by Jane Borden
forgets the sun. I’m sure most of you are this way. It’s rather daft of us, actually. But we’ll never learn, because we’re not allowed to; it’s a defense mechanism. Without it, I’d spend December, January, and February pining for solar rays. Instead, I forget they exist.
It’s as if, during the first frost, my brain calls a meeting with all the sun-seeking receptors in my nervous system, the loud ones who’d otherwise spend all winter poking me, “Are we there yet?” Once they’re all in a room together, my brain locks the door and drones into a microphone, “You’re getting verrry sleepy.”
All winter long, while those receptors are inactive, I can only recall the sun in the abstract. I know that I like summer; I’m certain that it’s nice. However, I can’t place exactly why.
But, suddenly, the first sunny day of spring: ka-pow! It slaps every cell: Wake up! Wake up! And the receptors are all like, “Why were we sleeping in our clothes?” My whole body buzzes. I turn my face skyward and melt in the spot where I’m standing.
Then, of course, I snap out of it, throw my hand on my hip, and say to myself, “Damn, Brain: fooled me again.”
This is how I forgot the South. My brain was protecting me from regional affective disorder. For nine years I lived in New York without an aching. I loved home. And I definitely missed it—but it was in the abstract. Until suddenly something changed. The long-dormant Southerner inside me stretched, yawned, opened her eyes, and said, “I wear glasses now?”
After that, she wouldn’t go back down.
How else to explain why, nine years into living life as a New Yorker from the South, I suddenly wanted to be a Southerner in New York? I started smuggling grits and relishes out of my parents’ pantry whenever I went home. When I got angry, I’d say things like “dadgum-blast-it.” I once called in to the NPR show Soundcheck because someone was bad-mouthing the banjo. And for an annual fee, I joined something called the North Carolina Society.
It’s actually the oldest operating state society in New York, I soon discovered. It was founded in 1898 and is essentially a social club. I signed up just in time for the annual December dance, a swank black-tie affair held at the University Club on Fifth Avenue. Never before in New York have I had the license to ask two well-dressed people in an elevator, apropos of nothing, “Where y’all from?” Never before in this city have I bellowed from inside a bathroom stall, “I was a Tri Delt too!”
It was great fun. The pianist even played “Carolina in My Mind” during dinner. But at 10:00 p.m., it was over and I turned back into a New York pumpkin.
Fortunately, college basketball season was getting under way. There’s a kid from Charlotte named Dennis Park who researches the Manhattan bars that screen Tar Heel games. Each week during the season, he e-mails his DIY list of alumni pals and announces the next location, which, for two hours, will house a sea of khaki pants and loafers. The waitstaff must think they’ve fallen prey to one of those flash-mob pranks: “Is something going on? Why is everyone wearing black croakies on their sunglasses?”
I picked a good year to start caring again; in 2009 we’d go on to win the NCAA Championship. The cheers and the chants were still second nature. And before long I once again knew all of the players’ names and stats. Carolina basketball was back in my life, and as such, anticipation of two events in particular eclipsed my winter: our matchups with Duke University.
The rivalry is one of the oldest and most storied in all of American sports, professional or collegiate. Hatred toward Duke University—or as we call it, the University of New Jersey at Durham—runs through North Carolina as thick as pig shit in the Neuse River. My cousin Calder taught his dog this trick.
“Sugaree, would you rather go to Duke or be a dead dog?” Then Sugaree rolls over, sticks his paws in the air, and lies still.
It is the one self-evident truth we know. Pinch me: If it hurts, am I not awake? Show me a picture of Coach Mike Krzyzewski: If I wince, am I not a Southerner?
This would be my thing, my secret wardrobe passageway to home. Neither time nor distance could diminish my disdain. For truly, though winds change, flat worlds become round, space bends, and time turns dynamic, one thing in the universe remains forever constant: Duke University sucks a big one.
Basically what I’m saying is that Duke thinks those jeans make you look fat.
