Okay, when it comes to choosing a recreation spot, few people think to themselves, “Hey, how about Biloxi, Mississippi!?” However, it had it been more than a year since our previous trip to Chicago, and that hadn’t been one of our favorite trips, anyway. Jennifer was low on vacation time, because she had only been working at her current job for about seven months, plus the salary didn’t allow for much in the way of indulgence. The trip to Biloxi emerged because my employer was helping me go there to attend the Southern Pain Society’s annual conference. Ergo, it was relatively easy for us to add Jennifer, because we only had to be responsible for her share of the food and lodging.
Jennifer and I were both truly ready for this vacation. During this chapter of our lives, it seemed like even the normal responsibilities had become major obstacles, like the entire universe was kicking us in the teeth. And it got worse the closer we got to our date of departure. First, Jennifer’s computer completely crashed. Then the week before we left, one of Jennifer’s coworkers at the newspaper, a man named "Don," but whom we had long designated as simply “the Fat Slob,” had manipulated the situation at work and stuck her with a weekend shift she wasn’t supposed to have.
The best approximation of the "Fat Slob's" physical and characterological presentation.To add insult to injury, it was while Jennifer was coming home from that unfair shift that she had a major flat tire on the interstate, after midnight. We were both up until 5 a.m., outside in the dark, trying to get her home and the car situation resolved. Yes, it was definitely time for a break and both of us eagerly counted down the minutes until our trip began….
Thursday, July 29: Heading to the Fire Down Below
The day dawned sunny and bright at an uncharacteristically mellow 70 degrees, as Jennifer and I headed for the airport, there to park our car for the future extortion we’d find when we came home to pay the garage fee. Otherwise, our flight out was relatively uneventful. I slept through most of it, or tried to read a book that wasn’t impressing me much.
‘Cause I’ve Been Walkin’ in Memphis
We arrived at our first layover, that being the Memphis Airport. There really isn’t much to say about this part of the experience either, other than that I couldn’t help singing parts of that old song “Walking in Memphis,” by American singer-songwriter Marc Cohn (1991). At first, Jennifer merely twitched in response, but eventually, her ears blackened, crinkled into dry, crackled bunches and rotted off of her head. She considered it a mercy when I stopped resurrecting a song she hates anyway, with my less-than-adequate singing.
We also noted as we walked from our landing concourse to the concourse of our connecting flight, that Elvis Presley paraphernalia proliferated in every shop. From blue suede shoes in some places, to hot hound dogs with mustard, to Scotch served on the jailhouse rocks, to breaded chicken love-me-tenders, it seemed like the King was king here. Hm…the wonder of him? In some ways, the spectacle represented a known Southern city holding to a valuable part of its heritage. On the other hand, one had to wonder, has nothing happened in this city since the King of Rock and Roll died in 1977?
Bludgeoned by Atmosphere
We reached our final destination, the airport in Gulfport, Mississippi, which was a small place, probably about on par with the airport from which we had departed back home. What we noticed the most, however, was the climate when we stepped off the plane’s descent stairs. Basically, the heat hit us like a large, steamy, sodden sponge. Walking through it was like trying to explore a planet whose atmosphere was made of chicken bouillon. We estimated that it must have been at least 20-25 degrees hotter in Mississippi than it had been back home.
We had anticipated the arduous and unfamiliar task of trying to locate a taxi cab to take us from Gulfport to our destination in Biloxi, but to our good fortune, we managed to spot a couple of my work colleagues, here known as “Meat” (on the right in this picture) and Dr D. It was mixed blessing, of course. Jennifer had gone to the powder room while I guarded our luggage and I ended up having to drag it behind me like Quasimodo’s hump while I swung on the bell ropes across the airport and tried to catch them before they climbed into Meat’s SUV. But catch them I did, and they agreed to give us a ride to save us the cost of a cab.The Beau Rivage
We arrived at what was probably the single most lavish hotel of Jennifer’s and my experience.
