I’ve been traveling again. I have to steel myself against the process. I knew going in what it would be like. The transportation schedules would be byzantine. The cab drivers wouldn’t speak English, or any other Romance language I could take a stab at. I understood from the get-go that the public transport would be rundown and unreliable. I’d have to keep my head on a swivel in public places, because as the philosopher Fagen once opined, “Everybody on the street has murder in their eyes.” I anticipated that traffic would obey the same rules as piglets at the tit, and fender bender disputes would be adjudicated by throwing hands in the street, if not gunfire. The denizens would shuffle by, morose, staring at the dirty sidewalks three feet in front of them, afraid to look anyone in the eye, as crazy people, beggars, and vagrants patrol the sidewalk.
Am I going to Mexico? Moldova? Mogadishu? Nah, Boston.
I know Boston, of course. Well, knew Boston. Past tense, now. Born there. Lived there. Built some of it. Worked there. Met my wife there. We decided to stay at the Parker House, a venerable Boston landmark. The concierge asked us if we’d ever stayed there before. We said, “Yes, thirty years ago.” There was a short, stunned pause, and she said, “That doesn’t count.” Alrighty, then. The Parker House is famous for various things. They invented Boston Cream Pie. That’s like claiming you came up with Zyklon B, if you ask me, who wouldn’t eat it on a dare. They have Parker House Rolls, which are better than snowballs in a fight. They were also the first people to make up a term for off-brand codfish to be served to the Irish pols back in the day. “We went to the Parker House, and we got scrod,” is an old, almost joke.
There is an ominous OMNI in front of the words “Parker House” on the sign these days. The stately pile was swallowed up and made to look like every other thing you sleep in when you feel like paying convention tax and sales tax and accommodation tax and are in the mood to spend $70 for valet parking. It used to have a certain James Michael Curley vibe. Now it has squiggles on the wall.
The Parker House is on School Street. That’s old bastid Boston. The Old City Hall is across the street, more or less. It’s a magnificent Second Empire dustcatcher. It was replaced by the new city hall, which I formerly referred to as the ugliest building on earth, but I no longer do that. Frank Gehry entered the sweepstakes and upped the ante since then. I don’t think anyone was trying to make the new Boston city hall deliberately ugly. It was just deliberately Brutalist, which is bound to be ugly. The architects were simply imbecilic ideologues, not misanthropes. Two hunchbacks don’t try to make ugly kids. They just can’t help it if they turn out that way. Slice Gehry anyway you like, he was an a-hole through and through. His mistakes weren’t mistakes.
We were doing basically the same thing that gestational Jesus, Mary and Joseph did back when crucifixion was the preferred method of torturing the locals to death, instead of just onerous taxation, which takes longer and hurts more, I think. We had to return to the city of my birth to be taxed. Our patience was taxed, mostly, and our wallet, boy howdy. But there are certain administrative functions that cities hoard for themselves, and we required, so we had to go there. I generally give all cities a wide berth otherwise.
We tried to make the best of it. Took the train. Amtrak Downeaster. The sign on the train was scratched, and it looked like Amtrak Downcaster, which I liked better. If the conductor had asked me if I’d ever taken the train to Boston before, I could have told the truth for once and said, “Yes, thirty years ago,” but he didn’t. His appearance suggested that he was more qualified to tie maidens to the tracks than punch our tickets. Come to think of it, the train might have been the same one I rode in last time. I would have looked for my gum under the seat, but figured it might have stiffened up overmuch in the interim to be useful, so I let it be.
The train station in Portland is a combo with a bus station, because you can never get downscale enough to suit public transit. There was an interesting mix of people in the waiting area. Kliban would have had a field day in there. There was Psychedelic Babushka, Snorting Businessman, Failed Student Athlete, Girl With Dorm Fridge Backpack and a Dent In Her Head. Amazing Mom and Mortified Teenage Son made an appearance. There was a quorum of furtive guys who looked like their backpacks couldn’t stand an olfactory inspection by even an untrained German Shepherd, never mind the police kind. Everyone was wearing workout clothes, evidently to do everything they do in this world except work out. I’m not sure when the shift occurred exactly, but all the men wear ladies’ eyeglasses now, and all the women wear Elton John’s glasses.
The train trip itself was exactly as I remembered it. An endless tour of downscale back yards, more tarpaulins than Harbor Freight, sorry trampolines sleeping under a meringue of snow, all the while the elderly railcars clanking and banging and chugging like an offensive linemen who picks up a fumble and tries to run with it. I knew we’d entered Massachusetts when the stations sported clear lexan trash barrels that were chained to metal posts, with clear plastic liners so you could see if there was a bomb or a baby in them. I did love the train whistle, though, as we passed through the center of towns:
♬ I hear the lonesome whistle blow — I’m so Amtrak I could cry ♬
Ah, Dirty Old Boston. I’d forgotten what it was like to hear car horns blown in anger, with every lane change a fight for primacy. Just like old times. The women in the city have changed, though. When I used to come here, they would get all dolled up for work. Now they’re uniformly unhappy, sourpussed, and dressed alike — all in black, like a giant Mennonite funeral with a crummy paycheck at the end.
We sat in the coffee shop across from the golden dome of the state house, downed our ration of coffee and buns, and enjoyed the hell out of the fender bender played out right in front of us, wild gesticulations and rubbing each other’s bumpers and screaming that it would buff right out. The dogs with better shoes than the people walking them. The whole ghastly wintertime scene.
But we mostly enjoyed it because we knew we’d never have to look on it again.
