My Southern Journey (28 page)

I can tell you now, those people make a fine product.

I decided there was no need to panic. I would figure something out. I would get my toolbox, and use a screwdriver to remove the small screw, though that presented some problems because my whole body would have to turn with the screw and I am not Spiderman. As a last resort, I could use a hammer or small pry bar to carefully pull it free. The glue that was fixed by fingers to the wood itself, I would scrape or shave away with a scraper or knife, all things I had in my toolbox … the toolbox that sat on the floor, across the room.

I searched my brain. Whenever a cowboy was locked in the hoosegow on television, he always took off his belt and, using the belt buckle as a kind of grappling hook, swung it over to the sheriff’s desk and dragged the keys across the floor and through the bars. I could have done that, but I hate belts—they just seem unnecessary—and refuse to wear them; and, my belt would have needed to be 15 feet long, anyway, to reach my bag. I moved to Plan B, but that one was hard. I would swallow my pride, and call for help.

Which would have been plausible if I had worn a belt. But because I do not wear a belt it means my pants are always slipping down, and the surest way to get them to slip all the way down in the buffet line at the Chinese restaurant is to walk around with a heavy smartphone in your pocket, so I had to choose between having a belt and a phone or having neither. It had seemed a happy choice, till now.

Well, I thought, somebody will come. But that meant it would be some random somebody, and not someone I could rely on to keep a really good secret. I had nothing but time, and my imagination ran amok.

I imagined headlines.

In the local papers:

Author Glues Self to Wall

In the tabloids:

Author Finds Elvis

Living in Wall

With Aliens

On the Internet:

Dude, like, there was this wall, and this, like, guy who writes stuff, like, GLUED himself to the wall, bro’… It was AWESOME…

I imagined the evening news.

“…but other than a slight case of dehydration, the pride of northern Calhoun County, Alabama, seems none the worse for wear from his ordeal. Now please text your answer to our Channel 6 poll: What would
you do, if your son or daughter were glued to the wall? Back to you, Chuck.”

On talk radio:

Host:
“And now let’s hear from Big Sexy from Slapout. Mr. Sexy…

(Long pause, static)

Guest: “…am I on? Hello? Am I on the radio? Helloooooo… I just want to say that that feller, that’un what got glued to that wall? Well he must be an Auburn man. Roll Tide.”

And on Fox News:

“…And it is rumored that President Obama is to blame for the tragic gluing incident…”

I had nothing but time.

I would like to say, as the hours seemed to drag by, that I had time to assess my life, to prepare my soul. Mostly I just stood, ashamed.

I was the grandson of a master carpenter.

How could that man’s blood be so helpless, so inept?

Maybe it would be better if I did perish here, if, someday, a team of archaeologists unearthed a skeleton of my rough dimensions still fixed to that wall—I’m telling you, that Gorilla Glue lasts—with only a short missive scratched out on the floor.

TELL PAWPAW I’M SORRY

and

SHOULD HAVE GOT ELMER’S

Time dragged.

The whole day, it seemed, came and went. My mouth and throat went dry. My legs grew weak. I could not really sink to the floor and rest, as I was glued awkwardly, too awkwardly for that. My back began to hurt, as the hours dragged by.

Actually, it was only about
an
hour. But you try standing next to a wall for an hour and see how you by God like it.

After a while it occurred to me that I had only run the screw into the wood the tiniest fraction of an inch, just enough to hold the patch in place, and I began to work the screw back and forth, just the tiniest bit, which was all I could do with two fingers glued to the wood. It was hard, unpleasant, but not really painful, and after a while it came free—still glued to my fingers, which were still glued to the patch, which was still glued to the wall.

But I was hopeful now. I decided to try the “it’s better to rip a bandage off fast and hard than a little bit at a time” method, and just closed my eyes and yanked, hard.

The paneling bowed out, and made a nice loud crack, but I was still captive.

I never saw my grandfather, the carpenter. He died the spring before I was born. I have only stories of his toughness, his skills. It would be romantic to say I pictured him there, but this was not such a dramatic moment, only a ridiculous one. In fact, I was glad he could not see me like this.

I braced my feet against the baseboards on the wall and let myself fall back.

I left some skin, but no blood to speak of, and I was free. It took a while to scrub and peel the glue partway off, and I wore a lot of it around for a long time, before it finally wore off.

The real carpenter, when he came to redo my work, told me, kindly, that it was not bad work, really, though he would have to smooth it out some, and I did not tell him I was held prisoner by the wall, though I guess that proverbial cat is out of the metaphorical bag now. But it’s funny. I am not really ashamed, being the grandson of a carpenter, that I glued myself to the wall. I think he would have grinned at that. I am ashamed my work had to be redone.

I told my big brother Sam about it.

The joy it gave him outweighed my embarrassment.

“Hey, it happens with that new glue,” he said, kindly.

“Did it ever happen to you?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he said.

PART 5

SPIRIT

DOWN HERE

ESPN The Magazine
, August 2012

W
e believe some things, down here. Some of them, I have lived long enough to question.

We believe that if a snapping turtle bites you, it will not turn loose until it hears thunder, but since I have seen a snapping turtle as big as a turkey roaster bite a broomstick in two, I believe it will turn loose any time it damn well wants. We believe snakes have mystical powers and will charm you if you look into their eyes. When I retire, I plan to test that theory on water moccasins at my stock pond, and if they have not charmed me in four or five seconds, I will shoot them. Then, in times of drought, I will hang them in a tree. That, we believe, will make it rain. My grandmother, God rest her soul, told me so, so it must be true.

