And now, now, the goddamn cherry on top: Cameron Harris, his one-of-a-kind subject, his soon-to-be star, was bucking him for just trying to mike the old lady down the street. The first bona fide moment of drama in weeks, finally a scene that wasn’t just people oohing and ahhing over the sight of a guy walking through Walmart, that wasn’t just a setup for some wisecrack from Tanya or a physical therapy montage that came off like a hundred-to-one dilution of the Rocky movies’ training scenes—finally this, resentment and sorrow under a supporting-actor sky, with Cameron, he thought, finally positioned to step into his role as an unlikely pastoral figure—at the moment Griffin was viewing the footage Honeybun had uploaded for him—and he had crap for audio, he had wind-whoosh and murmury garbled voices that might just as well have come from the bottom of a well or from a no-budget Brooklyn mumblecore flick.
“Fuck it,” he said aloud, dumping the footage file into a folder he titled, after the Gil Scott-Heron song, “Whitey on the Moon.” When Honeybun poked into the kitchen around two thirty, to check on the afternoon’s status, he found Scott T. dourly mixing a tumbler of vodka and kombucha, something he was unaccustomed to seeing during shooting hours from his longtime boss. (Though Honeybun’s first thought, he says, was about the drink itself: “Ewwwww.”) Griffin told him they were “eighty-sixing the Christmas shit” scheduled on the call sheet. Today’s vibe was all wrong for a chestnut scene, he said, and, for that matter, everyone knows that Christmas scenes are only effective when they air during Christmas. (It’s probably no surprise that the Christmas theme was Winterson’s idea.) He was of a mind to scuttle the holiday dinner, too, except that he’d already placed the order for two hundred oysters on the half shell and his bottomed-out morale didn’t need to infect the crew’s. “So are we just going to drink until nine?” Honeybun asked. Griffin tinkled the ice in his glass and shrugged. “Yippee,” Honeybun said flatly.
And that’s more or less what they did. By the time Cameron emerged from his room, crew members say, Scott T. was sporting a conspicuous vodka buzz. He strode straight up to Cameron, threw his arms around him in an apologetic man-hug, and like opposing athletes after a game they seemed to shake off their differences, especially after the Bud Lights started relaxing Cameron. They bickered mildly over the proper way to eat an oyster—Cameron claimed hot sauce and Saltines were essential; Scott T. issued an elaborate pitch for sucking them nude from the shell, to “guzzle their essence”—but otherwise seemed fine. Led by Honeybun, the crew members razzed Griffin for his gnarly kombucha cocktail, with even Kaitlyn—her relationship with Scott T. having graduated from open secret to open affair—joining in. She forced him—Cameron and Tanya too—to throw back whiskey shots the way she said they did back home in Alaska. A joint got passed, selfies got snapped and posted. The product-placement Vitamix blender, which the Harrises had never plugged in, was given its inaugural whirl mixing tequila with some frozen margarita mix someone fetched from the Biz-E-Bee. Scott T. blasted Drive-By Truckers and Todd Snider songs, and then, for Cameron, some retro-cool Southern gospel that Scott T. figured he’d dig. Kaitlyn tried teaching Aidan Casey some of her high-school cheerleading routines, resulting in an overturned couch. It was New Year’s Eve, after all, and no one, besides Scott T., was older than thirty.
The day’s call sheet, no one failed to notice, had all but been scrapped. “It was like we’d all come back from the production break,” says Honeybun, “and then decided, what the hell, everybody play hooky.”