I really threw myself into it. When friends hosted a party for the second Carolina-Duke game, I procured a documentary about the rivalry for us to screen in advance; I tended bar during halftime. After we won, while our counterparts stormed Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, lighting bonfires and blocking traffic, my friends and I stormed the Franklin Street that runs through Greenpoint; that is, we stood on a nondescript corner intermittently leaping.
A couple of kids across the street lodged an inquiry into our humble commotion and received in return a shout involving something about a “victory.” The kids ran off. We pierced the air with a few more woo-hoos and one of us tried to climb a street sign. Before long, though, our excitement atrophied to occasional clapping followed by deep sighs and a need for affirmation: “Haaah … that was fun, right?”
Then, just as we began to leave, the kids returned in legion. They must have annexed an army at the park a few blocks away for they were now seven or eight strong and carrying water guns and rubber balls.
“Do you want to battle us now?” the ringleader asked innocently.
There is no better indication of an army’s weakness than receiving a challenge from seven-year-olds whose idea of a sword is round and soft. Our real foe, meanwhile, didn’t even know we existed. We were too far removed, beyond the edges of the map.
And anyway, after March Madness, Franklin Street became, once again, just another road in my neighborhood. And I went back to jonesing for home.
I didn’t want to move home, mind you. I wanted to import it, bring it with me. The suggestion that I’d have to choose between NC and NYC seemed unfair, absurd. It’s just one little Y. Why can’t I have it sometimes but not all of the time like the vowels do? There had to be a way to have my cake and eat it too, and I was determined to find it.
It is in such moments of desperation that people act rashly. This is how I wound up, one April night during a particularly intense craving, crossing the kitschy threshold of Brother Jimmy’s, a barbecue restaurant in New York that promises to “put some South in yo’ mouth.” I thought it would help, stand in for the real thing, like methadone. I was wrong.
As soon as my friend and I sat down, a pert waitress in a low-cut shirt stopped by the table and asked, “Y’all want a shot?” Then she blew a whistle that signaled the time—one of many through the night, I’d learn—when, if you tilted your head and took it, she’d pour liquor down your throat directly from the bottle, for free, and with the added bonus of pretending not to notice any blatant innuendo. Her job is to be hot but demure. She is a Daisy Duke lost on the Upper West Side. Or the Upper East Side, or in Midtown. Brother Jimmy’s is actually a chain, but let’s not tarry over details now—quick, pay attention: I think she’s about to innocently whoop.
Hot girls are one way that the restaurant, which opened in 1988 and now has six locations in Manhattan, pays homage to the natural resources of North Carolina. Others include the barbecue menu, the picnic-table and cartoon-pig decor, and a clientele so Greek that, as a support system, it rivals the most ostentatious columns in UNC’s frat court.
The restaurant’s sound track, on the other hand, is singularly Bro-Jim. There is nothing North Carolinian about listening to Alanis Morissette during dinner. There is no salty Tidewater myth whose final moral espouses the digestive merits of pondering the irony inherent in rain on your wedding day.
But even if a superband composed of the Connells, Ben Folds, Tori Amos, Charlie Daniels, and the ghost of Nina Simone wandered from table to table mariachi style, it wouldn’t change the fact that Brother Jimmy’s is one big hunk of cubic zirconia. I don’t mean to disparage the place. It’s fi
ne for what it is: a Coyote Ugly-style theme restaurant. And considering that’s what it is, the food is pretty good. Compared with other barbecue in New York, they’re doing all right. But Brother Jimmy’s doesn’t compare itself to its neighbors. Instead, its website lists as inspiration one of the best barbecue restaurants in the world: Wilber’s in Goldsboro, North Carolina, a nationally renowned, award-winning establishment where presidents have dined. Or at least I assume that is the establishment to which they refer; I’ve never heard of a famous “Wilbur’s.” The mention is confounding. Why even bring it up? Especially if you’re going to misspell it! They were doing fine before they reminded me of something better. It would be like if Alanis Morissette tried to cover an Aretha Franklin song. And then attributed it to “Urethra.”
