Nashville Hot Chicken
By this point in our nascent relationship, Mavis and I had figured out how to mash our moist and sweaty sex parts together with marginally enjoyable results, suffered through awkward introductory meals with each other’s closest friends/families (including a surprise birthday party I totally almost ruined by being a pouty asshole), and gone in on a family cell phone plan: IT WAS TIME FOR US TO PLAN OUR FIRST JOINT VACATION.
Thoughtful romantic that I am, I texted, “Hey, instead of flying first-class to Jamaica to drink rum out of coconuts and risk skin cancer roasting under the sun, how would you feel about instead spending nine hours wedged into a rented car with my dead dad’s ashes to go to Nashville and eat biscuits and gravy and listen to terrible country music for a week?” In hindsight I realize that that is a heavy fucking thing to ask a normal person with actual human feelings to accompany you to do. In my mind it was like Weekend at Bernie’s, but in real life she has a mom she talks to on the phone once or twice a week and isn’t used to my whole LOL I KILLED MY MOM shtick. This could be an emotional minefield.
I’m not sure that I can articulate this exactly the way I want to without alienating anybody cool, but my parents have been dead for so long that it almost isn’t even sad to me anymore. I can’t remember their voices or what they liked to put on their pizza; I couldn’t tell you what teams my dad rooted for or what shade of lipstick my mom liked to wear. They had no part in my adult life, so it’s not like I miss our Sunday dinners or their career guidance. And, if I’m being straight up, I know that if the trajectories of their lives had continued down the paths they were on, I’d be sharing a one-bedroom apartment with my mom and giving her a daily lottery ticket allowance while my dad spent every day passed out in a racetrack bathroom. My life would be the kind of sitcom that’s more situation than comedy, full of scenes in which my adorably confused mother called me in my sad beige cubicle five times to remind hapless me to pick up her cigarettes at the gas station where my potential love interest works on the way home from the office as my Stereotypical Angry Employer stands huffing over me, the audience collectively worried that this is the episode that my likable yet annoying and overbearing mother will get me fired. My dad would make a cameo during sweeps week, all dressed up in a Salvation Army suit, smelling like Old Spice, and make a lot of promises he had no intention of keeping, then disappear at the end of the episode not to be seen again until the season finale.
There would be lots of walking-home-late-in-the-rain montages in which I’d adjust my unwieldy purse and clumsily drop the bag of Doritos I am going to eat for my dinner on the floor. The gas station attendant—who is secretly handsome under his oil-stained cap and thick, out-of-style glasses—works up the nerve to do something about his long-standing crush. He won’t, though, at least not this season; he’ll just watch me with longing as I tuck the pack of Virginia Slims next to the sensible office heels in my workbag. “Ma’am?” he’ll call out as I reach the door, and everyone at home on the couch will totally lose their shit because maybe he really is going to put down his wrench and sweep me into his strong, alternator-fixing arms. I’ll turn around hopefully, because I have a secret crush on him, too, and, duh, I’ve never been kissed and an Aretha Franklin song is swelling to a crescendo in the background, and holy fuck I might finally get to have sex, but that hope shatters into a million pieces as I realize he’s just holding out a pack of matches to take home to my mom. Roll credits, sad trombone.
—
That is for real what my life would be, shame-spiraling into spinsterhood as my mom made an ever-evolving list of reasons I could never move out and abandon her. We would definitely have too many of whatever pet we could both agree on, and she would sit smoking in her armchair and nodding along with Oprah while calling me constantly throughout the day to either (1) remind me of things she needed me to bring home, or (2) recount to me, in explicit detail, the happenings on her various beloved television programs. We’d be the type of people who had both of our names on household accounts. You know what I mean? Like when you get a new MasterCard and there’s that “Do you want to add an authorized user?” box, the one I currently check FUCK NO on while doing the untethered single-person running man. I would answer a begrudging yes and get a second card with Grace Irby on it. We would undoubtedly be sharing a bed, one that I definitely made the quilt for, and I would never post anything on Facebook other than videos of frolicking baby goats and inspirational infographics while wishing real hard every night that someone at the church would force her nonverbal son who is “too sensitive to get a job” to take me on a date to Baker’s Square and ask to touch my privates after. So I guess what I’m saying is that it’s okay they’re dead.
