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Over the years, as I’ve gone from being the youngest at work to one of the older ones (how does this happen??), I’ve heard younger workmates referring, adoringly, to  “the Eighties.” These musings from people who had been infants back then, what do they know about that decade? The Eighties, for me, stood firmly in the shadow of the Sixties, the decade in which everything important happened musically, socially, and politically, while I was the helpless ages of zero through ten.

The Eight-O decade was simply too far away from the Sixties to bear any importance. I, myself had missed all the fun of the best decade, navigating my childhood in a fractured, dysfunctional family in an island paradise, and I spent the Eighties being pissed off about it.  (Although, to give myself credit, the first two albums I bought at the ripe old age of nine were Inagaddadavida and Alice’s Restaurant.)

In 1981 I spent a month in San Francisco, the whole time obsessing about North Beach, walking the side streets, searching for Beat bars (found one) and fantasizing that these were the actual streets that Jack Kerouac had traversed. God, I had sure missed out on great times. Born too late, dammit.

The Eighties were bland, charmless, and people were stupid with Disco and Punk music. They even elected a movie star as president! What is there to reminisce about? During that decade, in my twenties, I would joke, “Yeah, someday everyone’ll look back at the Eighties like they do about the Sixties now.” And I had meant it as a joke.

The first sign that there was ‘something about the Eighties’ came from my daughter about ten years ago when I was modeling a skirt suit and jacket for her. “Oh, yuck!” she’d exclaimed.  “It has padded shoulders. That’s soooo Eighties!” My twelve-year-old had actually shuddered. Well, yes, I suppose shoulder pads were in back then. (I’ve since cut any shoulder pads out of innocent clothes hanging in my closet) And there was big hair. Women’s waistbands rode high on the waist. But I’d worn Chef whites back then, so fashion hadn’t been it for me. I know the fashion stuff from watching the original Miami Vice. Now that was the Eighties. I own all five seasons of that show by the way. But I’ve never been into the Eighties…

In my memoir I’m writing about the Eighties now and I think I see how time has softened the sharp edges and added new dimensions to that strange decade. It was an exciting time for me, living in New Orleans, doing highly stupid things most of the time, with little repercussion. I’d left a Sixties type life in Portland, Oregon, going to Grateful Dead concerts and full moon parties, to live in a city which embraced Blondie and Elvis Costello alongside Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong. The best concert I ever went to was the Talking Heads at the Warehouse on Tchoupitoulas in 1982. I actually began to wear dresses in the Eighties, and went through a butch-type Chrissie Hynde wanna-be stage with Goodwill black jackets and the latest black-rimmed shades from the punk-rock store. Gasp! I loved those stores, with all the lapel buttons and the purple shades and the New Wave music and…Oh, come on that was so much fun, I want to do it again!

Oh, sorry, back to being 51. Lately I’ve read a few novels which, synchronistically seem to line up with my memoir era right now. A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and now The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Is this a new thing? Books set in the Eighties? Or am I just noticing eighties stuff more now because I’m writing about it?

Hmm. I’ll go put on some Roxy Music and figure this all out.

 

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I honor my mom daily, flawed as she was. She was awkward as a parent, following in the footsteps of her strict mother at times, other times completely rebelling against tradition. She was aloof, a lousy housekeeper, disorganized, alcoholic (though the latter I never realized until she was gone). She smoked three packs of Marlboros a day and, when riled — usually by my stepdad — could curse like a sailor. She was smart, well-read and loved words.  One afternoon when I came home from school she demonstrated a word she’d learned by flinging the TV Guide out the living room open window. “Defenestrate!” she said excitedly. “To throw out a window!”

Of course my mom’s biggest fault was that she didn’t protect me. I don’t think she was capable of it because her flaws ran so deep: she feared life. And this is what I rebelled against, dashing away at seventeen to control life, to prove I wasn’t her. But we became friends later, played Cribbage and talked about random stuff. We drank together, this, a dysfunctional bond, I’m sure of it now.