As for the boobtastic staff, I am not impressed. A collection of the hottest waitresses in all of New York would pale in comparison to a random selection of North Carolina girls. Even Southern girls who wind up toothless and sagging on an episode of Cops are hotter than your girlfriend. You could pull an “after” picture of a North Carolina girl from the Faces of Meth project and Tyra Banks would say she looked fierce.
I don’t care to investigate why this is true, I just know that it is; I grew up with them. Living in constant comparison with these goddesses was tough on the ego. I didn’t know I was a relatively attractive person until I left Mount Olympus. Only in New York did men begin to approach me, which I found utterly perplexing: How could they know I was the “funny one” if we hadn’t spoken yet?
If you want to see real hot Southern girls in New York, forget Brother Jimmy’s; go to the Church Party. Every December, a group of UNC and UVA grads put together an event that started more than twenty years ago as a small Christmas party among friends and has since grown into a black-tie charity affair, which annually sells more than a thousand tickets and benefits a cancer research center. It is still attended, predominantly, by New Yorkers hailing from Virginia and the Carolinas, most of whom are in their early twenties and drink to get drunk. And it is something else I threw myself back into, after declining the invitation for many years, during my desperately-seeking-Southern period; in fact I became a host.
While standing at the dance floor’s perimeter, my friend Scott introduced me to his coworker, Mark, who was attending the Church Party for the first time. He didn’t talk much. He mostly sipped his lowball and stared. Scott later told me that Mark came because he’d heard how hot the girls were.
ME: Are you serious? He paid $185 for the opportunity to hit on strangers?
SCOTT: Jane, a lot of guys do. You didn’t know? It happens every year. It’s a huge selling point.
So, there you have it: Southern girls are so hot they’re curing cancer.
At Brother Jimmy’s, they cure hangovers. The owners claim to foster a place where Southerners in New York can go to feel at home, but how can that be true when the decorations are placed just so, and everything’s a little too waxy? It feels like there’s something sticky on you that you can’t wash off. A glue. A glue affixed to items in a diorama.
Geez, I’m really giving it to Brother Jimmy’s. It’s just a barbecue joint. What’s my deal? So what if it’s engaged in a misguided search for an authenticity that cannot exist beyond its own borders? After all, that’s exactly what I was doing. Oh, right, of course: That’s what I was doing. Classic projection of self-loathing. Sorry, Bro.
I felt like a character in a romantic comedy who, having wronged her lover, races to the airport to apologize before he boards a plane and leaves forever. “I’m sorry, North Carolina! I’m not really dating New York, I promise. You’re the one I love. Please come back!”
And that’s my problem: I want it to come to me. But I can’t import the South, not through pictures tacked to my walls, recipes created on my stove, or sayings inserted into my vocabulary. Because as soon as I bring those things to New York, they become part of my New York life, and are, therefore, instantly bereft of the quality I’d sought. Regions don’t travel. People do.
It’d been a little over a year since my sister Tucker left SoHo for Raleigh. We talk on the phone frequently, and I visit. I had convinced myself that her move would barely affect us. But I’d only accounted for time together. Turns out, there are gradations of time apart. Before, even when I wasn’t with her, I knew I could be in thirty minutes. But miles make potential energy heavy as sand. I miss having her here. I miss having home a half an hour away.
She brought the South to New York, the same way my parents do when they visit and insist upon making friends with every waitress, bartender, and cabbie. The last time they came up, while my dad and I were at the American Museum of Natural History, he asked me if I knew how to remember the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite.
“No, sir.”
“The one with the ‘g’ grows up from the ground. And the one with a ‘c’ comes down from the ceiling.”
Blame my middle-school earth sciences teacher, but I had never even known, before seeing that exhibit, that stalagmites were formed by stalactites, the dripping of the latter making the former higher, so that, in effect, they grow toward each other until, occasionally, they fuse into one.
