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On The Road #14
[Note: This column is written for the website to bridge the months between the end of April 2005 and the end of January 2006 when I resumed writing the column for the Little Rock Free Press.]
(Oxford MS, January 29, 2006)—It’s been a long time since your correspondent has filed a report from On The Road—since I wrote from New Orleans in late April, as a matter of fact. It was a hard year for your correspondent in 2005, so probably the less said about it the better, but if I don’t write it all down now I’ll never remember what happened.
I left the States from New Orleans during JazzFest My string of troubles started when I got back to Amsterdam last April 29th for the QueensDay celebration and broke my laptop computer the next night. I didn’t have the money to have the top lid of my iBook with the defunct screen replaced, so I was without my primary tool for making a living as a writer and I suffered for that for the next five months.
I had a great spring in Holland, made a bunch of radio programs for Radio Free Amsterdam, rode on the lead float in the Legalize! Parade and used the internet cafes to keep up on my e-mail. Then the 420 Café, my personal base of operations in Amsterdam, offered me the opportunity to put in some time behind the weed & hash counter each week, and that not only was a gas but also covered my food & incidentals budget.
On the 17th of June a friend gave me a bike to ride, and three days later—just a week before my scheduled departure for the States—I was riding back to Ferre van Beveren’s little apartment where I was sleeping on the floor and got into a terrible bicycle accident when a kid on another bike crashed into me and sent me flying through the air until I hit the pavement dead on my left hip.
I couldn’t get up to walk, so I laid there and phoned my producer and best pal, Larry Hayden, and he and Steve Dumach raced over on their motorbikes and escorted me to Ferre’s place. I stayed flat on the floor for the next five days,until the great Doc Rosen came over and gave me one hell of an acupuncture treatment.
Doc came back over the next day and finished me off with another dynamite treatment, and on Sunday afternoon I limped down the atairs and into Sarah the Healer’s van. She spirited me away to her farm outside of Breukelen for the night, drove me to the airport in the morning and poured me onto the plane.
When I wheeled off into Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, my daughter Celia picked me up and took me to see Dr. Ken,, our long-time chiropractor, to get my hip straightened out. From there I went directly to the Franklin Academy of Natural Therapeutics and a deep tissue massage from Swami Bill Lynn.
Now I could walk with the assistance of a pair of arm braces, and I caught the train to Atlanta to see my wife Penny and celebrate her daughter Krishna’s graduation in medical technology. Three days later I caught another train to Baltimore to begin my annual week of teaching Poetry of the Blues at Common Ground in the Hill in Westminster, Maryland.
You know, sitting here in Oxford in the middle of the night I can’t even remember all the places I went before I ended up in Detroit to spend the month of August in the Motor City, working around Michigan and visiting my wife, my daughter Sunny and my sweet l’il granddaughter Beyonce.
The hell of it was, my wife didn’t want to see me and just side-stepped her way out of my life without a warning. Evidently she’d decided that she didn’t want to live in Amsterdam with me as we had planned and simply moved on. Of course we all have the right to do whatever we wanna, but after spending a quarter of a century together it came as quite a jolt that she was actually through with me, and I spent the whole month in a state of profound shock.
* * * * * * * * * *
Then the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, and the levees broke in New Orleans to cause the flooding of 80% of the city’s homes, and the lives of hundreds of my friends and hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens were wiped out in a flash. Huge waves of grief swept across the nation, and my personal troubles were literally dwarfed by this incredible catastrophe.
My daughter Celia was out of town when the water hit and fled to Detroit to wait things out. Most of my friends safely escaped the flood, although many of them ended up in the SuperDome or the Convention Center with the rest of the wretched refugees who had no way out of town and nowhere to flee to. For me, I was simply overwhelmed with uncontrollable sadness and sat around crying my eyes out for days.
—Oxford MS @ January 29-February 2, 2006 >
New Orleans @ February 20, 2006 |
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