Where To Now, Saint Peter?

When we last saw our heroes they were beating a fast retreat from their shotgun brandishing, feverishly crazed carnie ‘host’ in exceedingly rural east central Texas. Red and I were chased off Dan’s Pluck, Texas land in the wee morning hours, for the heinous crime of inadvertently tipping the cat house next door’s hand to the local undercovers.

Oopsie!

Red was thinking more clearly than I as we headed down the Neals Freeway out of Pluck.  Wouldn’t take much — my mind was reeling, tumbling and pirouetting from having a gun pointed at me by the father of the two wonderful bambinos I’d minded and grown to love over the past ten days.

Gotta say, it’s one hell of a way to sober up fast.

Red was originally from Lake Charles, Louisiana and was sure that his sister there would let us stay with her and her famiglia for a little bit. We were buying time. We were in transition. While stopped at the Flying J Travel Plaza in Orange, Texas at 6 AM, he called to give her a heads up on our imminent, surprise arrival.

You know, getting an hour’s notice about an unexpected house guest, close, beloved  family or no, and getting that call at an obscenely early hour would put most folks off their Post Toasties. Not Marie-Élise, who was wonderfully welcoming at 7 AM when we pulled in. She made us a big ol' breakfast, coffee and then tucked us into the queen size bed in the spare room of her surprisingly large, comfortable doublewide. A bed -- after months of sleeping on the ground, this was heaven!

I don’t recall now (hey, this all went down 430 years ago!) how long we stayed with the awesome Marie-Élise and her two lovely, wee bairn but it wasn’t more than a week. During that time we visited Red’s father, a Cajun shrimper and A-MAZING cook. He made us a deliriously yummy shrimp jambalaya (shrimp he’d caught earlier that day), collard greens and biscuits. Christ, all these years later my mouth still water at the memory of that meal.

During the 5 hour escape drive from Pluck (sounds like a horror movie title doesn’t it “Escape From Pluck” imagine the ominous soundtrack — dah-duh-dunnnnnn) to Lake Charles, Red came up with the beginning of a plan. He’d been a welder and had worked off shore before joining the show. It wasn’t a gig which appealed to him terribly much but the pay was tremendous and would totally finance whatever our next move would be -- back with the show come April or elsewhere.

What would I do while he was offshore? Well, I could get a waitressing gig like his sister. While waitressing can be a good paying job, it’s hard, hard, triple plus hard and, for me anyway, soul crushing work. Yeah, I’ve done it and I suspect I was THE worst waitress EVAH! To say that I don’t excel at this would be the consummate understatement. My part of the plan felt uninspiring.

Now, a few days before our hot footed escape, I’d thrown a dart at a map of the US, in an attempt to discern Where To Now, St. Peter. I figured on moving, on my own, to the closest big city to where my little future picker landed. The dart landed in western Connecticut so my potential choice was narrowed from anywhere and everywhere to NYC or Boston.

I took a Trailways bus north out of Calcasieu Parish, back to my parents home in western Pennsylvania. Red told me he’d join me in Boston after he’d earned his seed money in a 4 month offshore welder stint.

I hadn’t figured on company but Red seemed like a serious beau. Me, I didn’t feel that, at the age of 22, I was ready to settle down. The future, my next adventure, was just opening to me.

Where to Now Saint Peter -- Elton John