Off Main Street

by Michael Perry

  Off Main Street

  Barnstormers, Prophets,

  and Gatemouth’s Gator

  ESSAYS

  Michael Perry

  For Frank and Gene

  Contents

  Introduction

  I. Around Here

  A Way with Wings

  Farther Along

  Saving the Kidneys

  The Fat Man Delivers Christmas

  Big Things

  The Roots Remain

  Taking Courage

  Houses on Hills

  Swelter

  You Are Here

  II. Gearjammers

  Convoy

  Rolling Thunder

  The Road Gang

  Fear This

  End of the Line for a Depot Man

  The Haul Road

  Aaron Tippin: A Holler Full of Trucks

  III. On Tour

  Sara Evans

  The Osmotic Elvis

  Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown

  Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

  Steve Earle: Hard-Core Troubador

  IV. The Body Eclectic

  Scarlet Ribbons

  Rock Slide!

  Life in the Fat Lane

  Manure Is Elemental

  Hirsute Pursuits

  Catching at the Hems of Ghosts

  V. Way Off Main Street

  What We Want

  RSVP to the KKK

  People to Avoid on the Backpack Circuit

  Falling Together

  Branding God

  Postscript

  About the Photographers

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Michael Perry

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  I am a stranger in a strange town, and the man standing beside me has just removed his pants. There are mitigating factors—he is well-kempt, we are in a Laundromat, and as a registered nurse I have seen this sort of thing before—but they fail to completely dissipate the tension inherent in sharing close quarters with a pantless stranger. I am in Seattle, on Day Seven of a paperback book tour that will have me on the road for twenty-nine of thirty-one days in October. There will be more road time in November. For the hardcover tour I mostly drove—as far north as Duluth, Minnesota, as far south as Jackson, Mississippi. I put seven thousand miles on my Chevy. Checked into the Motel 6 so often that Tom Bodett owes me a house payment. A freelance writer should know how to spell and type, but one is equally served by a certain shiftlessness and an affection for truck stops. I have been schooled by truckers and country music roadies over the years, and it is paying off. “The secret to getting somewhere isn’t to drive fast,” a trucker once told me. “The secret is to keep that driver’s-side door shut.” When I drove, I had room in the trunk for clothes. On this the paperback tour, I am traveling light. Carry-on only. One week down, and laundry has become a matter of civic obligation. And so I have lugged my laptop and dirty socks some twenty blocks to this Laundromat, where I’m typing against deadline while waiting on Dryer #11. Across the table, Mr. Sans-A-Pants is reading the sports page. Packers beat the Seahawks. Beer sales in Wisconsin remain steady.

  Writers sometimes report that book tours are difficult. This sort of comment is unfortunate, and will be poorly received by single mothers, strawberry pickers and astronauts. In Covington, Kentucky, I received a call from my publicist, a heroic former dancer and Canadian named Tim. It was January, and I had been on hardcover tour since the previous September. Tim was solicitous: “How are you holding up?” I had seen a weather map earlier that morning. Back home, the day dawned eleven degrees below zero. My brothers were logging. My dad was in the middle of some deep-frozen field, flaking out hay for the sheep. The turkey factory workers, having struggled stiff-fingered in the dark to get their cars started in time to make day shift on the evisceration line, would now be well into their day of repetitive-motion meat slinging. “I think I’m going to be OK,” I told Tim.

