I’m still grinning after reading random lines of Gary Snyder in the Poetry Room at City Lights last night. In a world quickly moving toward e-readers and cell phone novels, it was reassuring to drift among stacks of books and pick up volumes on impulse, graze a few graphs and move on. Wallace Stevens. Hart Crane. Denise Levertov. Lao Tzu. I could almost feel Ferlinghetti’s hot, beat breath on the back of my neck as the smell of yellow pages filled the room and the floorboards creaked beneath me.
Category: Travel Bob
My travels landed me in New York this week, where my friend Mike was reading from his book “The Card: Collectors, Con Men and the True Story of History’s Most Desired Baseball Card.” The reading was at a bar on the Lower East Side called The Happy Ending. Dubious, I grabbed a cab and headed downtown.
The Happy Ending was tough to spot. The cabbie looked a bit confused. But my directions said to look for a sign that said “Health Club.” After a little searching, there it was. And it wasn’t a massage parlor after all, though apparently it was at one time and that’s where it got its name.
Mike did a great job at the reading, but the highlight of the night came when Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim read from his book, “Running the Table: The Legend of Kid Delicious, the Last Great American Pool Hustler.”
Actually, it wasn’t Wertheim who was the highlight. It was the fact that Kid Delicious and his sidekick, Bristol Bob, were in the bar and took the stage. They were hilarious, especially when Kid talked about pool hustles they pulled in the South. Birmingham seemed to cause him particular trauma. Kid was a sort of seizure-driven version of Jackie Gleason, spreading a thick Jersey accent onto the microphone as he spoke. Bristol Bob was one of those guys who oozes cool. Their method was for Bob to make the scene first and play several games. Then Kid would show up, overweight, acting a bit clueless, dribbling cake crumbs and looking vulnerable. While Bob’s a very good pool player, Kid is a genius who would proceed to dominate the hall and walk out with everyone’s money.
I talked to Kid for a bit after the reading and was impressed. Apparently, they’re talking about turning the Wertheim book into a movie. That would be cool …
To top the night off, Mike and I drank a beer on a doorstep of a Lower East Side apartment, enjoying the late night sounds and smells of Indian Summer in New York. What an amazing city.
Business travel can really suck. This past week was a great example. I managed to get stuck at Chicago’s O’Hare airport during a swarm of terrible thunderstorms that raked the Second City. As I watched lightning crash around the airfield it became increasingly clear that I wasn’t getting home that night. I was booked onto three flights. All canceled, forcing me to wait in a 2-hour cab line to get to the only hotel I could find. It was all the way downtown.
The next morning, I arrived at the airport early, knowing it would be a zoo. It was. After a few delays, I did manage to get home at about 5 p.m.
But the trip had a few bright spots:
— The sunrise pictured here, as viewed from my hotel room at DFW airport in Dallas. I returned to my room after a 5 a.m. struggle in the fitness center to be greated by this scene. Very cool.
— The Knoxville effect. It’s never hard to tell which gate the Knoxville flight is departing from. It’s the one with all the people wearing gaudy orange clothes and baseball caps with the UT Vols logo. And they talk to each other. While other gates are packed with people doing their best not to acknowledge each other’s existence, the KnoxVegas gate is filled with people who talk to each other and socialize. This was true even as we watched flight after flight cancel at O’Hare. Talked to several great folks and we decided to laugh instead of cry. A few of them spent the night at O’Hare, and I saw them the next morning after I returned from my hotel to try again. A true Knoxville experience.