Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
counter in the local Dairy Queen, waiting for the postgame rush, everyone in town was at
the football game. You could drive in with a fleet of trucks and strip the town during a
high-schoolfootballgameinIowa.Youcouldblowopenthebankwithexplosivesandtake
the money out in wheelbarrows and no one would be there to see it. But of course nobody
wouldthinkofsuchathingbecausecrimedoesn'texistinruralIowa.Theirideaofacrime
in these places would be to miss the Friday football game. Anything worse than that only
existsontelevisionandinthenewspapers,inasemimythicdistantlandcalledtheBigCity.
I had intended to drive on to Des Moines, but on an impulse I stopped at Iowa City. It's a
college town, the home of the University of Iowa, and I still had a couple of friends liv-
ing there-people who had gone to college there and then never quite found any reason to
move on. It was nearly ten o'clock when I arrived, but the streets were packed with stu-
dents out carousing. I called my old friend John Horner from a street-corner phone and he
told me to meet him in Fitzpatrick's Bar. I stopped a passing student and asked him the
way to Fitzpatrick's Bar, but he was so drunk that he had lost the power of speech. He just
gazed numbly at me. He looked to be about fourteen years old. I stopped a group of girls,
similarly intoxicated, and asked them if they knew the way to the bar. They all said they
did and pointed in different directions, and then became so convulsed with giggles that it
was all they could do to stand up. They moved around in front of me like passengers on a
ship in heavy seas. They looked about fourteen years old too.
“Are you girls always this happy?” I asked.
“Only at homecoming,” one of them said.
Ah, that explained it. Homecoming. The big social event of the college year. There are
three ritual stages attached to homecoming celebrations at American universities: (1) Get
grossly in toxicated; (2) throw up in a public place; (3) wake up not knowing where you
are or how you got there and with your underpants on backwards. I appeared to have ar-
rived in town somewhere between stages one and two, though in fact a few of the more
committed revelerswerealreadyengagedingutterserenades.Ipickedmywaythroughthe
weaving throngs in downtown Iowa City asking people at random if they knew the way
to Fitzpatrick's Bar. No one seemed to have heard of itbut then many of the people I en-
countered probably could not have identified themselves in a roomful of mirrors. Eventu-
ally I stumbled onto the bar myself. Like all bars in Iowa City on a Friday night, it was
packed to the rafters. Everybody looked to be fourteen years old, except one person-my
friend John Horner, who was standing at the bar looking all of his thirtyfive years. There is
nothing like a college town to make you feel old before your time. I joined Horner at the
bar. He hadn't changed a lot. He was now a teacher and a respectable member of the com-
