by Tom Franklin
ALUMNI GRILL #2
Edited by Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-916-6
M P Publishing Limited
12 Strathallan Crescent
Douglas
Isle of Man
IM2 4NR
via United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672
email: [email protected]
Originally published by:
MacAdam/Cage
155 Sansome, Suite 550
San Francisco, CA 94104
www.macadamcage.com
Copyright © 2005
Alumni Grill: Volume II,
By Editors Franklin, Tom and Fennelly, Beth (Beth Ann)
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
© ISBN 1-59692-143-9
Several of these stories have appeared elsewhere, in some cases in a different form:
Jack Pendarvis’s “The Poet I Know” in Yalobusha Review, Vol. IX (Spring 2004); Donald Hays’s “Ackerman in Eden” in The Southern Review (Autumn 2004) and in Dying Light (MacAdam/Cage 2005); Suzanne Kingsbury’s “What War Will Do” in Atlanta Magazine, Vol. 45, No. 1 (May 2005); Brad Vice’s “Tuscaloosa Knights” in Five Points, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring 2004); David Wright’s “Writing the Real World” in The Kenyon Review, Vol. 24, No. 3/4 (Summer/Fall 2002); Joe Formichella’s “Fishtraps” in Yalobusha Review (2004); Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Bird of Paradise” in The Southwest Review; Brock Clarke’s “The Reason Was Us” in The Georgia Review (Spring 2004); Michelle Richmond’s “The Hero of Queens Boulevard” in Glimmer Train No. 51 (Summer 2004); and Daniel Wallace’s “The Last Time I Saw Him” in Glimmer Train (Spring 2005).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors would like to thank the man with the plan, Sonny Brewer; the writers who gave their work; the good folks at MacAdam/Cage who published it so well (especially Kate Nitze, Pat Walsh, and David Poindexter); and the bookstores who have welcomed it (especially Lemuria in Jackson, MS; The Alabama Booksmith in Birmingham, AL; and Square Books in Oxford, MS).
ALUMNI GRILL #2
Edited by Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOREWORD
THE POET I KNOW
by Jack Pendarvis
ACKERMAN IN EDEN
by Donald Hays
WHAT WAR WILL DO
by Suzanne Kingsbury
TUSCALOOSA KNIGHTS
by Brad Vice
WRITING THE REAL WORLD
An essay by David Wright
THOSE STEEL ARMS
by Matt Brock
WAITING WIVES
by Bev Marshall
FISHTRAPS
by Joe Formichella
HAWK & CLAY
by Juliana Gray
KING COTTON
by Juliana Gray
PEACHES
by Juliana Gray
BIRDS OF PARADISE
by Bret Anthony Johnston
THE REASON WAS US
by Brock Clarke
THE HERO OF QUEENS BOULEVARD
by Michelle Richmond
THE LAST TIME I SAW HIM
by Daniel Wallace
CONTRIBUTORS
FOREWORD
Great bars, saloons, and cafes aren’t built with lumber, mortar, concrete. Great bars are built with time, chance, history. Great bars are great because of what can happen inside. Great bars are great because we’re great when we’re in them. And great bars are living organisms, loaned to us mortals for a while, then taken away. You can rebuild a Chili’s; you can rebuild a Hilton hotel bar. But when a great bar is destroyed, it can never be rebuilt. Foolhardy—or is it affectionate?—owners try. But we know, don’t we, that they will fail. When great bars are gone, they’re gone forever.
