New York
Ohio
Georgia
Kentucky
San Francisco
Los Angeles
Las Vegas
New York

Kentucky
24th 26th of June 2002

I love Louisville immediately. It’s a proper old-fashioned American town and I really feel like I've left the blandness of the mid-West behind me. This place is rough, ready and cool. It’s got character. I mean, look at this shop display, for God’s sake:

Fantastic.

Louisville is famous for all sorts of things - the Kentucky Derby takes place here, Mohammed Ali was born and brought up here and it’s the home of the Slugger factory, America’s biggest baseball bat company. Funnily enough, though, nobody mentions chickens the whole time we’re here.

The Seelbach Hilton where we’re staying is a truly historical old hotel, all sweeping staircases, marble floors and ultra-camp lift attendants. But yet again, we’ve found ourselves in the wrong part of town. It’s like a film set. It’s dead. We go for a wander, discover nothing and resign ourselves to a night of luxury in our five star hotel instead. First we go downstairs to the Seelbach Bar - voted one of the Word’s Top 50 bars by the Independent, no less. I don't know what night the Independent were there but the night we show up the bar is air-conditioned to the point of meat-packer and there are only four other customers. We beat a hasty retreat to the ‘famous’ Oak Room restaurant upstairs, which is this posh:

This is supposed to be the best food in Louisville. The menu has us in raptures. It reads like Southern poetry. Jus of Colonel Newsome’s Fourteen Month Aged Country Ham. Apple Smoked Bacon. Bluegrass Cooperage Bourbon Barrel Smoked Yellow Bell Pepper Mustard Sauce. Puddlefish Caviar. Eiswine Balsamic Paint. Maine Lobster studded Weisenburger Grits. It sounds incredible. But frankly it’s the worst food I have anywhere in the States. We go to bed slightly disappointed.

*

I leave Jascha in bed the next morning and meet my Louisville escort, Juli Bobbit, outside the hotel in the early twilight. It’s 5.15am, it’s already steaming hot and Juli Bobbit seems every bit as disturbed as me to find herself up and about at such an ungodly hour. The studio where they film ‘Good Morning Kentuckiana’ (don’t laugh! It’s a portmanteau of Indiana and Kentucky, I’ll have you know) is just around the corner. I sit in the studio waiting for my slot next to a bleary-eyed man who’s here to talk about how to get more sleep. This is my view:

I go on air at 5.25am, I’m off 5.27 and back in bed with Jascha at 5.35, twenty minutes after I left him. I don’t think he even noticed I'd gone.

Another escort, Barb Ellis picks me up again at 8.30am and drives me to Lexington . As we drive, she shows me the stables where the world’s greatest and most expensive race horses are bred and then she shows me a castle that was built by a lovesick man for his fiancée a few years ago. The castle was completed and his fiancée promptly went off with the building contractor. I love all the escorts I meet in the States but it’s tough sometimes when you’re in a car with someone for five hours to keep talking all the time - especially that early in the day. Barb is going to be my last escort of the tour and to be entirely honest, I’m really looking forward to a whole day when I don’t have to talk to anyone.

First stop is the Jack Pattie Show - a live radio interview on WVLK-AM. Jack is truly lovely and does a great interview. Here he is:

And here’s Barb:

.

Barb takes me for lunch to an incredibly genteel little restaurant where they serve soup in tea cups and ladies murmur politely in mild southern accents. I ask her about who else she's escorted and she brings up the name Tony Parsons. ‘Do you know of him?’ she asks. The guy who interviewed me on Good Morning Kentuckiana said he’d interviewed him the previous week. And come to think of it Juli Bobbit mentioned him, too. I start to realise that I'm actually on the Tony Parsons Trail and for the rest of the day everyone I meet, says, ‘hey, we had another Brit writer in here last week, Tom Parsons?’ I fill Barb in on the full Tony Parsons story; music journalism, Julie Burchill, single parenthood, Julie's lesbianism, the works. And she loves it. Phones Barb on her mobile and makes me tell Barb all the juice, too. She tells me that the worst writer she ever had to escort was an American children’s writer (fairly famous, but shall remain nameless) who asked her what her husband's scrotum looked like.

After lunch she takes me back to her house to do a phone interview. Her house is the most immaculate thing I have ever seen. She has two huge baseball playing sons who are up for junior teams. In the photos on her kitchen walls they have very big necks.

