Dusseldorf divas and Bonnie’s delta dudes

I imagine rounding up the noontime patrons at Bonnie’s Café for a group photo on the front porch. It’d be a challenge to break up the half-dozen or so conversations buzzing inside Bonnie’s. To pull these boys, 12 to 15 I reckon, away from their heaping hot supper plates of chicken and gravy and dumplings. Fact is, I seriously doubt some of these boys are ready to take directions from a Yankee photographer. “Squeeze in on the left over there, just a little bit more, little more. Now everybody say, ‘gravy’.”

It’d be hard to fit all the fellows in one frame. Bonnie’s regulars are big boys. Broad shoulders. Large hands. Mostly heavyset dudes. They clomp into Bonnie’s looking like they’ve wrestled in mud trenches all morning. Before they grab a seat they head straight back to the kitchen to wash up over the sinks. It’s a gray raw November day out and the boys wear layers of clothing, plaid shirts, overalls, Carhartt outer jackets, work boots or knee high rubber boots. Every one of them wears some kind of ball cap, skull cap or wool knit cap. They pull up chairs that scrape across Bonnie’s plain wooden floor and huddle around square pedestal tables by two’s and four’s; a long table by the front window seats a half dozen. They’re all chowing down.

There is nothing fancy in the least about Bonnie’s Café. Function trumps form. Work crews don’t lounge about, they’re fed and out in 25 minutes. The cafe butts up against an abandoned general store with a sagging red rusted roof and has two plump and torn old sofas on its porch. Train tracks run in front of Bonnie’s, on the other side of a gravel-strewn street where the boys park hulking, mud-splattered Ford and Chevy, red and black, pickups. You won’t find a minivan, an SUV, or any foreign made car parked anywhere near Bonnie’s. Not down in these parts. A white water tower standing on three steel legs and rising above bare trees has “Watson” spelled out in black letters. Watson sits on Arkansas Route 1 about 8 miles west of the Mississippi River, a little more than 100 miles southwest of Memphis.

The town is but a speck on the map, taking up 0.2 square miles and home to 288 residents, according to the 2000 census. Bonnie’s is where the action is at lunch hour during the week. The waitresses work fast and talk like they know every customer, which they do. Everyone gets a large round jar, no handles, of iced tea. Some of the boys bullshit, joke and laugh, talk about the weather or the morning’s work, or equipment problems or what they’ll be doing this afternoon. Others sit and shovel down the chicken and dumplings. Three teenage Mexicans sit by themselves wearing hoodies. One fellow sits down, he’s lost every one of his fingers and his two thumbs jut out from club-like hands. A young boy hardly out of his teens if he is at all drags his limp right leg from table to table, shooting barbs, and taking some himself. A couple of large men wear big bushy beards, other have sideburns from another century. All have weathered, creased and lined dirty faces. Definitely lived in. “Those fried taters are good with catsup, let me tell you.” “What d’ya have coveralls on for, it ain’t winter yet?”

A couple of Bonnie’s boys yell goodbye to the women working the grills and the other fellows, and shove open the creaking screen door. A few minutes later they’re sitting in the cabs of huge green and yellow combines, metallic monsters as wide as the street that roar past Bonnie’s and slowly lumber up and over the train tracks.

Watson, Arkansas is 4,644 miles from Dusseldorf, Germany. After a day making sales calls in Memphis, I passed through Watson on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 out of Clarksdale, Mississippi, spiritual home of American blues music, by way of Marvell, Arkansas (population 1,395 and birthplace of Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer), heading down to Vicksburg, Mississippi across miles and miles of bottom land cotton fields. Exactly two weeks earlier, Wednesday, November 4, I was sitting in Frank Gehry’s restaurant and bar downing a couple of shots of Noah’s Mill bourbon in what’s called Dusseldorf’s Media Harbour, by the Rhine River.

Absolutely the one and only common thread connecting Dusseldorf with Watson, Arkansas half a world away is beer. In Dusseldorf it is Altbier, an “old beer” amber lager poured into tall thin glasses with three-inch foam heads. And the waiters keep pouring, refilling, until you say, “no mas.” Down in the delta the beer flows easy, too. Liquor stores, shacks or huts still stand in the smallest, poorest of towns. A Miller Lite “Welcome Hunters” orange banner hangs on fence next to the F&L Liquor Store outside Watson. At Monsour’s at the Biscuit Company in Vicksburg I downed dark bottles of Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan and Lazy Magnolia Indian Summer Spiced Ale, brewed in Kiln, Mississippi. That happens to be where future NFL Hall of Famer Brett Favre played quarterback for his dad, Irvin, who coached Kiln’s Hancock High.

In all other ways of life, culture and values, Watson and Dusseldorf trace extremely different orbits. Watson is rusted-out, dirt farmer poor. Dusseldorf, as Ibrahim, my Senegalese cabbie pointed out driving me in from the airport, is the most expensive city in Germany, the country’s center for advertising and fashion. Ibrahim confided in me his vision. After somehow enduring 28 years in Dusseldorf, where people of color are invisible, Ibrahim was finally plotting his return to Senegal, to build a home from scratch and bake all day. “If you are black, you get nowhere in Dusseldorf. No jobs, no opportunities, nothing,” he said.

