My Southern Journey (31 page)

T
he Pontiac, ragged, dented, rust-flecked, means it was ’74, since cars are the way working-class people of the Deep South truly mark time. Listen to them, when they are groping for a memory, and they will find it beside a yellow Oldsmobile, or baby-blue Malibu…

—From
The Prince of Frogtown

Ever since I was 16, I have kept track of my life in an almanac welded from tail fins, fender skirts, and chrome. I think many people do. The other day, as my mother and aunts sat trying to remember the date of some trivial thing, Aunt Juanita finally asserted she knew, exactly, because it was the year Uncle Ed “got that red truck.” Her sisters nodded yes, it was. It seemed to me they were all red, his trucks, but I do not argue with women who were around when the Italians hanged Mussolini.

They recall the Depression, how their family left a rented house in early morning dark, sneaking out on the landlord. A pig they were trying to load up panicked and ran head first into the tailgate of their Ford, and fell dead. That was ’39, maybe ’40; the Depression lingered long down here. They do not recall the pig, much, but the Ford was a cut-down Model A, black, bad to rust.

My daddy’s whole life passed to the hiss of turning tires. He worked the chain gang in ’54, and it almost killed him, watching
cars pass him by. He courted Mother in ’55, in a black-and-pearl ’49 Mercury. It burned a lot of oil, as she recalls. He went AWOL from the Marines soon after; drove off in a ’54 Hudson Hornet, the law close behind. He wrecked it in Georgia, steered it off the asphalt into much of the adjoining countryside, in ’56. Even when he was sitting still, he was in a car, listening to the radio in the shade of a cedar tree. It was a gray Chevy, so it was ’65. I was in first grade.

My brother Sam broke his leg in the fall of ’73; hit a tree in a powder blue Willys. I won the Calhoun County 4-H Club speech championship that year. I spent the day rubbing pinesap off a white ’66 Corvair, hoping it might get me a date someday because being an award-winning public speaker did not. In summer ’75, Uncle John bid $540 at auction on a ’69 Mustang he could have gotten for $400 if I had not been jumping up and down, hollering “Git it!” But I hit a guardrail and warped the front end, and took my driver’s test in my Aunt Sue’s car, in fall ’75. I borrowed it again for prom. I wore a white tuxedo and my date dumped me, but I rode home, stylin’, in a green ’75 Monte Carlo. It was May ’77.

The first time I truly flew was in a ’69 Camaro; wrecked it in August ’76, a week before senior year. It was 92 degrees in the dark. I moved on to a ’70 MGB, but no one knew how to work on it so it sat under a tree. My buddy Mike Ponder finally wedged a transmission in place with a 2 by 4, and we motored. We were big boys; people said we looked like circus clowns riding around in that tiny car.

We buried Mike last year, but every time I see one of those cars I think of June ’77, my friend, and British racing green.

THE GIFT OF LOAFERING

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: June 2012

O
ld women call it loafering, and I’ve always loved that word. I guess it is just how we say the word “loafing,” but the way we say it makes you think of loafers, of wearing out your shoe leather for no good purpose. Old women like to sniff and use it as a condemnation. “He ain’t here. He’s off loafering.” It means you are shirking work and responsibility. To the men who loafer, it means they are free, free to waste time, to count mailboxes, and wave at other old men who, as the rear bumper vanishes in the distance, wish they were loafering, too....The one thing you cannot do is loafer with a heavy heart...Bill Joe rolls down his window and just drives, sometimes as far as the Georgia line. The mountains and hills are at their prettiest now...the hardwoods, the pines, even the weeds take on a luminescence that will shimmer into summer, till the heat itself makes the landscape fade. But for now it all just shines. His heart is light. His conscience is clear.

—From
The Prince of Frogtown

I am only 52 years old but have been badly used and poorly maintained. I have worked since I was 11, digging in dirt, heaving hay bales around, loading pulpwood. Now I mostly stack paragraphs on top of each other, which I claim to be work, though no one believes me. Anyway, I have at best a few more raggedy pages left in me. So, I have decided to retire early.

I used to say I planned to fish, but that is a bigger lie than I now
have the energy to tell. The fact is, I am the worst fisherman in my family line. My grandfather came home from the Coosa too drunk to stand, coat pockets stuffed with fish. I couldn’t catch a fish standing over a washtub sober with a stick of dynamite.

But I can loafer.

I can walk to my truck, turn the key, and ride. I will dodge everything worrisome—my wife, traffic, the uncollected garbage under the sink—find a country road that leads no place in particular, and let it take me there. I can lie and say I am going to exercise or pick up a gallon of hateful skim milk, say anything to slip the surly bonds of home, and roam, till the wanderlust subsides.

