I remember that I recognized it from the first bars, when my mother inserted the disc into the CD player of the car: Calling Youthe theme song of the film Bagdad Cafe.
« A desert road from Vegas to nowhere, some place better than where you’ve been. A coffee machine that needs some fixing, in a little café just around the bend… »
I must have been in secondary school, my English was rudimentary then, but I understood well the melancholy, the desert, the solitude which emanated from this song and I was waiting for this lament which came immediately after this first verse, a deep lament coming out of the depths of the soul. I am calling you. Can’t you hear me? I am calling you. Je t’appelle, m’entends-tu? Je t’appelle. This call, resembling an invocation sung by Jevetta Steele, echoed in the car. Regardless of the language, what seemed like an insistent prayer, gentle and powerful at the same time, overwhelmed me.
The theme song of the film Bagdad Cafereleased in 1987, is difficult to translate. We could obviously do it. But, in French, the emotion linked to the text falls a little flat: A deserted road from Vegas to nowhere, a place better than what you know. A broken coffee machine, in a café on the bend of the road. If this text is so difficult to translate to restore its soul, it is perhaps because this Bagdad Café can only exist in the United States.
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Le Bagdad Cafe
Photo : - / Ivanoh Demers
A deserted road that leads from Vegas to nowhere, this is where we chose to end our American journey.
After the truck stop from Mesquite, this was the second road stop we wanted to visit. A two-hour drive from Las Vegas, the Bagdad Cafe, the real Bagdad Cafe, located on the famous Route 66, still stands in Newberry Springs, California, swept by a hot wind that carries sand from the Mojave Desert that l ‘surrounded.
Route 66, nicknamed the Mother of all roads
(the mother of all roads), was inaugurated in 1926. It linked Chicago to Los Angeles over approximately 4000 km. It was a key route to the westward expansion of the United States during the Great Depression and after World War II.
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The legendary Route 66
Photo : - / Ivanoh Demers
There’s no one left on this road
explains Carmen Van Lom, a Newberry Springs resident who came to Bagdad Cafe to deliver groceries she picked up at Costco. Since the late 80s, highways 40 and 15 have been built and idiots are too eager to go and gamble their rent money in Vegas to pass through here.
Cynical, the neighbor of the Bagdad Cafe. In a casual discussion, we talk politics. The lady in her sixties tells me that she voted for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, but that this time, without hesitation, it will be Donald Trump. She goes into a sort of disturbing nursery rhyme. Roses are red. Kamala is not black. Joe is insane and Hunter [le fils de Joe Biden] is a drug addict.
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Carmen Van Lom in front of the Bagdad Cafe
Photo : - / IVANOH DEMERS
Inside the Bagdad Cafe, the menu offered is very simple. We no longer cook there since part of the roof gave way above the stoves.
Coffee, tea, beer. Sodas. Chips. The menu is displayed on a blackboard where words have been composed with small white plastic letters. Next to coffee, tea, beer, you can also read the name of the owner of the place. Like that. Owner: Andrea Pruett.
How old is she? We won’t know, but she’s of a certain age.
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Mark Bradley is the manager of Bagdad Cafe.
Photo : - / Ivanoh Demers
When I enter inside the cafe, the song Calling You is heard through the speakers, as if by magic. Mrs. Pruett holds out her arms and hugs me as if she’s been waiting for me for a long time. Then, Mark Bradley, 61, a friend of his who now runs the café, comes out of the kitchen, changes the music and goes back to his business after shaking our hands.
Andrea is alone with Frank Sinatra who sings My Way. All of a sudden, she starts dancing and smiling, smiling and dancing, staring at me with her tender, lost gaze. She no longer knows who she is. She no longer knows that she is the owner of the Bagdad Cafe, but she likes to dance and smile. We dance for a few minutes.
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Bagdad Cafe owner Andrea Pruett dances to the song “Calling You.”
Photo : - / Ivanoh Demers
Bradley, with shoulder-length white hair, returns to the coffee room. He whispers in my ear that Mrs. Pruett suffers from Alzheimer’s. The 65-year-old man stands behind the counter, offering us a coffee. On the zinc, a framed photo of Percy Adlon, the director of this award-winning film. He died last year, Bradley told me. He changed our lives, this man. We loved him very much.
For those who don’t know the film, Bagdad Cafe is firstly the story of friendship between two women and, secondly, the demonstration of the beauty of openness to others and their differences. After an argument with her husband, Jasmin, a German tourist, leaves her partner in the middle of the desert and ends up alone at the Bagdad Cafe, a decrepit motel-café where she rents a room. The café is run by Brenda, an exhausted African-American woman who has just separated from an irresponsible man. At the beginning of the film, Jasmin and Brenda clash due to their cultural and personal differences, but over time they become great friends.
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Route 66 is not what it used to be.
Photo : - / IVANOH DEMERS
This is what Bradley takes away from this film. Everyone is human and everyone ends up loving each other, despite differences. This is what the Bible prescribes and this is what we do here: welcome people. You could ring anyone’s doorbell in the village, the residents here would offer you accommodation for the night if you were in trouble.
says the manager.
We address the topic of the day. And, ironically, Mark Bradley explains that we absolutely must put Trump back in power. You understand, the border is real chaos. We can’t take that many people into our house.
Again this invasion rhetoric. Since we hit the road, this is always the reason why the people we pass justify their vote for Donald Trump.
With that, he gets up. Andrea takes my hand and leads me out of the café. She wants to show me the trailers in which the little people of the Bagdad Cafe sleep. She wants to introduce me to her friend Gilbert, who shows up in the doorway of his dilapidated trailer shirtless. Then she takes me back into the café. The music has changed again. I think I recognize the song Tennessee, by Johnny Hallyday. Mark turns up the volume. That’s actually it. The raspy voice of the French crooner stands out with this text, like an ode to the America of dreams. “ Thus lived Tennessee, His heart in fever and his body demolished, With this tremendous desire for life, This dream in us, it was his cry, Something from Tennessee. »
Andrea starts dancing again. Obviously, she recognizes the song. Mark explains. No one in the United States saw Bagdad Cafe. It’s the French tourists who stop at our place. So we play that song a lot.
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Today, the Bagdad Cafe mainly attracts French tourists.
Photo : - / Ivanoh Demers
At the same time, a bus stops and drops around forty tourists into the desert. They enter, excited, into this place which has made them dream so much. They are French people on an organized trip to the American West. They come to see the site and buy t-shirts as souvenirs. Guylaine Paris is among them. After a few minutes inside the cafe, she came out crying.
I am very moved to be here. It’s a dream to be there. I tell myself that I was born on the wrong continent.
The dream of America in the eyes of a French woman. A dream tarnished, moreover, in the eyes of the tourist, by the crossroads at which the United States finds itself. Frankly, Trump scares me.
She leaves us to get back on the bus. Then, running, she comes back towards us. She has something important to tell us: If Trump passes, we will be alone against this idiot Putin, it will be disastrous for the world.
She leaves for her bus which sets off on Route 66, leaving this place which seems frozen in time.
Ivanoh Demers, André Perron and I take leave of Andrea and Mark. Understanding that we are leaving, Andrea smiles gently at me and hugs me again. She no longer knows who Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are. Her path ends with music and the simple pleasure of taking someone in her arms.
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Andrea Pruett smiling in front of her trailer
Photo : - / Ivanoh Demers