Travels with Brady (In Search of America)
June 6th, 1999 |Following in the footsteps of John Steinbeck, I decided to take a journey across America and find its soul. Actually, my main intent was to visit my friend Budd and his new bride Amy in New Orleans but bear with me for a little while.
Instead of a giant poodle named Charley, my erstwhile ex-roommate Brady accompanied me. Instead of a truck named after Don Quixote’s horse Rocinante, we travelled in one named after Rand Al’Thor’s horse Jeade’en from the bestselling and neverending Wheel of Time series. Instead of spending months on the road, we had but a week. Instead of casually meeting people in roadside stops and camping in the wild, we delved into the very heart of modern society: drinking establishments.
From day one, we interviewed as many single women as we could find only to come to one conclusion: The entire South was against us. On Bourbon Street in New Orleans, I was snared into dancing all night by a woman
who I can only describe using words borrowed from a Paul Simon song. She was indeed a “rolly-polly little bat faced girl”. Not only did she chase away most of her pretty friends in the bachelorette party, but she also left the last one in the Brady’s hands forcing my obligation as “Wing-Man”. Tired and rejected, we returned to our hosts’ home as dawn broke over the land.
At first, only New Orleans was abhorrent to us. It was a festival of unique houses that were in actuality very similar to each other and only different from the frame houses of our Native Oklahoma. In spite, we began to uniquely insult the city of our hosts only to find that New Orleaners insulted their city as well after pulling to a stop behind a truck with a bumper sticker proclaiming “Proud to Call New Orleans Hell”.
The very Interstate Highway System conspired against us at every turn, from a fender bender on I-35 to torrential downpours and one lane traffic on I-10 into Baton Rouge and we insulted everything. Undaunted we drove on, insulting Houston and Austin and the Texas Capitol building and the University of Texas’s infamous clock tower.
There should have been a peal of thunder on Thursday night in Fort Worth: we had to run away from a pair of funeral home-owning Wiccans. They had used their witchy ways to lure Brady into conversation1
and then set their sights on the rest of the drinking party.
After being thoroughly rejected by an entirely different bachelorette party on the final night of our journey, it was obvious that both the women and the roads of America were fighting tooth and nail against us. The wedding party acted offended that I dared to try to dance with them and compare their engagement rings.
After days of driving and disillusionment, I dropped Brady off in Norman and headed to the solace of my own bed for the first time in a week, haunted by the knowledge that the entire country to the south seethed with madness.
[1] I immediately informed Brady that his Wing-Man had already gone down in flames a few nights before and that he was on his own but he persisted in his folly.
