BBQ Joint Closes; South Loses Charm, Appeal

Charleston, Spring 1998. I'm on tour with my formerly famous rock band. We play a show in a filthy mechanic's garage on Spring Street, on the black side of town. The cracked wooden doors of the garage are open, and the traffic passes slowly by.

It's a poor neighborhood, and the paint on the row houses has peeled down to bare, bleached pine slats. Across the street from the garage, a parking lot serves a small row of businesses, including a wig store and a little family-run joint the New Orleans Connection, home of the Best Barbecue Ribs Ever Made.

The meat eaters in my band had loitered in the parking lot all afternoon, eating pork ribs as fast and James and Mabel Cumberland, the NOC owners, could cook them. The ribs were perfectly rubbed and slathered in NOC sauce, sticky with molasses. They crumbled in our hands and dissolved in our mouths. We dedicated every song of our show to them. Although the night ended badly for me, per usual - in a pile of junk on the floor of the van, bracing for a hideous hangover - I've been talking about the New Orleans Connection for 10 years. There is still BBQ sauce on my guitar.

Jump cut: Last week, I went to Charleston to revisit Spring Street and check up on the New Orleans Connection for a magazine article. The garage is still there, though there are no babbling, drooling punk rockers writhing inside. Sadly, the Connection is gone. All that remains is a flaking sign on the roof, the letters barely discernible. I stood for some time in the parking lot, sweating and feeling old and bland. I thought about going to the white part of town and eat at one of the new Charleston yuppie feed-troughs that have cracker food writers slobbering. But why bother? They're no better or worse than the new cuisine in Savannah to the south or even New York City way up north.

So the Hero poured a little Gatorade out on the parking lot in memory of James and Mabel Cumberland's pork ribs, then climbed into his Maserati QP Sport GT (that's another story). He programmed his GPS navigation system for the tiny coastal village of Darien, GA, where a new greasy plate ribs awaited.