While I had the good fortune, low-paying though it was, to get out of my mother-in-law’s condo forty hours a week, Sheri was stuck there. While taking care of her mother, she took solace in the innkeeping job hunt, the scent of the quarry, the near misses and the ones that got away.
Donning her pith helmet, she set out on the trail of inn jobs across the country, putting thoughts of her mother aside when she could, forgetting that her husband was having an affair with a garden nursery. For brief periods of time, she was nearly happy.
She e-mailed, had phone calls with, courted, and sent flowers to jobs in Montana, Oregon, and Northern California. We were, of course, hoping to get back to California, and if not there, then somewhere much further west than Ohio. And definitely not Indiana. We needed more than a mere three hour move to the Hoosier State. And then a big red, syrupy Hibiscus flower opened up in Hawai’i.
The Love-erly Buncha Coconuts Inn, on the Island of Maui, was looking for innkeepers.
“The…”
“…Love-erly Buncha Coconuts…”
“…Inn.”
“In … gulp … Hawaii?”
“On the Island of Maui…”
Sheri nearly peed her pants when she told me. Her mother did pee her pants, but her mother did that.
“It’s like a small village,” my wife told me, “And everyone comes to breakfast in the main yurt.”
“In a what?”
“A yurt.”
“What’s a yurt?”
“I don’t know, but we’d be living in one, too.”
“Inna yurt?”
She nodded vigorously.
It was a frightening thought, moving to an island in the Pacific Ocean. And it was exciting. I began to fantasize about yurts.
Running a distant second in the job hunt was a B and B in Mississippi. “But it’s on the coast,” Sheri pointed out unconvincingly, knowing the thought of Mississippi, in my head, was not a pleasant one. She wanted to go to Hawai’i as much as I; what did she care if the inn in Mississippi practically sat across the street from the Gulf of Mexico. “It’s not exactly on the Gulf. It’s just inside the mouth of the Bay of St. Louis,” she explained.
“The Bay of St. Louis? Missouri?”
“No, no, no. The Bay of St. Louis, Mississippi. It feeds into the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf is about four feet away.”
We were having this conversation just in case Hawai’i, by some incredibly bad karma or sheer dumb luck, didn’t work out. I demanded we have a safety net, just in case (I was tired of falling on my face; it hurt), and in this case, the safety net was Mississippi.
But Mississippi as a safety net wasn’t very reassuring. I mean we’re talking about Mississippi here. The Deep South. The Ku Klux Klan. Emmett Till. It gave me the willies. But so what? We were going to Hawai’i.
Except we weren’t.
We negotiated and arranged and put together a plan and then discovered that our cats – Rufus and Charlie – who had been on the road with us all along, would have to spend a month in Hawaiian quarantine. And we would have to foot the bill.
A month in quarantine would kill the cats, either literally or in some deeply psychological sort of way. I couldn’t do that to them. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t afford it anyway.
Hawai’i would have to wait.
We drove to the bottom of the country for an interview. “I told you we needed a safety net,” I growled at Sheri somewhere in southern Kentucky.
And so it was, with visions of Hawaii still flitting about my back porch light, we drove south, to the Gulf Coast for a job interview at the Bay Town Inn.
The inn, like the Hellhole, in North Carolina, was an elegant old home with more ghosts than a cemetery and more family history than a reunion. It was built in the 1870s by Ludovic Adrien de Montluzin, a Frenchmen and one time friend of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. Ludovic had a bad heart and an interest in chemistry. He and his wife, Reine, were married sixty-two years; they had six children, and their descendants lived in the elegant old house until 1956. The family sold it in 1970, where upon it immediately fell into disrepair.
In 1992, after months of gutting and stripping and dry-walling and spackling and staining, Julie Guttapercha and Stone Slugfest opened the doors of the house to the public: The Bay Town Inn was open for business.
The inn was a success, but nobody wants to run a B and B forever (the generally accepted shelf life of an innkeeper seemed to be seven years). Julie and Stone sold the inn to Miss Anne, who was suddenly, unexpectedly, a widow and had a lot of free time on her hands. Her innkeeper shelf life was even shorter than that of Julie and Stone, which was why Sheri and I were interviewing for the job. (She didn’t want to be an innkeeper any longer, but she wasn’t in so much of a hurry to part with the income. Most owners aren’t. It ultimately makes them a pain in the ass.) In fact, we had exchanged a few emails with the inn a year earlier, when we were desperate to be rescued from Asheville, North Carolina. Their emails stopped, and we assumed they had hired someone else. We ended up going to California.