Our relationship had been a tense one and often I felt like the parent. One night when I was staying with her in her rented apartment on Maui (I think I was 24), she tucked me into the cot she’d set up for me and when I looked up at her from the sheets to say goodnight, she was looking at me so deeply. “I love you, Marisa,” she said with such tenderness that I wanted to cry. How I had wanted this every night of my childhood life and there it was, finally in my twenties. “I love you too, Mom.” And she kissed me on the cheek and turned out the light.

Mom died of throat cancer 22 years ago and I have since forgiven her all her imperfections, for she was my mom and that bond runs deep. I see her when I look in the mirror, even though I’m now one year older than she was when she died. I still talk to her sometimes and in times of great need, I know she is there, being my mom in the way that matters.

So here’s to you, Mom, I love you.

Happy Mother’s Day

 

 

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Revising my memoir I’ve discovered that the stuff I left out the first time around is actually pretty cool.  Ah, to be fifty and writing about the 20 year old self; if only I’d known at the time I’d be on such a critical stage 31 years later. This week’s episode in Stepping into the Water chapterdom has me embarking on an epic road trip with high school pal, Donna. I’ve graduated with an Associates in Restaurant Management, recently split up with a live-in boyfriend of three years, just celebrated my 21^st birthday with sufficient amounts of sex and drugs and rock and roll (not in that order) and we’re headed to New Orleans to live a year before continuing our travels to Key West. Donna does go on to Key West the following year, I do not get there until 2004, but that’s another story. Back to the road trip.

So we zoom out of Oregon on a sunny 1981 September morning,  my Volkswagen Rabbit stuffed to the windows with clothes, milk crates of record albums, books, posters, my record player and speakers and Donna’s parrot, Manu squawking in a cage at her feet. We spend two weeks bumming around San Francisco where we explore North Beach (you know, Jack Kerouac and all), Haight Asbury (the Grateful Dead weren’t dead yet) and the Castro (I had a gay prep cook friend). Then we head south again and hang a left after San Diego and head east.

Cliché as it sounds, in the rearview mirror we saw our pasts shrinking in the sunset while ahead of us  a huge expanse of grey eastern future loomed mysteriously. We routinely consulted a travel guide book to learn about towns in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and were particularly interested in the ghost towns. We slept at rest stops and determined MacDonalds’ had the cleanest bathrooms.  We lost a few layers of mouth skin trying out salsa at a Mexican taco stand in New Mexico. We drank Lone Star beer. We actually (I kid you not) looked for Rose’s Cantina in El Paso, even consulting a phone book at a roadside pay phone (isn’t that quaint?). One night we showered and slept in a real bed  in suburban Fort Worth at my gay prep cook friend’s aunt’s house. She made us pea salad. Slathered with mayonnaise.

We ate cheddar cheese and saltines while driving and pulled over on the freeway to take pictures of each under Texas’ Drive Friendly sign while holding up a Lone Star longneck. We nearly ran out of gas one night near Monahans, and scared, slept in the car by the side of the road to discover the next morning we were less than half a mile from a truck stop.

(Missed opportunity here: we had no idea we could’ve instead been travelling along the famed Route 66. But we were from Hawaii, what did we know).

Donna the whole time was writing in her journal. I was not into writing for myself in those days, I was constantly proving myself to others so I was documenting my trip by writing postcards to other people, mostly to my mom. Sometimes I‘d write her three cards in a day. This was my nineteen eighties Facebook: see what I’m doing now?—riding a jackalope in Texas!

Now Donna wrote postcards too of course and we agreed to be on a weird postcard hunt in every town we got to. And we found some doozies.

Mom kept my postcards from all my travels and after she died in 1988, a box of them showed up in her belongings.  So here are some of the best ones out of the dusty closet from that trip across the southern states: (having some technical difficulties here, the one on the right says, “A horned toad smoking a cigarette.”

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Since I’m rigorously working on filling out my memoir, all I have to blog about is writing. And all this retrospect stuff that pops into my head as a result of these trips down memory lane.