Our family tree is so goddamn sparse that if you shake it you’d probably start a fire. My dad was born in Mississippi but spent his formative years in Memphis, where he fathered my brothers before ditching them to move to Chicago and eventually meet my mother, who already had three young girl children of her own.
—
I have neither seen nor spoken to either of my brothers since they attended my mom’s funeral in June 1998. That’s part of the reason I’ve never done anything with our dad, because it’s just my luck that the minute I decided to dump that asshole in a barbecue grill or sprinkle him outside the shady SRO he lived in for a while, one of them would turn up and be upset that I hadn’t included him in the decision. Our father was terrible—he tried three times and still couldn’t get the kind and loving parenting thing down—but it still nagged at me that they might want to say good-bye or something. (My sisters don’t give a shit—he was the kind of jerk stepfather who yelled a lot about nothing and nailed the windows shut after they’d snuck out of them at night to go meet their boyfriends.) My brothers are not men who Facebook. They are not gentlemen who tweet. Once every couple of years, I will do some lightweight Google sleuthing and call the first handful of phone numbers I run across, but they have all led to dead ends. The last time I was in Memphis I was fifteen and spent the entire time taking pictures of heartbroken women earnestly sobbing over Elvis’s grave with a disposable drugstore camera, not risking getting my head blown off going door to door asking “Are you my brother?” in unfamiliar neighborhoods.
So I ended up with SB on a technicality. The thought of physically handling his ashes in order to transfer them from the box they came in to a nicer container horrified me, plus I ain’t got no fireplace. Where the fuck was he supposed to go? Should I have, like, displayed him? Not doing that ever. But isn’t it wildly disrespectful to just, um, throw him away? Is there no discreet disposal service I could use? WHY DID THEY MAKE ME HIS GUARDIAN? I HATE BEING IN CHARGE OF THINGS. It would’ve been an easier decision if I had a house. Because then I could just dump him in a hole and plant a rose bush in it or something, and when houseguests admired my garden I could explain to them how I’d ingeniously repurposed my father’s cremains and look like a thoughtful and sentimental person. But I’m broke and can barely keep the tiny succulents in my studio alive, so instead of doing anything with him, I hid the giant can of rocks and dust that used to be Samuel Irby in that Gap bag on the top shelf of my hall closet and decided to ignore him. It would be a fitting metaphor for the bulk of my childhood. Plus I didn’t think my dad would give a shit, really; I was more haunted by the ghost of the old boyfriend I’d purchased those fucking Gap sweaters for.
I’m not sentimental; I don’t save birthday cards or baby pictures or newspaper clippings, I have no real traditions, and I throw everything away the minute it stops being shiny and new. Still, one day I realized that dusty box full of my dad’s ground-up bones and brains had been sitting between the cat carrier and a bag of mittens for seven years, and I was determined not to move it to another apartment ever again. My dad died eighteen years ago: it was time for my dude to get free and stop grossing me the fuck out every time I needed a goddamn jacket.
I decided to take him to Nashville, to dump the as
hes of my dead father in one of Tennessee’s thirty-plus rivers or tributaries so he could float on and become one again with the earth or whatever, but also to kind of try to have a vacation. Like I said, he was technically from Memphis, but I’ve been there. A lot. There are only so many times you can trudge through the excruciatingly depressing mausoleum that is Graceland without wanting to scoop your fucking eyes out with a grapefruit spoon, so I wasn’t doing that again. I needed to get rid of him, and it needed to be in a place that felt like it had at least a little bit of sentimental value in case any of my future children (read: cats) ever ask about their grandfather. It also needed to be someplace close enough that I could drive there without dislocating my fucking knee, yet far enough that my boss couldn’t get cute and try to call me in to work. My hipster friends with good taste like Nashville, there are a lot of Kinfolk-looking blogs espousing Nashville’s many hidden gems, and Nashville has a shitload of good restaurants. If my daddy had really wanted to split hairs about his final resting place, he should’ve left a goddamned will instead of overdrawn checking accounts and a bunch of gambling debts and worthless old scratch-off tickets. That motherfucker was getting scattered in Nashville.
