THE RIVER

Tales of Southern Discontinuity, part I, the final chapter

The first river I encountered was the Missouri river. Perhaps it is this river more than the Mississippi that divides the West and the East. More like west of the Mizzou is really the West, east of the Big Muddy is really the East, in-between no one knows. You can say whatever you like, can even say a void, a void with Des Moines as its capital. Des Moines ain't that happening. But you can trade bananas for cigarettes there.

Awakened from the dark afternoon hotel room heat from the wet rain pounding the storm is in already here. The wind rushes it heals the world stops outside its like a shower you don't have to think if you think too much or maybe you think if you never think other times. It freezes you in time with its warm wetness. All of this will end up in clouds or a river or tears or all the above.

I'm driving in the rain the drizzle the trucks ahead of me in the two lane road the hills up and down the pavement wet. I'm east toward the Mississippi the farmlands get richer I'm nearing Illinois and as I near it, it begins to smell like it used to it begins to feel like the cars I used to drive the 54 Chevy Bel Air (stick) the 72 Bonneville the 63 Chevy Malibu (before they were cool) the 73 Mercury Comet with no brakes the 78 Chevy Suburban (RIP Toledo 1988) the 77 Ford LTD rusted through (RIP Iowa 1991), my family goes through run-down used automobiles like other families take out the trash. Clinton has a nice bridge and brick buildings and screams of the midwest I cross the Mississippi which is never so much a river as a long, long flooded parking lot it seems, does it even move? It must. Entering Illinois it all comes back. The signs, the cars, the shape of the land this is home even if I didn't think it was. The radio fades into familiarity. I am back East.

Downtown Chicago is a place where two rivers meet, and shortly but briefly coexist before they empty into Lake Michigan. (Che-ca-gau is American Indian for "Field of stinky onions") No other reason to found a city based on a field of stinky onions than two rivers meeting. Cept now the only reason there's a city there at all is that it was there before, most cities really. They don't need rivers or bays or anything anymore really. All they need is to be pretty (Los Angeles) or fun (Las Vegas) and maybe that says something about people too.

The river was the reason, then the lifelink, then the sewer, now just a legacy. The river carried everything into the lake into the ocean into the clouds into the mountains. Everything. The river wasn't a piece of nature; it was infrastructure. The sides of downtown weren't lined with river parks; they were lined with docks and effluent tubes carrying waste. All this went into the lake and it all came back out of the tap and the diseases and the fevers got worse. So they turned the river backwards. It flows backwards now, always looking like it doesn't know where to go. "Don't you know nobody parts two rivers met?" It ends up in New Orleans now, where before it ended up going over Niagara. Don't ask me which is better. But I'm heading to New Orleans just like this dirty river.

Cairo is a town surrounded by levees and poverty and rusting bridges and lots of them. It's the southernmost part of Illinois and it's more south than Richmond Virgina (which they love to point out, cause else they point out that their bridge needs a new coat of paint). Cairo (pronounced CAY-ROW, Americans can't pronounce anything like it should) sits there at the Mississippi and the Ohio and you have Kentucky and Missouri right there and Indiana and Tennessee not much more than a riverboat ride. It must be awfully nervous in a downpour with two muthers of a River bearing down on this nothing town, it's lucky it has that Kentucky Dam up there to calm down the Ohio a bit. Cairo is more of a point than a city, mostly just a throughway. It seems to exist mostly because this point needs a town. And bored people look the same as always.

If you look at the Tennessee back to front, from its end to its beginning, it starts at the Ohio, starts in Kentucky really, gets dammed up and pissed, heads into Tennessee and meanders into Mississippi, Alabama, back into Tennesse. It's called the Tennessee by default really. It's the 'T' in the TVA and it colors a whole region. You know that the river is nearby even if it only means a lower electric bill or more mosquitoes. This was the river that Grant used to strike into the Confederacy at first, finding it easier than the Mississippi. You get to the heart here. The heart of country music on AM radio that is. The heart of Dairy Queen.

Down towards Mississippi on the Tennessee is Pittsburg Landing, a former dock now just a cemetary, dead from Shiloh. Walking around the battlefield you forget that the reason it happened here was the river. The river carried the Union straight down into the thick of it. The river carries sounds too. Grant heard the gunshots of Shiloh 7 miles away while eating breakfast in Savannah, Tennessee, along the same river. The river is quiet now it laps. There's a "Stuckey's" in Savannah now or at least there should be.