  It can be a little frazzling. I was sitting in the Manchester airport at 1:49 p.m. on October 20, 2003, when Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards strolled past. I caught his eye and he grinned. I thought of toothpaste and hairspray. The contrast between our respective perkiness was alarming. Here was a man on a dead run for the highest office in the land and he looked like he was striding for the riser at an Up With People concert. As opposed to me, just three weeks into a little old book tour, looking like some sleep-deprived hillbilly who took a wrong turn on his way to the tractor pull. Of course, John Edwards had someone carrying his bags, and he wasn’t afflicted with a world-class internal nose zit. I realize I’m deep in self-disclosure here, but I believe the internal nose zit perfectly captures the glamour quotient of the self-propelled book tour. It appeared front and center—right at the tip of my nose—in Portland, Oregon, the morning of my first television appearance of the tour. Pulsing red schnozz notwithstanding, I went on TV makeup-free, in part because I wasn’t sure how to wield the pancake dealie (the only thing worse than no makeup is amateur makeup), and in part because I followed Mrs. Oregon 2003, and she used enough product for three of us. Nice lady, but her eyebrows appeared to be derived from a palette of ninety-weight motor oil. I posted these specific observations on my Web site, and subsequently received an e-mail from the Mrs. Oregon compound. In chastened fairness I must report that: (a) the correspondent demonstrated a gracious sense of humor; and (b) while I can get by looking like a rumpled dump truck mechanic, it is the duty of Mrs. Oregon to look like Mrs. Oregon.

  As the tour moved forward from Portland, the zit thrived. It was one of those subdermal terrors, the sort that doesn’t resolve itself quickly. A few days later, I spoke at an emergency medical services convention banquet and my nose had achieved such a Rudolph-like immanence that several vendors who were there to sell emergency lighting systems for ambulances approached me to see if we could work out some sort of endorsement deal. People were mostly polite about it. They somehow managed to maintain eye contact and pretend they didn’t notice what had become a nostril beacon. But they did notice. The morning after speaking at the banquet, I did a book signing. A woman at the front of the line whipped out a tube of antibiotic ointment and squirted a dollop on my index finger. “Put it on,” she said. I looked at the line of about twenty-five staring people and my face flushed as red as the zit. “Go ahead!” she said. I recognized the militant mothering tone and knew resistance was futile. Dabbed a little on my nose. “The inside, too,” she said. I just sat there gaping, much like all the people in line. “Go on,” she said, in an eat your peas sort of way. And so we achieved what is so far my pinnacle book tour moment: your Correspondent, sitting in a chair before a handful of fans, finger up his hot red proboscis, swabbing bacitracin into the far reaches of his authorial nostril. Oprah, the boat has sailed, and you missed it.

  The point was not to write about the book tour. The point was to convey how grateful I am for the chance to be out there at all. In 1989 I left a perfectly good career as a registered nurse in order that I might try my hand at writing. It was a half-baked decision at best. For years I wrote everything and anything: three-hundred-word pieces on call waiting for the local business newsletter; radio commercials for a used car dealer; a chapter for a medical-legal textbook about death by gunshot. My friend Al and I put together a television ad for a frozen pizza maker in which I composed and lip-synched the lyrics “When it’s time to eat-za, I like Roma pizza.” As a freelance writer, you’re never really sure where your next gig is going to come from, so you take ’em all. Like any musician playing weddings, you are working on your chops, hoping for a chance to play your own stuff. You try to balance writ
ing for the muse with writing for the bill collector. Here and there I caught a break. The progression was spotty, the details off-beat but interminable. I’ll spare you the full reprise by simply saying, from the time I published my first piece of writing until I found myself in Seattle with the Pantless Man, fourteen years passed. I spent most of those years up late, typing. But I also spent time riding shotgun in the company of sculptors, philosophers, urologists and butchers. I have been invited to cross America with truckers, sleep on country music tour buses, and sometimes, just to write about life on my own terms. Last night I was working in my little writing shack when I heard a Del Reeves trucking song on the Airline transistor. Del sang, “I’m lookin’ at the world through a windshield/ and I see everything in a little different light,” and I thought of all the words and miles and people and helping hands since 1989, and again, I felt gratitude.

  Book tours are a delight, but health insurance premiums loom, and so I keep feeding the freelance engine. Every deadline is a welcome opportunity. Thus I find myself typing in Laundromats. The selections that follow represent not a collection of works but of work, and I’m glad to have it. A man asked me recently how I deal with writer’s block, and I said my muse is a bald man named Jim. He sits in a swivel chair just up the road at the Sterling Bank, and he holds my mortgage. When the words won’t come, I think of Jim, and I get to typing.

