I’m So Amtrak I Could Cry

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.

Hickory Shampoo and Other Discontents. WHOOOO!

Of course this video has been pawed over, analyzed, and generally chewed like a behavioral studies cud by so many ruminant internet animals that offering my input would be superfluous. But, in the parlance of our times: Do you know who I am? I’m Sippican Cottage! Superfluity is my métier!

I don’t really care too much about these two proto-sea hags in particular. Everyone else has pretty much covered the waterfront [The management cannot endorse this pun, and disavows any responsibility for it] about their sense of entitlement and so forth. Salt water is wet, y’all. But I’d like to bring something new to the table. Add some seasoning to the stew, and stir the pot, too. Share the benefit of my vast experience. So here goes: Just how obnoxious do you have to be to get the heave-ho from Clarke’s bar?

I’ll head the achshually crowd off at the pass and testify that I’m fully aware that the name of the establishment is the Clarke Cooke House. No one ever calls it anything but Clarke’s bar in my experience, which while somewhat out of date, is voluminous. You see, the minute I espied the screen cap on those videos I knew exactly where these two strumpets were getting their comeuppance. The quarterboard that reads Wine Bistro Spirits. The host’s standup desk thingie. The striped awning. I’ve been in Clarke’s lots of time. That’s Bannister’s Wharf in Newport, Rhode Island. I know it inside and out, and since trolling by it on Gargoyle Earth shows that most everything there is unchanged from the way I remember it, I’ll assume what goes on around there hasn’t changed much either.

Bannister’s Wharf is attached to Bowen’s Wharf right next to it, too, another place I know intimately. I performed in bands dozens of times in that general vicinity, and been drunk dozens of additional times, usually not at the same time. They set up a big tent at the end of one of those wharves, I forget which, and we performed there. There was a restaurant across from Clarke’s with a function room over it, and we’d played for another musician’s wedding reception there, and to give you some idea of the way people act at that locale, the groom jumped out of the second story window halfway through the reception. If you manage to cross America’s Cup Ave. without getting run over, you’ll be standing on Thames Street in front of One Pelham East. I performed there several times, and still have PTSD from it. I played in the nearby Newport Bay Club, too, and used to go across the street on our breaks to pound a quick beer with the jazz band that played in the Red Parrot.

You see, Newport has always been THE location for white bread girls like the two imbeciles in the video to let it all hang out. And by let it all hang out, I really mean yelling Whoo! a lot, and asking you to play Brown Eyed Girl for the third time that evening. Did I mention, WHOOH? Of course back in the day the WHOOOOH was accompanied by five drunk girls making ducklips while one drunk girl took an out of focus picture of the other drunk girls with an Instamatic. Now it’s resting bitch face straight into your Instagram cesspit, but the result must be the same. WHOOOOOOH!

Oh man. I’m having flashbacks. Salve Regina night at the One Pelham East. Yikes. Catholic college girls let loose for the evening, packed in like bullets in a box, yelling WHOOOOOH and climbing up on the stage to paw at us and yell whooo into your microphone, which transmogrified it into WHOOOOOOOO! The stage was several feet higher than the floor, thank god, or I wouldn’t be here to call myself Ishmael and finish the story. A WHOOOH! girl once called me to the edge of the stage in the middle of a song and motioned to me to bend down where she was. When I did, figuring all she wanted was to yell Brown Eyed Girl in my ear for the fourth time, she grabbed a fistful of my shirt, trying to kiss me, and pulled me head first off the stage onto the floor below. That certainly made everyone (but me) yell WHOOOOOOOOOH! Later, on my break, I was walking to the men’s room, and the girl’s room door opened, and there she was, with a gaggle of her friends, and they dragged me in there. I eventually escaped with my life, a torn shirt, and more lipstick on me than a maiden aunt, but I still have tinnitus from the WHOOOOOOOOOOH! they let loose in such close quarters.

And Clarke’s? I’ll ask it again. What in tarnation would a girl have to do to get bounced from Clarke’s? If you shot someone in there, they’d probably ask you to put on a silencer before you shot anyone else, but they wouldn’t bounce you. Clarke’s? Really? Oh, how we abused that place. My friend Mark knew someone who worked in the kitchen. He took me and my buddies to the little wooden gate that hides the alley between the buildings, and we entered through the kitchen, made our way through the rugby scrum of sunburned drunken hedge fund managers and dental hygienists in the bar, and came out at that bouncer lectern you see there in the video. Mark would tell the guy we just went in for a minute to see if someone we knew was there, and he wasn’t, so could we have our $10 cover charge back? He gave each of us ten of someone else’s bucks and we’d go right across the alley for oysters and pitchers of beer. That was pretty obnoxious of us, but we were just trying to fit in around there. So I’ll repeat myself: Just how obnoxious do you have to be to get bounced from Clarke’s?

Please understand that I’m talking about how hard it would be for female humans to get bounced from any nightspot around there. If you’re not of the distaff set, you could get bounced, literally and figuratively, by the local constabulary, sometimes at the drop of a hat. This was also a known fact. But girls? Never.

I’m mystified (not really) by the assistant D.A., who not only doesn’t know the law that forbids turning off a cop’s camera under those circumstances, she’s also unaware that the Newport police department has never been in the business of handing out hugs. Everyone always said the were pretty enthusiastic about applying the hickory shampoo to your scalp. I got stopped by the cops  while going home over the Newport Bridge once, going about 40 MPH. It was really late (early), and the bridge was deserted. The cops said the limit was 25, because of “construction,” here’s your ticket. I mentioned it wasn’t posted, and there was no construction. He asked me if I’d like to come down to the station and “discuss it.” I demurred, because I’ve never wanted a second chance for my fontanel to fuse up. With cop-worn cameras, that approach seems to have morphed into a hair trigger, no compunction about telling you to STFU and move along, and a quick trip to the hoosegow if you put up a fuss. The STFU part is the same as it ever was, though.

So I know something the assistant D.A. doesn’t seem to. First, the Newport police ask you. Then they tell you. Then they make you. There’s no other steps, and they’re always in the same order. But to even the score, she knows something I’ll never know: How in the hell do you get bounced from Clarke’s bar?