The "Delta" refers to NW Mississippi, the poorest region of the US by most estimates. The delta refers to the maze of rivers that shoot up into the flat earth around the Mississippi so flat the only hills were manmade. Even for an Illinoisan this is damn flat, where the Mississippi takes the longest way possible between point to point and maybe that's reflected in more than geography. You can feel the river there in the silent cotton fields. It just says come to me, because you have to, eventually. But you may take your goddam sweet time roaming to and fro and up and down and never can tell which way you're going, but you always end up in New Orleans. If you spit or piss, it's gonna end up in New Orleans.

Vicksburg is farther south, along the River and from its bluffs you can see the whole complex maze of water below. The height and the distance don't offer that much clarity to the meandering below. You drive across into Lousiana and listen to Zeppelin When the Levee Breaks and wonder what levee Plant was talking about. If this levee broke it would take most of the US with it, as you stand on top of the world, really only 20 feet above the flattest earth that ever was. So flat you can see the burning fields down the row for miles, just from 20 feet up.

It's late the moon is full, it's wet from recent rains and it's misty and it's hot and the journal is gone and the rain keeps coming and the River is always there and the thunderstorm rolls in and out and moon keeps hiding and coming back so you listen to that old Springsteen album weatherbeaten as Tusk scratchy and all and you drive around in a circle and you get lost in a cemetary and the clouds come in and out and you're going in circles but the river is still there only there are no bridges and you think about that but give up and you stop at midnight and try to smoke a clove but the Man in a Cajun accent gives you a boot and you find out this is the False River and it's nothing more than a long thin lake because the river stopped flowing this way it just decided it had better things to do and the stupid false river don't know any better. And there ain't nothing more discouraging than a river that don't know where to go.

I'm fascinated by infrastructure mostly old and decaying and metal-like, always linking something to something else really. And the rivers were the first infrastructure and the ferries were the next. Big hulking pieces of flat metal churning back and forth Charon perpetually working all hours of the day and night no romance just a job to do to endure until something better comes along or takes it place and it only costs $1 to cross else these poor people would be left more isolated than they already are. $1 ain't much but it was enough for an early morning ferry ride bouncing around Thibodaux. Is this destined to be a tourist attraction of a day gone by?

The Ferry from downtown N'Orleans to Algiers runs back and forth every night. Free to people if you have a fever and want to cool off and want to take photos. Tourists and lovers ride back and forth and the fake steamboats compete with the barges and tankers on their way to Baton Rouge. Barges and tankers can offer a romance that way, romance is nicer when it's far enough away to make a nice photograph.

It's 2 AM and you need to find some sleep so you cross the Missouri for the last time and try to find a motel no luck, try to find a field no luck. So you sleep for 3 hours outside the 24 hour automat car wash where there's some grass and some kids check you out because who in the hell would choose here to sleep? And you leave a statue of the wolf there because it don't fit anymore.

DEATH

Tales of Southern Hootchy-Coo, Part VI, any negativity in your views on death purely of your own creation I just reports what I sees.

When I was 10 or 12 or 13, I forget, I suddenly become confronted with that intangible that I was going to die someday. I thought it was a joke. I didn't even know how to live and already I knew I was going to die. I knew what dying was before then but I hadn't really thought of the void before. I mean I was supposed to believe in the hereafter and all that but it wasn't even on faith it was only because I was supposed to. And it never got any more defined after that date. All of us have faith when you draw out the intangibles. Atheists, fundamentalists, avowed agnostics all have "faith" that their world view is the best they can come to grips with. No one is sure that when they die they're dead dead dead. And no one is sure that they'll live after it all comes down. If you were ever 100% sure of anything it would fade from importance.

I was drugged from lack of sleep best drug in the world scariest at least makes you laugh when you shouldn't. Driving out on the freeway bound toward Kansas City it being 4 AM too late to get a room too early to get a room either need some grass can't find it just drive. As I merge into 435 I am listening to Lush at high volume, spooky in fact, no "Spooky" the name of the album, and it's spooky no one on the freeway not California. I see it in the headlights what is it? It's red it's large it's the dead meat of a dead deer in the center lane a deer makes a lot of mess on a freeway must've killed a truck along with it.

