I saw it from ten miles away, a flashing red beacon amid the dull iron skies. From Joplin there was nothing to see for a hundred miles but a billion little trees in their naked winter frames. But then that red dot poked above the horizon. And it did something funny to my foot, it made it push down harder, and the Nissan spluttered into life for the first time since Utah, where I’d almost killed her speeding across a vast salt lake.
Now everything was alive again. My heart beat faster. All my thoughts flowed into a single destination, forcing the car in the direction of the light, that blinking red light: my destiny. And it was at that moment I was pulled over for speeding.
A friendly warning, good day Sir, no ticket.
This used to be Route 66, a beautiful fantasy of a thousand books and movies and dreams. Old timey gas stations and neon arrows pointing to clapboard motels with ice machines and vibrating beds. The Open Road, the almighty symbol of Freedom. But it wasn’t here. As I powered down the five lanes of beige concrete, I could have been anywhere. A featureless road dotted every thirty miles or so with mega-sized truck stops with Starbucks and Subways. There was nothing to say: ‘THIS IS ROUTE 66!’ or ‘YOU ARE SPEEDING ALONG THE AMERICAN DREAM, AND IT’S AWESOME!’ It was like the whole fantasy had been erased from this corner of eastern Oklahoma. It felt strange. Was it a deliberate dashing of all hopes and dreams? Was it part of a bigger trend to keep the expectations of debt-ridden citizens in check? Or was it just a thoroughfare serving major cities and no one cared about its ancient past? The romance of the road was still strong on the lonely highways of the Southwest – but what else for a crossroad of shacks in the desert but a girl, my Lord, in a flat bed Ford?
The mammoth white concrete Hard Rock Hotel & Casino came into view. It was like seeing the Vegas Strip for the first time, after hours of sand and heat. In some ways, this drive was even more desolate, even more Mad Max than Vegas. At least Vegas comes with the promise of white shorted tourists smiling in hordes under blue skies and cooling fountains. In the locale of Catoosa, Oklahoma, I found only grey skies and black tangled trees, with bearded commuters in rusty cars (and occasional state troopers) for company.
The Hard Rock was right there. I felt a physical spark as I passed alongside: I’d finally found my fateful path, and the spark was my body entering one those freaky fate wormholes like in the movie Donnie Darko. Or maybe the spark was just the billion watts of raw American electricity flowing through the air. Whatever caused it, I knew what it meant: This was where it was at. The American Dream. The true pinnacle. Everything I wanted to know and feel, the singularity of purpose of this trip was right there, inside those doors.
I drove straight past. Because for now, I was Tulsa bound, and the smog encircled skyline had risen from the snaking highways ahead.
This was the city that my twelve year old self had earmarked as a future home. On my maths textbook I drew a Utopian paradise of clean glass towers, zoos and funfairs, and my white clapboard house with a white picket fence. It seemed impossibly romantic to me then, the word itself – Tulsa – even now it sounds electric. Also the fact it looked so isolated on the map, so central, so embedded in America, that was exactly where I wanted to be. Yes I was a strange twelve year old. Now I was here, and in the same vein that you should never meet your heroes, I came to realise you should never drive 8,000 miles to your childhood dream home, either.
Tulsa appeared to be dead; the glass towers that drew me in seemed more like ancient megaliths, long abandoned. The central district was a ghost town, surrounded by the distant buzz of raging highways. It was a modern Giza. These sleek black towers were the Pyramids of the Plains, silent, mysterious, presumably housing the hidden oilmen, the overlords of our era. All the chaos of commuter life was audible, but somehow abstract and distant.
There was no one around. A street cleaner here, a homeless man there. That was it. The multi-storey parking lot was nearly full, but I didn’t see anyone coming in or out. I shared a lift down to street level with a deaf cleaner all dressed in green, pulling a trolley loaded with green and white bottles of disinfectant. I couldn’t find the Woody Guthrie museum, the only thing I really wanted to see before heading back to the Hard Rock. I looked for a shop to get directions, for a drink, a fridge magnet, a newspaper, anything. But found nothing and nobody. Woody would have hated this place.
On a sunny day maybe all would have been different. I could have stayed longer, I might have got hit by a truck, spent a month in hospital, got a job in the Woody Guthrie museum and settled happily ever after. I could have found my white picket fence. ‘If only I’d been hit by a truck,’ you can use that on your tourist brochures. First impressions were glum, and I just didn’t give the place a chance, and I’m sorry. But right then I didn’t care; I knew my destination, and I’d found my path, so I followed it back up the turnpike.