This year, the Alabama Gulf Coast (and the world) lost two of its best bars. The Florabama straddled the Florida–Alabama state line and shouldered the Gulf into its back yard. Fronted by a package store where you could buy Hot Damn in brown paper bags and tacky T-shirts (a Florabama fish encouraging, “Do it with us on the line”), it opened into a labyrinth of dark rooms and tents where bands crooned and Royal Red Shrimp were steamed at all hours, shrimp so fresh they were brought right up the dock and into the kitchen. Ten bucks bought you a pound, a plastic shot glass of butter, ingots of new potatoes, and some overcooked corn on the cob, all heaped on a plastic cafeteria tray. You ate on long picnic tables studded every few yards with rolls of paper towels like bouquets. The other greasy, butter-dripping Corona drinkers would pause in their shelling to pass a paper towel, and no one looked askance if you tucked it into your Harley T-shirt or low-cut blouse. And no one looked askance at the cockroaches long as cigarette lighters darting along the concrete floor, either. Later, if you wanted to get lucky, you could either join the dancers or cross over to the Florida side of the bar to buy a lottery ticket. If you climbed the stairs to the deck overlooking the beach where the bar’s famous mullet toss and January 1 Polar Bear Dip took place, you could pop a quarter into the telescope to observe the stars, and, not infrequently, a couple getting busy on the white sand.
Judge Roy Bean’s was inland, in Daphne, but just as strange and nearly as large, rooms opening onto other rooms the same weather-beaten wood the color of a hornets’ nest. It was topped by a ramshackle tin roof and centered by a big wood-burning fireplace, which provided what seemed to be the only source of light. In the front, there was a stage so small it’s hard to imagine that Judge’s was one of Jimmy Buffet’s favorite places to jam, and, since its 1946 opening, had hosted Emmylou Harris, Alabama, and the Marshall Tucker Band. Everybody went to Judge’s sooner or later, young or old, patchouli or preppy. You could dance with a long-haired cowboy, the kind with the badge of a Skoal tobacco can permanently faded into the back pocket of his Wranglers, or a woman who believed her big hair only brought her closer to God. The music was so loud you’d feel it through your breastbone, through the floorboards. When you’d damaged your hearing enough, you could mosey out back, the dance-sweat drying in your hair and down your shoulder blades, to the giant fenced yard, an Oz-like tiki bar that had not only a Ping-Pong table and horseshoe court and wooden polo pony but a chess board with life-size pieces (someone would hold your bourbon while you hugged the knight to your body and dragged it the two spaces over, one up). There were the usual strays—this was Alabama, after all—a cat sacked out on the bar, others brushing your ankles, a macaw named Tattoo, and a goat named Billy.
Great bars, both gone. The Florabama by Hurricane Ivan, winds 120 miles an hour, one mile of water inland, forty-nine dead. Smashed to splinters, most likely, though maybe parts of the bar exist intact out in the Gulf, full of fins, where shrimp fan-tail over bar stools, serve themselves. And Judge Roy Bean’s, destroyed by fire, burning inexplicably a foggy morning in February, uninsured of course (this is Alabama), everything lost in the blaze. Everything but Tattoo and Billy.
At least we still have that other great bar born in Alabama, The Alumni Grill. True, this is a bar that can’t be found in guidebooks or on Mapquest—it exists only in the Alabama of the mind. The outgrowth of Sonny Brewer’s Blue Moon Café gathering of Southern writers and its annual anthology, lovingly published by MacAdam/Cage, The Alumni Grill provides a home for those Southern writers who have been invited into the café but just can’t bear to hear “Last call!” at closing time. And it provides a home for those readers who’ve been sitting chatting with these writers on bar stools, who aren’t ready for the party to end either. So come on in, partner, and check out what voices have been gathered here, waiting for you to join them. The music is just starting up, and the bartender has flicked his wrist to slide a cold,
cold beer down the counter towards your stool. You’ve got it, yes, you’ve got it now, sit back and settle in—the pleasure is all before you, here in your deserving hands.
—Beth Ann Fennelly
THE POET I KNOW
by Jack Pendarvis
The poet is pregnant.
I keep saying, “You should name the baby after me.” I say, “It’s a good name for a boy or a girl.” I say a lot of other things.
I’m not serious am I?
My buddy Hodge likes to tell me I’m a bit self-absorbed, but I don’t know. I ponder it all the time.