French for “beautiful shore,” the Beau Rivage is a massive, towering casino that sits right on top of the edge of the Gulf of Mexico; the laws of Mississippi insisted that casinos all be built over water. Outside, the Beau Rivage’s garish sign flickered with advertisements, ranging from the in-house Russian dancer show, “Red Dream,” to a brief plug for a rooftop dance club called Tiki.The building itself bulked before our amazed eyes, all 1,780 suites with varying degrees of Southern opulence. This was a colossal casino consuming what we estimated to be nearly half a mile of the Gulf coastline. We unloaded our luggage, walked past the fancy water fountain at the entrance and entered this vast landmark. You can see it in this video clip.
On the inside, it was pure Deep South décor, with multi-colored carpets of splattered, pastel colors, floral designs and furniture shaped like various animals.
The Southern decor of the vast interior that is the Beau Rivage casino.After standing in line to register and get our room keys, we encountered what was perhaps the strongest weakness of the Beau Rivage; it only had one set of elevators, right in the center of the building. With a hotel guest capacity larger than some Kentucky cities, it meant that the elevators were always crammed with people and one had to wait through two meals just to get on and off of them (the elevators, that is, not the people!) We weren’t sure if it was because this was a casino hosting a larger-than-average grab-bag of drunken tourists or what, but these were some of the rudest people we’d yet encountered in our travels. In our time there, we would find that each time the elevator opened at our stop, these impulsive people stuffed themselves on board before we could even execute our exit. Any time we encountered a group of them in the hallways, they seemed to have no concept of the implicit social norm that says you stay on the right side, much the way we do in traffic. Instead, this clueless herd of buffalo chumps would walk diagonally toward us, thus ensuring they almost blundered straight into us.
All that would be later, however. For now, we were glad to get to our room. Of course, considering the raw size of the Beau Rivage, it took a good two to three minutes of intense walking from the elevator just to find our room. But once inside, we were not disappointed. Our view outside was through a gargantuan picture window, and it showed us the murky, humidity-draped landscape of that part of the city. The bed was a field. We had more bathroom sinks than we needed, so one of them would eventually be used to stow beer (when we found it). The Beau Rivage also offered a pay-per-view system on television, which we eventually used to watch the movie Hidalgo (2004). No refrigerator, alas, and no microwave; those are both luxuries Jennifer and I both still hold out that we’ll be able to experience someday in our travels.After napping and freshening up, we joined a few colleagues for a seafood dinner at a place called Mary Mahoney’s.
A Rare Night of Revelry
After the meal, our little professional group went back to the Beau Rivage, where we stopped for a time at the in-house bar and restaurant and had a few brews. When I say “a few,” what I mean is “many, many” brews. Yes, for perhaps the first time in a number of years, Jennifer and I probably had a bit too much. We sampled everything from local beers brewed right there in the Beau Rivage, to variant brands of tequila, to a couple of “lemon drops,” to a ridiculous experimentation with a gawd-awful black liquorice concoction designed to kill roaches. Nonetheless, the atmosphere was festive, we were away from our usual stresses and things were going well. To quote Dr. D, “what happens in Biloxi stays in Biloxi.”
This was a Thursday night in a tourist locale, so it didn’t take long for the place to become very crowded. A live band was performing up front, so the 3-foot-by-3-foot dance floor had people ground together like potted meat. It looked more like a chance to quiver rather than actually dance. Nonetheless, Jennifer, Dr D and a colleague here known as JS decided to go out there and see if they could squeegy themselves into the mass and twitch a bit.
I, of course, don’t dance and there isn’t enough alcohol in the Deep South to change that fact. So I remained behind and talked with Meat and another colleague, referenced here as “Celeste.” Despite the fact that Celeste had been married for a number of years and had four children, she and I were of an age, both being of the high school graduating class of 1991. It had been a long time since I had met anyone from my birth cohort, so we talked for some time about memorable music best left forgotten. My own graduation song, for example, was the resurrected plodding hit by the Righteous Brothers, known as “Unchained Melody” (1965), which had made a comeback because of the movie Ghost (1990). She actually trumped me for obscurity by saying her own class song was “I Wanna Be Rich” by Calloway (1990).
Since we had to be up early, all of us eventually staggered back to the elevators, waited another hour and then jogged the long distance back to our rooms, there to fall into oblivion.
NEXT: A nervous man asks a most important question of a suspicious woman.
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