And we believe—well, maybe all but the Unitarians—that God himself favors our football teams. On Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, our coaches, some of them blasphemers and backsliders and not exactly praying men the other six days of the week, tell their players to hit a knee and ask his favor at the same exact instant the other team is also asking his favor, which I have always taken to mean that God, all things being equal, favors the team with the surest holder on long field goals.

It is gospel—the gospel according to Bear. After a rare Alabama loss in the Bryant era, Bear’s sidekick on his weekly television show
told him: “The Lord just wasn’t with us, Coach.”

“The Lord,” growled Bryant, “expects you to block and tackle.”

The point is, and we talk real slow down here, so it may take awhile to get to it, that we believe some things regardless of science and sometimes common sense. And what we mostly believe in, across racial, political, religious, and economic lines—is football. We believe absolutely in our supremacy over all pretenders, upstarts, and false prophets from the North, East, West, and some heathen parts of Florida that are too sissy to mix it up with the real men of the SEC. We have been fed that belief since we were infants. That, and an unhealthy amount of Coca-Cola in our baby bottles.

But for years and years, we have even had the science of the BCS on our side and have grown accustomed to the pretty way that crystal trophy catches the light; for three years it has not even exited the state of Alabama. We are sure of this pre-eminence, so sure that we view all the years when the South was not dominant in college football as a surreal space-and-time fluctuation, like the dancing hot dog and bun they used to show at intermission at the Bama Drive-in theater on Highway 21 north of Anniston, Ala., which we watched through a blur of Boone’s Farm. It was just temporary, just intermission, ’til the real show resumed.

We felt no disappointment in January, when two SEC teams played in a rematch for the national championship in New Orleans. We have long known that the real battle was in playing each other anyway. South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier, who was nicknamed the Evil Genius when he was the head coach at Florida, said recently that it is harder to win an SEC championship than a national one. “Ask Nick Saban,” he said, though he might have just been trying to be a smart aleck.

My uncle John Couch, who made tires for 20 years at the Goodyear plant in Gadsden, Ala., is a Crimson Tide fan. Years ago, in the era of Bear Bryant and Shug Jordan, he suffered through a brief Auburn resurgence, in years he cannot precisely recall, nor cares to. But he remembers seeing a co-worker strutting around the plant in an old Auburn jacket. He remembers how he walked up to the man, leaned in close to him and sniffed.

“I thought so,” he said.

“What?” the man asked.

“Mothballs,” he said.

Somewhere, right now, an Auburn man is telling that same
story, the other way around.

We know the true big games. We might not even be able to tell you whom we played in a bowl game long ago, probably against a Yankee team that would melt like Crisco in the furnace of a Southern summer, but we remember how we did against Florida or Tennessee or Georgia. We know that if our teams survive the outright savagery of an SEC regular season, their regional rivalries, they can beat anyone.

There will always be the occasional Utah or rare Boise State in down years, but they are an aberration, like heat lightning. “Somebody else might win a championship,” says my uncle John, “sneaking out through the back door.” Don’t get him started on Notre Dame.

We know deep in our guts that it is not truly a birthright. We know that it takes blood and sweat to win in college football. We know that dominant programs are built by smart and relentless taskmasters like Saban, who is so serious about the process—the science of it—that when he allowed himself a big smile after winning a second national championship in three years, it kind of scared me, as if Billy Graham had done a handstand.

When Spurrier went to South Carolina seven seasons ago, he was disheartened when he heard fans applaud the team after a close loss. “Please don’t clap,” he told them, “when we lose a game.”

I, personally, think we’re a little wack-a-doodle but usually in a good way. Before the hate mail begins to flood in, or people start leaching bile into a chat room, they should know that this story—half of it, anyway—is written in fun, because that is how I view this game.

I had Alabama season tickets once, but it’s hard to take anything too seriously when you’re up around Neptune and can barely discern actual human beings. Situated somewhere above the catfish concession, I came home smelling like French-fried taters.

And while it is a joy to watch real Southern football, from any seat, my self-worth has never been bound to this game, though there have been times in our history as a region when it seemed it was all we had. For Southerners, to say we do not care is to invite suspicion. We must
know
football to
be
Southern.

“At LSU, for instance, everybody knows what Les Miles
should
have done,” says George C. Rable, the Charles G. Summersell chair in Southern history at Alabama, whose football heart belongs
mostly to his grad school alma mater, LSU. That means last season he was 1-1… in a purely mathematical sense. A friend at LSU tells him that since the championship game, “one of the big donors has refused to wear any LSU attire… he is not wearing his hat.” How mad do you have to be to not wear your hat?

An award-winning author of books on Southern history, Rable is not a native Southerner but grew up in another football incubator, in Lima, Ohio, in the swirl of Ohio State-Michigan, rooting for the Buckeyes. He came down here to see real obsession. He once exited Tiger Stadium as the faithful chanted: “Go to hell, Ole Miss, go to hell.”

“And,” he says, “we weren’t playing Ole Miss.”

We do not care so much about professional football here because it is a new phenomenon and has had only 40 or 50 years to catch on. Whereas college football has been an antidote to an often dark history for as long as even our oldest people can recall. We are of long memory here. I gave a talk once in Mobile, Ala., and mentioned that the Southern aristocracy had been on the wrong and losing side in two great conflicts: the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, prompting one older gentleman to rise from his seat, huffing that I did not know what I was talking about, and leave the room. Later, I said I was surprised that mentioning the turbulent 1960s would anger anyone so, after so much time. A nice gentleman told me, no, that wasn’t it. “He’s still mad,” the nice man said, “about the war.”