For example, the poet puts her friends’ names in her poems. I keep thinking, when is she going to put me in a poem?
Like how about the time we saw that sunset?
Is that self-absorbed?
Of course, I was drunk and I talked all the way through the sunset.
Like, “Look at that!”
Like, “Wow!”
Like, “I think I saw a fish!”
The poet said, because the sun was a fierce dot above the bay, casting a rope of fire toward us on the water, “An exclamation point.”
I said, “I was just going to say that!”
I said, “I was going to say a Spanish exclamation point!”
I said, “Because it’s upside down!”
The sun plunged all of a sudden and you could feel the temperature drop just as the poet had predicted.
What had happened that day?
Let me start over.
Hodge and I had been out of work for some time. We decided to become writers. We were getting old, and as long as our lives were in shambles what did we have to lose? We thought, “It’s now or never.”
I called the poet’s husband to ask him how to become a writer.
“Well, you could start by going to some of these conferences,” said the poet’s husband.
The poet’s husband and I had been friends since early childhood. He had become a famous novelist. He was my “contact.”
Hodge and I drove down to the Conference of Southern Authors. Our wives stayed behind.
We went to the opening night reading.
First there was a story about a guy who drank too much and harbored bad thoughts about himself. He had one last shot to make good.
Somebody else read about the marvelous and eventful tea party that Mrs. Magnolia P. Dillblossom threw for her rebellious daughter, Topsy.
Then came a tale where everybody had names like “T-Toe” and “Little Jay Joe” and “Moedine” and slept in pickup trucks with dogs and chickens and talked about their “britches” and so on.
Well, Hodge and I kept nudging each other. So this was writing! Writing was going to be a piece of cake!
“What are your influences?” somebody asked the panel.
Everybody said Faulkner.
I wrote in my notebook: “Read Faulkner.”
The next day we got there early. Listless, bent writers decorated the lawn of the converted church where the next reading would be held. It wasn’t noon by a long shot but some of the writers clearly cradled beer in plastic cups. It seemed appealing.
I introduced Hodge to the poet’s husband.
“Where can we get a beer?” I said. “Or is that just for writers?”
“Come on,” said the poet’s husband. “We’ll go to the bar where I lost my coat last night.”
We headed for the car.
“Will we be back in time for the reading?” I said.
“They can’t start without me,” said the poet’s husband. “I need to find my coat anyway. Either I lost it or _________ stole it.” (He named a certain drunken writer.)
We drove around the corner to a little shack that smelled like fish. All the doors were open so things were lit that shouldn’t have been lit. Stools, forlorn, showed their pale stuffing, for example. Tin and concrete everywhere, startled by the sun. There was just room for Hodge, the poet’s husband, and myself at the small bar, at the end of which a sulky stranger stood drinking.
“Did anybody turn in a coat last night?” the poet’s husband asked the woman tending bar.
“Is this it?” she said, holding up a coat.
“No, it was a nice coat.”
“What’s a nice coat? Nobody turned in a nice coat. You wouldn’t happen to be _______, would you?”
To our surprise, she named the same drunken writer to whom the poet’s husband had recently alluded.
“Yes, that’s me, why do you ask?” said the poet’s husband.
The bartender handed him an American Express gold card.
“This isn’t really me,” said the poet’s husband. “I know him, though. I was here last night, remember? I was in here with him.”
The bartender looked doubtful.
“I’m about to see him in fifteen minutes. I tell you what, put a round of drinks on this card. He won’t mind. He’s a sweet man. Buy a drink for that guy, too.” He pointed to the end of the bar.
The sulky stranger brightened.
“Hey,” he said.
The bartender looked doubtful.
“Come on, he’s a sweet man. He’d want to reward us for finding his card. We’re friends of his. Remember, he was making up songs? He was really funny? Another guy was playing guitar?”
“That’s right,” said the bartender.