In my pre-chef, late teen days, I worked in some crazy kitchens. It was the Seventies and Julia Child was the only celebrity chef and restaurant kitchens were unseen, unadvertised and unkempt. Last year when I went home to Maui, my husband  insisted I pose in front of the place I worked the summer after my first year of college. Since I have this picture (below) I figure this excerpt to be blogable:

And what a summer it was, 1978, working as a baker at Longhi’s on Front Street, a hip restaurant recently opened by Bob Longhi from San Francisco. He was some kind of a known man back on the mainland (Haight-Asbury, rumor had it) because he had rock star friends who visited. Jesse Colin Young, Jackson Brown and the entire band of Fleetwood Mac hung out in the restaurant regularly. The food was all healthy fresh made; the term “organic” wasn’t the rage yet but that’s the best way to describe the bulging mango-honey pies I made, the fresh pastas cranked out by Marina Beebe the boat-dwelling, aged hippy pasta lady, and the signature dish, Shrimp Longhi with its splash of licorice-tasting Pernod. The huge kitchen was a Darwin experiment of hippies, musicians, beach bums, serious-surfer cooks and me. Most of us wore next to nothing—beach wear with an apron so we didn’t stain our bikinis or burn our bellies. All of us were tan and salty from the beach and into music, getting high and food. The sound system in the back, where I worked in the prep-kitchen, blasted Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones and some of Bob Longhi’s resident faves through speakers which hung over our heads like huge, black musical clouds. Every day at sunset all us prep cooks would snake out the back door to the stone seawall across the street, pass around a doobie and watch the sun sink orange over the blue horizon. Then we’d return to our respective prep stations and crank the music up louder to enhance our moods.

Longhi’s was the place where I baked a birthday cake (carrot) for Stevie Nicks. It’s where I snorted coke on the bar after work with the waiters. Where I smoked hash through an apple left for me in the bathroom in the kitchen (which was conveniently located right off the bakery nook where I worked). Where I took Quaaludes with a prep cook and had sex on Lahaina beach. It’s where I, with Bob Longhi’s son, raided the liquor cabinet in their fancy house further down Front Street and got so drunk on our shifts that the cops came. It’s where the homeless musician Dennis, who called himself Mango, peeled mangos for me in my small  station and in return for his efforts, I’d give him limes. The juice of which he used as deodorant or to mix with small bits of paper to fill his cavities. I didn’t need to give Mango mangoes because he climbed the trees in Lahaina and gathered his own. When not helping me, Mango walked the sidewalks of Front Street, holding with both hands a tree-picked soft ripe fruit to his mouth, sucking the flesh through a small hole he’d bit in one end. “Mother Nature’s tit,” he explained to stunned tourists as they considered the skinny, mango-sucking haole.

 

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I’m going to seriously stretch random blogginess here. I’ve been busy editing Stepping into the Water so have reached into my unpublished archives to see if anything may be of postable blogging interest. Back in the early 2000′s, after my divorce I began working on a project called Tiki Bars Chickee bars and Fish Camps, the Real Florida. It was a fun idea and certainly made me friends, as I travelled around, sometimes alone, sometimes with a little entourage (you know who you are) in what spare free time I had, went to local bars and wrote about them. What could be more fun than that? A girl has to have goals, right? So in my old writing archives are these fun little stories which never saw the light of day so here we go, here’s the introduction:

Introduction

My fascination with bars began before I entered Kindergarten. Living in Hawaii during the sixties, Mom and Grandmother would take me along on their afternoon jaunts to Don the Beachcomber, Halekulani, and The Willows. I didn’t mind, really I didn’t. Life at home was nothing compared to the stimulation of roaring voices and clinking glasses amidst some Tiki-type building on the beach. And I was a sponge. I saw people with different shades of skin, some had Mainland accents, and others had slanted eyes. As I waited for people to leave so I could scoop up their playdough-colored swizzle sticks and little umbrellas, I would eavesdrop on conversations and invent peoples’ lives in my head. At four years old, I got away with gawking at people.

I’ve been doing it ever since.

Mv formative twenties were spent in New Orleans. And although I somehow managed to make a living, I cruised from oyster bars to jazz piano haunts to unnamed alley bars, like a local river rat. But that’s another story. I mention this only to prove my qualifications and that I have the stamina to pursue this venture.

