GRAND CANYON: THE GREAT FLOOD

Much has been said about the great flood of the northern Mississippi River on this journey. The story has been front-page news for weeks now. The latest reports question whether the floodwall protecting St. Louis will hold. The great rivers of the North American continent are higher now than they have ever been since records have been kept. Most of Illinois, Indiana and much of Missouri have been declared disaster areas. The bulging Mississippi and Missouri Rivers are cutting new channels and rerouting. The land will never be the same. New streams, creeks and rivers, new ponds, lakes and natural gardens are now forming to change the maps and rearrange the inhabitants.

It is a tumultuous event in the continuing evolution of mother earth but around here they don’t talk about it much. What is there to say? It’s a big river and a hell of a flood. Not much you can do about it except pick up and move when your time comes. These are not the kind of people to panic. Other than a catastrophic collapse of the floodwall, the biggest concern now seems to be the supply of drinking water. It’s ironic. With all this water fresh from the heavens, they’ve had to cut off the public water supply in many communities. I guess you can’t drink that river water. It’s contaminated. I’m sure somebody can set me straight on this. It just seems a mighty strange world when you can’t drink untreated water.

I noticed it several years back in the high Sierras of California: Don’t drink the water. It will kill you. It had something to do with deadly microbes. I don’t know what the story is here.

Driving through St. Louis on a bright summer day you would never imagine it was an official disaster area. We have seen little evidence of the great flood from the vantage point of the interstate, only the immense rolling rivers themselves. Just north of St. Louis is where the Missouri joins the Mississippi from the west and the Illinois from the northeast, making it a critical flood area. To the south the great Ohio and Tennessee Rivers join forces at Paducah, Kentucky, and feed into the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois. The flooding is confined to the north. By the time you get to Tennessee the worry is about a drought. Nature is full of irony.

The Missouri crosses under the interstate at St. Charles on the outskirts of St. Louis. These are dirt-water rivers the color of creamed coffee and thick in appearance. Of the two, the Missouri is the more impressive. Its breadth is mammoth and the force it carries can be felt like brain fever even from the highway above.

There are a few scattering raindrops but little more to hint at the looming terror at the floodgate. There is a clarity of vision rarely seen in the heart of an industrial land, a brightness of color, sharp crisp angles of the St. Louis skyline and the great arch, which conjures images of MacDonald’s despite its striking beauty.

St. Louis strikes me as the first eastern city on the interstate, like Memphis to the south. The line is drawn at the Mississippi. It presents a stunning contrast to Kansas City, which seems to have neither eastern nor western roots, and an even greater contrast to Columbia. Its glory and its pain are wide open to the view of all who pass through its gates. Its stylish towers and skyscrapers, its Victorian houses and classically drawn neighborhoods seem to be at war with its brick housing projects, crumbling buildings and concentrated poverty.

Here too are the billboard advertisements of assorted Gentleman’s Clubs and Dancing Girls by the score. You can’t mistake a sign like that. I make the inevitable suggestion that we give it a look. It’s our last day on the road, the last major city we will encounter and the last chance at false romance.

Before this journey began I had written a series of jazz poems under the title Random Erotica. It might have titled the Wet Dream Series. Those who are associated with erotic literature yield to an unspoken law that they should never cross the line that divides the sensual from the sexual. I have no such restriction. With the Wiz playing background, we recorded several of them in the schoolhouse before we left. It is a part of our repertoire.

We had intended to catch a ballgame in St. Louis but the killer of Tioga Pass threw us well off schedule. Now there’s only one thing left to do.

We pick out a billboard advertising a place called Cheeks that seems to be on our path. The name is a little obvious but what can you expect? This is not art. We pull off the highway at the advertised exit and find ourselves in the middle of slum city. Welcome to East St. Louis. There are no white folks here except in the joint where we’re headed. We drive about ten blocks when the red neon sign of danger lights up the front of my consciousness. I turn to Wiz to gaze his thoughts. He is not alarmed as I am: What could be more inviting to the criminal element than a couple of white boys in a bright orange Mustang with California plates? How bad do we want it?

