Somewhere in Middle America 

I wanted to hang around Des Monies for a while because Jack Kerouac once said the prettiest girls in the world were from there.  Lasky was in a hurry to get to Omaha because Warren Buffet owns a furniture store there.  With friends like these, who needs to go to the zoo?

To be fair, I couldn’t exactly figure out how to get Des Moines to work.  It seemed like it was just highways and fast food joints.  Everyone I asked to direct us to the “cool part of town” seemed to be suffering from mad cow disease.  They would just flail their arms, scratch a body part and mutter something about the Perkins that was nearby.  Eventually, we went to the Perkins.

We were the only people in the restaurant under 95 years old.  I got the biscuits and gravy.  Lasky got the whole grain pancakes, which he feared would eventually make him “deuce like a wild man.” (One of Lasky’s most revolting little quirks is that he always refers to shitting as deucing.  More on the later) 

Watching the little old ladies dole change out onto the tables to pay for their coffees and side orders of cottage cheese, I couldn’t help but wonder if any of them had been one of the world class pretty girls that caught Jack’s eye so many years before.  It didn’t hurt to believe that they were.  I also wondered if they were as disappointed with Des Moines’s new generation of women as we were.  I didn’t see one under forty years old who weighed less than 200 pounds.  But what can you?  Things change. 

We sped across the Iowa countryside.  Now it was pretty.  Lasky’s iPod pumped Levon Helm’s earthy vocals out over the cornfields.  The music seemed at home there, even if Lasky and I didn’t. 

Like most New York Jews and New Jersey Jew lovers, we shared a certain mistrust for “middle Americans” that ranged from subtle to crippling.  They were the bible thumpers.  The ones who voted for G.W.  The ones who watched television.  The unwashed masses.  If we were gay and wanted to get married, though, we could have stopped right there in Iowa and done it.  New York and New Jersey are still working on it.  And as far as being unwashed goes, Lasky and I hadn’t showered for days. 

It had nothing to do with Warren Buffet’s furniture store, but Omaha turned out to be a great town.  They had the cool downtown we couldn’t find in Des Moines with restaurants, shops and wine bar that looked like it should have been in Soho. 

The first thing we saw was a guy standing on the corner wearing a cowboy hat, playing country songs on the guitar.  He was wearing an Obama t-shirt.  We watched him suspiciously.  Deep down, wondering if he liked Obama or was illiterate and thought Obama said Omaha.  There was no way to know for sure. 

We ate at a cool little BBQ place and Lasky didn’t mention deucing the entire meal.  The evening was off to a good start.  We spent the night barhopping and walking around the city.  We stopped into a place to watch a jazz band that I thought was good but Lasky said wasn’t.  He knows more about music than I do. 

We were good and drunk by the end of the night when last call rolled around. We didn’t have a place to stay so we either had to find some girls to go home with or sleep in the truck.  We played darts and eyed a group of girls who may have been eyeing us too.  After beating Lasky soundly three games in a row, he mustered the stupidity to go over to the girls.  I don’t know what he said to them, but it didn’t work.  They nodded politely and looked down at their drinks in unison.  I didn’t say a word to them.  That didn’t work either.  We slept in the truck. 

We cleared some of the boxes in the trailer and laid down moving blankets to sleep on.  I used a stack of t-shirts as a pillow.  It wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.