Category: Travel
Yesterday I drove down to Miami to tape an interview with Joseph Cooper at WLRN. (It will air on March 27th). The subject was my essay in the current issue of The Missouri Review about Palermo and the anti-Mafia organization Addiopizzo.
I am indebted to literary quarterlies for their interest. My first travel story, about the Tatra Mountains, appeared in The North American Review in 1981. Later that decade I published essays - on Warsaw and Madrid - in The American Scholar. These magazines provided - and continue to provide - a home for travel writing that travel magazines won't publish. There is much to be said for publications that aren't dependent on advertising.
The only problem is that fewer people read quarterlies than read glossy magazines, and so travel writing gets a frivolous, boosterish reputation. Not long ago I read excerpts from my Missouri Review essay at a writers' conference. The man who introduced me mentioned my books and then, instead of citing awards and praise (as he had with the poet and the novelist who had preceded me), he said: "The thing about Tom is, he's a great person to talk to about travel. He gets so enthusiastic about places." It was with immense pleasure that I got up and read about the worst slum in Palermo.
Last week at LAX I took a seat at the bar of a Mexican restaurant to watch the Australian Open. Even before I sat down the young man next to me started talking. I soon found out why: he was three quarters of the way through a nine-hour layover between Auckland and Miami. From Miami he was flying to St. Martin, where he worked on a luxury yacht (the property of the owner of an energy drink).
A young man - also in a long-sleeved T-shirt - took a seat on the stool to my right. He was flying home to Melbourne, where he worked for a sky diving company. He had done over a thousand dives, he said, including one onto the field before an Australian Rules Football semifinal one year.
The Kiwi looked at him with awe. The Aussie asked him what he did, and he told of his stint on a luxury yacht in the Caribbean. I don't remember if the Aussie actually said it, but his reaction was a clear, "good on ya, mate." I sat back happily, enjoying the spectacle of other people impressing with their professions.
Watching the Golden Globes in southern California is not that much different from watching the show in South Florida. It's on earlier out there, of course, and if you miss the beginning you can just stay on the sofa because they show the whole thing again as soon as it finishes (which makes sense in a land famous for clogged freeways). And then, just like at the movies, you can say: This is where I came in.
The next day, driving the coast from Long Beach to Belmont Shore, I came upon a film crew working on the beach. I parked and walked toward two men in leather jackets. I was wearing a scarf against the cold wind.
"What are they filming?" I asked.
"CSI Miami," one of the men said.
"Miami," I said. "That's where I'm from."
"Bet you wish you were there now," he replied, hands in his pockets, hair blown by the wind.
I walked along the sidewalk, passing carts holding bagels and bowls of tossed salad. Out on the sand, two Miami Dade police cars were parked, and two actors in MDPD T-shirts walked two lovely bloodhounds. A bundled-up young woman sat on the sea wall. I asked what time they had arrived there that morning.
"Around 6:30," she said. "And we'll be here till around 5."
They would be filming, she said, about six scenes. I quieted when one of them started: a woman was carried off on a stretcher and two men with shovels dug a hole in the sand. They looked cold in their short sleeves. After a couple minutes, someone yelled "Cut!"
"That's about as exciting as it gets," the woman said to me.
Exciting, no, but definitely instructive - what every viewer of the Golden Globes should see the morning after.
The art walk in downtown was sparsely attended - it gets cold in Southern California in January - so I stepped into the bar of the Utopia restaurant.
A man with grey hair sat with his back to the window playing the piano. I chatted with the manager, who had been born in Iran, and then another man, who had landed in Long Beach after starting in San Diego.
"It's an urban setting next to the sea," he explained. "Where else do you have that in the States? San Francisco, New York."
"Miami," I said.
"Miami," he said dismissively. "I was there last year. Every place I went it was "BOOM ba BOOM ba BOOM ba BOOM. Even in a restaurant that looked like this," he said, giving a look around the quintessential corner bistrot.
"It's why I came in here," I told him. "It's hard to find a piano bar in Miami."
"I ended up going to the Ritz-Carlton every night," he said.
Doug invited the woman sitting by herself to join us at the bar; he and Denise, it turned out, were good friends. Then he poured us each a glass of red wine. He was a big proponent of the city, and lived in its stateliest building, the Villa Riviera on Ocean Boulevard. I had noticed its steep sea-green roof and lone pointy tower the day I arrived. It had an association with Mary Pickford and looked like a kind of high-rise chateau.
The pianist was terrific; we applauded appreciatively at the end of each number. Eventually he came over and joined us. His name was Joe and he had an endearing soft-spokenness.
Doug was a lawyer and photographer. He handed me his card, which carried a black-and-white photograph of an interestingly enfolded nude. He asked if I'd been to the Sky Bar at the top of the old Breakers Hotel. When I said no, he suggested we go, and we all headed out into the brisk night. I began wishing I were on assignment instead of vacation.
Now a retirement home, the Breakers still rises grandly on Ocean Boulevard. We took the elevator to the next-to-last floor and walked into a dining room that looked like a lounge from the QE2, circa 1975. A few couples clung to each other on the dance floor.
Then we climbed the steps to the bar at the top. It was open air, with clear plastic windows at the bottom of each Gothic archway. Doug bought everyone a Maker's Mark and pointed out the gun turret above, which, he said, had been added to the tower during World War II to shoot at invading Japanese ships. A few freighters floated in the distance and, adding to the illuminations of the port, was a golden string of lights atop the Queen Mary. I sipped my very urbane drink and gazed out over the cold dark sea.
I recently ran into someone who several years ago took one of my travel writing courses. He told me that I had said something during one class that he has always remembered. I was flattered, but unsure as to what this piece of unforgettable wisdom could have been. I asked him to remind me.
"You never look like a tourist," he said, "when you're carrying fruit."
One of the pleasures of watching Alexander Payne's The Descendants is seeing Hawaii, which is rarely depicted in contemporary movies. And the state is more than the setting, it is almost a character, permeating the film in everything from the clothing to the music to the social interactions.
The film is also admirable because it disavows its audience, in the first few minutes, of the notion of paradise. It should be required viewing for editors of travel magazines.