In our VW, racing along from Daytona to Nashville in the buffeting wakes of trucks and trailers, surrounded by the highway signposts, the concrete dividers and huge green directional signs, we could only imagine the blood-soaked land we were passing through. Still, certain places with history caught us in their web so that we experienced more than our seatbelted cocoon. Just beyond Chattanooga was the battlefield of Chickamagua, where my great-great-grandfather was killed in 1863, leading his unit of a Wisconsin Norwegian regiment.

Nick's associations were not so much of the South, but there was one site he was excited about.

"Timmy, when we get to Nashville we've got to see the Parthenon!"

Nick spoke glowingly about the full scale replica structure that awaited us, near the Vanderbilt campus. "My grandfather would have loved to see it," said Nick. It turns out that Nick learned the motel business from his grandfather in West Virginia, and Nick was not averse to playing up to the crafty old gentleman's desire to leave his fortune in good hands. Nick was all ready to be the old gentleman's guide on a return to Greece, the fatherland, until Nick's father, seeing a threat to the line of succession, told the boy to scram back to Daytona.

Leaving Chatanooga, the weather tilted. We left the dream-like Florida mid-eighties and met head-on the ominous fringe of a Northern blizzard. Further ahead in Tennessee lay a vicious front of unending rain and tornadoes looking for barns to rip apart. Nick didn't talk much by then. He took over the driver's seat in a trance, driving steadfastly, relentlessly drawn toward the source of his $200 phone bills.

This was not the same fellow who once told me: "Making love doesn't mean so much. It's just a few brief moments where people get together and make each other feel better."

Now, he was driven.

WE ARRIVED in a downpour of majestic proportions in the magic city of Nashville. The Nashville I was looking for was the Nashville of an old Hank Williams and a new Waylon Jennings. I wanted to see performers whose edges were finely honed and who seemed to spring from the country, and made no accommodations for television in their performances. The Nashville Nick had come to find was part of the vast network of motel people. He had come to apply for work in one of the newly-opening prestige chains, fixed with glowing references from his employers in Florida. This boy can fill your house, they said. Nick was going to get a job to be near Penny. We checked into an eight-dollar-a-night shell at the intersection of the main highways which went to Louisville, Knoxville, and south to Chatanooga

Our 12-hour, nonstop journey notwithstanding, we took off at 10 p.m. for Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, just around the corner from Ryman's Auditorium, the site of the original Grand Ol' Opry. Tootsie herself was clearing the bar early, since Nashville had been put on a tornado watch that evening. Nick and I managed two beers apiece, and I added my name to the tens of thousands that had already been scrawled on the walls in the back.

I tried to see all the thousands of Instamatic prints and the signed record albums on the dark walls: Loretta Lynn, Minnie Pearl, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins all had bits and scraps of their fame tacked on the walls. As, Tootsie was ushering us out the door into the unrelenting rain, stung by forks of lightning which left a sulfurous taste in the fingers-frozen night air, we asked where we could find some good music.

Across the street, was the answer, right next to Ernest Tubb's music shop. As Nick and I crossed the cracked pavement in this fast-crumbling section of town, with the heart, the old Opry building, cut right out of it and transplanted into the wide open spaces of chain motels and highway interchanges--transmogrified into another exhibit in a Disney vision of Country Muzak land--we saw the lights of a glowing juke joint called the Wheel.

Thanks to Nick's easy introductions, I asked an older woman to dance to Carl Perkins's "Blue Suede Shoes." The Wheel was top heavy with musicians, for six different performers sang at one time or another, and although one long-haired jeans-wearing young couple danced like a cut out of Woodstock, the audience was a strict country crowd. There were ducksweep haircuts and fancy stitched pointed boots for the men and the women wore their hair up. The barmaid never stopped hustling, and every time she came by Nick obliged her, as he got further and further into this new society. When we sat down the woman told me I had a lot to learn about dancing in this town.

The woman looked at me straight on, but her whole attitude did not include me in the circle of her friends as she had included Nick. He was now deeply involved in a conversation with her younger companion, a pure country sapling of a girl who spoke in an uncut twang and who retreated into a scared doe shyness as she smiled at the music. The woman said she drove trucks every now and then, when she wasn't working at a local truck stop.

"Mah husband, I drive with him. He had an accident about four years ago. Driving, I take care of him. But every now and then I go out like tonight. It's like this. I can't leave him. You grow to love a person and you cain't cut it off. But he cain't give me what I want any more. Now I'm not talking about going out and finding a young feller or nothing...But sometimes you jes have to lay down with somebody...every now and then...to feel right."

THE LIGHTS ARE LOW and the music spins along. Nick's eyes are set in a determined fog, he is on his way to his ninth beer and suddenly he looks like a stranger. His arm is around the skittish girl.