Once, on a road trip through Texas, my friend Dona and I persisted in searching for “Rose’s Cantina.” A watering hole worth singing about has to be special! Well, we never found Rose’s, but don’t let that obscure your faith in my abilities, Rose’s Cantina doesn’t exist. At least not in the United States.

I returned to Hawaii in the early eighties and was disappointed to see the beaches covered with hotels,  their lobby bars sporting overpriced ‘fru-fru’ drinks to the backdrop of Hawaiian Muzak. The salty beach spots were gone and the local life was dispersed into unaffordable condo units. Picnics on the beach at sunset with huli-huli chicken and cans of beer was now where the local scene could be observed.

In 1988 I was lucky enough to spend some time in Australia. I was bemused by the hotels and “package stores,” which were actually bars. Brightly painted to resemble whichever regional beer company endorsed them, they loomed up from endless, left-driven highways. I stopped at every one of them. Must have been in a hundred bars in sixty days. I excitedly snapped a photo or two of each one, but my attempts at a photo journalistic study of Australia’s bars were in vain. All the pictures looked the same.

In 1989 I moved to Florida. The smells and sounds of harbor and beach bars gratified me. The true spirit of Florida is felt by observing people in the little bars and fish camps sprinkled throughout our natural surroundings of ocean, lake, swamp, or river. Bars built or created over the years to satisfy the need for locals to round out their day of fishing, housework, alligator wrestling, and mosquito swatting. Analyzing these bars is a science – a science I was born to study.

My short stories in Tiki Bars, Chickee Bars and Fish Camps—The Real Florida are part guidebook and part road novel. I may post one up from time to time, just so they can get some air and I can keep on editing my memoir…

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I received some constructive criticism (translation: REJECTION) from an agent on my memoir so after a few weeks of reflection which included some serious beer drinking, I’m back at it, writing and editing on it every morning. I’m filling in corners of it with some scenes I’d simply referred to in retrospect and now I see that maybe I was cheating the reader, just a bit. You may think memoir writers like to sit around and write about themselves but I have a hard time writing about myself, unless there’s some really interesting insight or event happening in a particular scene that’ll move the story along, just like in fiction.

So as I work to fill in the blank spots and enrich my story with more nuance, I’m finding myself sitting in front of the computer a little grudgingly, thinking, should I really write about THAT?

Here’s yesterday’s THAT: the three months I spent in Oregon after I got booted out of Lewis and Clark College for non-payment of first term. It was 1978, I was 17 and, unbeknownst to me, my mom and stepdad had just filed for bankruptcy.  But after first term when I took the red-eye back to Maui in December for winter break, they told me not to worry about the tuition. So I didn’t and back I was in Portland, in the cold, damp and dark January, and homeless. What?

So being the stubborn girl that I was (am), I crashed on a work-mate’s couch for a few days ( I was a sauté cook at a restaurant close to my former school), while looking for a place to live. Now I had money, because I’d worked my ass off through high school — weekends, holidays and two jobs in the summer because my biggest dream as a kid was to move out of our smelly, animal-ridden house and away from my stepdad and be on my own. Well, here it was, my golden opportunity, as my mom would say.

I found a little house in a town outside of Portland called Oregon City. Rents were cheaper out there, my little house was $165 per month, and it didn’t really seem that far from things until I took the bus into Portland or to work. Sometimes it was faster to hitchhike. Sigh. So at this point in my recounting of this in my memoir, I decide to describe the little old house, situated in front of busy railroad tracks and overlooking a river where the paper mill sneezed stink into the air all day.  I can’t remember the name of the river so I GOOGLE it!

And there it is, a bird’s-eye view of Oregon City. There’s the freeway overpass I‘d walk under to catch the bus. I used to walk up to High street to the Laundromat which had a little home-made ice cream shop next door.  (Doing laundry and gorging on peanut and chocolate chunk ice cream. Ah those were the days?) And up High Street were the neat little junk stores whose wares I’d comb through for bent aluminum pots and pans. Once I bought a vintage chrome toaster. So began my love for antiques. I zoom into the Google map and trace the rail road tracks to see where the little house might have been. There are a lot of parking lots, no more little wooden houses. Hm. I zoom in some more, take in some street views. I wish I could remember the address! My landlord had also owned the old house next door he and was over there daily, fixing it up as I watched with awe. (Sewing the seed in me of real estate ownership and landlording, which has me presently in a state of massive debt. Maybe I can go back in time and shoot this guy?)