And now here we were, a year later, sitting across the table from Miss Fredonia, Booger, and Airman Kirby, in the kitchen of the Bay Town Inn.
Booger was, from what we could discern, Miss Fredonia’s boyfriend. Since he had been handling the current emails and phone calls, we assumed he was the muscle behind the business, if not a bit of the brains. But that wasn’t the case at all. Airman Kirby was the muscle and the brains and whatever other assorted body parts were necessary to overseeing the inn, as well as all of Miss Fredonia’s affairs. We suspected the only body part Kevin provided was his co*ck.
Airman Kirby, a former hurricane hunter, was Miss Fredonia’s son-in-law.
Booger was hilarious and seemed like a hell of a guy. Life on the Gulf might be a little more enjoyable with him around. And he was part of the reason we eventually took the job.
Airman Kirby, on the other hand, was something of a simple man, succinct, friendly, a Mississippi good-ol’-boy. He wasn’t simple minded, just simple. His dreams and aspirations – and he did have dreams and aspirations – were grounded in practicality and necessity and usefulness and so on. All pragmatic stuff: goals that were reasonable and achievable and eventually profitable. There was no hidden agenda or ulterior motives with Airman Kirby. He was the kind of guy you’d like to have for a friend, a friend you could depend on. Booger, for all his hilarity, always left me feeling like I had been pickpocketed.
Our interview was a pleasant enough affair. We sat at a table in the kitchen of the inn with Miss Fredonia, Booger, and Airman Kirby and talked about innkeeping and breakfasts and expectations and goals and so on, the same old hooey with a humid gumbo undertone. With more than a year and a half of experience at three different inns plumping up our waistlines, we felt pretty good about it.
An old guy named “Spiggot” wandered in through the back door. “Hey Spiggot,” Airman Kirby greeted merrily.
“Ah hah!” Booger conspiratorially added in his thick Cajun accent.
“Well, hello, Spiggot. How are you today?” Miss Fredonia asked sweetly. Saccharin sweetly. Nauseatingly sweetly. It nearly put me off sweet stuff once and for all.
“Fine, Miss Fredonia. Just fine. You?” Spiggot asked back with much less the artificial sweetener.
“Sunny, Spiggot. Sunny.” I suspected she was always sunny no matter how dire the prognosis.
It seemed that a Tennessee Williams novel might break out at any moment.
A few more pleasantries got exchanged while Spiggot rummaged through the
fridge.
“Spiggot,” Miss Fredonia began, ladling thick, golden honey over the saccharin, “I want you to meet these two fine people…”
“…though they’re Yankays,” Booger humorously interjected with mock disgust. At least I think it was mock.
Miss Fredonia shot him a look and then continued, “…who have driven all the way down from Ohio…”
“…yankays…” Booger muttered, shaking his head.
“…to interview for the innkeeping position.”
Spiggot walked over, wiping his hand on his shirt as he did so, and extended it to me as I rose from my seat. “Spiggot,” he informed me as if I hadn’t caught his name the dozen or so times it had been used so far.
“Gregg,” I replied in kind.
He nodded, shook my hand, and then extended it to Sheri. “Spiggot,” he said again.
“Sheri,” she replied.
He nodded. They shook hands.
“You know, I came down from the north…” Spiggot began.
Booger gasped in shock. “Why … you … yankay!”
“… Detroit. Back in the early ‘60s. A bunch of us came down to work at a Stennis.”
“Stennis?”
“Yeah, Stennis. Space center. They test shuttle engines there.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah … course it wasn’t called ‘Stennis’ then, and they obviously weren’t testing shuttle engines then either.”
“Obviously.”
The conversation continued, with input from everyone seated around the table. Everyone who was a southerner that is. Sheri and I listened politely, nodded politely, and asked the occasional question to give the appearance of being interested in all this Southern Mississippi bullsh*t.
Christ, I thought, the crap ya gotta go through to get a job.
The conversation mercifully ground to a halt (mercifully for us; they could have gone on for hours). Spiggot excused himself; Miss Fredonia, Airman Kirby, and Booger took us on a tour of Bay St. Louis.