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We had to leave our Tiny Town™ here in NW Wyoming and drive 56 miles each way to go to even Tinier Town for my wife to see a medical specialist. Hey, it’s better than driving 100 miles each way to go to Big City™. On the way out we spotted one of the food trucks in our area parked in Really Tiny Town’s gas station…we’ve never eaten his stuff before, but it serves Greek food. We stopped there on the way home and picked up a couple of gyros, made there on the spot and with incredibly fresh ingredients. We finished them off in two separate meals…yeah, we’re geezers and don’t eat as much, but those things were huge.
Back when we lived in the Heart of the Hive™ of SW Shittiapolis there was a chain of restaurants run by a bunch of Greeks that served (among other things) really good gyros for a reasonable price. This food truck guys prices weren’t what I’d call reasonable, but it was the best Greek food we’d had since we got here. And the grin on his face when I thanked him (“efcharisto”) and he responded with “parakalo” was worth it. (Nope, I’m not Greek.)
I told you all that so I could mention this: There is literally NOTHING that could make me voluntarily go back to that nightmare of a city. Not even the choices in food or restaurants that simply aren’t available here. Not the ethnic grocery stores, or even just the “regular” grocery stores. People from the Soviet Socialist State of Minnesota have got to be the nastiest, most unhappy people on the planet…and they’ve made themselves that way. Heck, here in the Tiny Town™ grocery store we routinely strike up conversations with the folks behind us in line, whether we know them or not. The folks helping us behind the counters and at the check-out know us, and we usually find something to laugh about together, even if it’s just the weather.
As Uncle Remus used to say, “Stay away from crowds”. All a city is, is one great big crowd.
Hi Blackwing- Greeks have to be in the running for the greatest restaurateurs in the world. Only the Chinese can compete with them, I think.
I’m with Remus (PBUH), too. A city is where people go to be lonely together.
A Mainer making taking the to Boston reminds me of another Mainer train
trip to Boston: Down East Socialism.
My Maine relatives are toughing it out visiting their children and grandchildren in California. February is the month to get out of Maine.
I am reminded of a night train from Boston to NYC, one of the last train trips I took. A fellow passenger was telling his seatmate—and everyone else in the car—that Harvard Law students were SUCH good people. (And so modest, I thought to myself.)
Coincidentally, the girl who was my main babysitter married the son of a Harvard Law prof. When I was a Hippie eco-freak in Berserkeley, I visited them.
I got acquainted w Boston’s Chinatown when my mother had appointments at Tufts Medical. Learned about Chinese bakeries and pork buns. I made it a point to always get some pork or coconut buns when in Boston. Over the years, made many visits to Boston and its environs, as my sister lived in Boston or its burbs for 50 years.
The only unpleasant encounters I had with Bostonians were with Boston drivers. Not just car on car bad drivers—worst drivers in the country in my opinion—but car on pedestrian.
Hey Gringo- Yeah, not sure what Chinatown is like now, but it was a godsend back in the day. I was a musician, and finding places to eat late at night was a chore. Chinatown was awesome for that. And you’re right about the other thing, too. Boston drivers are justly crowned the worst drivers in America for good reason. Why, I even believe they could hold their (crazy) own in Rome or Bangkok.
Another good one, Mr. Sippy. Your hotel squiggles hanging on the wall made me laugh. Years ago, my company sent me to a seminar in a big hotel in Miami around Christmas time. During a break, I walked around the halls and looked at the artwork, and I’m not making this up, it looked like pieces of plywood that had been left on the roof of the hotel, and someone had fed the pigeons different colors of oil paint. Then, after they pooped all over the plywood, they walked all over it and let it dry in the sun. Then they hung it on the walls. What made the paintings even more hideous was the juxtaposition of the hotel art with a bunch of grade school art in a large exposition at the hotel that had won awards given to grade school students who had been taken to see the Nutcracker suite for the first time and then told to draw or make a painting about it. The little kids were magical. They didn’t have any artistic training; nobody told them they couldn’t do what they did with their art supplies. Every one of the paintings the kids created was full of life. All their paintings made you smile. And of course, they made the official art hanging out in the hallways look even more artistically bankrupt.
I have never been to Boston, but I do like Boston Brown Bread, and I always liked the TV show Cheers, and the spirited way that Boston citizens got involved in student school busing.
That hotel room looks identical to Quality Inn and Best Western rooms I’ve stayed in across the US. I bet it costs a little more to stay in the Parker House Best Western in Boston than it does to stay in the Best Western in, say, Fowler, Colorado. Sorry.
Some years ago we went to DC for a vacation trip and paid the $$$$ to stay in the Capitol Hilton. I knew it was going to be a ripoff, but just wasn’t prepared for how much. The first floor lobby was very nice; but the rooms were straight out of the universal Hampton Inn playbook (though smaller and dirtier than they would have been in, say, Topeka), and the air shaft right outside our window was specially designed to amplify the backup beepers of the garbage trucks that came EVERY SINGLE DAT at 3 am.
I’m pretty much completely DONE with paying exorbitant prices for hotel rooms. I’ve been in a lot of hotels in a lot of countries and I no longer get anything out of it. The location, yes, but the hotel itself? Nah.
Hi JC- Thanks for reading and commenting.
Yeah, to someone like me, who has a sense of Old Boston history, the Parker House is supposed to be the shizzle. When my wife and I stayed there way back when, it was still old school posh. Now the rooms are completely blah. We paid $200/night for a nondescript room the size of a closet.