You may not be familiar with the word if you were born north of Fort Payne or in a bloodline that thinks a bad day is a flat tire on the million-dollar motor home. I come from a long line of loaferers, from semi-sorry men who vanished for days, if not years, in the highlands and deltas of the Deep South, sometimes with nothing more than two dollars and a Zippo lighter, men of beautiful, restless spirit and less-than-rigid adherence to jobs and spouses and other constricting things.

I had two bachelor great-uncles who loafered a lifetime, from Tampa to Chattanooga, high-steppin’ alongside an accelerating freight train, a guitar case in one hand as they reached, reached for freedom with the fingers of the other. My great-uncle Fred reappeared just before his death in a college bar in Jacksonville, Alabama, dressed in a checked sport coat and brown-and-white wingtip shoes. He finished a beer, took a roll of money off some college boys at the pool table, and disappeared forever into the night. It may be he never left very deep footprints in the sands of this society, but by God he left a lot of them.

I’d get too homesick to be like him, truly. Most of us loafer only in an afternoon. The descending sun sends us home to a woman’s worried face, or sometimes wrath. It may even be we were not greatly missed while we were gone. But at least, occasionally, someone will lie and say we were.

HOLIDAY LIES

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: December 2012

I
’m dreaming of a Christmas free of the harmless fibs, gentle untruths, and little white lies that pile up like (fake) snow.

The holiday season officially begins when they take down the Halloween decorations in the drugstore and start foisting off the fruitcake and the crème drops. It is what we have instead of snow. My brother Sam likes fruitcake; it is the only thing about him that troubles me. My mother told me she liked it, too, but that turned out to be a lie, a lie she told for 45 years to keep from hurting my feelings, dating back to the first fruitcake I gave her when I was a boy. I found out she foisted that one and every fruitcake that followed off on Sam, who, now that I think about it, may not truly like fruitcake either but may just be forcing it down, gob after candied, gelatinous gob, so as not to hurt her feelings. Either way, I guess, it is a lovely lie, in a season of lovely lies. How would we get through Christmas without them?

Think about it, about the lies we have to tell—or just let drift along from year to year—just so we can have peace on Earth. In my family, you had better not dare tell an ugly truth for fear of eliciting the dreaded: “You have ruint my Christmas!”

Invariably, it was because someone was caught in a truth.

But I am done. I am out of holiday lies.

We shall start with the weather folks. I am done pretending the
blip on your radar on Christmas Eve is Santa. I am not saying Santy ain’t coming; I’m saying that blip over Fort Smith, Arkansas, ain’t him.

Everyone knows the real Santa has magic powers that prevent us from seeing him, and if Santa can steer Donner and Blitzen across the December sky unseen by every child on Earth, I doubt your Doppler can track him. Maybe I can pretend, just one more year, if he brings me a fly rod.

I am through being nice to carolers. I have, for years, been one of the designated shut-ins on my street the carolers come to serenade. I do not sing well with others, and besides, it involves a great deal of walking. So I am left at home where I can cheerfully open the door and smile like a Stepford wife while everyone else on the street sings to me. Last year, I opened the door to be greeted by:

“You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch…”

I’ll show them Grinch. We’ll see how jolly they are dodging rocks through Glendale Gardens. I wonder if Santa would hold it against me if I went upside their heads with a fruitcake.

I usually do not have to spin any untruths when unwrapping presents. My people are wonderful gift buyers. They get me Carhartt shirts and good, thick socks and wrenches and screwdrivers and jeans that fit and 36 pairs of white undies from Fruit of the Loom, whom we have forgiven, apparently, for shutting down the plant and laying off the entire extended family. But I will NOT pretend to like a purple velour pullover with a V-neck collar, three sizes too small. I put it on and looked like a 300-pound grape. Don’t do that to me no more.

And I am through pretending that my one, special Christmas wish will come true. I am a low-tech man, but have begged for an iPod loaded with the Allman Brothers Band, The Amazing Rhythm Aces (“Third rate romance/Low rent rendezvous”), and some Jerry Lee Lewis. The iPod did arrive under the tree, two years ago. Empty. Silent. Christmases and birthdays and Father’s Days have come and gone and it is still silent as a box of saltine crackers, because my family members who actually know how to insert music into the magical device do not love me enough to do so.

Well I am through. From now on, during Christmas, I will celebrate in the warm light of truth.

Guess I’ll go see what’s on the radio.

O CHRISTMAS SOCK

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: December 2013