Except, that is, for one thing: They were still heading out to Guidry’s Lava Lounge, even if, at this point, they recognized themselves to be something less than an adept television crew. “We don’t gotta get all that much,” Scott T. said of the footage they needed to shoot—not that herding the group toward a bar required much lobbying. A location shoot like this one comes with an array of challenges: releases need signing, lighting can be tough, drinks get spilled on electronics, scoring a decent camera angle in a cramped dive bar can be next to impossible, audio is a nightmare, cameras get jostled, talent gets soused. Yet both Honeybun and Austin Kroth, the sound mixer, had worked with Griffin on World’s Rowdiest Bars (Spike TV, 2006–07). Producing that show, they all felt, had equipped them with a tool kit more than sufficient, even with margaritas hobbling them, to shoot a handful of scenes in—“What’s this place called? The Champagne Room?” Casey asked on the way, texting his girlfriend back in L.A. Honeybun, who’d scouted Guidry’s with Kaitlyn, and was responsible for renaming it on the call sheet, let out a fat burst of laughter. From the front seat he cooed, “You’ll see…”
No one can explain the lava in the name of Guidry’s Lava Lounge, not even Guidry’s daughter Breanna, the current owner. The bar, up far enough in North Biloxi to have weathered Katrina, has been around since the early 1970s, leading some to theorize that the name might’ve had some connection with lava lamps. Others figure it was a sign painter’s misspelling, though they’re at a loss to cite what the intended word could’ve been. Curiosity about the name, however, is exclusive to newcomers and out-of-town visitors, neither of which Guidry’s much attracts. It occupies an unwelcoming cinder-block rectangle set on a wide dirt lot on Old Highway 67, the only indication of life inside being a neon Budweiser sign obscured behind a barred-up and dirt-clouded porthole of a window. In the daylight, the building’s maroon paint—everything’s maroon, even the window bars, as though the building hadn’t so much been painted as dipped—evokes the color of a fresh kidney left to rot in the sun.
But daylight isn’t what Guidry’s is about, despite the obligatory lunch specials and the handful of tattooed old men barnacled to the bar on most afternoons. On Friday and Saturday nights, when there’s live music—country-rock cover bands with names like Free Beer Tonight and the Rebel Rousers—Guidry’s can get magnificently rowdy, crowds spilling out into the dusty dark parking lot for bouts of fighting or loving or both. Painted over the entirety of the ceiling is a giant Confederate flag, but it’s almost impossible to make it out since someone got the idea in the nineties to shellac magazine covers over it—mostly the cleavage-and-chrome covers of Easy Riders, a biker mag, but also, weirdly, a few Good Housekeeping and People covers, including one featuring Ivana Trump, decades of cigarette smoke having stained her smiling face a decidedly non-Caucasian shade. You can theoretically get a cocktail in Guidry’s, but, as the Miracle Man crew discovered, you really shouldn’t try. When Aidan Casey ordered an Old-Fashioned, that au courant order of L.A. hipsters, Breanna Guidry slapped a Budweiser onto the bar. “That old-fashioned enough for you, hon?” she said.
Guidry’s is a Tanya haunt, not one of Cameron’s. Cameron had only been there a few times before tonight, when Tanya would drag him in during his leaves from Fort Benning, and the way he contorted his mouth whenever Guidry’s came up relayed his opinion of the place. Tanya, however, has been a semi-regular since just after Katrina, when the Point Cadet bar frequented by her and her equally underage friends got swept out to sea. It was Guidry’s she was leaving, in 2013, when the highway patrol busted her for DUI. The year-long license suspension that followed curtailed her visits, as the constraints of Miracle Man production did later, once her license got restored. She’d been looking forward to her return tonight, though, sending group texts to friends as Kaitlyn drove her and Cameron to the bar, inviting them to “get yr hot asses on the TV!!!!!” Certain folks at Guidry’s haven’t always treated Tanya kindly—a contributing factor to her DUI, she says, was overhearing some friends of a cute biker guy she was talking with that night laughing how they didn’t know what he’d do with her because he didn’t have a “wide load” sign for his bike. So Tanya was relishing tonight’s homecoming—making her reappearance with a film crew in tow, outfitted in a black Adrianna Papell sleeveless lace dress the production company had bought her, with Kaitlyn having done her hair and makeup, and with margarita glee already zipping through her veins. She gave her brother’s knee a giddy squeeze on t
he drive. He didn’t respond, she recalls; he was looking out the car window, vacantly, with his cheek resting in his palm.
None of the patrons was surprised to see the cast and crew and camera sweeping into Guidry’s, as the deal Griffin’s company had struck with Breanna called for a doorman to be stationed outside the entrance, requiring patrons to sign an appearance release before entering. True, they might have expected a more sober-acting crew than the one that spilled through the doorway, but then again, this was Guidry’s Lava Lounge, where the lead singer of the Rebel Rousers was known to occasionally pass out onstage. (Audience members sometimes commandeered the microphone afterward for a band-backed version of karaoke, belting out Garth Brooks songs while trying not to step on the unconscious front man.)