So I get the name of the river, Willamette, and continue writing. How that old house would shake every time the train rambled by. How the sun shone in through the milky old windows in the kitchen. How excited and scared I was on my own. How I was running out of money. I pull up the Google map again and I feel like I’m visiting myself, watching that young girl forge her life. I watch her in the dark on McLoughlin Avenue at a payphone talking to Uncle Jack. He offers a full ride to school, to pay for it all. I’d go back and live in the dorm. This, in retrospect, was a crucial life decision: I told Uncle Jack no, I wanted my independence. And no matter how loud I yell at the younger me from my present post, she repeats this flawed decision over and over.

And there it is, I see it on the map now, my life a vortex swirling out from this little spec, at the pay phone across from the paper mill on the Willamette River in Oregon City in 1978. Those three months apparently were very important and yes, I‘ll write about them in my memoir.

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I don’t see her come in to the Fox Sports Bar as I’m shutting down my laptop, just overhear the bartender carding her so look over to my new barmate, rummaging through her purse for her ID.

“I must—I must . . .  have left it in my coat,” she says in a perfect, quipping Yankee accent.

She looks at me looking at her so I say, “Going through Security.”

“Yes.”

So where’s her coat now? I do not ask.

The bartender says, “Well that’s okay because you’re pretty.” He’s a white college punk, she’s a black 68 year old (her age she mumbles, smiling when he lets her off the hook).

“I always lose track of things going through Security,” she reiterates, hugging her purse to her lap. Her face is smooth like porcelain, only cocoa colored. Dark eyes peer above cat glasses perched halfway down her nose. Her lips are thin, aristocratic. 68 years old seems impossible but if you could shed away about 35 of them, her beauty would more easily shine through her youth, than her years of, what, being a smart black woman in the North?

“Where you headed?” I ask. Not to improve upon the standard airport bar question.

“Richmond, Virginia. You?”

“Business trip to Jackson, Mississippi. Had to fly up here from Tampa to get down there.”

She smiles. The bartender lands a tall clear drink in front of her and she nods at him. She goes into a detailed and confusing account of allowing herself to be bumped from her previous flight for a four hundred dollar voucher, then ends with, “I’d be reading but my Kindle’s not working.”

Aaahaaa!!! Seeeee????? No, I don’t say this but I want all the E-Reader-Haters to join me in a chorus of book respect. Instead I say, “What’re you reading?”

“The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”

This lands in front of me on the bar and I momentarily forget my juiced up sarcasm about her dead Kindle. I know it’s Black History something because driving to the airport this morning I listened to an interview with Walter Mosely, so Malcolm X is appropriate conversation, I suppose.  I pull my book from my Tumi bag and wiggle it at her to demonstrate that I have a real book, not to say, look I’m reading a black author too, although I am. Reading a black author. John Henry Days by Coslon Whitehead.

I flip it over for her to see the author’s picture. “I saw him at the Key West Literary Seminar and he was funny, so I bought his book.” And it’ll never break.

“Hm. . . not heard of him.”

“Young, he has dreadlocks now, from New York, tongue-and-cheek stuff.” Not heavy as her book. Or her Kindle. When it works.

It looks like she’s trying to find a pen in her purse, realizes she doesn’t have one and pulls out her cell phone, fiddles with that. I think she wants to write his name down but I can’t be sure. Instead she says, “In Malcolm X there are people my husband and I knew in the black factions, so I’m reading about them.”

This, can probably really be expounded upon, but in airport bars, things are abbreviated. Unless you’re spending the night in, say, Atlanta. Then all human philosophies are sure to bubble up in the wee hours of plane-waiting.

“Well, since it’s Black History Week –”

“Black History month,”  she corrects.

“Oops. Yes, Black History Month, year, life,” I try to redeem myself. “Anyway, I heard an interview with the writer Walter Mosley this morning. His mother is Jewish from the northeast and his father a black man from Mississippi.”