I make the suggestion: Let’s get out of here. Wiz is not ready to turn back: Let’s give it a few more blocks. I figure he wants it a little more than I do. A few blocks up we pull into the parking lot of Cheeks. It is a flat top painted brick building that looks like it could have been a garage in a former life.

Wiz ran out of cash somewhere between Boulder and Kansas City. Before we embark I hand him a twenty and suggest that we not sit in the front. I am not a veteran of these joints but I know there’s a world of difference between a titty bar where well-rounded women with too much makeup shake their breasts, slap their asses and take your contributions with their cheeks, and a true strip joint where the women move with the grace and sensuality of cats or swans and stimulate erotic dreams with a blueprint of the universal male psyche. I am an admirer of a good erotic dancer and an artful tease. This place is somewhere between.

It is surprisingly tasteful with red carpeting, velvet drapes, a circular bar, padded barstools and several small stages with lighting in red, blue and amber. We sit at the bar, order the beer on tap and turn our attentions to stage one. The dancer is tall, thin, blonde and beautiful, a worthy specimen of the profession. If she’s smart and looking to get ahead, a few years on these stages and she’ll have enough money to buy a house or go to college or pursue the kind of life she chooses.

She dances with a natural rhythmic talent but little imagination and less choreography. Choreography is not in her job description. The first song closes and Wiz springs from the bar to approach the dancer. I have no idea what he’s up to and less sure that I like it. He returns with a shrug and explains that he was trying to buy me a table dance. Unfortunately, it costs twenty bucks and after the beer he only has ten. I tell him it wasn’t meant to be.

The next song starts up and the blonde dances for me. She’s sure she can get the extra five and she wants me to know she’ll give me my money’s worth. I resist the temptation but acknowledge her raw talent. There is a thin line between enjoying the erotic nature of human kind and infidelity. It is a line I’ve chosen not to cross.

A man with a dark complexion steps up to the blonde, whispers in her ear, hands her a bill and the dancer springs to action. Wiz got it wrong. It turns out the specialty of the house is the lap dance. She straddles him as he sits on an armless chair and grinds with a piston action that would turn back the floods. She presses her well-contoured breasts to his face and squeezes. She spins on a dime and continues her riveting motion from the backside view. All the while she maintains eye contact with the Wiz and I. We’re marked at the next recipients of her charm.

Suddenly she rises and stands like a stature before her customer. Without pause he produces another bill and the show goes on. It reminds me of a mechanical horse outside a supermarket. It is as close to sex as it gets without penetration. It is also one solution to the AIDS epidemic and it is no coincidence that these places have thrived in the wake of that deadly disease.

I say to myself: Yes, this will do. The words begin to mold themselves into poetic form. It will be my first wet dream poem in a thousand miles. I signal the Wiz, leave a five on the stage, and we walk out to the startling daylight of East St. Louis. The plan was: One beer and we’re out of here. I am a little surprised we lived up to it.

We head out to the highway, Wiz at the wheel, the image of the blonde still fresh in our minds, words circling in my brain, finding their niche like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. As we near the southern turnoff I whip out my notebook and write:

She was a streamline model nobody’s whore
Breasts the size of golden delicious apples

She pressed her cheeks against the mirror image
Twisted and squeezed in a manner that suggests one thing

Twenty bucks she said mouthing the words
Twenty bucks to feel the force of her machine

Shake it baby grind it to the rod and core
Writhe and squirm and squeeze
Drive it like a locomotive full steam
Like an atomic powered submarine

Quake it shake it take it down in liquid lust
Guide the stream of wanton dreams

Buck and quiver like a wild stallion
Ride it high and low

Take me to the poorhouse
Drop me off the edge of sanity
Lay me down in tupelo honey
Floating in the waves of fantasy

You’ve got to feed the monkey she says
Beyond the sweet blue flame of far far away
The monkey has been fed

Ten bucks for a beer and a poem. Not bad. She delivered on her unspoken promise. She gave us our money’s worth.