It was heaving with traffic, getting out was harder than getting in (the American Nightmare in action!). Red tail lights snaked as far as I could see, God knows why it was so busy on a Thursday morning. But I was calm in the knowledge of where I was heading. The huge concrete resort was slowly coming into view over the hill. Then came my chance for freedom; the highway was backed up but the slipway was empty, and I cut through and floored the gas; I felt the adrenaline of near-death, zipping past angry drivers, honking and smoking inside their oversized toy trucks.
There was an outside parking lot and a huge multi-storey, so I headed straight for the latter, even though the outside lot was barely a quarter full. A giant billboard said Bob Dylan was playing next week, which emboldened my sense of destiny. I was in the right place, at very nearly the right time. The Hard Rock is everything they thought Bob was against. But Bob Dylan never claimed to represent anyone, only America. And so it is. Here. All in one place. A white concrete block of Freedom, Guilt, Pride, Shame, Fantasy, Boredom, Lust, Gluttony and Envy. When I walked through the giant blacked out doors, Tom Petty’s American Girl boomed from every direction.
Until recently, it was the Cherokee Hotel & Casino. Built on tribal lands unbounded by US gambling laws, similar casinos are dotted on other reservations, and provide otherwise impossibly huge cash injections for the tribe. While this one had been turned into a Hard Rock franchise, it is still is a major centre for Cherokee events, including the Cherokee International Film Festival, and a high proportion of the staff and customers were Indian.
If Joplin, the quaint town I left this morning, was the image of small town, white America, a hardy Protestant settlement against the untamed wild, a fist in the face of brutal nature, then the Catoosa Hard Rock was the entire history of America mangled and shaken, twisted with lime and blown up a thousand feet in the air. You’ve got Buffalo wings, oversized plastic Cokes, real American beers and burgers, old ladies with bumbags full of quarters, young Indians with Nike t-shirts and diabetes, security guards with guns, everyone with guns, truckers in dungarees, conference rooms with diet classes, Cherokee classes, gaming classes. And a thousand screens with Adam Sandler, Eric Clapton, and The Dave Matthews Band. Twenty two stories high in the Oklahoma sky.
What the hell was I doing in these parts anyway? It was mainly to do with the sky. And this hotel specifically, quite apart from being the vortex of the American Dream, fitted my parking requirements. A big concrete shell that looked like it could fit in the whole of Oklahoma if it had to. And the hotel itself was way higher than anything else in the area, a classic 60’s sturdy concrete tower.
I was in Tulsa for one reason only: it was tornado season. And for the last week the excitable weathermen on Channel 42 had their ‘red zone’ centred over northern Oklahoma for today and tomorrow. When it was first forecast I was in the snow of the Sierras, worrying about bears and overpriced beer. Dustbowl storms felt a million miles away. By the time I got to Tulsa it felt more like two million. I scorched across the Plains for the second time in a month, ate pizza, slept Super 8 and saw a shit ton of dead corn. All for this storm.
Now here I was. And here it came. It soon became obvious that the Hard Rock was out of my price range. But not to worry – there was a Holiday Inn across the Interstate, and I could still use the Hard Rock parking lot. Well what was there to do? I sat down with a beer in the all American grill inside the casino, booked in across the road, and relaxed. It was lunchtime.
The waitress had an accent not from these parts, more southern, more charming. We chatted about weather and high school and before I knew it she suggested the prime rib sandwich. As expected, the thing was big enough to feed Canada for a year; I got through half of it and needed another beer to recover. I made sure it was my last, it was still frighteningly early to be enjoying beer this much. By now a thirty-something couple had joined me at the bar and were taking shots of Jagermeister between beers. Jay and Renee. They were from Oregon visiting relatives, had a spare day to hit the casino, and were quite impressively drunk. In a quiet moment whilst they kissed – like lions trying to bite each others tongues – I looked around to notice that all the tables were taken, each by a solitary, silent male. They all had John Deere caps. And they all had tiny dots where their eyes should have been. And they were all eating steak and eggs.
I couldn’t check into the Holiday Inn until 3pm, so I wandered the complex like a bad spy, hiding in different bars to write some notes and steal popcorn, never sitting at a slot machine or table, and when no one was looking, I got in the lift up to the VIP SkyLounge. There was not a soul in sight, no barriers, no warnings, and absolutely clear 360 views, fifty miles in all directions. Along the partition of the room was an unattended bar, full of beer pumps, sweating. Teasing. Purple curtains were tied between the high windows, bleached almost white on the sky-side.
In a way it felt like Heaven. It had that unreal quality. I was alone, in the sky, with just a bar for company. But time was now of the essence, and I had to make sure I was back in this spot for the storm’s arrival. The sky was turned dark by the tinted windows, but the clouds were really bubbling and shifting in supernatural rhythms. I could sense even from here that the air was alive. I had to get out there.
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