No recognition here so I go on. “He said something very interesting. That his first book was about the Black Experience but his agent said they wouldn’t be able to sell it because: white people don’t want to read about the Black Experience, black women don’t want to read about black men and black men don’t read.” I pause for effect and she smiles. “So his second book and many after that are mysteries, because everyone loves a mystery, and the Black Experience is still in his books.”

“I do like to read mysteries,” she agrees.

“One of his books was made into a movie with Denzel Washington. Devil with the Blue Dress On.”

“I‘ve heard of that. I don’t watch movies much though.”

“It was an interesting interview.” If she knew people who knew Malcom X, then who am I bragging about black authors? Oh! Look at the time!

“Gotta go to my gate,” I say. “Hope you get your Kindle working!”

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My daughter is living in New Orleans, soon to have a college break because February 21 is Fat Tuesday  and she’ll immerse herself in the craziness of my beloved former city. (By her e-mails I think she’s already started.)

Recently I finished watching the first season of Treme for the second time, teary-eyed and glued to the screen.

I’m 51 so I flashback to my younger days spent in New Orleans. A LOT.

For these reasons I feel the spirit of Mardi Gras coursing through my blood. Almost as much as it did when I lived there thirty years ago. Sometimes I feel like I’m back there, well I want to be anyway, because  it’s not quite enough to experience flash backs while playing my New Orleans music (Cajun, Zydeco, Jazz Blues, etc.). Hm. . .  would it cramp my daughter’s style if I show up next week? Maybe I should check into flights on Kayak.com.  Sigh. I’ll just make a pot of gumbo. . .

No, I’ll write a story about my first Mardi Gras. (Then I’ll make a pot of gumbo).

February 23, 1982

I awake to complete silence. Maybe I’m still asleep and just dreaming that I can see sunlight through my still-closed eye-lids. I test one eye, wink it open and my head starts spinning the moment light cracks through to my brain. I mash the eye shut. Laying on the wooden  floor of Tony’s spare room on Prytania Street, I reconnoiter in my darkness: Last night  I was curled on the floor crying when he brought me the sleeping bag. “I’m just not monogamous,” he said.

The giant boobed girl sitting up in his bed, sitting up in his bed, sitting up in his bed. Boobed girl smiling. Both eyes fly open at this intrusion into my dogged memory.  “It’s great,” Tony had said, “you take the acid before you go to bed and wake up tripping! Then we’ll go find the Indians.” So I took the hit of windowpane, went into Tony’s bedroom to retrieve chapstick from my backpack and there was the girl. In his bed. Smiling. Not even trying to cover her lily white boobs. So Tony likes big boobs was my first thought after recovering from my choking gasp. And it was too late to un-take the acid.

I mash my eyes shut again.

I roll over and stick my butt up, stretching my back and burying my face in the sleeping bag. Testing my eyes in the dark of it. “Fuck the Indians”, I muffle, testing my voice now. Slowly I lean back onto my heels. Open my eyes and look at the room. Everything is rimmed with rainbow strings. Dizziness overcomes me. I lie down again on my side this time and contemplate the vibrating plaster wall and the staring French windows.

At 21 I’m just a cocoon of a woman, not fully formed, only my head poking out of the bindings of my childhood. When Tony, the motorcycle-riding waiter at Arnaud’s in the French Quarter asked me out the first time, I had a flash of confidence. I‘d been wearing my cooking whites, so I figured it was not my body he was after but my personality, which I knew needed work. It was a big boost to my ailing ego.

But last night he slept with that other big-boobed girl. Not me. Dejected, I want to cry some more, but the acid curls my emotions into themselves and I feel peaceful now, lying here, unmoving, studying the wood floor, the plaster-cracked wall, the milky windows and fantasizing about big-dressed mulato gals and uptown debutantes of antebellum days. I steal a glance at my backpack, crawling along the floor. It holds my black tights and shirt and the face paints. Dona and I planned on getting dressed up this morning before setting out for the parade and the search for the Indians, a la Tony.

