Pigeon Forge is so bizarre. There’s these big, big rolling hills in the distance, but to get there, you’ve got to crawl past mounds of kitsch draped in rope lights that make your eyes hurt. I don’t even know what the point of Pigeon Forge is. I just opened a new tab so I could read the wiki. Huh.
FAMILY VACATION HUB
Yes, okay. If you insist. Jeez, Pigeon Forge. Step the eff off, Pigeon Forge. We’re all friends here, pal.
Amber and I rolled into town Sunday night (a leisurely drive on our part, with no less than TWO pee stops where we allowed ourselves coffee and things wrapped in cellophane and time to gawk at all the weird “regional” shit pumped out by factories in China. Part of the trip we spent trying to come up with questions for the students in an online English composition course Amber teaches. Don’t worry; we were completely sober. When we arrived at the resort (I can’t say “hotel” because we have a timeshare (*places monocle over left eye*), and the timeshare place is also a hotel and resort, so, yeah, resort), we went to the front desk to get our parking pass and directions to the cabin (indulge me, please, for another parenthetical as I point out that these places are hotel suites dressed up as cabins; my family is a sucker for the creature comforts). We crept up the mountain on the winding asphalt road and parked when we saw my parents’ truck. We were greeted by my brother, who was outside schmoozing with a neighbor (my brother is basically the third-best schmoozer I know) because this neighbor happened to be the father of two cute girls (one of whom, by Wednesday, had made a date with Evan).
The cabin itself was pretty motherclucking swank. I mean, I am kind of into hotels anyway, but usually when I’m paying for my own room, I am staying in budget rooms with scratchy Polyester comforters and not thinking about how many speeds the kitchenette’s dishwasher can run. Our half of the suite opened onto a really lovely balcony overlooking the downslope of the hill — I get uncomfortable calling something a mountain until it’s technically east of Gatlinburg — and had a fireplace and a washer/dryer and big glass shower and big fat sauna tub thingy and leather couches a kitchen full of shiny utensils. It was connected to my parents’ half and they insisted that we keep the doors propped open so that Sissy had open trotting access to the whole compound.
Amber had to go file her test questions so we dropped her off in the lobby (wireless hadn’t been set up in our building yet, we were told) and my mom and I took off to Kroger after I called to make sure they were open 24 hours (it was pushing 10 p.m.). Because if you bring the Turners to a place with a kitchen, you can bet your ASS we are going to buy a shit-ton of food for that place. Empty pantries make us anxious. So mom and I traipsed up and down every aisle in the Pigeon Forge Kroger (I presumptuously assume there’s just one), filling up a proud, bulging cart and finally, after both agreeing we had scoured every aisle for everything we could possibly need while staying more or less on a budget, headed toward what looked to be the checkout aisle, where a dour lady with long stringy brown hair was dragging grocery items across a scanner.
“I’m closed!” she said with exhaustion and utter contempt. We shuffled our feet and smiled meek smiles and looked over the remainder of the aisles for the other open aisle, and found none of the numbers lit. An even more miserable-looking man with white hair pointed us down toward the U-Scan area. “You’ll have to use the U-Scan,” he said. “Everyone but one person who runs the U-Scan leaves at 12.” So we walked toward the U-Scan. Except white-haired sad man wasn’t done. “But you can’t go to the U-Scan. You’ve got too much stuff.” He heaved a colossal sigh that could have made a butterfly in China shudder. Mom and I flushed with embarrassment, like, THE SHAME OF BUYING SO MANY GROCERIES. “So what are we supposed to do?” we asked. “Who’s open?”
The white-haired man, now joined by dour lady and milquetoasty mustachioed man No. 1, all mumbled things about everyone getting off work at midnight (it was 12:05) and how only one dude was left to man the U-Scan and we had too much shit for the U-Scan.
I don’t know if that’s true or not; I only ever buy cereal and cheese when I go to the grocery.
But mom, ever the Southern lady who will slap someone with a metaphorical white glove if they sass her, held her hands up off the cart like she was a bank teller confronted by a masked man. “We will be more than happy to leave all this right here and go on down the road,” she said. It was a standoff. A standoff in Kroger at midnight with my fucking brie and crackers at stake! Mustachioed man No. 2 — the post-midnight U-Scan Wrangler — stepped in and relieved dour lady and waved us on through the line because there were even MORE people ready to check out behind us. My mother, flushed and flustered and taken aback by this less-than-friendly treatment, mumbled grievances under her breath as we both shoved things onto the conveyor belt and watched mustachioed man No. 2 scan them all with a quickness and watch them pile up at the end of the counter. “So everyone but you leaves at midnight,” I said to the guy. “Yep. And I run the U-Scan,” he said. “Which can only handle certain orders,” I said. “That sucks for you! I mean, it puts the burden on you!” All I wanted was for the guy to say that Kroger had a bullshit policy but he was a pro and clammed up.
