The Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs Blues

by Melissa Bright

written for Literary Nonfiction, ETSU, Fall 2004

How can you really know a place? Is there an easy way to make it open up and reveal its secrets? Can you read a book, watch a film, listen to a record, or take a tour? And, how do you recognize that coveted point of authenticity?

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About the author: Melissa Bright is a sophomore at East Tennessee State University majoring in Public Relations with a minor in English. She suffers from the all-too-common problems of other college-aged writers, including self-obsessed subject matter that permeates even in her most academic papers. She is currently struggling with the idea of authenticity and it seems to be the only thing she can write about –other than herself, of course.

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I still have those warm, wonder-filled ideas about travel. I answer the what-are-your-interests questions every time with an emphatic “traveling, seeing new places, and learning about different cultures!” I then sigh, knowing that I have very limited experience to back up such declarations.

I’ve spent a lot of time (and money) trying to correct my inexperience. Being a self-professed, self-loathing townie homebody from a quiet place in East Tennessee has caused me to push myself to become acquainted with this thing called “the world.” Raised in such a small plot of the frontier, I cannot let go of the belief that what I am looking for is out there, somewhere else, far and away.

Granted, I have time on my side. I am only now emerging from teenhood into my twenties. And, although I have traveled some by myself, my usual companions are my parents. Our most recent trip to the northwest was to be our most ambitious yet, a reward for two years of hard work and no play.

After almost four hours of ear popping and the newest over-saturated romantic comedy, we arrived in Seattle during what the locals were calling “a heat wave.” The temperature was a low seventy, and, to a trio of sweaty southerners like us, it felt like the day the summer heat breaks in September. After some confusion at the Hertz counter, we ended up with a 2002 Cadillac Coupe Deville. Both shocked and amused to see that these cars existed beyond the universe of country music lyrics, I climbed in the back seat and prepared myself for Seattle.

We zoomed along I-5 into the city and began the process of orientation. As a loyal viewer of The Travel Channel, I have learned that it is best to observe the natives and take note of their customs. A woman blaring Sheryl Crow in a beat up silver Honda provided our first taste of voyeurism. She seemed happy, so happy in fact that she couldn’t be bothered with using her turn signal. My father blamed the sunshine, my mother mentioned something about caffeine, and I concluded that she was merely recognizing a time of celebration. I observed the context clues, a hand painted window dressing that read: “Honk, if you love Greece. 2004 Olympics, Woo! Hoo!”

Another pleasant offering from the natural composition of Seattle is the wonderful smell. For all the trouble the early settlers faced with building a city on a tide flat, they made sure they were close enough to smell the salt and seaweed that wafted off of the ocean. As the smell traveled on the wind, I tried to swallow as much as I could through my nose. I snapped a few pictures as we strolled down the sidewalk to Pike’s Market, the big ocean meeting the mountains to our right.

We waited for the appropriate place to enter the line of people rushing into Pike’s Market and caught glimpses of the most beautiful food we had ever seen. The market began to resemble a beehive, with busy tourists shedding pollen for the retailers, and the cash registers, like honeycombs, collecting that out-of-town money –I mean honey. There was constant movement in and out of doorways and arches with faint sounds of live music ringing beneath the buzzing din. Pyramids of fruit, not mortal fruit like the kind at the grocery store, but the kind of fruit captured only momentarily in Dutch still-life paintings. It seemed the rule that only the finest specimens, only super model fruit were to be put on display. Their smell was of something so ripe that it is about to explode, as if by gently touching the skin they would break open. The closer we came to the structures, the more the saliva flooded my mouth and coated the enamel.

After counting at least twenty varieties of sausages, we joined the crowd circling the famous, documented-in-movies Pike’s Fish Market, known around the world, thanks to Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, for their fish-tossing ability. Everything was right on cue for the tourists: beautiful flowers, beautiful fruit, and beautiful dead fish.