No way. I’m staying here. All day. I’m happy now. Comfy on the floor. It’s a beautiful old wall and, look at those windows! Listen to the sound of the streetcar grind on by. I picture the costumed hoards walking up St. Charles toward the parade. No, I can see everything from right here. No more Tony, no more smiling booby girl. Then. . . an intrusion, something wails outside my bubble of drug-induced comfort.

“Go away!” I yell, flustered, confused. What’s that noise? Tony? Come to apologize?

The door bursts open, its warped ancient wood echoing into my bubble and into my peace falls Dona, giggling.

“C’mon, Masa, let’s go. Let’s go find the Indians!”

“No.” I burrow into the sleeping bag.

“C’mon Masa, so Tony’s an asshole, screw him. But let’s go have fun. Everything’s all rainbowey!” More giggles.

“No Shit.” I look up at her. And start to laugh.

She comes over and grabs my arm, pulls me upward. “Everyone’s ready, we’ll come back later and dress up.”

“But look at my sweater,” I say, standing now, looking down at my chest.

Dona says, stoically, “Oh, that’s cool though.”

And so we head off in my car, Tony driving because I’m too stoned, toward the uptown end of Tchoupitoulas Street in search of the elusive Mardi Gras Indians. The bright dawn is bursting into my eyes and ears and I feel like  an egg that’s just been cracked and trying to stay in the shell. For distraction Dona and me, in the backseat, woosh our rainbow-trailing fingers past our faces.

Tony parks my car and hands me the keys. I resist the urge to stick my tongue out at him. We start walking up Tchoupitoulas. There are crowds of people, dancing to music that’s coming from somewhere I can’t tell. Jazz beats resonate in the air as if the wind has taken on a new sound. Adorned floats are parked on the street, the parade hasn’t begun yet but colored beads fly through the air anyway. A strand chucks me in the head, sending a bomb blast through my body. Tony and booby-girl walk up ahead. And join some people who walk with them. Dona and I hang back.

“I don’t care about the Indians,” I say to her. “Let’s lose them.” I jerk my head toward Tony and the girl.

We‘re standing on the street corner and people are dancing, dancing around us, holding beers and dancing. Music blasts from every open window and door of the paint peeling, rotting shotgun houses that guard the narrow street. A painted up woman, no clothes at all, just paint, dances up to me with swaying hips and hands me a bottle of Miller High Life and dances off. I take a serious pull from the bottle.

And suddenly, I feel what Mardi Gras is all about. In this moment it’s about me, standing on this corner of the seventy something block of Tchoupitoulas, at seven in the morning, beer in hand, addled, recently jilted by a non-monogamous motorcycle-riding waiter, and geeked out in Goodwill bell-bottom jeans and a brown sweater with Bambi and Thumper knitted on the front.

“C’mon,” I say to Dona raising my beer, “let’s party.”

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I travel alone sometimes for my job. My boss goes to the Caribbean on business and returns with Rum and cigars. I go to New Jersey or East Georgia and I return with corns on my feet and hard-hat-hair.  I did go to the Dominican Republic a few times for a job,  not the beach resort side of Hispanola, but the interior, third world part. One mountain range over from Haiti part. And I still came home with corns and hard-hat-hair.

Anyway, this post is about the solitude of solo business travel, being that person on the plane alone and on a strange mission, hell-bent on making the best of a free ticket and rental car. The solo traveler feels important, being sent somewhere to do something and being paid for it, more or less. In my case it’s supervising the installation of kitchen equipment on construction sites. And being paid for it, more or less.

Last week it was a hospital kitchen in rural Georgia. I won’t go into all the gory and ridiculous details of the construction site, construction sites are all the same, disorganized and not particularly woman-friendly, and I’m always amazed at how anything ever gets built. What’s important to the solo business traveler is the off time. The time spent exploring an area that would not be a part of the solo business traveler’s life if it weren’t for the business trip.

First, selecting the automobile.  In an effort to be a good steward for my boss, on this trip I picked “economy” instead of “compact.” But the dejected cars parked in the “economy” line-up at the Atlanta airport’s rental lot consisted of Ford Focus and Chevy Aveo. Not a Nissan or Toyota in sight. Oops! Focus’ are ergonomically impossible for me to drive, so I picked a red Aveo. A car which I quickly nicknamed the Chevy Oleo.

