Between Wrecks (26 page)

I would like to express my gratitude to the Patel and Parthasarathy families for offering me a discount when I wished to “check in” to their respective motels in order to “acquire some quiet time” so that I could “get some work done.” Thanks, too, to both C.H. and P.S.—I promised I wouldn't tell your friends or family—for aiding me when I got all pent up to the point where I didn't think I could continue with what ended up being 550 pages of
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
. I know that y'all know that my name wasn't really “W.J. Cash,” and I thank you for letting me sign in for two-hour increments.

Eugene Stansell, from the Highway 62 Super Stop, deserves my undying gratitude for warning me about taking Tylenol should I be drinking too much. And I would like to thank his brother Floyd, who operates the Highway 62 One-Stop Auto Repair next door, for cherished advice concerning tire tread and oil changes, plus that seamless Bondo job on my car from when I ran off the road, dodging a deer, and scraped the passenger side from fender to bumper on Old Lady Crenshaw's rock-encumbered mailbox that must've been designed by the same guy who did the Washington Monument. And I would like to thank their sister, Patricia, for allowing me to pick her brain when it came to what ended up being a linchpin of a chapter in
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
titled “Columbus's Oyster Conundrum.”

Though not technically “friends” or “family members,” I want to thank the editors of the
New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Paris Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, National Geographic, Nation, Economist, South Carolina Review, Appalachian Heritage, New Delta Review, Arkansas Review, Shenandoah, Epoch, Mid-American Review, Playboy, Oxford American, Esquire
, and some others. Although all of you rejected individual chapters of this book, I could read between your standard rejection letter lines that you wished for me to continue my important tome. And I would like to give a special thanks to Steve Wickett and Danny Gillis for understanding that the story and plight of Columbus Choice was worthy of sharing on their most excellent blog
dungbeetleworkinghard.com
. Salut!

A hearty heartfelt heartwarming hug to Ida Flokiewicz and Maria Cherepanov—both names that prove I have a regular New York publisher, seeing as those kinds of surnames don't exist in either A) Tennessee; or B) the world of vanity-self- publishing—in the “jacket designing” department. I'll be the first to admit my error in thinking that my book,
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
, should have had a photograph of a black man wearing a bandana on the cover, or a black man pointing at a Dynamite Roll on the cover, or an empty noose, or a photograph of the Tennessee hillsides north of Chattanooga and west of the Smokies, or a picture of someone standing with a fishing rod in his or her hand on the banks of the Emory or Clinch River, or members of the fucking idiotic KKK in their hoods with a burning cross in the background, or Sammy Davis, Jr. about to bite into a photoshopped piece of sashimi, or a soldier running for cover while bullets ricocheted around him, or a tuna hanging from a rope, or an octopus with a knife jabbed into it, or an African-American male looking off into the distance to a land where no one will judge him by the color of his skin, or a bowl of kani salad languishing on a picnic table covered in ants, or a two-lane Tennessee road leading to nowhere until the end of the asphalt turns into a pinpoint, or a mound of fresh dirt on a gravesite, or me.

I want to thank Ida and Maria for talking me into understanding how
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
would never sell without, and how it deserved, a cover that depicted a full-blown photograph of a stray dog with the wind at its back, and an American-made sedan driving off toward the horizon. That's the thing about people in the art departments of publishing houses working hand in hand with their PR departments:
They know what's the right thing
. Listen, if the government were headed up by people with backgrounds in publishing's “jacketing design” realm, I'd be willing to bet that other countries wouldn't hate us as much. There's no telling what the American flag would end up looking like, but that's another story.

My editor, who has asked to remain anonymous, deserves a lifted glass of champagne. I cannot express my regret that she's decided to accept and publish
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
as her final work with this particular publisher. I am fully awestruck by your saying to me, “This book will show them a thing or two!” Please believe me when I say that, should a movie ever be made of my life, then I will make a point to have a Leading Lady of Hollywood play the part of the editor. I'll request to have the Leading Man of Hollywood play the part of Stet Looper, biographer, and have about the Twentieth Most Requested Leading Woman of Hollywood play my ex-wife who endured my thinking about, then writing,
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
. Kudos galore!

