I got up and went out back and found a little party sitting on a patio, talking by lantern light. They were in wonderfully high spirits. Most of the people who ended up in the shelters had been living pretty close to the bottom already. Some had no reason not to assume that their new FEMA housing would be nicer than what they’d been living in for years.
There on the patio, a big jolly-looking bearded white man named Bill Melton, a shrimper with a neck tattoo, was kicking back in a wooden chair next to a black couple in their forties, R.J. and Jacqueline Sanders. I asked if they’d all known one another before the storm. Mistaking my question (or maybe taking it correctly), Melton said, “There’s no color here, man. R.J. and Miss Jackie, they’re my brother and sister now.” I heard other expressions of this almost Utopian feeling. An old man and woman were talking in the hallway. “All them rich people,” he said, “I don’t care how much money you got. We all the same now. That’s why I’m always looking up to God. I don’t care how high I get.”
Bill and R.J. and Miss Jackie were part of a small group at Harrison Central who appeared to be dealing with their situation by staying constantly, almost frantically active. The Red Cross had more than enough packaged meals for everyone, but this crew had convinced the woman who managed the school lunchroom to unlock the kitchen doors so they could use the food before it went bad. Boots was a cook in a restaurant; he fired up the gas burners and took the helm. They’d been serving meals to everyone, and their energy was shoring up morale. (The next morning, I tasted what Melton called S.O.S.—shit on a shingle, or meat in gravy on a roll—and found it edible.) “We feed eeeeverybody,” R.J. said. “Not just our little family here.”
“We even feed the officers!” Melton added.
Miss Jackie jumped up and told me I had to see the shower they’d made. Normally, the Red Cross doesn’t like to use a site for shelter unless it has shower facilities, but many of the original buildings they’d chosen were destroyed in the storm, so they’d been forced to take over Harrison Central.
Miss Jackie and R.J. led me past a plastic curtain into the shower area. What they’d done was pretty ingenious. With the keys the lunch lady gave them, they’d opened a metal plate in the bricks that shielded an outdoor spigot. Someone rigged a gas burner to heat a water tank inside. They’d scavenged the neighborhood around the school for metal pipe and rigged up a flow. For the showerhead, they’d taken an empty can, one of these curious white cans of tap water that Anheuser-Busch evidently produces during natural disasters, and poked a bunch of holes in the bottom. Then they’d taped it onto the pipe.
“Turn it on, Miss Jackie!” said Bill Melton. Jackie was entrusted with the keys. She opened the metal plate and turned the red knob. Warm water came spraying out of the can, a fountain of water. It made a pattern like a garden spider’s web in R.J.’s flashlight.
“We made this happen,” Bill Melton said.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Miss Jackie said.
I groped for a response.
“It is beautiful,” R.J. said.
* * *
When after a few days I left the shelter and drove back to Jackson in my rental, I had a Mad Max–style experience that I’ve thought about many times since. I started running low on gas, and the gas situation was bad. People had lined up for miles at the few pumps with any fuel left. My gauge showed well below a quarter tank, so I pulled off. The road to the station ran long and straight. I could see how far we had to go and wondered if I had even enough gas to last the line. It was unsettling to see something like that in America. In all the nuclear war movies that damaged us as kids, wasn’t there always a scene where they waited in line for the dwindling gas? Here we were. But so far everybody seemed calm, treating it like any other traffic jam. It was hot and sunny on the asphalt as we slithered over it, bumpers inches from one another, each of us an interlinked segment of some slow, determined insect.
At one point, we intersected with another, smaller road that exited onto ours, the road to the gas. Few people were foolish enough to try entering the line by this road—it was cutting, essentially—but every time someone did, there’d be tension, shouts out the window, the exiting person making upturned “What can I do?” hands. Nothing awful, though. No fighting. The radio played “Sweet Emotion.”
There was a traffic light at the intersection of these two roads, and in passing through it, as it reverted from green to red, I did something sort of awkward. An older woman who’d been immediately behind me—for an hour—was attempting to come through the light with me as well. She thought she’d be the last one in our group to make it. But she’d miscalculated, there wasn’t room. I’d gone as far forward as I could without hitting the truck in front of me, and the back half of her car was still stranded in the box. