Driving Under The Influence . . . Of Nitro

I thought, friends, that Nashville was going to be a bust. This despite the presence of almost 30,000 rabid country music fans in town for Fan Fair, jacking up hotel prices and ensuring the presence of squealing girls in the corridor at 2 a.m. How could it go wrong? But it looked for a while to be a bust with only my inertia to blame.

That first day I got in at 3 a.m., woke my sorry self up in time for the hot breakfast (served 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.; in Knoxville I kept missing the free continental breakfast and it pissed me off every time -- a tragic waste of danishes), and then returned to the privacy of my hotel room. Where I watched tv. Then I ate lunch. Then I napped. When I woke up I kept telling myself that I would go downtown and check out the action. I told myself that for about five hours, at which point I realized all I wanted was to stay hidden and watch more tv. More! The voices of squealing girls in the corridor that night rebuked my indolence. And I had to check out the next day.

But there are times when brute determination is necessary. I was going to see Nashville no matter what. So the next morning I planned to take a 3:30 a.m. bus, and left my junk in a locker at the station. I was disoriented, and a little melancholy. There's something weird about not having a private place to retreat to; it leaves you all screwed-up feeling. Then I hit the beating heart of Fan Fair.

The crowd skewed female, older, and white. The crowd skewed heavily white. The crowd skewed blonde. I saw more personal beer sleeves on the street than ever before in my life. I walked across the river to the Titans stadium, where you could hear a band warming up. I went and got lunch. A band was in the restaurant. I heard Dixieland Delight played every two minutes. I bought a t-shirt that said "In Willie We Trust." I went to Tootsies, because I had heard a woman at the hot breakfast tell her daughter that that was the bar. That same woman asked her daughter if she (the daughter) had ridden the mechanical bull last night. The daughter had. At Tootsies there was a group of people in matching fluorescent green t-shirts. The t-shirts detailed the costs of attending Fan Fair from some town in Illinois that I had never heard of, and ended with the phrase: Family Time, priceless.

I talked to one of the kids in the group. He said they did this every year. He said that his grandma made them wear the t-shirts. He asked if I wanted his. A shaved-head guy built like a mack truck danced while balancing his beer on his head. People applauded him. He tipped the band $20. It was incredibly hot outside. Some of the people in the fluorescent green t-shirts were not in fact members of the family. They were just friends. Or co-workers.

At about 6 p.m. I walked back to my hotel to see if I had left my sweater there. No success, but I decided to get dinner at a restaurant nearby. The restaurant looked nice. I was grubby and sweaty; I thought they might not let me in the door. In the restaurant people asked each other whether the festival was still going on, and said that they thought it had ended yesterday. People asked where the piano player was. I got one of the best half-chickens I have ever had in my life and a chilled glass of white wine. The wine glasses hung from the top of the bar, along with the brandy snifters, champagne flutes, etc. etc. The waitress said that the glasses got dirty from the smoking at the bar.

Inside the steakhouse the women were wearing sequins and dramatic makeup. When the piano player started up, people started dancing. The owner mingled. He patted me on the back and introduced me to a Swiss-educated doctor from Liberia. We talked for a bit. The doctor looked at me soulfully and asked when my bus was leaving. He suggested that we get out of there and do something. He offered to pay for my dinner. A friend of the doctor's came up and asked where the doctor's wife was. The friend said he was amusing himself tonight, and hopefully into tomorrow morning and he looked meaningfully at the women in his party. Then he winked. "Les femmes," he said. He was from Quebec City, originally.

I went to see the Parthenon replica. It was eerie, lit up in the dark. It was still warm out. I was a little disoriented by everything. In the park by the Parthenon was a bandstand, lit up with colored lanterns and a big band was playing. People were dancing in the pavilion. Other people were practicing outside of the bandstand, kids dancing with their parents. Other things happened -- example: a guy at the Greyhound station asking me for $12 then offering to buy me a beer at the corner store -- but those people dancing in the park under the colored lanterns with the Parthenon not far away were probably the best, somewhere in between the sequins and the beer sleeves.

At the Greyhound station I took a 10:30 bus instead; it just meant a longer wait in Montgomery, but I wanted to sleep. I'm in Mobile now.