America Essay Pt II Where Have All The Celebrities Gone?

I think every town should have one street that is dedicated to nothing except fun and partying. Like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Beale Street is just such a street. It is one block where live music can be heard coming from every direction. Bands play right on the sidewalks. From beginning to end it is nothing but gin joints, blues bars, outdoor cafes, tacky tourist museums, and cheesy gift shops.

Like Bourbon Street, if you walk left or right in either direction the scene quickly dissolved into urban squalor. Poverty lurks all around. But on Beale Street the good times never stop. Walking Beale Street by myself was like going to a party where you don’t know a soul. I ate Cajun chicken at an outdoor café where the waitress thought it was very bizarre that I would put milk in my tea. I watched a cute young couple jitterbug like no tomorrow to a 20 piece swing band that was crammed inside a small booze hall. At night’s end, after a few drinks, I sat on the curb and watched a lively blues band play on the sidewalk in front of a taffy store on the other side of the street.

Feeling the first pangs of the loneliness that is to be expected on a long journey alone, I began to watch the thinning crowd pass by. The late hour began to weed out the squeaky-clean yuppie tourists, leaving only the small-time tough guys, dressed in black dungarees and sleeveless Levi jackets, the necks of their wife-beater T-shirts revealing the mysterious blue lines of jailhouse tattoos and the soft ripples of pool hall scars.

The lucky ones accompanied by marguerite soaked sex kittens whose clown make-up failed to disguise the weather-worn texture of their well lived-in faces. This detail of little concern to the gentleman of the streets whose attentions are distracted by half-opened discount-store sequined -blouses, chipped high heels, and too-short skirts that might have turned the heads of more selective men in days long gone by.

That night I drove in circles through the streets of Memphis trying to find a location where I could sleep safely. Eventually I realized there is no location in Memphis where I could sleep safely, so I drove over the border to Arkansas and quickly found a friendly looking highway welcome station and pulled in.

Throughout the trip I was fighting a losing battle to keep my cell phone charged. I found an outdoor outlet hidden behind a hedge on the welcome center wall and plugged in the charger. As I waited for the phone to charge I sat on a dark picnic table under a pine tree and played guitar. It was a warm night stroked slightly by a cool breeze. As I sang songs I have sung a thousand times before, travelers straggled in and out of the welcome center bathrooms then drove off into the night. On the highway, cars buzzed by in the distance. Everyone was on their way. Everyone had somewhere to go. Only I sat alone with no direction, and without purpose, except to play guitar and wait for the next cool breeze to caress my tired muscles.

My trip had just begun and already it was a wonderful adventure. When you step outside of your work-a-day routine, almost immediately your perspective on life’s priorities begins to change

Plus when you travel on your own, you begin to transform. Shyness melts away. The invisible social shield that separates us from our fellow man begins to dissolve. There is an openness that is born on the highway.

Lonely travelers seem to be able to pick each other out. Long distance truck drivers think nothing of shouting across a crowded diner in order to share a few minutes of casual conversation with another traveler. Truck stop waitresses quickly understand the good deed they provide by speaking to traveling strangers as if they were old friends.

You instinctively begin to look people in the eye, always open to make a new friend, or perhaps just engage in banter about the weather or the sights and sounds of the highway with a stranger who has a few minutes to kill. Humanity itself seems to take on a friendlier hue.

Contrast this with New York City where we swarm through the streets and subways crammed together like a colony of insects. Yet despite the forced intimacy, we are a million miles apart. Jammed into subway trains like cattle, we never look each other in the eyes, we rarely speak to strangers, even when we are crammed tight up against them.

There is little that makes one feel lonelier than to spend every day of your life isolated in a crowd. I believe New Yorkers would like to break out. I think they are just waiting for a chance to do something nice for another. I have seen a woman’s heel break off on a crowded street and hands reach out from every direction as people tried to catch her before she hit the ground. On the rare occasion when I have a chance to open a door for woman, I almost feel like thanking her for giving me an opportunity to feel like a gentleman.

I believe we dwellers of Gotham maintain our invisible shield, not because we have cold hearts, but because we fear intruding on another’s space. Simply commuting and surviving a day of New York City life is such a spiritual challenge that we mentally shut down. There is too much stimulus, too much stress, just too much of everything. I often walk so deeply entrenched in my thoughts that people have spoken to me and I walked on by without even realizing it.