I would like to thank the Tuskegee Airmen.

I owe thanks to Booker T. Washington.

When I showed up to interview Jack Plemmons at the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary—who still maintains his innocence in regards to lynching Columbus Choice—someone told me that I needed to wear good rubber-soled tennis shoes because the guards might think I wished to steal in a “shiv” or a “shank,” much like the sharpened toenail clipping taped to a toothbrush handle that ended up being used to slice the neck of Sid Plemmons, Jack's brother and cohort in the lynching of Columbus Choice. So I went immediately down to Mid-State Shoes and got me a nice pair of running shoes that didn't have those light-up flashers on the heels. Who knows if there's some kind of Prison Wish List when it comes to light-up shoes? I'm no expert—I only have a low-residency master's degree in Southern culture studies—but I would think that no prisoner with any brains would want a pair of glow-in-the-dark shoes to wear while escaping. Anyway, I got some regular Nike training shoes with waffle bottoms and strode right in the gates.

So I want to thank a man named Phil Snoddy for selling me those shoes, and for all of his advice about how I might perfect some kind of toe-heel-toe thing should I ever involve myself in a middle distance race the likes of the 800 or 1500 meters. The chances of my getting into shape and entering an all-comers race are pretty slim, Phil, but you never know when I might undertake a biography of, say, Haile Gebresalassie, so thanks for everything you did for me in regards to fitting my running shoes correctly.

I would like to thank Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the Olympic stand in Mexico City.

I am deeply indebted to Visa, MasterCard, Discovery, American Express, and four other Visa cards. When the royalties come in, I promise to pay off more than a minimum balance. Well, as far as you're concerned, American Express, I'll just pay you off in full, I suppose. What's with the policy that everything must be paid in full? That's not even American, if you ask me. It's
express
, but it's not American.

I would like to thank John Maynard Keynes.

Boundless gratitude and praise should be offered to my old exstray dog Dooley, who—in his way—pointed me in the direction of Columbus Choice's life and death. This is a funny story that perhaps I should've included in the text of
No CoverAvailable:The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee:
Before phlebotomist-to-be Juanita Wilkins got thrown out of my class for saying a racist term back when I taught America History 101 at Tennessee Valley Technical College, which later caused me to walk off that job because she went to the dean and said I'd molested her or whatever and then recanted her story when she got caught, Dooley and I were taking a walk across the campus. I had him on a leash because of the squirrel population. I had him on a leash because, at the time, I didn't own any Nike waffle trainers. Dooley came across a stray piece of sandpaper and started sniffing it. I said, of course, “Don't eat that. It's not a dog chew.” Dooley wagged his tail. This white woman came by from the opposite direction—I forget her name, but she worked as an instructor in the Machine Tool Technology department—and she said, “That dog got some Japanese in him. That dog think that sandpaper a piece of nori, like what served over at Columbus Choice's Sushi over in Harriman.” And I said, of course, “What? Where are you from?” And she said she was from Oak Ridge originally, and then she told me about how she had a second cousin who had a friend who had an aunt who had at one time been engaged to
both
of the Plemmons brothers, et cetera, before they lynched Columbus Choice for supposedly stealing freshwater fish. As we talked, Dooley ate the sandpaper. Later, when I was trying to clean up all his vomit on the floor of my apartment, I couldn't get the Machine Tool Technology woman out of my mind. I called up my estranged wife, Abby, to tell her all about it, and she said, “You need to get rid of that dog.” I didn't. He was my lucky charm, and while I was doing research for
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
, Dooley rode shotgun. So, Dooley—I hope it's another fifty or sixty years, but I look forward to seeing you in the afterlife.