The gang was clearly proud of their small, steamy, languid, village on the Gulf, just as they were equally proud of their southern heritage. (We were “yanks,” that was obvious, and not just in the southern drawl, which got nowhere near the way we spoke, but in everything about us, our mannerisms, our temperament, the speed (or lack of syrupy slothfulness) at which we went about our lives (we seemed amphetamine-riddled compared to these southerners), our attitudes (which were so sinfully progressive they bordered on anarchy), our misguided belief that the North won the Civil War … Booger joked that the Mason-Dixon Line was, in fact, I-10, which bisected the country from northern Florida all the way to Santa Monica, California, and passed a scant few miles north of town. They were Deep South, and in their bayou-riddled minds the Deep South was The South.
The town was charming; there was no doubt about that. And I suspected it had something of a New Orleans feel, but I couldn’t be sure since I had never walked those jazzy streets. There was a feel of Ann Rice and her vampires in the thick, molasses air, though somewhat diluted in my imagination by Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and it – Bay St. Louis – was quaint and marginally historic. There was clear evidence of an attempt at preserving that history; a battle with the salty environment; a war to preserve and carry on the Deep South, despite the world and the new 21st Century.
Bay St. Louis, as well as our three tour guides, seemed quite happy to dwell in the swampy, lethargic Gulf Coast of, say, the 1970s just, as I’m sure, their parents carried on the lifestyle of the 1940s with resolute determination, f*ck the rest of the world. The rest of the world was the North, and the North was an evil place clearly in a hurry to go to Hell. And we were Yankees, an inferior life-form at best.
Did we really want this job?
Well, it was across the street from the Gulf, and Sheri really, really wanted to be by the water. And it did have that New Orleans vibe going on, and New Orleans itself was only forty-five minutes away. And there was that sleepy, Deep South, Tennessee Williams thing in the air … it was as different and exciting to us as California had been a year earlier. The possibilities were intriguing, or at least the potential for some possibilities…
…and it was several states away from Ohio.
With all these bees buzzing about our wildflowers, our trio of southern fried hosts took us up to what would be our living quarters, a large, high-ceilinged apartment with a living room, three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom, on the second floor of the building next door to the inn, a building which Miss Fredonia and Airman Kirby also owned. It also had a French Quarter-like balcony off the living room, which hung out over the sidewalk below, affording us a view of the waterfront, and the Bay of St. Louis across the street. Sheri nearly wet her pants. It was Deep South and groovy. Even my bladder twitched.
From there we made our way next door, back to the inn, where we were shown to our room for the night. We had a couple hours to shower and rest and fill out an application before we all went back out to dinner.
That evening, Booger and Miss Fredonia drove us over to the Railroad Station Eatery, “where everything is ala carte,” Booger gushed at us in his best Cajun treacle, a swampy southern commentary on this pinky-in-the-air establishment. There was more of a tour involved as we drove back roads and side roads and the main drag, all beyond the limits of our earlier shoe-leather-on-pavement tour. Sheri and I had to admit, the small town was quaint, and the syrupy honey sunlight of dusk certainly cast it in a somewhat magical light. It seemed to be a place in which we just might find some comfort; a place we might call “home.”
Booger’s already thick, mosquito-infested Cajun shtick was even more turbid during the drive, evidence of a few aperitifs; Miss Fredonia was clearly and downright vexed about it. He got even thicker during dinner. And funnier. And though Miss Fredonia shot many dagger stares at Booger throughout dinner – he was clearly not going to get laid tonight – his hilarity only made the job more attractive.
Airman Kirby and his wife, Miss Fredonia’s daughter, joined us for dinner. The food was delicious (and even more so because they were paying for it), the continued conversation about the town and the job were marginally tolerable, and Booger was a hoot. By the end of the evening, Sheri and I each were imagining ourselves as locals along the Gulf of Mexico, on the coast of Mississippi.
We had nothing to discuss. If they offered us the job, we would go to Mississippi.
And they did offer us the job, despite Sitara Booshes, no less.
We went with the honesty approach on our application: we filled up three pages – front and back – relating the tale of our demise back in California. And we wrote that there was no way in hell Sitara would have a single kind word for us and if they called her for a reference, well, sorry for wasting your time and you have no one to blame but yourselves.
Of course, they called her. How could they not? Their curiosity was piqued. Booger, in full, charming Cajun regalia, got Sitara on the line, told her the reason for his call, and was greeted in return with, “I have nothing to say about those inbred, mid-western, thieving, conniving, mother, f*ckers. And f*ck you, too, you Goddamn hillbilly co*cksucker.” And she hung up.
They had to hire us after that, if only to hear more about what exactly happened back in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
And a week later we were living on the Gulf Coast.