  And finally, thank you. I am allowed this life through the good grace of readers. There is so much shiny noise in this world, I am pleasantly flabbergasted by the idea that folks will sit still with a book on their knee. I wish you safe travels, in or out of your reading chair, and leave you with the best advice I know, given to me by a country music roadie in the middle of the night on a bus rolling somewhere: If you see free food, eat it. If you get five minutes, sleep.

  I. Around Here

  A Way with Wings

  One summer day when I was a child, a rocket rose through the snow in Oleander Caporelli’s television, headed for the moon. I have always believed Neil Armstrong was on that rocket, bound to make his giant leap for mankind—but my little brother, who recalls the same scene, believes we saw a later mission. He was just two years old in 1969, and doubts he would remember Apollo 11. We do agree that we sat together on the Caporellis’ floor and watched a launch, our heads tipped back as if we were tracking the ship itself into the stratosphere. The television sat on a shelf high above the fireplace mantel, the power cord clipped to a car battery. The Caporellis lived deep in the Wisconsin woods, in a small house without electricity. We had electricity on our farm, but no television, and so, with history in the air, Mom loaded us into the car and drove us down the snaking, dead-end dirt road that wound around the old cranberry bog, up a sharp hill, and then hairpinned back on itself in a long decline leading to the Caporelli place. For the last five hundred yards, the driveway ran parallel to a narrow cow pasture that doubled as a runway.

  Crazy Joe Caporelli hung billboards for a living, but he had also trained fighter pilots in the Middle East. So the locals told it, anyway; or some said Korea, and others said he had been a test pilot, and you got to where you entertained all versions, because Crazy Joe had a way with wings. He carved us balsa wood jets the size of dragonflies. If you flung them low, they swooped high. Crazy Joe said the secret was in the tiny wire counterweight he crimped over the nose of each craft. Crazy Joe built a jet out there in the woods. I remember the tubular cowling on his garage floor, remember Crazy Joe with his goggles and gas welder. But when he bolted the engine to a hand-built fuselage, pointed the nose down his dandelion runway and throttled up, the jet wash incinerated the tail works. Later, he repaired the tail, switched the jet engine for a snowmobile engine, and got the rig airborne, but the Chippewa County jet age never took off.

  Mostly Crazy Joe flew his homemade canvas two-seater. Summer evenings, our yard would go dark early, the sun blocked by the tall white pines sheltering the house and barn, but the sunlight that cleared the treetops gave everything to the east—the oat fields, the popple trees, the fence rows—a deep swab of color, a promise for the morning, as it were. And just when everything was glowing, there would come a buzzing from the northeast, and Crazy Joe would clear the treetops, flying through the last of the sun, his plane bright as a little red wagon against the blue sky. It was an evening ritual as common as the deer emerging in the meadows.

  Some nights, after the cows were milked, and Joe had flown home, Dad took us swimming. He drove us to Fish Lake and sat on the grassy bank reading the paper. We swam and splashed until it got so dark Dad could no longer keep track of us. When he stood up, it was time to go. One day some men came to build a steel shed behind our barn. It was abominably hot, and at noon, Dad loaded the entire crew into the truck and hauled them to the lake. It was a rare treat to swim in bright sunlight. I scissor-kicked beneath the surface with my eyes wide open, trying to touch bluegills. At night, the sunfish appeared dark green, almost gray. Here at high noon, they hung in the underwater sunbeams like electrified ornaments. If you stabbed your hand out quickly, you might brush a fin before they flashed away. Given a reprieve from gravity, I hovered above the lake bed until my lungs ached for air.

