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Cheap Eats By Dan
Leone Slacker OH, I'M home, finally, and the postcard I never sent to anybody goes like this: The more I see of my country and the people in it, the more I love the people and hate the country. I might be the least misanthropic terrorist the world has never known. Maybe someday I will find a way to blow away all our bogus patriotic nationalism and even more annoying self-righteous religiousness without hurting a hair on anyone's head. In the meantime, here's a steel drum solo ... In Salt Lake City when Chris said we were from Ohio, the old folks cheered. I didn't know why. I don't know why Chris, my brother, continues to insist we are from Ohio. I always say San Francisco. Over lunch at my new favorite restaurant, the One World Cafe, our hostess explained that the cheer was because Ohio won this last election for Bush. At the One World Cafe you pay whatever you want. It's anarchy in action and poetry in motion. You go in, get what you like, however much of whatever dishes – and it's all organic, healthy ingredients, even meat. And you eat and eat, and then afterwards you put whatever you think the meal was worth, plus a little something to help end world hunger (ha ha), into an anonymous can with a slit in the lid. If you can't pay, you can still eat; you just have to help out in the kitchen. Please. But it's all conducted on the honor system. This is in Salt Lake City. Would it work here? Why not? In Wyoming the old people started requesting "God Bless America." They requested "God Bless America" from Wyoming to roughly Cleveland (not quite sea to shining sea), and when we said we didn't know "God Bless America," they said, "Well, play something patriotic." We said we didn't know anything patriotic and tried to distract them with "Old Joe Clark" or "Five Foot Two." Expecting more of the same for our trip home, through the South, we learned Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land." But nobody requested "God Bless America" in the South. It was the strangest thing. Not one more request for one more patriotic song, now that we knew one. Now all anyone wanted to hear was Christmas songs. After all, it was the week after Thanksgiving. We didn't know any Christmas songs. We knew one Christmas song: "Blue Christmas." They'd call out for "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," and we'd play "Blue Christmas." They'd call out for "Silent Night," and we'd play "Blue Christmas." "We Three Kings?" "Blue Christmas." I love old people because no matter what they thought they wanted to hear ("Tie a Yellow Ribbon," Elvis, "Frosty the Snowman" ...), they ate up what we played. They were like: Oh yeah, Gene Autry. Oh yeah, right, Bob Wills. Of course: Hank Sr. Bing. But my new favorite kind of person in the world is people with Alzheimer's. Nobody knows how to party like people with Alzheimer's. You start playing, and they're dancing and laughing and singing along, no inhibitions. They couldn't tell you the names of their own children, but they still remember all the words to "Home on the Range" and "Red River Valley." Which says something about something. Maybe the power of music, or maybe something else. I'll figure it out. In St. Louis we played at a nursing home for nuns, in honor of which I wore some really plaid, really weird women's pants, or slacks, or whatever women call them, and by the time we played our last couple of shows in Tucson, thanks to a few more truly inspired thrift-store purchases, I was performing pretty much in drag. Without tits or hair or makeup, of course, I didn't look like a woman so much as a clown. And those were happy times ... Tucson, at an Indian reservation senior center, which fed us grilled cheese and ham sandwiches with french fries. We saw the first sun we'd seen since practically early November, when we left northern California, and the same sun stayed with us into southern California. On I-5, heading north, we remembered what fog was, and by the time we got to Pea Soup Andersen's in Santa Nella, a couple hours south of here, pea soup seemed like a pretty good idea. Especially bottomless bowls of pea soup. The 49ers game was on TV in the bar, and I made friends with a 49ers-fan trucker from Boise, or else maybe I'd have a review of Pea Soup Andersen's for you. Instead, I give you these lines from my own personal all-time favorite Christmas carol: Give
me land lots of land under starry skies above / Don't fence me in / Let me ride
through the wide open country that I love / Don't fence me in / Let me be myself
in the evening breeze / Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees / Send me
off forever but I ask you please / Don't fence me in. |
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