Between Wrecks (24 page)

I sat at the kitchen table reading a book about three out of the four ancient elements. My mother had just gotten up to go to the bathroom, I assumed. She said, “I could've gone to the Maryland Institute College of Art. Here I am walking to the bathroom one more time.”

Those were her last words, as it ended up. “Mom's last words were ‘Here I am walking to the bathroom one more time,'” I said. My father, without offering a reason, performed a U-turn in the middle of highway 108 and drove back to Mr. Henderson's. I said, “I guess she didn't know those would be her last words.”

“Maybe she was a visionary. Maybe Heaven's just one giant toilet, Stet. I don't mean that in a bad way.” I knew that he
did
mean it that way, though. My father didn't cotton to there even being a Heaven or Hell. In the past he had said, “If there was a Hell in the middle of the planet like some idiots believe, I think I'd've seen a flame or two shoot out from as deep as I've dug for rocks over the years.”

We drove back up Mr. Henderson's rocky driveway not two hours since we first arrived. He had already shoved my mother into the chamber. My father told me I could sit in the truck if I wanted, which I did at first until I realized that I had something important to say to the potter's daughters, something that might prod them into seeing me as special. Something that might cause both of them to be my dates at the prom in a few years. I got out and stood there. Mr. Henderson explained something about the firing process, about the wood he used, something about how he can perform cremations cheaper than making his own pots because there's no glaze involved. His daughters walked up and stood with us twenty feet from the kiln door. I said, “My mother was an artist.”

They said, in unison, “Sorry.”

Smoke blew out of the kiln's chimney and my father said, “Well I don't see any smoke rings going skyward. Which means I don't see a halo. Come on, son.”

Not until I had graduated from college with a few degrees—my father had told me to get my fill of education before coming back to run the family river rock business—did I understand the backtracking to Mr. Henderson's makeshift crematorium: My father wanted a sign from the Otherworld, just in case his final plan bordered on meanness or immorality.

I'm not sure what we spread down by the Unknown Branch of the Middle Saluda River. It's not like I shadowed my father for two days. I imagine he flung plain hearth ash down on the ground. At the post office, though, my father told Randy the post office guy, “They all weigh the same. You can weigh one, and the postage will be the same on all of them.”

There were six manila envelopes. Randy said, “Don't you want return addresses on these?”

“I trust y'all,” my father said. “I trust the postal service.”

To me Randy said, “You applying to all these colleges?” He sorted through the envelopes. “I guess you are, what with all these admissions departments.”

I said, “Sorry,” like a fool, for the words of the Henderson girls rang in my ears still. I'd learned long before not to contradict my father. A man with a river rock business doesn't keep many belts around. I could go throughout life saying my father never spanked me, but I couldn't say that I'd never been stoned, in a couple of ways.

Driving back home my father said, “She got her wish. She finally got to attend all those art schools.” Then he pulled off to the side of the road, past a short bridge. Beneath it ran a nameless creek. I got out, too, and together we took drywall buckets out of the back of the truck, trampled our way down the embankment, and scooped up smooth rounded mica-specked flagstone, each one the size of an ice cube, each one different in glint.

I WOULD BE REMISS

At this, the completion of
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
, I will not thank God, like all those athletes and musicians do on TV in hopes that it'll make them appear like a neighbor one would wish to know. I'll try to make this short. If I were the kind of mono-theist I was brought up to be, I would have to begin with Adam and Eve, and get through all the long history of begats right on up until I handed the manuscript over to my publisher. For in any person's biography, everyone who's ever lived on the planet plays some minor part in said person's life. But I lean toward believing in evolution. So that'll save some ink.

I want to thank a girl—not a
woman
, at least at the time—named Juanita Wilkins who sat in the very first American History 101 class I taught at Tennessee Valley Community College and got all mad at me for “dissing” her, as she told the dean, for using inappropriate politically incorrect language and claiming that I had offered to trade sex for grades, et cetera. Juanita Wilkins, who then got caught for lying about all that, got kicked out of school, and caused the dean to tell me never to “dis” a student in front of her classmates ever again, and that this warning would go into my file, which made me walk off the job that day newly intent on my researching
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
.

