As I wait for the shuttle taxi that will take me into town, a young woman comes up to the hotel’s reception desk. Slender with fine features but unattractive glasses, a baseball cap covers her long thin braided orange hair, and an unlit cigarette dangles out of the corner of her mouth. She looks like a toughie, but she leans across the counter in a seductive, flirtatious way.
The male receptionist isn’t indifferent. Amused, he smiles at her, then shakes his head in apology. “You had someone else in your room last night.”
“He was only there for a little while,” she says. “He left at 4:30.”
“Yeah, well, sorry. The management says you still have to pay for the extra guest.”
“Doesn’t matter.” She shrugs, indifferent, then slumps onto the couch next to me.
“Hate having to get up this early,” she says. “Got an early flight.” Outside, the sky is still night black.
“Where are you going?”
“Seattle.”
“For work?”
She tugs at the brim of her cap. “I’m a dancer.”
“That's nice,” I say, but she doesn't answer.
Three drunk middle-aged fat women barrel through the lobby, give us both suspicious looks, but she’s still slouched down and not looking at me, so I think she has no intention of continuing the conversation.
Only when we settle into the shuttle that will also take her out to the airport does she say, slightly embarrassed, as if talking to an ancient granny she doesn’t want to shock “I'm a lap dancer. You know, dancer, stripper, that sort of thing.”
I only nod, but she wants to clarify. She wants me to understand. “It’s an itinerant life, but not a nice one. You can’t trust the other girls you work with; you have to keep your door locked all the time. I wanted my best friend to come with me on this trip, but she has two dogs and cats and couldn’t.” She is silent for a while, stares out at the bleak industrial wasteland we’re passing through. “You have to want to get up in the morning. You don’t want to, on this job I do.”
Her loneliness touches me, what can I tell her that will make things right? “Is there something else you can do eventually?”
“Yeah, there is. What I really want to do is be a dog cop, work for the humane society.”
“I never heard of a dog cop,” I say. “Can you get a job like that easily?”
“Oh, I saw it on television. You can do it in some cities. I’m going to look into it. I don’t want this kind of life forever.”
“Then go for it. And best of luck to you.” I wish, once again, I had a magic wand.
In the bus station, the early buses going north are crowded. Our driver is a woman, but this is not to the taste of one huge square-bodied mama. “I'm not goin’ with her. She has an attitude.” Fashionable husband with his dernier cri hairdo says nothing, shows only self-centered boredom.
We stop in some ungodly place for a long pause while we change buses. Two police agents have handcuffed a screaming fellow passenger.
“What's going on?” I ask a lady in a fussy bright green go-to-church hat. She has been sitting across the aisle from me.
“He just refused to show his ticket to the driver, and he was rude. Now he’s been arrested. You show respect to someone in an authoritative uniform, that’s what you do.”
“My own son is a bus driver,” she says, “and yesterday he was driving towards Charlotte and he sees a police car with flashing lights right behind him. He knew he wasn’t going over the speed limit so he pulls over. The police tell him to get out — they didn’t want to talk to him in the bus, you see. And the police asks him, you got some people from — oh I can’t remember — something east, you know."
“Middle East?” I offer.
“Yeah, that’s it. They ask him, ‘You got people from the Middle East on your bus?’ And he says, ‘yes, four of them.’ They was wearing long robes, you know, and all. So the police says, that’s the ones we’re lookin’ for, and pulled them off. Then he had to wait for an hour somewhere because someone was going to blow up a Wallmart.”
The newspapers are silent on this subject. Is it true? Who knows? She informs she is the leader of a church group, was the deaconess for a while. Then she gets down to brass tacks, preaching “the good word,” and there’s no discouraging her. Fortunately, she suddenly discovers she has left her cell phone on the last bus and goes off in search of it while I watch her bag, “only got the one. I left all the other bags with my son. He'll bring them up later. I had to leave in a hurry. My best friend died, and I have to get to her fast.”
Rather after the fact, I think, but don’t say.
She returns shortly, telephone snug in her purse. “God looks after me,” she says with assurance.
I tell her my own story of losing a telephone on a train in France when accompanying a friend to the airport near St. Malo. By the time I discovered my loss in the city of Rennes, the train had gone on, heading for the far west of Brittany before shunting back across the country to Paris. There was nothing to be done, but I had shuddering thoughts of someone finding the phone, calling Brazil or Tahiti, and racking up a fortune.
In St. Malo, my friend took a plane to London. I returned to Rennes and bought a ticket to Laval where I had left my car. There was a train leaving immediately and I had to run to catch it. It would have been easier to wait for the next one half-an-hour later, but the station was cold and cheerless.
I scraped in just as the doors were closing and took a seat. And suddenly I heard a telephone ring, a familiar sound coming from under my seat. I took a peek — and there was my phone, sitting where it had dropped out of my purse five hours earlier. It had been traveling back and forth for hundreds of miles and no one had seen it.
The green hat lady smiles happily. “You see? God took care of you, too. He knew that was your phone and he wanted you to have it.”
Which is a comfort. Despite all my usual careless sloppiness, I needn’t ever worry again. I can’t help wondering, however, if there aren't more important issues for God to be busying himself with.
In Philadelphia, I wander through city streets where townhouses are lovely, and the beautiful 30th Street train station, is a glory — especially to me, coming from France where elegant nineteenth-century stations are being converted into shopping malls. Of course, nothing is certain: there are plans afoot to change even this beauty and increase retail space within the station. People just can’t leave nice things alone.
Philadelphia was founded in 1682 as the capital of the Pennsylvania colony, and it remained so until the Philadelphia Mutiny. In 1783, the Continental Army of more than 10,000 soldiers was camped on the nearby estate of Jockey Hollow. Feeding such a large force put great a burden on the local community, and the result was badly fed and poorly clothed soldiers — many were going barefoot in the snow. Not only that, but they had not been paid for most of the year despite their many pleas to Congress.
Over one thousand soldiers deserted, another 100 died in the brigade hospital. Those remaining decided to mutiny. Running wild, raging through the countryside, foraging what they could, stealing horses, and food, they marched into Philadelphia and surrounded the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) and threatened Congress at bayonet point.
Instead of attempting to resolve the problem, Congress gathered in the first-floor room where the Declaration of Independence had been signed, wrangled with the Pennsylvania government to make the mob go away, and pleaded with George Washington, then encamped in the Hudson Valley, to send reinforcements.
Washington was incensed when he heard about the mutiny. “I cannot sufficiently express my surprise and indignation at the arrogance, the folly, and the wickedness of the Mutineers.” He dispatched 1,500 troops to disperse the crowd and arrest the ringleaders. He did, however, urge Congress to provide supplies, and remonstrated with politicians to deliver pay.
In the meantime, the delegates had taken flight, making their way through the jostling and rowdy crowd, fleeing the city and reconvening across the river in Princeton, New Jersey. Finally, in July 1790, Congress approved the creation of a national capital on the Potomac River.
There’s a fairly large audience at the Jewish Historical Society for my book talk, which is certainly satisfying. Okay…I only sign and sell two or three copies, but there’s compensation. The president of the Historical Society just happens to own a very chic fish restaurant in the city, and after the talk, that’s where he takes me.
Learning of my passion for oysters, he presents me with a huge plate loaded with two of every single variety available on the east and west coast of North America. The oysters and the lovely white wine he serves me, are hedonistic treats, and those are far more memorable than unloading a few books.
More about my books and passionate life can be found at http://www.j-arleneculiner.com
and http://www:jill-culiner.com
and on my story podcast at https://soundcloud.com/j-arlene-culiner
