Home for the Hellidays
"What are you doing?" Gloria asks.My winter coat is hanging on my head, and I am arranged underneath it, holding my Nintendo DS in such a way that the screen is easily visible, even when the bright sunlight is flooding the cabin of our car, which even now is speeding away from Shreveport as fast as it can, but not nearly fast enough.
"I'm experiencing the entertainment revolution in a home theatre environment," I say. On the screen, I'm tapping impatiently through the fiftieth consecutive screen of text in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.
Gloria is laughing. Why she would laugh, I don't know.
"It gives you the aura of a woodpecker," she says, referring to the tapping.
"Drivers drive," I say. "Attorneys defend their clients. Excuse me if a coat over my head or incessant tapping saves my client from the death penalty."
Here's what you need to know to understand this trip to Shreveport: the highlight was seeing a giraffe drink another giraffe's pee.
Shreveport, for us, has turned into the curse of the mummy's tomb. It's not Gloria's family, although I would have more in common with Bantu tribesmen. No, somehow the simple act of driving through endless spans of East Texas, followed by staying in a state where Napoleon still matters, alters our personal gravity to the point that we both fly off into space.
Shreveport is the Hal 9000. I am Frank Poole.
We left Friday morning, overloaded like a Cuban refugee boat. At any moment, I expected a Coast Guard vehicle to board us and force us to abandon the car. Instead, we drove. And drove. And drove.
Driving to Shreveport from Austin through East Texas is like being sentenced by a judge, then having to walk twenty miles to the prison.
We reached Tyler so late in the day that the zoo, our favorite part of the trip, closed in an hour. Plenty of time, though, to walk to the African savannah and watch a giraffe pee. And pee. And pee.
It was, all in all
a waterfall to recall
from one high and tall
My bright young fellow
It was sunflower yellow
Stunning, said we all
Eli 4.4, obviously, was delighted. That was nothing, though, compared to what happened when another giraffe walked up to the first giraffe and starting drinking his pee.
"Hey! That's not a lemonade stand!" I said.
"Daddy! Daddy! You are cracking me up," Eli said, gasping for breath from the sheer hilarity of watching a urine-drinking giraffe within thirty feet of where we sat.
We flat-lined from there.
For some inexplicable reason, Shreveport was crowded. We used to stay at The Clarion, which became so decrepit over time that Gloria took to calling it The Carrion, and finally we accepted that the only even decent hotels in Shreveport are attached to casinos. Even the good casino hotels were booked, though, and so we wound up at the Isle of Crapi Casino.
I might have misspelled that.
Knowing nothing of casinos (I am a compulsive person--gaming, working out, and writing this blog are more than enough), I was unaware of the Isle of Crapi's place in the casino universe. When I saw a giant billboard advertising the "hot penny slots," though, I realized we might be in for a rough ride.
"Why penny slots?" I asked Gloria. "Have the ha'penny slots not been installed yet?"
Bad calypso music greeted us as we drove up. A parrot with murder in his heart was stationed in the lobby. Our room looked like the set of a Fruit Loops commercial.
It was extremely clean, and I give them full credit for that. Let us not, however, speak of the food.
On Saturday afternoon, while Eli was at Disney on Ice with Gloria and his Nana, I took a cab to a local shopping complex and did some Christmas shopping for Gloria. I purchased a blouse for Gloria, and my cashier was a sixty-something Hungarian immigrant whose raspy smoker's voice was deeper than Leonard Cohen's. It literally took her fifteen minutes to ring up one item for the woman ahead of me, and during that time she repeatedly said "Sorry, hon," and "We're getting there, folks," interspersed with an occasional "I just lost it."
When I finally emerged, clutching the blouse like a shipwreck survivor clutching the last bottle of fresh water, I looked forward to recovering my hearing, because the other key feature of this store was Christmas music played at ear-bleeding volume.
I was shocked to discover, though, that the Ghost of Burl Ives was chasing me down the sidewalk, shouting "PA RUM PUM PUM PUM," as if his angry spirit was in a PCP-induced killing haze. I began to run, then sprinted, but his voice was everywhere.
These innocent-looking sidewalks were the killing fields of the Little Drummer Boy.
So when I say that I was under my coat on the way home, it seemed entirely reasonable, given that due to the seat-belt constraints I could not curl up in the fetal position. "What are you calling that, um, innovation?" Gloria asked.
"The Gaming Enhanced Travel Atmosphere, or G.E.T.A.," I said. "And as to your next question, it's pronunciation rhymes with 'pita'," I said.
"My next question was why it wasn't called D.O.R.K., or Daylight Obscuring Recreational
C(K)loak," she said.
"Well, it is now," I said.
Minutes later, she said "Could you please peek your head out from under your D.O.R.K. and help me find this turn?"
We were hurtling through East Texas when this all happened. East Texas is a place where "The Donut Palace" sells both doughnuts and fried catfish, and a convenience store will sell both fried chicken and bait. I cannot get my arms around this, and frankly, I do not care to try.
Every small town in East Texas seems to have four things: a lake, a bar (or "private club"), a church, and a cemetery. This is what you need to know to live in East Texas: where to fish, where to drink, where to pray, and where to die.
I have no desire to die there with them.
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