starting my own line of anti-steroids clothing. I'd call it "Natch" and it would have slogans on tee shirts that would embarrass my mother, highlighting the... um... notorious physical side effects of steroids. Since I never thought the Yankees should have acquired Clemens in the first place, I feel somewhat lamely vindicated. Clemens has got the crazy eyes like my arch nemesis, Jason Giambi.
- Get ready for a lot of photos of this room...
Cotton on the side of the road. Arkansas, south of Dumas (which the locals pronounce Duh-miss).
Lake Chicot, which is leveed against the Mississippi.
The Mighty Mississippi!
"It's Like Coming Home."
Greenville, the first town over the bridge from Arkansas.
Crossing into Greenwood over the creek, which is actually a slough, which I learned in my travels are little tributaries that usually fill up only after heavy rains--that goes for the west. In the southern Delta, they're filled up most of the time, as are the ditches dug on the sides of the roads, so be careful to stay off the shoulders of the highways.
When I first got there I ran around the room and made little "Eeee! Eeee!" noises like I was watching the Beatles's helicopter land at the World's Fair grounds.
Leather headboard and pillowtopped mattress! And down pillows!
The prints on the wall are of bayous in the Delta.
Handsome, no?
My own little office.
Look at the floor!
The coffee is from Wolfgang Puck.
Looking toward Howard Street.
The Viking Cooking School.
The kind of research you do in the Delta. Pictured, top to bottom: A set of postcards of turn-of-the-century posters featuring magicians and conjurers; Bob Dylan's "Modern Times"; Robert Johnson's "The Price of Soul" compilation; William Faulkner's Collected Short Stories and Peter Guaralnick's Searching for Robert Johnson.
Day 16:Little Rock, Arkansas - Greenwood, Mississippi
Mileage: 207
Total Mileage: approx. 7,000
(I have to check the tripometer--there are two, one which I use to record the daily trips, and a second which has the total tally, which is the correct number. But I've tried to break it down daily to give you all a breakdown of what my driving days are like--I just keep forgetting to reset the tripometer or I reset after I've gone a few miles, so the total is the only real way to know for sure how far I've gone. Full report tomorrow, once I've remembered to look.)
Click for every Dylan lyric ever (except, oddly, the lyrics to "I'm Not There"--odd because of the Todd Haynes movie about Dylan that's out right now, includes the song and takes its name from the title):
I'm gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Bob Dylan - Blind Willie McTell
No solid plans for tomorrow; I'm hoping to make it to Asheville, North Carolina, which I hear is adorable, and an easy drive from here. See you on the flipside!
Greenwood trivia, from Wikipedia:
- Greenwood is one of the few places in the world where you can stand between two rivers flowing in the opposite direction: the Yazoo River and the Tallahatchie River.
- Legend has it that the Leflore County Courthouse in Greenwood stands on Choctaw land once used for rituals and sacraments.
- The City of Greenwood is named after Choctaw Indian Chief Greenwood Leflore, who negotiated the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek with the U.S. Government.
- Cottonlandia Museum in Greenwood houses furniture from Chief Greenwood Leflore’s mansion Malmaison, which was destroyed by fire in 1942.
- Greenwood known as the Cotton Capital of the World and boasts the second largest cotton exchange in the nation located on Cotton Row.
- The Tallahatchie River in Greenwood contains relics of the Union side-wheel steamship, Star of the West, sunk to prevent passage of the Union flotilla, led by General Ulysses S. Grant, to Vicksburg.
- Walter "Furry" Lewis was born in Greenwood in March 1899 and became the first bluesman to record the bottleneck method of playing guitar.
- Keesler Bridge in Greenwood is a swing bridge of the Howe Truss design and a dedicated Mississippi landmark.
- Helen Keller gave a speech about happiness in Greenwood on March 29, 1916 (Unfortunately she was unable to hear the applause.)
- John Phillip Sousa conducted a concert in Greenwood in 1930.
- Robert Johnson died and was buried just north of Greenwood in August 1938 and now has three memorial gravestones set across the county in his memory.
- B.B. King, King of the Blues, was born near Itta Bena at Berclair in Leflore County in 1925 and initiated his career in the mid-1940s on a broadcast over Greenwood’s WGRM [then located at 222 Howard Street - upstairs (now home of the Greenwood Blues Heritage Museum & Gallery)] as guitarist for the St. John’s Gospel Singers quartet from nearby Indianola.
- In 1944, Time covered the Greenwood Mule Race, attended by over 5,000 people.
- Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman graduated from high school in Greenwood in 1955.
- Young Emmett Till's abduction from the home of relatives at Money, Mississippi (just north of Greenwood) and subsequent murder in August 1955 sparked the civil rights movement.
- Little Richard sang a song titled, Greenwood, Mississippi and William Eggleston captured his photograph Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973 there.
- The movies Home from the Hill (1960), The Streets of Greenwood (1962), Ode to Billie Joe, The Reivers, Mississippi Masala, and The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag were filmed on location in Greenwood.
- Greenwood sites used in the filming of John Grisham's “The Chamber” include Webster’s Restaurant where you can sit and eat steak and seafood on the same barstool as Chris O’Donnell.
- The largest Bible-binding plant in the nation is Norris Bookbinding located in Greenwood.
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