Seven lane freeway coming out of Atlanta driving a go-cart at 50 miles an hour. Observation: Georgia drivers are friendly. Thanks to all of you who actually saw my blinker and dropped back so I could change lanes. Not something you see too often in South Florida.

Second, the hotel. I always try for a hotel with a bar. A solo business traveler likes to talk to other solo business travelers, to trade, you know, schticks. I know mine’s always the oddest one, this installing of kitchen equipment versus, say, selling computer products. But on this trip, again, I was looking for the best deal and wound up at a Hampton Inn. A very nice, clean, well-run place with terrific chocolate chip cookies, but no bar. I’d be in Athens, Georgia, 25 miles from the job site. Surely I’d find a bar nearby.

The first meal. Since the Hampton wound up being nestled between an Applebees and a Checkers, on a busy 4-lane lined with scenic America  big box stores, and the Southern Peach at the hotel desk was clueless (but very nice) about where to go for a fine meal, I drove into downtown Athens for dinner somewhere. The good thing about the Oleo is it can maneuver like a bicycle, so as I missed streets and U-turned, the friendly Georgia drivers letting me do this with nary a car honk or display of the middle finger, I found myself parked a block from University of Georgia and street-walking in search of a good meal, a glass of wine and some local conversation.

A place called The Globe. Pulled me in like a magnet. Dark, rustic, small horseshoe bar with a white porcelain beer tap that said, “Hey! I’m a lefty college joint, come drink in here!” There was nothing globe-y about the joint that I could see, I just liked the settled in look. With a Tandoori chicken salad and a glass of Cabernet at the bar, I struck up a conversation with Tom, a teacher who has taught teaching at U of G across the street for nearly 30 years. When the conversation went to Retirement plans, I felt a boot on my chest and salt in my eyes. Ah yes, the string of the solo business traveler’s reality does, at times weave through her anonymous trip. I put my defunct retirement story into one short sentence, as if spitting in the face of real estate values, and ordered another glass of wine. Being maudlin is a no-no on a business trip.

My next two nights yielded similar experiences, with decent food and I got the hang of driving the Oleo around Athens and rural parts in between. I went home with very sore feet, dust on my eyelids and a load of dirty construction site-kissed clothes. No rum or cigars but a bottle of Georgia Brown Ale that boasted on its pretty label, “Smoother than a Clinton Apology.” Not only friendly drivers those Georgians, funny too.

The end of this month I get to go to Jackson, Mississippi. This won’t be a construction trip but an equipment training seminar sponsored and paid for by manufacturers. It’ll be fun! No corns or hard hat hair! Just food, wine and education. In a new place.

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I cannot tell a lie. I went back to my therapist. After, what, eight years? Even Superwoman knows when she’s up against too much. Therapists and lawyers are probably the only ones thriving in this damn market. Anyway, as usual, she brought it all into focus for me. That plan I had? The one I worked and paid into for twenty years? The plan that motivated me to get up and go to work every day? The one that got me through managing my rental properties, cleaning, maintaining, advertising, spending money on, investing in. . . this was all going to pay off someday. It didn’t pay off in 2010 as previously orchestrated, but someday it would, right? If I just keep on working, paying, working, managing, that light at the end of the tunnel . . . my North Florida, oyster bar, fishing on the beach retirement. . . .

Just. Winked. Out.

So. Now what. I see what others are doing who have realized that there is no hope for it any more. There’s bankruptcy with a new start. Foreclosure. Just say fuck it and keep working. One guy I met chucked it all and moved to Key West. Now there’s a thought.  But I haven’t yet moved past my visions of bank lobbies (one in particular) filled with high explosives.

My brilliant therapist says to first mourn the loss without all the confusion of what to do next. Perform a ceremony to symbolize this loss. (This will probably include setting fire to something and drinking some Cabernet). Then, once past the anger and the mourning, come up with the new, adjusted-for-the-recession plan.

Which could be . . . .