Earlier in the day Kaitlyn had delivered to the bar hundreds of silver cardboard cone hats and Mardi Gras beads and other New Year’s Eve party favors (though not traditional noisemakers; Austin the sound mixer threatened her with death if she got those). The crew was glad—and in some sense relieved, spooked as some of them were about the rough clientele—to see patrons wearing them, with possibly the exception of the friend of Tanya’s who’d engineered a kind of pointy brassiere using two of the hats and some fishing line from her boyfriend’s truck. “She really wants to get on TV,” Tanya told Honeybun. In this, she wasn’t alone: Word had gotten out and Guidry’s sparkled with an unusually glammed-up clientele—young women, mostly, jockeying with one another to stay in front of Honeybun’s gliding camera, sipping their drinks through straws so as not to sully their lipstick. This provoked flurries of texts from male patrons to their elsewhere bros, and by eleven Guidry’s was packed way beyond fire capacity, with Kaitlyn forced to go searching for a copy machine because the doorman was running out of release forms.
And queen of this teeming kingdom, for a brief and glorious time, was Tanya Harris. The same half-dozen of her friends who’d descended upon Reconfort Avenue to celebrate Cameron’s recovery were there, plus a half-dozen others, massaging her with compliments about her dress and her hair and about the thirty pounds she’d lost since filming began (or that she’d been encouraged-slash-directed to lose, thanks to Bree Winterson’s desire to see “transformation”). “Seriously, girl,” one of them said, with vodka-cranberry-infused tears of joy on her cheeks, “you look amazing. Ah-may-zing.” Tanya didn’t necessarily believe this—“no matter what you do,” she’d told Kaitlyn earlier about her hair, “it’s always gonna be badger fur up there”—but, smiling, blushing, she couldn’t help feeling a little amazing.
For two months she’d been on camera, yes, but most of that had been private domestic scenes, her galumphing around in her sweats with Cameron, doing whatever Griffin told her to do. This felt different. This felt, she’d later say (with a speck of unintended irony), like “a coming-out party”—like what cotillion girls must feel, making their debuts. Everyone laughed a little louder and longer at her jokes, and no one, not a soul, made jokes about her. (If only the dickhead bikers were there, she found herself thinking, to get a look at her load now.) Cute guys didn’t look askance when she looked their way; one guy, a tattoo artist who’d inked the butterflies on her left calf but for years had mostly ignored her at Guidry’s, was suddenly hound-dogging Tanya all night, repeatedly letting slip that he was going through a divorce. (“Wonder why…,” said one of Tanya’s friends.)
Yet it wasn’t all surface cheer. That afternoon she’d spent more than two hours with Mrs. Dooley on her porch, helping her cope with Antwain’s death as the rain patted the porch roof, maintaining a hand on Mrs. Dooley’s bony shoulder as the old woman narrated photo albums, even fishing a couple teary laughs from her at the end about Antwain’s young exploits. (Unlike Cameron, Tanya had lots of Antwain memories.) Something about that, the sense of fulfillment that comes from expended empathy, or the plain satisfaction that comes from leaving people better than you found them, had kindled inside Tanya a warm firefly glow. Taking care of people was what Tanya did—first her mother, then Cam—and she hadn’t realized, until today, how much she was missing that, with Cameron now more or less independent. And this realization—that she possessed not just a skill but a purpose, maybe even a calling—was only adding to the buoyancy she was feeling at Guidry’s.
Partly as an homage to Antwain, she cued up David Banner’s “Cadillac on 22s” on the jukebox, a mellow hip-hop song dating back to before her mama died and before Katrina hit and before Cameron went off to Afghanistan, and with her eyes closed Tanya began swaying then dancing to its chill, stuttering beat, adding a fizz of nostalgia to the cocktail of emotions she was savoring. When she opened her eyes half the bar was dancing with her, her friends in a semicircle around her, Scott T. and Kaitlyn grinding sloppily in a corner, Honeybun raising the roof with one hand while filming with the other, the cute if leering tattoo artist trying to snake his way toward her, someone she’d never seen before handing her a fresh drink out of nowhere, the wannabe reality-TV starlets bobbing in a miniskirted tangle behind her, everyone hollering out the last line of the chorus with her, “Pray to the Lord for these Mississippi streets, hey hey hey.”
Emboldened, perhaps, by having shared the dance floor with Tanya, the wannabe-starlets thronged her afterward, pleading with her to pose for selfies and group shots with them, filming her with their cellphones, and at least one of them asking for her advice on how to break into TV. Tanya’s response was characteristically wry: “Maybe ask God if there ain’t something he can do for your brother?”