And so, I am not ashamed to say, that sometimes, in my bedroom, I put in my earphones, close my eyes, play James Taylor, and try to grow myself toward home.
“Here I sit, country fool that I am … holed up in a cave of concrete.” “So close your eyes. You can close your eyes; it’s all right.” “And I can hear a heavenly band full of angels and they’re coming to set me free.” “Cause there’s nothin’ like the sound of sweet soul music to change a young lady’s mind.” “It’s time for me to be stealing away. Let those rain clouds roll out on the sea; let the sun shine down on me.” “Keep a weather eye to the chart on high and go home another way.” “And the dog barks and the bird sings and the sap rises and the angels sigh—yeah.”
There are plenty of musicians reminiscent of home, but only JT brings me closer to it. He doesn’t just sing about North Carolina; he is North Carolina. The thick drawl in his voice is like the humidity, slapping over certain vowels and hugging them the way a sweaty T-shirt sticks to your back. His cadence and phrasing loll unpredictably on top of a melody the way waves roll randomly over a current beneath. If I close my eyes when I hear it, I’m sitting on that dock in the Bogue Sound, pulled out by the tide.
How could I possibly have explained that to the indie rocker? He’s from Michigan. Besides, who’s to say he’s wrong? If he doesn’t know where James Taylor comes from, then the music does suck. It’s as saccharine as triple sec. I’d rather he disparage it than open a theme restaurant in Times Square called “Fire and Rain.”
All he knows about my home is what gets the most press. And I don’t deny his knowledge; the South wears many faces. My grandmother used to take me to the Woolworth’s in Greensboro for lunch. I sat, eating grilled-cheese sandwiches, at the same counter where civil-rights activists staged the famous 1960 sit-in, on the same stools that were later installed in the Smithsonian. I do realize that these things happened. My great-uncle, who as a candidate for governor supported desegregation, woke up once in the middle of the night to a burning cross on his front lawn.
But I only understand this side of my home in the abstract. That South isn’t in my bones. The one I know is forty-person-strong Thanksgivings, and having to buy an extra book of stickers for all of the casserole dishes that came through my house when my grandmother died. It is “Shower the people you love with love.”
And it’s not fake. When my great-aunt died, her children received a phone call from a stranger who’d seen the obituary. The woman said, “I’m sorry to hear about Mrs. Preyer. I work at the Burger King, and every time she came in, she told me I was beautiful.”
“Franklin has something to ask you,” Lou said, and passed the receiver to my nephew.
“Do you know Lyle the Crocodile?” he asked.
Aha, the title
character from a popular series of children’s books about a crocodile who lives with a family in an Upper East Side town house.
“Yes!” I responded excitedly. “I just saw him the other day. He is so funny.”
Silence.
“Franklin? Are you there?”
“Well,” he began, because he once began every sentence that way, “I don’t think I believe you.”
“It’s true!” I said. “We laughed and laughed; he’s very silly.”
In fact, I felt silly, but no matter: He’d already handed the phone back to Lou and run off. “Shoot!” she exclaimed. “I had him going this morning.”
“You’ve got a skeptic on your hands,” I said, noting that he probably recognized that crocodiles can’t make beds. Or maybe he did believe Lyle was real, but doubted that I, based on the way I dress, could have any friends on the Upper East Side.
Either way, at this point, the most noteworthy aspect of the call was that my sister and I reaped great humor from lying to her child. But then, about a month later, I heard a variation on the theme. On the Saturday of a weekend visit with my dear friend Lyssa, her first child, my goddaughter, announced that tomorrow she wanted to take me to the other park, the one with the bigger slide.
“Sweetie, Jane has to leave tomorrow,” Lyssa said.
“Why?”
“Because she doesn’t live here.”
“I live in New York,” I interjected.
She looked confused.
“Do you remember when Curious George goes to the big city?” Lyssa asked.