On the route into Nashville, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a sign saying:
“Welcome to Nashville – Site of US Army war crimes”
I pissed off quite a few people by reversing down the main highway in order to re-read that. But, sure enough,
there it was: “Site of US Army war crimes”
Well, bugger me! That’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to be reading anywhere in America. Basra, fair
enough. Baghdad, probably. Well, basically most places in the Middle East, to be honest.
Or Vietnam. Actually, I’m going to have to stop this list or I’ll be writing all night.
But Nashville?! If America’s suddenly developed an ironic, inward-looking international conscience, this isn’t exactly where you’d expect its epicentre to be. I eventually realised that the sign refers to the time when Tennessee had seceded
from the Union and was part of the Confederate States during the American Civil War, and I did feel
slightly smug to have worked that out myself without having to Google it first.
As I only had one night in Nashville, I hit the city with aplomb. Unlike a lot of places in America, its
night-life hub is quite centralised, and spying a ‘Hooters’ bar right in the middle of it made me perk up
immediately. Or at least one part of me.
If you’re not familiar with Hooters, the basic premise seems to be that having your food and drink served to you by women who are too attractive to be models, wearing handkerchief-sized t-shirts stretched across truly gargantuan breasts
is somehow going to make the restaurant experience more enjoyable. This is, of course, entirely correct.
After the mandatory steak meal and a generous number of beers, I realised I was staring one waitress
squarely in the cleavage perhaps a little too blatantly, and decided that it was time to just leave the tit ...
I mean, tip, and head elsewhere for more boobs ... I mean, booze.
It wasn’t difficult to happen upon a live music bar, called Tootsie’s, where I saw a country & western band,
who were jolly good, although my travel journal gets a little vague towards the end of the evening. All I
seem to have written is that I discovered some graffiti in one of the toilet cubicles which said: “This toilet
paper is like John Wayne – it won’t take shit off no one!”
Alas, I cannot confirm how accurate that statement was.
When I’d arrived in Nashville and checked into a motel, the lady at the front desk had asked me if I wanted an early call. “Do I bollocks!” was roughly the gist of my response. Consequently, it came as a none-too-pleasant shock when the phone rang at 11 o’clock the next morning and an irritatingly cheerful voice on the other end twittered, “Check-out time.” Oh thank you. Thank you so much.
A few minutes later I stumbled out of the door into sunlight, feeling as though a metaphorical bear had
taken a metaphorical shit in my actual mouth. Curiously, the cleaning lady who passed me going the
other way seemed to be in exactly the same mood. We grunted at each other.
Getting up and about, though, did give me a little time to drive to the city’s Centennial Park and have a gander at its most bizarre tourist attraction – the world’s only full-size replica of the Parthenon from the Acropolis in Greece. (Yeah, in the middle of a park in Nashville – I thought that was weird, too.) And a pebble-dashed one, no less! Brilliant! They’ve re-created an historically fascinating piece of architecture and still managed to make it look slightly tacky.
After a few hours’ road trip across Tennessee to Memphis, I arrived just in time for what is honestly the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen on my travels. Truth be told, I almost don’t know where to begin in describing this.
Ladies and gentlemen, The March Of The Ducks… (By the way, if you’re only interested in debauched boozing
anecdotes, I’d skip this next bit.)
There’s a hotel in Memphis, called The Peabody Hotel, where the two-storey foyer area has a resident
collection of five ducks, who cheerfully spend their daytimes splashing around in the water surrounding the
ornamental fountain, in their own ducky manner. (And, by “ducky manner”, I don’t mean they act slightly camp.)
At 5 o’clock every evening a red carpet is rolled up to the fountain and the “Duckmaster” – now that is a fucking fantastic job title – leads the birds along it to the elevator, where they are transported up to the “Duck Palace” on the hotel roof. I do genuinely beg you, if you don’t believe me, please please check out their website. The ceremony is
repeated in reverse at 11 o’clock the next morning, and both walks are accompanied by the tune King
Cotton March.
If none of this sounds weird enough for you, I almost despaired for the future of humanity when I stood
(no less than four rows back, by the way) watching the ducks’ actual march and was almost blinded by
the machine gun flash bulbs that started firing off as these five fucking birds walked between an army of
tourists that looked like paparazzi on speed. What can I say? Five ducks.
Okay, back to debauched boozing anecdotes…
Beale Street in Memphis! Have it! This is a place that, in the evenings, is closed off to traffic, and
there are roadside stands selling beer which you can then merrily drink whilst wandering up and
down, sampling the live music in the bars which line both sides of the street. Fantastic for people
watching! As a rock ‘n’ roll band pounded away in an open-air courtyard, one drunk guy spent the
evening making a spectacular fool of himself trying to dance with a beautifully buxom black lady who
was jiggling away to the music.
Sadly, it was me. When I eventually gave up and moved on, I found myself in a bar where two guys were playing duelling banjos on stage, and out back there was a fenced-off section containing two goats that were drinking beer. (Because it was being fed to them by a bunch of frat boys, by the way, not because they’d somehow developed opposable digits.)
I think I’ll leave myself there, happily watching the drunken goats, and conclude my Tennessee tales by
asking: so is it the case that the southern states are populated with nothing but bible-bashing, gun-toting,
cousin-marrying rednecks who couldn’t point to Iraq on a map of Iraq? Well, no, of course it isn’t. That’s
a stupid generalisation. People here are as weird and diverse and strange and interesting as people from
anywhere else.
I did steer clear of Alabama, though. I’m not stupid.