At the wedding I was thinking that the strongest commitment you can make to somebody is that "I will bury this person." I guess that was the not so subtle point of the old til death do us part thing. That means your love has gone over the top, over that dam. Point being that if you can actually stand the thought of living alone after giving your all the all must really be the all, that it's so goddam frightening that you end up together not so much out of the strength of your attraction, but out of not being able to imagine you apart. It just all is and you accept whatever comes. Most would run. Most do, I guess. And then I thought if it weren't for the death, the love
wouldn't have any significance. You could just chalk it up to experience. Death isn't frightening; it's the only thing that gives real importance and consequence to the things we do.

Cemeteries are great time killers you can just sit there and lay in the grass underneath a big old oak. No one bugs you since you could be mourning actually just need some space. I had time to kill on a sunny morning in downstate Illinois so I toured an old cemetery, mostly empty rusted gate lots of trim creaked even. Women driving their kids to school waved at me. Truckers hauling feed waved at me. Everybody
waves in downstate Illinois. They figure no one ever visits you must a local must be related to somebody and they'd sure hate to cause a stir by ignoring you, I suppose. And everyone has this weird reverence to cemeteries when all they are is parks really if I die and have to be buried I hope some kids are able to play touch football or fly a kite or something else the ground gets bored.

Driving through mid Tennessee I crossed the interstate and found a Tennessee visitor's station run by a gray haired gentleman by the name of Lee but everybody is named Lee in the South not many named Sherman I can tell you. The man told me that the ground I stood on was the battle of Parker's Crossroads where Nathan Bedford Forrest, famous
confederate cavalry general and founder of the Ku Klux Klan routed a set of Union cavalry. Apparently he was surrounded and when asked what to do said "charge them both ways." Forrest knew how to run a set of horses even being an asshole hisself horses ain't the best judges in character.

A battle that Forrest also attended was Shiloh. Shiloh is located in extreme southern Tennessee, just north of Mississippi. Located on the Tennessee river, the battle was named after the small church of that name about 2 miles west. "Shiloh" means "Peace" in Hebrew, God and the devil sure do love their plays on words and I capitalized one on purpose and didn't the other. Shiloh was the first ferocious battle of the war, the one that made war lose all charm, the one that brought 24,000 men to the end and brought reality home, needed to, I suppose, but we always mess it up and forget that it ain't a way to settle an argument. After you've lost all passion for everything except life war seems about as damn silly you almost have to laugh sitting there
staring at all the ghosts.

The numbers are staggering for such a small piece of wooded property, a battle that you could walk across. There are a number of strange images of death amid the air. The peach orchard, site of one of the more intense battles, was in bloom. The bullets cutting the peach blossoms looked like falling snow might've even been pretty. A pond where both sides came to die was turned red with blood no one killed there only drippings. When it was all over and boths sides read their morning papers over tea, war didn't seem nearly as dignified. Which is a good thing chalk it up to learning experience too bad some had to die to learn it. Shiloh was such a mess cause neither knew how to fight, if you don't know what you're doing I guess you'll learn but it'll fuck you up in the meantime.

As bloody as Shiloh was, it didn't have a hopeless aspect (even if it were really hopeless). Both sides had the option of maneuver and the illusion of victory. Of course since they didn't know what they were doing it was all Fate and that omnipotent always-winner had already decided the Union would win. This was the beginning of war and the possibility of being devious enough to close a trap and mercilessly destroy an enemy hadn't yet dawned on either side. No strategy, just guts and guts don't mean much in this life, most of the time.

The battle of Vicksburg, about 200 miles south on the Mississippi is a study in hopeless death and by the time it became obviously hopeless there wasn't nothing left to do but wait it out for the honor factor. Over 6 weeks, the Union bombed, shot, shelled, set fire, name-called a holed up contingent of confederate troops losing food losing ammo losing sleep. No relief would ever come it was obvious that defeat was there. Morale was so low the confederate commander recommended surrender not to avoid more senseless death, but to prevent the shameless defection of a once proud army. This was a siege, and like Leningrad Corregidor Sarajevo hopeless case, who is that patron Saint - we all need that number.