Amid all this, she realized later, she’d lost track of that brother. Everyone did, except the bartenders. Cameron started drinking hard the moment he entered Guidry’s, and not just his standard regimen of thermal angel blood, or Bud Light. Scott T. kept buying him whiskey shots, to reseal and then seal again the détente they’d hugged out that afternoon, which led to other people buying Cameron whiskey shots, and which led, after a while, to Cameron buying himself whiskey shots. Honeybun admits, and the raw footage makes clear, that he didn’t devote many megabytes to filming Cameron. Griffin, for one thing, was having too loosey-goosey a time, using bourbon to flush out all the bile of his recent weeks and the earlier part of his day, to remember to direct, and the way Tanya was hamming it up kept Honeybun’s camera lens glued to her. Aidan Casey sat with Cameron at the bar for a while, until some older guy engaged Cameron in a religious discussion that quickly went deep—way too deep for Casey, at least while his head was topped with a pointy cardboard hat. Austin Kroth, who hadn’t been there to witness the friction between Cameron and Griffin, recalls wondering if Cameron might’ve still been pissed about the incident, whiskey fueling and maybe exaggerating some residual resentment. “He just started getting this coiled-up thing about him after a while,” he says. “We were all pretty squiggly in there, having way too big a time dancing around and shit. I don’t know that anyone was in the mood to hear a Scott T.’s–a-prick rant from Cameron, if that’s what it was. That’s what I figured it had to be.”
It wasn’t until ten minutes to midnight that Honeybun, with a panicked yelp, realized he needed his missing star for the countdown. After two minutes of frantic searching he found Cameron outside, smoking by himself in a misty blue drizzle.
“You’re allowed to smoke inside, you know,” he said to Cameron, noting even as he said it that Cameron didn’t need his hometown’s ordinances explained to him. Cameron shrugged dazedly.
“We’ve got, like, five minutes till midnight,” Honeybun told him. “You ready to put on the happy face? Pop some bubbles?”
Cameron nodded as he took a long drag from the cigarette, showing zero capacity, in Honeybun’s eyes, for putting on the happy face.
Honeybun took a step toward him. “Hey,” he said, finding a more sober register. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m cool.” Cameron shuddered his head as if to dispel something inside it. “There’s just someone in there, someone
I kinda got a problem with.”
Honeybun instantly latched onto the same mistaken assumption Kroth did: that Cameron was still distressed about his earlier dustup with Scott T. “Oh, just get over it,” he said. He did a little shuffle in the dust, trying to dance a smile onto Cameron’s face. “That was so last year. Ha! Come on, we gotta get video of you popping some champagne…”
From all accounts, and from what the footage shows, Cameron seems to have rallied. Honeybun scooted him up beside Tanya on the dance floor where Kaitlyn armed him with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. Tanya led the bar’s countdown, and Cameron, with graceful skill and perfect timing that would’ve mystified his sister had she paused to consider it, popped the champagne bottle just as midnight struck, the launched cork bouncing off the Easy Riders ceiling and the champagne foaming up and out of the bottle and down Cameron’s forearm. Tanya took the first swig, the champagne’s fresh suds causing half the swig to come spraying from her mouth, and Cameron got the second. From every corner of the bar there was cheering, hooting, kisses, yowls. Brother and sister enjoyed a long embrace as the bottle got passed around, but in that clasped moment—their only semi-private interaction of the night—Cameron mentioned nothing to her, she says, about anything or anyone bothering him. She saw no warning signs whatsoever. “He was drunk, yeah,” she says. “But so was I. So was everyone.”
For the next hour or so Cameron flickers in and out of the timeline, mostly out. Cameron himself can’t really account for his doings or whereabouts in the bar, though Breanna Guidry says one of her bartenders refused to serve him a shot—an uncommon event at the Lava Lounge. Casey recalls seeing him besieged by a gaggle of the same young women who’d been flocking Tanya, and him awarding Cameron a fist-bump for what looked, to Casey, like a “groupie buffet.” Tanya spent that hour on the dance floor, her dress sticking to her from champagne and sweat, she and her friends teaching the crew the Cupid Shuffle line dance, an expression of roaring bliss fixed solidly on her face.
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