  Crazy Joe used to climb high in the sky over our hayfield, stall out, and then drop in a silent free fall. It put us right on the edge of our seats, waiting to hear the engine sputter and kick in. Can you imagine us, young boys in the country, playing all day, with an air show every evening? Crazy Joe used to bring his plane in low right over the garden, swoop by the house at bedroom level, dip to the clover blossoms in front of the barn, then yank back on the stick and just clear the oak trees at the end of the meadow. My brother and I would go pelting out of the house to watch. My mother had slow-motion plane crash nightmares and dreaded the day she would have to pluck Crazy Joe from the brush. Finally she forbade him to buzz the house, and he complied, but when he spotted us boys waving from the yard, he’d waggle his wings.

  One night all the neighbors—from babes in arms to the two elderly Norwegian bachelor brothers who worked the farm adjacent to ours—queued up in a hayfield and Crazy Joe gave everyone rides. My brother and I rode together in the seat behind Crazy Joe, and I remember the homemade stick swaying and dipping at our knees, mirroring every move Joe made in the front. He flew to our farm and banked hard over the barnyard. He looked back and hollered over the engine noise. “Can you see?” My brother and I nodded. “You can’t see!” he yelled, and flung open the side doors. We clamped hold of the seat but were transfixed. There was our yard, the green shingles on our red barn, Dad’s aqua-blue wheelbarrow propped on its nose in the driveway; now we knew how it was to look down from the moon.

  Today, the rockets come and go, and we barely notice. Crazy Joe disappeared in the mid-’70s, a contrail of myth drifting in his wake—how did a billboard hanger living in the woods without electricity come to possess a jet engine? My brother and I were trading Joe stories recently, and on a whim I did a nationwide phone search. Joe Caporelli came up twice. I called the first number, in rural Tennessee. Danged if Oleander didn’t answer. She is sixty now, her voice thinner, but still with the flower-child lilt I remember. She was delighted to reminisce. Crazy Joe is eighty one years old, she says, and dying of cancer at home. She says she has written up an outline of all his flying stories. In fifth grade, an airplane flew over his school. He jumped out the window for a look and never returned. By age fifteen, he was building wings for Piper. In World War II, he was one of only two survivors in his squadron. She says the rumors about Korea and the Middle East aren’t right, but thanks to a crash, the stories we heard about the metal plate in his head were correct.

  I describe my memory of the moon shot, and she says I have the details right—even down to the silver pliers they used to adjust the antenna, but in 1969, she says, they were living in a tent, still building the house. I can no longer say I remember watching Neil Armstrong shoot for the moon. Our summers become a conflation of memories; we see them
in astounding detail, like brilliant sunfish that disappear when you try to put your finger on them. But the fascinations survive. I was a child in the country, living summers filled with barnstormers and astronauts. The surreal was natural, and desirable. Such a profound thing, the idea that one might soar. I think of summer, and I think of flying—in the air, in the water…to the moon….

  2001

  Farther Along

  If you ever watched Hee Haw you remember Grandpa Jones. When he died the editors at the alternative country music magazine No Depression allowed me to compose a eulogy based on a coincidental experience. The term “alternative country” refers to a musical movement that first gained popular notice in the 1990s. In the broadest sense, the term describes country music that eschews Nashville polish. It draws heavily on the aesthetics of rock and the do-it-yourself ethic of punk, and is played by people who know Buck Owens was more than some goofball with a red, white and blue guitar.

  Roughly thirty years ago, before the methodologies of holistic health care and the vagaries of corporate cost cutting convened a dialectic that produced today’s burgeoning home health care industry, my mother—then a young nurse in a small rural hospital—was recruited by the county to be on night call for a dying ninety-two-year-old woman whose family had promised to keep her out of the nursing home. The house was remotely located, and the woman’s son, Henry, usually called after dark, so rather than send Mother alone, we’d pack our family of five into the Rambler, and Dad would pilot us through the swamps and backcountry to where the small wooden house sat hunched in the trees at the end of a short dirt drive. I was very young—not yet four—but I remember wolfish dogs looming through the moonlight, some tethered to brush-bound Packards, others circling the Rambler, stopping to strain at the windows.