—
I am for sure about to be called a nigger with the hard R. That is what I was thinking while Mavis and I sat in my rented Toyota Camry outside a Hucks gas station in Madisonville, Kentucky. According to the faded signs in the window, you could get a pack of cigarettes here for less than three dollars. You can’t even get a newspaper in Chicago for three motherfucking dollars. Should I move? I mean, I don’t smoke and the South is terrifying to me, but last week I spent thirteen dollars on some trash called “young raw coconut juice” and that is really not the kind of life I want to be living anymore.
Anyway, we had been in the car for seven hours, me behind the wheel as we darted between terrifying big rigs and 1976 Toyota pickup trucks driven by mulleted, shirtless teenagers. Mavis thought it would be more romantic to take the small and beautiful back roads due south rather than the ugly congested highway with its bright lights, densely populated McDonald’s, and the kinds of white people who care about driving fuel-efficient hybrid cars, so we had been singing along with a two-hundred-song Spotify playlist I packed with BONA FIDE JAMS like “Return of the Mack” and the Human Nature remix of SWV’s “Right Here” (if you weren’t a teenager in the early nineties then I am terribly sorry for you) to keep me awake on the road while driving through hundreds of miles of desolate farmland.
A man wearing thick white athletic socks shoved into Adidas shower shoes shuffled past the car, studying my stylish urban Mohawk with an intense curiosity. “My barber fades it by hand,” I almost called out, my polite northern way of asking exactly what the fuck he was motherfucking staring at, but decided against it. Mavis is a healthy person, reason number 137 why I am convinced she will quickly grow tired of me and my bullshit, right after “votes in local elections” and “has never eaten a Hot Pocket purely for enjoyment of the taste.” Healthy people keep themselves properly hydrated, and this was the third time we’d had to stop and find her a bathroom in the kinds of towns where Confederate money is still accepted as legal tender. I’m the opposite of whatever she is, the kind of person whose extra-large drive-thru Diet Coke had lasted from Broadway and Thorndale to the middle of Kentucky, and I hadn’t once had the urge to pee. Or shit, for that matter, since I had eaten only a handful of saltines and Imodium for breakfast. I don’t need that kind of stress, man. I would rather fight Moby Dick on a raft with a hole in it than be stuck in a car in the middle of nowhere groundhogging a giant poop. Or squatting on the side of the interstate with nothing but Mavis’s skinny legs for cover.
Mavis emerged from the sliding glass doors, loaded down with water bottles and whatever healthy snacks are to be found in a country-ass gas station. A blazing neon sign in the window blinked an advertisement for hot fried chicken and gizzards and, maybe I’m disgusting, but there really was an internal struggle between the part of my brain that is averse to eating food left out in the open under a heat lamp and the part that knows that chicken was probably delicious. I spent the entire rest of the drive dreaming about those room-temperature gizzards as my stomach growled loudly in protest.
I really dig a fancy fucking hotel and we picked the Fucking Fanciest. Nothing like rolling up to the tastefully appointed valet and handing him the grocery bag you packed your one outfit in as you hold out your arm and painfully unfold your plastic travel slippers and stained yoga pants and cramping limbs from where they’ve been molded around a steering wheel for half a day. I’m not going to continue to put too fine a point on this, but getting with someone the total opposite of you is the goddamn move. This is how I pack for a five-day trip: many underpants, maybe an extra bra, multiple socks, maybe two T-shirts, a hoodie, and a bag of dehydrated sriracha bacon and a fountain drink for the car. This is how Mavis packs: many separate top and bottom options, including but not limited to multiple shorts and shirts, dresses short and long, skirts, running/exercise tanks and shorts, a special moisture-wicking-type bra, athletic socks, several sandals, a pair of gym shoes, at least one romper, an extra carburetor, a full silver service, a twin-size bed, several different types of Tylenol, and a cooler full of dry snacks and drinks and coffee. It never even occurred to me that I might do anything other than survive off of whatever I could find in a vending machine or from room service. She is a real-life adult. It’s impressive.