“Come on, one round of drinks. I’ll sign for him. He’s a sweet man.”
She said okay.
We all ordered drinks and had a great laugh.
The poet’s husband fingered the gold card. “I ought to buy a coat with this,” he said. He handed the card to me. “You hang on to it. I might buy a coat with it.”
I put the card in my shirt pocket.
I must say that an extremely pleasant ten minutes followed, among the most pleasant imaginable. Hodge and I discussed our aspirations with a real writer, a true friend, who seemed to have faith in us. We laughed and drank free beer in an atmosphere of unprecedented trust and generosity, where a bartender was knowingly letting us use another person’s credit card without permission, and we had made a stranger’s day. The stranger wasn’t the least bit sulky anymore! The bartender stirred a cauldron of rich-smelling gumbo. The day had a buzz. We hated to do it, but finally we had to go back to the church.
A couple of flat-eyed, tough-guy writers stood on the piney lawn, near the breezeway that led to the former chapel. They were taking turns drinking from a flask. The writing life was just as I had imagined it! I could easily picture Hodge and myself in a similar position, swapping a flask of rye or such back and forth in a casual manner out in the open for all to see, without a care in the world. I wrote in my notebook: “2. Buy flask.”
I nudged Hodge and showed it to him. He grinned.
“What you got there?” said the poet’s husband.
“Nothing,” I said, and closed the notebook quickly. Suddenly I had become ashamed of my grand aspirations!
The poet’s husband introduced us to the craggy novelist and the drunken writer.
“I’ve seen your picture in the newspaper,” I told the craggy novelist.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Has it started?” asked the poet’s husband.
“Yeah, but if you go in now be sure to take your estrogen supplement.”
The craggy novelist and the drunken writer snickered.
I took it that some women were reading, and that their writing was insufficiently masculine.
“Hey, we found your credit card,” said the poet’s husband.
I took the card from my shirt pocket and handed it to the drunken writer. Somehow he got it into his head that I alone had been responsible for rescuing his credit card, and he hugged me over and over. He was smiling and making snappy jokes, but there was something aggressive about the hugging and his stubble burned my face.
The poet’s husband, the craggy novelist, and the drunken writer used a special entrance. Hodge and I stood in the back of the church for the reading, in wh
at would have been, in more sacred times, the narthex.
“_________ is pretty funny, isn’t he?” I whispered to Hodge.
“I think he’s dangerous. He strikes me as the type of guy that can be funny and then suddenly turn on you.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Stay away from him,” said Hodge.
There were readings by the poet, the poet’s husband, and the craggy novelist. Well, they put Hodge and me in our place! Writing no longer seemed like a breeze. The things that came out of their mouths! The air was heavy with reality, that’s all. They grabbed reality and ran a fire along the bumpy surface—or showed the red meat under the skin, like when you clap your hand over a flashlight. Writing seemed like a hard job, an impossible job for the likes of Hodge and me. Middle-aged men! Starting from scratch!
We returned to the sunlight humbled, and drank more beer in the breezeway. There were three or four coolers of it, just lying around like nothing. Pretty soon it was time for all the writers to go to a party at the home of a patroness of the arts, a certain Mrs. Post. The poet and her husband said that Hodge and I should come along.
“Are you sure?”
“Free food.”
We ended up right on the water, in a mansion jammed full of screaming writers, professors, mavens, hoydens, and such. I thought I saw some tycoons. Movers and shakers. Ne’er-do-wells and pillars of the community. Social butterflies. Maybe even a pariah. We walked around in the backyard with bottles of beer and paper plates full of curries and pastas and rare roast beef with horseradish on the side and chicken salad with apples and walnuts and other catered foods. People were falling-down drunk. You could clearly hear through the din the drunken writer roughly cawing, loud as a bullhorn, cutting through everything like his famous knifelike prose.
The sun began to look as though it might want to set.
The poet asked her husband, “Do you want to walk down to the end of the pier and watch the sunset?”