Cahn is both epic traveler and epic eater, the unholy offspring of Homer and Homer Simpson. Every week during football season he tailgates before and after a Saturday college game and a Sunday NFL game, and most weeks makes it to the Monday Night Football game, almost never setting foot inside a stadium. "I might skip the wedding," says the fifty-five-year-old retired businessman, "but I never miss the reception."
For the last eight years, since he sold his house and cooking school in New Orleans, Cahn has been clogging America's arteries—automotive and otherwise—in his JoeMobile, a forty-foot Cholesterolls-Royce. Along the way he and his cat, Sophie, have discovered what Joni Mitchell never did: that paradise is a paved parking lot.
"The parking lot," claims Cahn, "is the ideal American neighborhood in an idealized America." Want the parking lot as melting pot? A fan outside Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego once gave Cahn a bratwurst rolled in a tortilla.
As land of equality? Cahn knows groups of women in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City who tailgate while their husbands stay home.
As the new world? He met a pair of tartan-clad Scotsmen on holiday in a Tennessee Titans' parking lot and, one year later, met them again, in the lot at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, where they asked Cahn if he remembered them. "Believe it or not," replied Cahn, "there are very few others who wear kilts to Giants games."
Cahn has tailgated at baseball games and NASCAR tracks and polo matches and steeplechase events and, next summer, will bring his beloved Bar-B-Gater grill to the alfresco Santa Fe Opera, where the game really won't be over till the fat lady sings. But his true love is the football lot, be it in Baltimore, where Cahn parties with members of a SWAT team (Stop Working and Tailgate), or Buffalo, where a fan known as Pinto Ron cooks on his car hood and serves libations from the thumb hole of a bowling ball.
How does Cahn do it? How does a man sip a thumb-and-Coke at Ralph Wilson Stadium and call it a job? How can Cahn afford to be at Purdue on Saturday and at the Colts on Sunday and at the Rams on Monday night and at Stanford the following Friday, in between living on leftovers provided by other tailgaters?
Cahn cajoled a modest grant from Coca-Cola to collect demographic data on the American tailgater. (The company also donates a dollar for every mile Cahn drives to Share Our Strength, a hunger-relief organization.) And the Monaco Coach Corporation lends him the JoeMobile, which Cahn parked, last weekend, in the Louisiana campground he calls home. (It was his first week off the road since mid-August.) Even so, the professional tailgater loses money on the year. "I may not earn a lot," he points out, "but I ain't going hungry."
"Thin people have no credibility in a parking lot," continues Cahn, whose belly, white beard, and bald head give him the air of an Eastern mystic, a man who finds transcendent beauty on the ten-acre Grove at Ole Miss, where tailgaters set up camp the evening before home games, the field blooming with tents throughout the night. "I watch the tents go up," says Cahn, "and think of the old Disney time-lapse photography of flowers opening."
The professional tailgater is an exceedingly contented man. Divorced for ten years, Cahn remains the best of friends with his ex-wife, Karen, and will even give her away at her wedding this year. "People can't understand that," says Cahn. "Many tailgaters have told me, 'I'd like to give my current wife away.'"
Of course his calendar isn't all days of wine and Rose Bowls. Tailgating can be hard. Which raises the question: If Cahn could make one improvement to American parking lots, what would it be? "Depends," he says. On what? "They should pass out Depends," he clarifies. "Or add more Port-a-Lets. In Dallas you spend half an hour waiting to use a Port-a-Let. In Baltimore and New York, where cars and RVs park together, people come to my door with very sad eyes. They don't have to say anything. How can you turn them away? It's not neighborly." And so he opens his bathroom with a profound sense of duty, and hits the road, alas, with a profound sense of doody.
More often, though, tailgating is a glamorous life. This very month Sophie is featured in Cat Fancy magazine. And seven days before the Super Bowl at Reliant Stadium, Cahn will perform the ceremonial lighting of his grill, which will remain aflame for 168 consecutive hours, seven straight days and nights, in the parking lot of a Houston food store. Says Cahn, "We will not allow those charcoals to go out."
An eternal flame, too, burns in Cahn's heart. And a million Zantacs will never douse it.
(January 26, 2004)
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