I shop at Schnucks post-11 p.m. quite a bit, so I am no stranger to the bag-your-own-shit game. I hopped down to the end of the counter and plastered a middleman smile on my face and shoved packed bag after bag back into the cart while mom just got angrier and angrier at being embarrassed in front of all those people. My carton of blueberries slipped between the wires and spilled into the floor, sending purple juice splattering everywhere. “Poetic justice,” my mother said while watching mustachioed man No. 2 attempt to mop up the mess after my failed attempts to pick up and salvage each berry one by one. She asked him for his manager’s name and he evaded like a champ. “Never in my life,” mom said, holding her hand over her heart. “I have shopped at Kroger for years.” When everything was bagged I thanked the mustachioed men for their help and threw my weight against the cart to get it moving as my mom went to the customer service counter to get a comment card. I tossed everything into the back of the truck and, like a sullen teenager, dicked around with my phone while mom talked to the New Yorker lady who had been in line behind us about how horrible an experience we had apparently just had. I don’t know. I just can’t handle hyperdramatic 2-hour bouts of grocery shopping with any sort of grace, I guess.
We drove back to the cabin and I was probably short with mom and tired of talking. I’m not grown yet, am I?
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Monday morning. I wake up vacationlate, 9 or so, bed empty because my sleeping partner had retreated to the living-room couch when my snoring proved relentless. Amber and Evan told me I had stopped breathing in my sleep … a lot. Both my parents and my one remaining biological grandparent have sleep apnea and have to wear C-PAP machines. I don’t want that. Not now. Not yet. Not until I convince someone to sleep in my bed longterm. THEN maybe. Nocturnal horizontal SCUBA divers. Not yet.
We’re having coffee in mom and dad’s suite. Mom is moving slow because of a headache. We finally convince her to take something and lie down. Next door a racket is brewing. We think someone is laughing but we quickly realize it’s someone shrieking … about a phone … being taken away by a parent. And it takes ten or so foggy-brain minutes of us listening, slack-jawed, to some teenage girl shrieking about her unfair parents before that obnoxious I HAVE GOT TO GET THIS ON VIDEO thing that’s always with me kicks in. TEN MINUTES!
And then I got this video, which makes me lol and lol and lol because the girl’s shrieking is straight-up COMIC and then at the end it looks like I do some kind of ninja roll.
Our brilliant plan when we bolted once the neighbors’ door opened excluded CLOSING OUR OWN DOOR, so the mom just peeked in and apologized for their “unruly teenager” and then gushed over Sissy a bit and then did some laundry, seeing as how we were basically eavesdropping right there beside their suite’s laundry room.
Amazingly, even though I had bounded through my mother’s bedroom like a frightened, very stupid gazelle when that door had opened, mom remained asleep. Which is how we knew she was really feeling unwell, which is why Evan and dad got ready and went out while Amber and I hung back, taking our time getting ready and making sure mom was okay. When she woke up, she insisted that she was okay and that we get out and about. She seemed better but tired, so we didn’t feel too bad about leaving her to putter around the suite by herself (I think I got my love of solitude entirely from her).
So Amber and I took to the nooks and crannies of Gatlinburg and handled trinkets and candles and dreamcatchers and wolf shirts and free dip samples and tiny shots of free coffee. We had lunch at a “pub” with actually decent food and then followed the rest of the family up into the mountains since it wasn’t rainy and gross and my dad insisted that I’d be able to get good photos (which I, probably out of sheer laziness, was unable to do). Mom’s head was still kinda hurting her so dad said they were heading back 17 miles short of Clingman’s Dome. We had the choice of going on to North Carolina or turning around too. Amber was powering down and the sun was setting, so I saw no reason to go to Cherokee.
Back at the cabin, everyone crashed but Evan and me. I got a text from work saying, basically, where is the biz cartoon for this week?!, and I realized with great eye rolling that I had forgotten on Saturday to import the upcoming week’s comics, blah blah work minutiae hooey. I dug into my e-mail on my phone and forwarded the files, and they converted into one big bitmap. I realized my phone and I were going to fight so I needed to talk to my laptop ASAP. Except … no internet except the $12 internet in the lobby. So Evan and I made for the lobby and I pushed us on through to the bar because I knew that’s where he was wanting to go anyway. We bellied up to the bar and exchanged squinty glances when our bartender turned out to be probably the most unlikeable, sour bartender I have ever encountered in my entire life. She was bitchy — and not in the funny, you’re-in-on-the-joke, sassy way either — and took the duration of my brother’s entire first beer to get my first glass of wine (when I reordered, thinking she’d forgotten me, she gave me the same look of utter contempt I’d gotten with my mother at Kroger and said, “I’m getting it!” without even a hint of a smile) and then had the fucking nerve to chastise me for having my laptop out in the bar. “You’re on vacation,” she sneered. “No technology!” A giant television screen flickering a basketball recap show made her into a silhouette. “There’s a TV!” I said, smiling thinly. “That’s different!” she scoffed.
“Where are all the women?” my brother asked, half joking. The bartender curled her lip and looked at him. “Sweetie, I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t a singles bar. If you’re looking to meet women, you’re better off going to some other bar. Of which there is none.” My brother downed his third beer and muttered a curse word under his breath, and it was time to go. I drank the last of my wine as he paid the tab. He didn’t leave a tip, so I threw $2 on the counter as we shuffled out. “Awwwww,” the bartender called. “Y’all were the coolest people I’d had all night!” I smiled and wanted to hit something.
$12 for 24 hours of internet and she had sucked so bad that we couldn’t stand to spend more than 30 minutes in her bar. Now THAT’S a moneymaking strategy, Westgate.
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Amber awoke before midnight and I had gotten into the whiskey. We stayed up, clucking, until past four.
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