We worked our way through the maze of shops and found a quiet place on the second floor of the hive. We read a storefront sign advertising a Relaxing Chair Massage and went inside to inquire about the rate. “Thuty-five fo haf owah,” the short masseuse said before we agreed to do business. With a disarming smile, she gestured me into a side room with a thin little curtain as the only form of privacy. I gave her a look that could have been interpreted as protest –obviously not in her language. I exhaled a mental “what the hell, it will be an adventure” and placed myself in a position of vulnerability that I was not quite prepared for. In the end I was not the only victim of her false advertising, as my father had to experience his vulnerability in the middle of the room. My poor father had become part of the show. “Oh look at the tourist getting rubbed down. Isn’t he cute?”

Another excursion led my family and me to the Underground Tour of Seattle, hosted by Steve Martin’s twin brother. I tried to forgive him for capitalizing on stolen punch lines as he told us the story of Seattle’s great fire. We walked together down the street, past the bums and the Barnes and Noble to a stairwell that released the smell of moisture and dust, the smell of oldness. To prevent flooding, city officials raised the streets…but not the sidewalk. Crossing the street included climbing a ladder, avoiding traffic and climbing down the other side.

When the sidewalk was finally raised to meet the street, a different world emerged

in the hollow space between the first floor of the buildings and the supporting structures

of the roads. As Steve’s brother told the story, I imagined what this mausoleum must have felt like before the authorities shut it down: dirty, warm with the heat of drinking and prospect. I reached out to touch the walls, cold cement. A teenager wearing an Old Navy sweatshirt asked his father about the rusty bed frame with the gnarled springs in the corner. I gave a silent answer.

After taking a picture of one of the original crappers, designed by Mr. Crapper himself, we ditched the tour.

It wasn’t that the tour was unhelpful in getting to know Seattle. In fact, tours often provide another level of observation. A city’s clumsy beginning can counter the glamour that has made it popular and intimidating.

Seattle is a novelty city with more subtlety than New York and more dignity than Las Vegas, to be fair. I blame myself for this perception. I wanted the true essence and only gave her a few days of my life. Can I really claim anything other than my own ignorance? I was left feeling like another victim of invasive marketing. The low point was when I caught myself gazing at the Space Needle and singing the Frazier theme song.

“Oh baby I hear the blues a’calling, tossed salad and scrambled eggs.”

I know the word lame came to mind shortly after, but, when I am kinder to myself, I remember that my desire to discover the truth has led me to these wayward influences. Why else would television shows like Frasier, movies like Singles, and grunge rock carry so much appeal? All are set, though some more fictionally than others, in Seattle. The movie stills and fabricated television sets radiate images and create a vivid place in the imagination. And, though I am pretty far-gone, I wasn’t expecting the fashion to be long johns under cut off shorts and nervous psychologists in every quaint café complaining about their sex lives. Sure, I am brainwashed with infinite images and catch phrases, but there is a part of me, perhaps that small town chip on my shoulder, that causes me to struggle against the plague on genuineness –novelty.

“Novelty: originality; fad, fashion. Ant., OLDNESS.”

The New American Roget’s College Thesaurus (2001)

The trip back to the airport was drenched in rain, the first Seattle had seen in at least two months. Even though it was an occurrence of nature, it made us feel privileged that the rain waited for our departure. My parents and I, with our rented, sparkling Coupe, became northwestern nomads –the somewhat sterilized American variety. And, even though I felt a restlessness within me subside, Seattle stayed in my mind as a place I could not rescue from novelty –from the screen T’s with coffee cups and little bears dancing in their rain gear.

A few weeks later, I was far away from Pike’s Market and back in my local grocer reaching for the Whole Bean Starbucks bag. Suddenly, I remembered Seattle and my first thought was not some bald psychologist or greasy musician. I saw that young woman in the gray Honda buzzing down the highway. Maybe I could not save Seattle from her own history, but Seattle saved me, by replacing the fiction of marketing with something, well, authentic.