We go to a fantastic bookshop in Lexington called Joseph Beth to sign some stock and because we have time to kill, we go our separate ways and browse for a while. It’s nice to have half an hour to myself. Then we head over to WLAP-AM for my interview with Lee, on Live With Lee. Lee is young and nice-looking and seems quite taken with me. He asks me if I'm married and expresses his disappointment when I tell him that I am. He is wearing a wedding ring. Here’s me with Lee, enjoying a moment of irreverence:

Barb drives me halfway back to Louisville and drops me at a diner on the freeway where Juli is waiting to take me the rest of the way. Juli and Barb are great friends but rarely get to meet up because they're both so busy, so they enjoy these little roadside rendezvous. Barb tells me that when she brought Tony Parsons here he insisted on eating in the diner and ordered ‘some horrible greasy sandwich - but he loved it!’ A true man of the people then. Here’s the girls (and Tony’s favourite restaurant):

Jascha has had his own adventure today - playing a round of golf with a local police officer and his police officer son. I've got a restaurant recommendation from both Juli and Barb, so we book a table and kick start our evening in the cocktail bar in the Oak Room upstairs. Jascha can't resist a bourbon tasting and I order a Margherita:

The barman is a bit of a loose cannon and we’re his only customers so he keeps slipping me free Margheritas (and something else with strawberries in it) and serves Jascha the finest bourbon in his bar. This stuff lives in a metal casket and costs $50 a glass, but he lets Jash have it as part of his $25 tasting. He also puts away a few drinks himself and by the time we leave he's enthusiastically expressing his desire to go to Amsterdam where ‘did you know it’s legal to smoke pot?!’ He’s a brilliant bloke and he's managed to get us incredibly pissed in under an hour. Now that’s what I call service. Feeling somewhat like we’ve been on the Holodeck on the Starship Enterprise we stumble into a cab which takes us to a restaurant called Jack Fry’s, in the happening part of town. Now - if you ever find yourself in Louisville for whatever reason, I urge you to eat at Jack Fry’s. Live jazz, great service and the best food I ate anywhere in the States. Possibly the best (non-Asian) food I've had anywhere in the world. Really. That good. Halfway through dinner, the couple sitting behind us get up from their table and start dancing. No-one finds this even slightly embarrassing and we think it’s incredibly cool.

And then the evening gets all surreal on our asses. The same guy who drove us to the restaurant is there to pick us up as well. He’s got slightly too much hair and is wall eyed. He doesn't smile or laugh. He appears to have absolutely no sense of humour whatsoever. ‘You been to Lou-a-vah (the correct pronunciation) before?’ he asks. ‘No,’ we say, ‘but we think it’s great.’ He switches off his meter and swings the car round. And then proceeds to take us on an impromptu tour of the city. He takes us to an extreme sports park where dozens of kids are trying to break their necks in various ways in the middle of the night:

Then he takes us to see the paddle steamers in the dock. He's the guy on the left in this picture. Shame you can't really see him:

Then he drives us a long way out of town (a bit too far for our comfort) to see this amazing view of the city from across the river:

He shows us the Slugger factory which has a hundred and twenty foot baseball bat outside and he shows us where he lives. It’s a fantastic old office building in the centre of town, five storeys high. He lives there with his father and his brother. They’re renovating it together. This man loves his city. You can tell it’s in his blood and in his bones. I ask him how long he's lived in Louisville. ‘About a year,’ he says. I shut up.

He drops us off an hour later and seems embarrassed when we give him a huge tip. We feel slightly unsettled by the encounter. He was very kind and we really appreciated him showing us the city, but he really didn’t seem to enjoy it at all and we couldn’t quite work out what his motivation was. Nasty, cynical Londoners that we are …

*

One last radio interview the next morning, live from my hotel room, and then my tour's pretty much done. Ironically, just as I've started to feel quite blasé about all this scary live stuff, I get my toughest interview yet. The guy sounds about eighty-three and doesn't seem to quite have got the hang of the technology. He really doesn't know what to make of me or my book and seems to find it very hard work to think of anything to ask me. I pad as much as I can but even I can't prevent the odd awkward silence creeping in. Someone else in the studio rushes to the rescue during one of these silences. ‘Say,’ he says, ‘we spoke to another Brit author on the show last week. Tom Parsons, have you heard of him?’

By the lunchtime we’re at the airport and on our way out of Tony Parsons Country.