The morning after we arrived, I awoke in a bed larger than my entire apartment and suddenly remembered why I rarely ever take vacations: trips cost a lot of money and I don’t ever really feel like doing anything I couldn’t already be doing in my own bed. I never wake up excited at the promise of a new day; instead, I grudgingly tear my eyelids apart while dreading whatever soul-crushing obligation is on the other side of my door. A job, a phone call, a lunch: I would rather be dead than do any of it. Mavis was already out in the world—the note she’d left next to the bed let me know that she had gone out for a run and LOL WHAT DO THOSE WORDS EVEN MEAN. I toddled around the room in a sleep haze, wiping crust out of my eyes and debating whether I could accept a room service order without a bra on. Like, what if it’s more than an exchange of plates or whatever and I have to awkwardly tuck my tits into my armpit to sign a receipt? I like traveling to other places to do the exact same thing I do at home: read books in bed, occasionally get overpriced takeout, and groan exasperatedly at tourists chattering excitedly outside my door over whatever thrilling activity they are about to go do.
—
Shit we did in Nashville, in no particular order:
• Saw Dave Chapelle’s return to standup.
• Ate doughnuts in the parking lot of the Donut Den during a tornado.
• Learned what a “meat and three” is.
• Cried while eating Hattie B’s hot chicken.
• Listened to a terrible version of that “Black Velvet” song sung by your drunk stepmom at this overcrowded bar with delicious okra.
• Drove around all damn day Easter Sunday looking for an inconspicuous place that wasn’t a golf course or children’s playground to dump a giant can of ashes without alerting anyone to our possibly illegal (?) agenda.
• Xanax.
Shit we did not do in Nashville:
• Go to the Country Music Hall of Fame.
• See the Parthenon.
• Hit the Grand Ole Opry.
• Venture outside a whole lot.
• Eat anything we probably couldn’t find in Chicago.
• Talk to anyone other than my friend Lena, who was living in Nashville for work.
• Much of anything, really.
Even when I had stopped believing in God as a teenager, I would still drag myself to church once a year to contemplate my mortality while celebrating the risen Christ and surveying all the elaborate headpieces worn by the women of the congregation for Easter service. When I was little and forced week after wee
k to attend our death-boring Methodist services, Easter was always a welcome change: better songs, a well-rehearsed play, a fierier sermon. Plus, Easter has the best candy, so of course it was my favorite. To this day, I weep like a child when those purple bags of Cadbury Mini Eggs show up in the Walgreens seasonal aisle at the first dawn of spring.
I didn’t have very much of an attachment to that dusty can of gravel; I don’t know if I’m a robot or dead inside or what, or if the passing of time leeches the sentimentality out of loss, but guilt was the only emotion keeping me from just dropping it in a garbage can outside of a 7-Eleven. I’m not much for ceremony, either. If ever there is a wedding in my future, you can bet your sweet ass that it will take place in some nondescript room in a courthouse, followed immediately by appetizers and margaritas at the closest Chili’s. I don’t like to make a big to-do, although it did seem fitting to sprinkle his ashes on Easter, if for no other reason than to see if I’d find him randomly hanging out in my kitchen three days later.
I wasn’t sure how to appropriately eulogize a dude who had once punched me in the face for washing the dishes wrong, and it really never even occurred to me that I might write something down for the occasion. People always assume that because I’m a writer, I just show up to special events with some super poignant shit written on a scroll in my purse. I write butt jokes on the Internet, you guys. Please stop asking me to “say a few words” at your kid’s baptism. Also, the only semiprivate spot on the river we found after driving around in the nice clothes I remembered at the very last second to pack was a very public boat launch down a sharp incline. Even though it was three in the afternoon, I was terrified that some kids out to enjoy the shit-smelling river on a warm day in a kayak would happen upon us and call the fucking police. (I read To Kill a Mockingbird—I’m not trying to be caught with a pretty white woman doing anything.) So even if I had written a speech, I would’ve been too fucking jittery to read it.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Page 16