The organ tone signals blue line swinger I'm pacing on the levee road at 30 mph halted now it's sunny outside the white church stands there its lot full a policeman stops us all the procession begins black with lights on one more one more one more all in a row gravel spits as the cars turn onto the blacktop one more one more one more music continues the one dead has many friends the music keeps coming the tone keeps humming the climax reaches the last car spits out and the silence begins and I follow. Out of town the cop peels off for beignets and I take his place bringing up the rear daytime running lights force me into respect for the dead.

If you love cemeteries Lousiana is for you. All the tombs sit there on the ground you don't visit the earth you visit some great big tomb of marble and the patchwork on marble and concrete white redolent coffins forms a little city in each small town a mirror of the community around it. It seems they used to bury them like normal cept the water tables would rise and the coffins would rise up out of the ground poking through the earth even after the rains stopped on a good old sunny day because the water was soaked just 2 feet below and the sight of all those wooden blocks jumping and creaking out of the ground freaked everybody out so much that they still continue to bury them in the tombs even though the levees have been made stronger and it doesn't flood like it used to. The larger cemeteries in N'Orleans look like peaceful versions of the violent neighborhoods they abut. One of the more dangerous cemeteries is also one of the most patchwork and interesting: St. Louis Cemetery #1. It's where many of the jazz greats are buried next to their former haunts on the edge of the Vieux Carre. Louis Armstrong wanted to be buried here, instead he was buried in St. Louis, Missouri I sure hope someone didn't screw up reading that will. If I have to be buried in a coffin I'd like it to be N'Orelans. The white crosses so block-like a big set of legos. No big deal with a name but a cool looking box can't beat that.

The 50 or so miles from Selma to Montgomery Alabama were a key piece of the civil rights movement. Selma was a cornerstone of the voter registration movement and Montgomery is the capital of Alabama. Dr. King organized a rally in 1965 to march from one to the other along the US highway to draw attention to the voting rights bill of 1965. Johnson was getting pressure to scrap it, and the demonstration was meant to push it to fruition. Except that Selma happens to sit on a river, the Edmund Pettus Bridge big old curved steel very modern looking for the South kind of sinister Blade Runner like, a big obstacle.

Each time they tried to cross they were met with Bama troopers and tear gas and billy clubs and fists and hicks in pickup trucks. One photo I saw (from the other side welcoming people into Selma) had a cop beating the crap out of someone under a billboard saying "Welcome to Selma: Town of 100% Human Interest - Selma National Bank" There`s that irony again like 10,000 spoons. But that was the great thing about the bridge; the troopers, the authority thought it was great that the bridge was such an obstacle, but the very fact that it was an obstacle made it important to cross. They could've gone round but the point was to cross that bridge, and finally they did with 4,000 escorts from the US military. But 3 people were killed on that march. Taken as stragglers and shot in the back. But they made it to Montgomery.

Oak Ridge, TN helped build the bomb but hates talking about it. A woman there complained that all those protesters don't realize "we don't build bombs." She even said something like "we didn't build it anyway; we just helped design it." (That is an interesting mindset, I thought.) I don't have a problem with the bomb; we'll always find new and fascinating ways to get rid of each other. Getting rid of each other doesn't scare me. Ruining life scares me a hell of lot more than facing death. Maybe that's the part about the bomb that's scary; it's psychological; it's not understood, no one know what the hell goes on with radiation. People like to see what's going to kill them "I don't want to fuse with no economy seat/Fuel some fireball at 30,000 feet/I just want to see/What kills me" (Cowboy Junkies) Some of us will never be able to handle what we can't see or understand, though the understanding is very thinly tied to reality in the first place. Anyone who understands it all has no use in this world. Probably another good reason for us to die; if we were left to live forever, we
might not have anything to figure out. And if you've actually read this far, email me and I'll give you a $1.

THE BLUES

Tales of Southern Hospitality and Gentlemanly conduct, Part II

"The Blues is a low-down achin' feeling." 

Being a good ole Chi-town boy, I grew up with the Blues. It's really a Mississippi vibe, electrified. It was Muddy and Junior and Howlin Wolf with their old hickory guitars that plugged them in and elevated the blues to what they are today. But the roots are all still there, in Mississippi, in the poorest section of the poorest state in the Union. It was poor a hundred years ago and it's poor now always will be I suppose. But it keeps it honest not shiny it keeps its soul on edge.