Let me make certain that this is clear: We'd gotten to the Civil War, which happens to be a major part of American History 101 at Tennessee Valley Community College, if not everywhere. Juanita Wilkins, who is now a phlebotomist living in the area, said that racist word. She said our economy would be better if we still had slavery, et cetera. I made her leave the classroom, and wouldn't let her return until she apologized to the class and me. This was one of those Tuesday/Thursday classes all the kids like, and it was on a Thursday when the occurrence took place. So she had Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to mull over things, and she came back on Tuesday to apologize. To be honest, Juanita did a pretty good job, but I think it might've had to do with her being a second semester student who'd already taken the Public Speaking class that's required of all TVCC students. I let her back in. When we took our midterm exam, she made an F, and she made an F on her term paper, basically because I realized right away that she plagiarized. Who would hand in a term paper called flat-out
Abraham Lincoln:The PrairieYears and the WarYears
that came to 800 pages? She typed the whole thing up, too, to make it look like her real work. What kind of phlebotomist-to-be can type 800 pages in a few weeks? This was before the age of computers, at least at Tennessee Valley Community College. It's not like she could've scanned Carl Sandburg's book, or whatever it is the community college students are doing these days.

Juanita failed the class, she told the dean that I'd offered to give her a B if she gave me a blow job, and I got called in to tell my side of the story. When Juanita Wilkins went in for her meeting with the dean she said to him, “I can't even be in the same building as Mr. Stet Looper,” and then the dean looked up what Juanita signed to take for classes in the Fall. Right there he saw “American History 102—Looper,” and he said, “If you can't stand being in the same building, then why'd you sign up for another one of his courses?” and she said, “Oops, I guess you caught me,” and then she got kicked out, though I guess they let her back in at some point—maybe on a probationary status—seeing as she became a phlebotomist, and there's not another Nurse's Aid major within another hundred miles of here, I doubt.

So I quit. And I started right away working on this biography. So I want to thank Juanita Wilkins for a serendipitous moment.

Going backwards, I want to offer many thanks to my old tenth-grade English teacher back in South Carolina, Mrs. Rena L. Stone—her real name—who once told me that it didn't make a difference where I put the apostrophe in a word like “didn't.” She, too, used to say after every student's book report: “I have read that book, and it is a very good one!” like that, all excited. So a couple of us started making up titles and plots and characters, and spun whole tales about mountain lions eating entire Appalachian-dwelling families and whatnot, just so we could hear Rena L. Stone say, “I remember how scared I got when
I
read that book,” and so on. My entire craft of telling good tales—or learning how to
avoid
what's not necessary in a biography such as
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
—emanates from an eleven o'clock tenth-grade English class.

I wish to offer boundless gratitude and praise to my agent, Cherry “Chart Topper” Chitwood—working out of Signal Mountain, Tennessee—for her gentle prodding when it looked like my obsession might take longer. Who says everyone needs one of those fancy, easily distracted New York City agents? Speaking of which, oddly enough, I would like to offer sincere clemency to the 421 agents who told me I'd be better off starting with either A) a biography of someone already famous; or B) a novel; or C) a story of people living a hardscrabble life in Appalachia during the 1920s; or D) a book of linked stories; or E) a collection of poems; or F) a cookbook featuring the recipes of Appalachian hardscrabble citizens living in 1920. May you all thrive, and find another biographer with a bestseller in his or her head!

Eternal gratitude toward Ray Simmons, Blister McCovey, Boyd McJunkin, Leslie Spivey, Myra Cummins, Dev Patel, Moe-Moe Autrey, Bill Finster, Lefty Hopewell, Punt Hutto, Williemina Goode, and Virag Parthasarathy, for providing me work as a housepainter, janitor, roofer, floral-delivery driver, lawn-maintenance guy, motel desk clerk, housepainter, janitor, roofer, telemarketer, and motel desk clerk—all noble professions that allow for biographers to work on tomes such as this one. I am indebted to you all, and apologize for perhaps shirking my duties at times in order to pull out my Mead notebook to sketch out such chapters as “Simon Hirsch Taught Me Cooking in Vietnam,” or “That Sea Cucumber Turned Sour!” or “Fuck You, Whitey, I Don't Serve Barbecue Here.”

