The namesake Ionesco stage-play is my vade mecum for this trip, to Fredericksburg, Virginia. This absurdist anti-play would prove apropos. My traveling partner was my friend J, who I'd fight within 32 hours.
It was the 10-year anniversary of our last bus-trip to the D.C. area. That was during my hair-headed days, 16-years-old, when my healthy shoulder-length crop was my ticket to learning the word 'esplanade' from a 22-year old journalism co-ed as passing Hoyas hooted.
Now, in Chinatown, Manhattan, J and I tried to match our tickets to the correct bus as a hard rain tamped down both the steamy odors of exotic cuisine, and the volume of my hair. Three hours later and these two Yankees were south of the Mason-Dixon with their friend C.
In Virginia, one day's newspaper included a letter to the editor which admonished readers against the clear and present danger of trial by jury.
That morning's breakfast, at the greasy-spoon Battlefield Diner (adjacent to a Civil War battle site), was comprised of grits (with 1/8 stick butter melting in it), 2 eggs, a plate-sized pancake (with 1/8 stick of butter melting on it), and strange bacon (could have been opossum back-fat). Pouring on syrup with C still reading the letters, I remembered Ionesco's quote, "One can prove that social progress is definately better with sugar."
At least this was a departure from the obsession with the Fire Chief's line, "You don't have a little fire in the chimney, something burning in the attic or in the cellar? A little fire just starting, at least," which while on the bus to D.C. fanned the flames of my obsession with my stove.
A trip to Hooters for a Lucullan order of 50 chicken wings (dial a 911 on the hot-sauce-meter; ex-Manhattanite C made a contretemps by ordering the 9-11 wings), turned out to be an event that would have depressed even Ionesco to new lows. Our waitress, exposed in the chauvanistically-tailored, garish orange-and-white uniform, had suffered a peach-sized gunshot wound through her shoulder, and she had long pink-bump scar down her sternum where her ribs had been cracked by a chest-spreader in a long-ago ER. Now, pull apart the wings.
Next we went to a party in an American Legion where they had an over-abundance of chicken-wings. The party was for teenager who was headed off to fight the hell-war Afghanistan, although he was too sheepish to sing a blues-version of the song "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in front of a small gathering of friends and family.
Between sets, outside for a smoke, a drunken band-member stepped into an open-air gazeebo, gave a perplexed expression, laughed at himself and admitted he thought it might be warmer in the gazeebo.
The party took place in the Legion's main hall; there was barbeque Sterno-style; also, kegs, church ladies, veterans, families with small children, electric bingo boards on the walls; the band took the stage after a CPR course ended.
One evening I played the drums, for the first time, in C's basement. I discovered I might have a knack for it, and if I make some money maybe I could buy a kit. (Hey, Radiohead's Paul Selway is bald.)
Either before or after a high-brow discussion of the authors John Cheever (pithy prose) and John Updike (poetry that would make Larry Flynt blush), we found ourselves in a low-brow fight. What began as a whiskey-infused gambol near the childhood home of John Adams devolved into friendly fire, sans muskets or bayonettes, and then a fist-fight.
When I felt a thumbnail being pushed into my eye socket, I oddly formed a new-appreciation for the vile-jelly scene in King Lear, then remembered I was fighting and pummeled J square in the face. Had something to do with an ugly jape J pulled with a woman's gardenias, and maybe one too many bald jokes. Good thing C pulled me off. That was the end of that. (Pictured, J's black eye, post frozen peas.) 
The selfsame cop rolled past thrice, taking our drunken selves by surprise each time with his undercover SUV. Each time he'd ask us if we were home yet, and we'd wipe the blood and dirt off and reply kindly with crystal-coherance, "Yes, sir, thank you sir," and he'd give a nonplussed smile and roll off while not looking at the road. Luckily for us, the Southern gentleman did not engage us Yankees. (Pictured, my shirt after the brawl.)On the final day we played baseball in a park. Large speakers blasted Beethoven, then gangster rap. We cracked cans of PBR, chewed Double Bubble, and hit home-run derby with a new softball bat. A small black Pomeranian chased and dodged the white orbs loping through the grass.
C's Virginian friend tells me about all the bodies from the Civil War strewn throughout the Virginian soil. Home improvement, digging a pool or basement, can mean exhuming a mass grave. Stories of houses standing near the ball-field where saw-bones'es lopped off arms, legs, and gangreneous stubs, defenestrated them. Poltergeist, anyone?
The raconteur swore, when he's drunk at night, he can hear dead soldiers moaning. I admit, when we had passed the site of the Battle of Fredericksburg, that odd even-at-high-noon ethereal battlefield light, that spectral mist in broad daylight, the fact that the battlefield still inexplicably looked like a battlefield 150 years later, bolstered the tale.
A decorative pyramid of cannon balls at the cemetery, and I recall some Cormac McCarthy from his novel Blood Meridian: "... there grew a loud rumbling that he took for thunder until a cannonball came around the corner trundling over the stones like a wayward bowl and went past and down the street... how the cannonballs were solid copper and came loping through the grass like runaway suns and even the horses learned to sidestep or straddle them..."
McCarthy was writing about the Mexican-American War, but the description could have been the Civil War. Hell, the metal grape-shot used in those wars was seminal to the plastic balls made by the Honeywell corporation and used in Vietnam because X-rays couldn't detect them.
It's the vicious circle Ionesco limns in his play. As the Martins took the place of the Smiths (an inspiration Ionesco only conjured after the 100th performance), there was now a small Pomeranian sidestepping baseballs where there once were those horses.
Early morning, in Chinatown, D.C., the hard rain is falling again at it did in Chinatown, Manhattan. We sit in a basement, waiting for the bus, after eating a Burger King Whopper for breakfast. I use the toilet depsite the fetid odor; with just enough toilet paper to use as a herpes-etc.-aegis on the scabrous seat, I take off one of my grey tube-socks; in the loo, in lieu of paper, I use the sock, throw it in the trash. (Pictured, the missing sock.)As we left the south, I saw soldiers washing down with soapy push-brooms what looked like a Vietnam-era Hercules helicoptor.
For the duration of the return-bus, I am struck with worry that a burner is on, like a secret Olympic flame.
Now I am back in the North, on my Northern couch, glancing at my Norther clock, drinking my Northern coffee, reading my Northern papers, eating my English fish and chips at my Northern cafe.
As I finish this post, I tune in right at the end of Easy Rider. America is dead! "We blew it. Goodnight, man."
