Through The Portal of Hell and Back Again
Or
My Wife’s birthday trip to Charleston, S.C.
On her 50th birthday, I made the grievous error of organizing a surprise birthday for my wife, Joanne, with ALL her family and friends. She swore that if I ever did that again, I would be castrated with a butter knife. Since then, we have traveled every year for her birthday. This year, we paid the Ferryman to take us across the river Styx to Hades. Some may also refer to it as Dante’s Fifth Circle, and still others call it Charleston, SC.
After 11 hours of reasonably drama-free driving, the other shoe fell and I had to drive through not one, but three apocalyptic rain storms. I mean these were Old Testament, grab some gopher wood, gully washers the like I have never seen. Certainly, the molasses-throated South Carolinians (first of two “Office” references) would have thought this rain nothing more than a carriage-horse pissing on a flat rock. And so, my sojourn begins.
Now I am by no means a person of perfect height-weight ratio. Matter of fact, I passed Kevin James on the backstretch a few thousand chicken wings ago. I know that and I expect as a “portly fellow” sweating is not only a result but an expectation. However, sweating more than the rainstorms I endured to get here was not in the bargain.
My nephew said that Charleston was hot and humid but there was an ocean breeze. Well, when you blow hot, fetid air through a furnace, it becomes a friggin BLAST furnace. No romantic, Corona beer commercial dancing winds, but a stifling convex oven capable of deep frying turkeys on the ”low” settings. Add to this the permeating odor of old, decaying seafood and freshly produced horse shit (courtesy of the Carriage Tour battalions) and you have the makings of a new BIzarro Calvin Klein fragrance commercial.
Did I mention it was hot?.......I am firmly convinced that South Carolinians have been selectively bred without benefit of sweat glands. These stout folk travel around town in three piece suits (probably made of wool), long sleeve shirts and ties without nary a trickle to be seen. I walked outside of my (thank God!) air-conditioned hotel at 9am, picked up a dropped coin off the ground and launched a geyser of sweat down to my ass crack.
The next three days we endured a Bataan Death March smorgasbord of museums, boat trips, board walks, ghost walks (at dusk when the temperature was a brisk 93 degrees) and the culmination of it all, the trip to Drayton Hall.
Drayton Hall is another plantation type estate which boasts the fact that the interior/exterior has been left “untouched” since the 18th Century. Yeah, that’s right, NO AIR CONDITIONING. Matter of fact, for some unknown reason they didn’t even have the windows open. Note to Historical Society: try spending a little of the 18 bucks/per head you charge to escort folks through a Revolutionary microwave on some electric fans. Yeah, I know it’s not 18th Century realism, BUT this ain’t the friggin 18th Century. Hell, even today’s last pioneers, the Amish, use cell phones today and their cousins, the Menonites (or Amish-Lite as I call them) have been using electricity forever.
I must digress here to speak (very UN-politically correct) about white man guilt. I had always been resistant to call Blacks African-Americans partly because I don’t refer to myself as “shanty-Irish American hillbilly” and in speaking with some Black friends found that they really have no connection to Africa. But here is South Carolina, specifically an area called Sullivan’s Island, it is referred to as the gateway from where MOST of the slaves uprooted in Africa ended up coming into the colonies. I think the real African American slaves had been given the fuzzy end of the social lollypop. Occasionally you will hear of a benevolent slave owner who treated his minions well, but a lot of Blacks were mistreated, tortured, hardly fed, and in some cases forced to propagate with afore-mentioned white owners who lacked sweat glands. Certainly no bargain there….But much like the maligned and royally screwed Native American Indians, the African American descendents of slaves are extracting their own kind of revenge on the white man. Two-hundred and some years later, Native Americans have modernized the “fire ant torture” and call it MAXIMUM PAYOUTS on the slot machines at their Casinos and African Americans have cornered the market on “sweet grass and palmetto” baskets. These are allegedly hand made wares that they sock the ignorant tourist upwards of $75-$150/per and I think to some degree the white tourist pay these abysmal prices feeling that this is their reparation penance. First of all, I think this is a conspiracy. I believe there is a clandestine group of African American slave descendents who force otherwise handsome, matronly black women to dress like VooDoo Mama JuJu (second “Office” ref), grab some sweetgrass leaves and twiddle the strands through their fingers as they sit out in makeshift sauna-like stalls at the street markets plying these goods. But I have it on good authority, these fraud merchants are seen late at night in Charleston back alley “sweat shops” forcing Asian children to actually make these wicker wonders.
Back to Drayton Hall a minute. I witnessed a phenomenon that I believed was physically impossible. It was so hot and humid during this tour, that I actually began sweating out of my fingertips. That’s right, sweat drops coming out of the tips of my fingers like I was giving blood drops to that carnivorous plant in “Little Shop of Horrors”. The culmination of the tour finally involved jamming 20 tour goers into a room the size of an outhouse (which this might have been), and there we were able to share our “swamp ass” and “monkey butt” with complete strangers. Ahhhh yes, mint juleps and “swamp ass”!……
By the way, the title of this trip is a reference made by our Ghost Tour guide on Tuesday night. She had said that there was a significant supernatural presence in Charleston and even alluded that black magic, architecture and even Masonic rituals were all intermingled in the Charleston mythos. Two Early American authors opined that the intersection of King and Broad streets were so heavily drenched with supernatural electromagnetic forces that they could have very well been the “portal to hell”.
Did I mention it was hot?!......................