For invaluable insight into the upbringing of Columbus Choice, I would like to thank his brother, Leroy, Jr. First off, I want to thank him for teaching me that his and his father's name weren't pronounced like Lee-Roy, but more like Luh-ROY. Without Le-roy Choice's willingness to tell me all about his brother's travails in the Army, and his life as a sharecropper's son in northern Mississippi, I doubt that I would've completely captured a sense of Columbus's obsession to succeed as the only sushi restaurant-owning black man in Tennessee. Also, I want to thank Leroy for his patience in regards to listening to my story, and his openness when it came to showing me the painful photographs he owned of Columbus hanging from a tree.

I want to thank Malcolm X.

I am indebted to the memory of Medgar Evers, whom I can see in that casket, which makes me think of how funeral home directors play on people's emotions, which makes me think of Mr. and Mrs. Walker Hitt's daughter Cassandra and how she toyed with me while I was finishing up my story.

A thoroughly researched biography such as
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
cannot be written alone. Sure, I'm the one who sat in the apartment, tent, bar, truck, trailer, or elsewhere scribbling down ideas, forming entire sections, and wondering if Columbus Choice would be proud of me should he still be alive, but just about everyone I've ever come across has played a part in the work, naturally. Take the woman who served me a western omelet those times at the Huddle House in Kingston, just down the road from Harriman: She said to me, “Do you like ketchup with your eggs?” and it made me wonder if Columbus Choice liked ketchup with his eggs, or if his blood looked like ketchup after he'd been hanged and stabbed to death. Take the man I met at the Day Old bread store in Oak Ridge who came up to me and asked, “Does that look like mold to you?” Well, it made me wonder what Columbus Choice did when his fish turned south, especially in the beginning when he didn't have a lot of customers who trusted an African-American man running a raw fish place in the middle of Tennessee. Take the man who cut my hair so I would have a decent author photo, a barber named Mr. Drake, who clipped a little too closely on my temples, which made me think of Temple Drake in Faulkner's novel, which made me think of corncobs, which made me think of grits, and how they probably weren't served in Columbus Choice's restaurant, which made me wonder if he'd've been accepted in the community better should he have offered them on his menu. I could go on and on. I
will
go on and on.

I am grateful to Cap'n Will Caldwell over at Tennessee River Marina and Boat Supply for showing me exactly what kind of water ski tow rope Jack and Sid Plemmons used to wrap around Columbus Choice's neck—durable 12-strand, quarter-inch poly-propylene—and for his good-natured advice for me to stay out of people's affairs in and around the Tennessee Valley. When the royalties start streaming in, Cap'n Will, I promise to come by your place and buy me one of those used Sea Rays!

Because the Plemmons brothers went to great extents to make sure they killed a man who, as the evidence proved,
didn't
deplete local farm ponds at night, I am thankful to Rex Palmer at Palmer's Pawn and Gun for showing me his selection of nine millimeter pistols like what the Plemmons brothers used, and which may or may not have been bought or stolen from Palmer's Pawn, plus the beautiful serrated knives like the one used to stab Columbus Choice long after he'd probably died from asphyxiation and bullet wounds. I must say, though, Rex, that I
cannot
thank you for asking me to take a look at your jewelry, seeing as I came across what I feel pretty sure was the exact wedding band and engagement ring I'd given to Abby back during happier times. I'm not sure if it's worse to see a specially designed wedding band standing upright in a pawn shop display case or on the ring finger of a complete stranger woman. But I thank you from the bottom of my heart anyway, even though I had to undergo horrendous flashbacks of a woman packing up her belongings, saying things like, “You're a loser,” or “The marriage vows didn't mention anything about odd obsessions,” or “I knew I should've listened to my mother, father, siblings, friends, neighbors, and people I'd never even met,” before going off to follow her personal dreams, which, I am convinced, weren't as lofty as publishing a book. As a matter of fact, I know that Abby wanted only to become a real estate agent in an area that thrived, seeing as her lisp kept her from being a TV anchor-woman—which probably makes me a bad person for being happy that she moved to Florida right before housing prices dropped because of everyone signing on to ethically questionable loans that they couldn't afford.