Mississippi and Chicago have this kinship with the Blues. It's probably the only real thing in common with Mississippi. In the migrations that happened during the wars, the railroads linked Sippi to Memphis and Chicago. Going north meant just that, straight north. Chicago and New York weren't any different. They were North and North meant jobs and family and jobs again. And maybe a temporal replenishment of hope. The blacks from Georgia went to New York, from Bama to Cincy and Cleveland, from Sippi to Chi-town. Family ties between the two stayed around (to this day). It was a Chicago kid (Emmett Till) who was visiting family in Mississippi that was killed in 1954 for whistling at a white woman. The South side of Chicago still has some of the best grits north of the Mason-Dixon. Little threads.

The first of the Delta blues players to strike out in famousity was Robert Johnson. But when he first started playing, he sucked he couldn't play a guitar to save his life. But he disappeared for a year and came back then he could play. He played so spectacularly that the running gag was that he sold his soul to the Devil and he probably did, with the gravel in his voice becoming spookier than a quiet October night. I hope Tom Waits bought it back for him he can afford it. Regardless of the state of RJ's afterlife soul, he also helped spring the Delta Blues from his skull and unleash every piece of electric guitar music that has existed to this day. That's a beautiful thing about music, every piece will persist and affect every other piece either directly or indirectly for eternity, or til the music dies. You don't need to be perfect you just need to try and to endure. Just like people.

I headed out from Oxford and the mind flowed from Faulkner to Clarksdale going down to the crossroads looking for a soul to steal. Myth become legend become cheesy travel tip has it that the crossroads are a little outside of Rosedale, near the town of Bealuh, MS, so if you want to sell your soul, there's your place though I suppose you can sell it anywhere anyhow anyway he's always looking for a bargain.

Listening to the Mississippi public radio I heard a godsend, BB King was coming home to Indianola tonight for a small home-town concert in the city park. I hit highway 61 if I come back I'll be Dylan and headed into the town beaten up dusty sooty bricks falling apart. Downtown stood a Delta Blues Museum came in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds playing "Murder Ballads" Nick Cave is one fucked up dude. Bought a tape of Harmonica blues to pop in the player for the drive down to Indianola passing the jook joints dusk settling young black men sitting on their 70s autos waiting for the place to open up black women dolled up leaning on the car waiting for something else. Cotton not that tall not that much edge in the air, wait until August.

Driving through Greenville the darkness descends both real and imagined. The town bursting behind a levee on the Mississippi not much to it, downtown shelled out nothing at all, casino on the river, and swaths of boxes that they call houses. This part of Mississippi has some of the most dire poverty I've ever seen, the system is frozen in place. At least in a city you can see where you can try to go; growing up here I wouldn't even know where to try. I head out and some toughs in a Barracuda offer to sell me a beeper, then a radar detector but "I always know where the cops are." Don't like that answer much.

I enter Indianola and head for the edge of town to the park. It's a small town affair it's a summer night. The 8 year old girl takes my $5 and stamps my hand and I load up on fried catfish. Sitting there on the grass 20 feet from BB King kids playing old men sitting in their lawn chairs warm summer night fireflies clouds and a full moon the electricity of the strings shooting out and his voice like a booming kind voice of God. He spoke of love and Love and Looooooooove, the last one more of an ache than anything. He kept on it, in the middle of songs screaming "You KNOW, you KNOW, you should .... NEVER be afraid to tell someone you love them!" This seventy year old fat man with an ache in his heart is the happiest man alive and he ended with the Thrill is Gone he must always and you just walk out of that field with an understanding. And you drive at 2 AM with the moon and the fields and nothing else.

And you're on your way to Lousiana and Margo is telling you not to go back to New Orleans but you have no choice and you have a sore throat and the radio has a guy singin in French and English Cajun really and the air kind of hangs and then it drizzles and then you watch the clouds roll in and the levee bounces as the road stays still and the huge fat river just goes up and down up and down and the lightning hits and the fires in the fields roll and pass you by and you sit in N'Orleans with a fever and a coffee and a muggy afternoon why here in June and you listen to an old black man play as time goes by and you write and you sweat and you write in a sweat and you wait for the fever to lift. And the jazz just sits there like a tone.