I need to offer gratitude to the school board for allowing me to substitute teach in the school system on a sporadic basis, right on up until I accidentally wore some of those stick-on eye-black things that I wrote something on that wasn't “John 3:16,” and scared the townspeople. I'll get to thanking the appropriate people about that incident later on, if I have A) the time; and B) the ability to write it out in a way that doesn't make me sound like a pervert.

Eternal gratitude plus one day to all of those stamp-hoarding editors who wouldn't even send back my SASEs to say they weren't interested in my book, because it's true what they say when they say “the best revenge is living a served cold good life.” I hope all of you editors end up in Hades with Columbus Choice's lynch mob and have to talk to them endlessly about rope and knots.

I would be remiss not to mention that I really don't despise or blame the editors. No, I fault the idiotic book reps. Why are they even called in for an opinion in regards to a novel or biography's worth? Allowing book reps to have a say in the acquisition process is on par with letting stockboys tell farmers what they should plant, and how they should tend their crops, if you ask me.

Tad Milkins needs to receive a special thumbs-up for letting me overstay my welcome at the Frozen Head State Park Campground, on the outskirts of Harriman, Tennessee, back when I had no other place to live. I am sorry, Tad, that you had to live through all my stories about my ex-wife, and I want you to know how much I appreciate your keeping an extension cord with a drop light attached all the way out to my two-man pup tent so I could scribble down ideas and paragraphs in the middle of the night, amid James Earl Ray conspiracy theorists who camped alongside me in their wonderful Northface dome tents and wished to be left alone before making their pilgrimages to nearby Brushy Mountain Correction Complex, once known as the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, which won't even be in operation by the time
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
ends up on independent bookstore shelves around the country, plus those other places both real and internetic. I also want to extend my good wishes to Tad for lying to that Department of Natural Resources officer about my having a fishing license when I got caught working the Emory River, trying to get enough to eat back between working for Dev and Moe-Moe. And I apologize for taking your sister out to the CCC dynamite shack along the South Old Mac Trail. Those were questionable times for me—and your sister, from what I could tell—and I owe you. But you're not an uncle yet!

No biography of Columbus Choice can be completed without a tip of the cap to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who helped start the Tennessee Valley Authority, who helped America fight people like the Germans, Japanese, and Koreans—which made it impossible
not
to fight the North Vietnamese—who caused Columbus Choice to want to get out of the Harriman/Oak Ridge, Tennessee, region and join the military, seeing as there would be more African-Americans in Saigon than in Roane County. Mr. David Eli Lilienthal deserves a pat on the back, also, for being “Mr. TVA,” as he's been tabbed by Wikipedia, as by other people equally enamored by the New Deal.

Next door to Harriman stands famous Oak Ridge, Tennessee, known as
the Atomic City, the Secret City, the Ridge
, and
the City Behind the Fence
. I'm sure that it affected Columbus Choice more than a little bit. If I'd've known Mr. Choice personally, before I partook writing his biography, maybe I'd've asked him why he didn't call his restaurant Secret Sushi Behind the Fence, or The Atomic Nigiri Behind the Secret Fenced City, or something along those lines. Maybe he would've made more friends and money, and not ended up hanged way up on Bird Mountain, elevation 3,142 feet.

I have undying gratitude for a redneck driving one of those old, sky-blue Ford F-100 trucks with a Confederate flag license place on his front bumper. He tailed me—I suppose—because I had an Obama sticker on my back windshield. In the end it gave me a sense of utter fear, and I realized what Columbus Choice must've felt when the last two white faces he ever saw stopped and said, “Need a ride? Get on in,” and took him to Bird Mountain.