In the delta you get stories, lots of stories. Just ask a question or two. I spent two hours jawing with a businessman named John at the bar in Vicksburg after the sun went down. According to John, who’s the only man in the bar wearing a jacket and tie — “It’s been a long day; I’m kinda tired — three times he sat down with old Irvin Favre for beers. “He was tough on the outside but a softie, really.”

Neil the bartender served up shots of Old Charter and kept the chatter going about Southeast Conference football, predictions, opinions and his supposedly inside information. Mark in a tie-dyed tee shirt and flowing locks walked past offering chocolate pecans. “Pass ‘em around. They don’t get getter than this. You OK, bud? Keepin’ the chill out?”

These conversations with John, Neil and Mark ran longer and deeper, far longer and deeper, than any conversation I had in Dusseldorf in the four days I was there, save for a dinner with the trade fair sponsor who paid my way over to write up the show. And that was the kind of shallow business lite talk you could have in your sleep. Dusseldorf is all business, no small talk. Germans I’m convinced don’t do small talk. Especially with foreigners. Especially in Dusseldorf, ranked by the Mercer 2009 Quality of Living survey of cities as possessing the sixth highest quality of living in the world and first in Germany. In Dusseldorf it’s about making money and spending money. Office lights are on until 7 or 8 at night at banking institutions, publishing houses, telecommunications giants, insurers, ad agencies and internet companies.

As I sat at world renown architect Frank Gehry’s stylishly hip, amber-lit woodsy bar rest assured no one came up and asked if I was OK or passed around chocolate pecans. The after-work crowd started filtering in around 8 and all went straight to dinner tables. No raucous laughs and ribbing like you got with Bonnie’s boys; no barstool philosophizing like at the biscuit company in Vicksburg — “It’s laid back here. It’s beautiful on these bluffs overlooking the river. People here, like the owner over there, they put up with me; they’ve shoveled me out of here more than once, I can tell you,” said John.

Image is paramount, image is everywhere in an ad agency and media capital like Dusseldorf. Nature is buried beneath late 20th century architecture, save for several parks. History is difficult to find, too. The RAF firebombed the city repeatedly in 1942, destroying 80 percent of it. More than 700 British bombers would crowd the night skies over Dusseldorf, igniting hundreds of fires, killing thousands, and making 140,000 homeless. “A pity,” said a middle-aged well-to-do investor, shaking his head, as I walked through the faux old town cobblestone streets taking photos. One was of a bright, shining red metallic front door of an office the man had rehabbed and was now looking to lease. He had rushed out to greet me like I was a potential leaser, scouting locations with my camera. It’s all about business in Dusseldorf.

And it’s about the fruits of a workaholic life. Black and silver BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, and Opels are tightly parked on “Queen Street,” the KÖ shopping district. Not a single minivan, SUV or pickup will you find. No U.S. or Japanese cars. And strangely, there is little sign of family life. No college stickers on rear windows. No “Proud parent of an all-star honor student” bumper stickers. “All this, too expensive, very expensive, for you and me,” smiled Ibrahim on the way to my hotel in the cab. Women in tight black skirts, with black stockings or black stretch leggings, maneuver atop black leather boots with spiked heels, balancing shopping bags from Gucci, Chanel, Prada, Boss, Sacha, Espirit, Tiffany and Company, Goex, Feel Good, Elena, Franzen, Kult, Villa Happ, Bvlgari, Louis Vitton. Men wear black, black ties, black scarves, black overcoats, and particularly hip black-framed thick, rectangular glasses that make them look like professors or scientists.

“Dusseldorf denizens thumb their noses at the rest of Germany,” I recall Ibrahim warning me. “But the German character is strong. No dancing about. You get straight talk. Yes is yes and no is no. That’s OK. But Germans, they are not warm and open like the Dutch. The time is come. I must live my vision. Make my home in Senegal.”

Down in the delta, folks of course are too damn poor to thumb their noses at anyone. Red Roof Inns don’t have portraits of Audrey Hepburn and Jackie O, like were hanging in the lobby at my Dusseldorf Hotel Carat. Red Roof rooms are twice the size of my spartan Carat closet, too. It is the world of dirt farmers, combine drivers, ditch diggers, machinists, blue collars versus Dusseldorf’s world architects, psychiatrists, fashion designers, lawyers, accountants, consultants and gallery owners.

At Gehry’s on the Rhine no one asked if I was OK to get home. John at the bar in Vicksburg leaned over at one point and strongly suggested in friendly manner, “You don’t wanna drive back up to Clarksdale tonight. That’s three hours. You don’t wanna do that. Tell you what, you go down the street to Harrah’s and get yourself a room for $31. Then come back and stay with us for a few more pops. Then you can just walk back to your room.”

I walked along the Rhine back to my hotel from Gehry’s. It was chilly and spitting rain. Couples walked arm in arm in wool caps, scarves, driver’s gloves, berets, those studious rectangular glasses, carrying umbrellas. Some jogged in running suits. Cars suddenly pulled out of side alleys, crossed walkways, wheeled and circled like in a Bourne movie. Silent cyclists occasionally zoomed up on you out of the dark, without warning, no bells or horns or “hallo,” seemingly intent on seeing how close they could come to clipping you.

A few times in Dusseldorf I chanced upon old white-haired Germans, stout, stone-faced husbands and wives, standing shoulder to shoulder, bundled up, like squat statutes waiting for a bus or the tram. I wonder if a wailing Little Walter harmonica solo would make them flinch, or wince.