I once watched a documentary film where scientist placed a group of monkeys in a small room and videotaped their behavior. The usually rambunctious simians suddenly became very quiet and still. Crammed into close quarters, like their human counterparts in subway cars, the monkeys became very careful not to disturb their neighbors.

It takes a lot of work to be polite in the hustle and bustle of frenzied city streets. The subways always seemed like an odd conundrum. If you bring a bunch of strangers together it would often be called a party. Yet subways riders are usually as morose as funeral mourners.

Anyone who breaks the sanctity of the subway quiet by speaking too loudly is usually looked at as a bit daffy. Whether it is religious fanatics calling people to the Lord, or homeless beggars singing do-wop for pocket change, we tend to avert our eyes lest we find ourselves in the line of fire. Rarely does anyone speak up to complain, but we try to avoid the disturbance so we do not become entangled in an embarrassing situation.

On one occasion I was on an uptown train heading to some horrible day job, when I heard a man’s loud voice rambling at the other end of the train car. The train was crowded, but I had managed to get a seat. The man with the loud voice came down and forced himself into a too-small space beside a pretty blonde girl who sat directly across from me.

As soon as he sat down he began a tirade in a booming voice. He was a tall, strong looking fellow who arched his back forward with his hand above his kneecap and his elbow arched out with a demeanor that suggested he had some particularly vexing problem on his mind.

“Where have all the celebrities gone?” he asked the crowd.

Everyone looked away from him, trying not to make eye contact. The poor girl beside him crossed her arms and tried to make herself smaller in a futile attempt to gain a little bit of personal space. She was young and fresh-faced and appeared to be dressed for a day in the office.

“Where have all the great one’s gone?” he repeated his query.
“I am around every day and I don’t see them anywhere!”

We were trapped on an express train giving him ample time to complete his soliloquy without annoying interruptions from stops at every point on the line. Or with any opportunities to escape.

“Where is Perry Como?” he asked, gesticulating with his hand held open as if waiting to receive the answer from God himself. “Where is Andy Williams?”

The sincerity of his inquiry, and the fact that his list of celebs was so far out of left field, struck me as absolutely ridiculous. I peaked at him, then quickly looked away so I wouldn’t give in to the urge to laugh at his surreal performance.

“Where is Guy Lombardo? Where is Engelbert Humperdink?”

He had obviously been walking the vacant streets of some easy listening netherworld.

“Where is Desi Arnez Jr?” he demanded indignantly.

When he pleaded as to the whereabouts of Annette Funichello, the pretty girl beside him and I made eye contact just long enough to communicate the sense of absurdity we both felt. Immediately the laughter we were trying to suppress, burst out. And not just a little laughter, we both had a complete meltdown while the funeral mourners looked on, their steely expressions making it clear they did not find the situation nearly so humorous.

Unconcerned by our laughter, his litany of has-beens continued unabated, “Where is Frankie Avalon? I never see Bobby Vinton anywhere any more. Where the hell did Art Linkletter get to?”

By the time the train pulled into the station we were both holding our stomachs, crippled by uncontrollable laughter. Due to our outbursts, in the eyes of our fellow passengers we had been demoted to the unsavory ranks of those who brake the sanctity of subway silence, making those same passengers even more uncomfortable. When the train doors opened we both dashed out, gasping for air.

As we exited the subway on opposite stairways, she looked back and smiled sweetly, I nodded and winked in response. Once the shield had been broken it was suddenly ok to make a warm gesture to a stranger.

Sometimes when walking over the Pulaski Bridge with my ex-roommate Samantha, I would say a big smiling hello to people walking in the opposite direction, just to gauge how uneasy it made them. People seemed to be completely flummoxed by such behavior.

Now as I sat at an Arkansas rest stop, peacefully playing guitar and turning these thoughts over in my mind, little did I know that events would soon befall us that would break the invisible shield for all New Yorkers for many months to come.


But tonight was a beautiful night under a star-filled Southern sky. America lay before me. The future was an open highway filled with potential, and ripe for fun and adventure. As I retrieved my newly charged cell phone I peak at the time and date. The time is 11:59PM and the date is September 10, 2001.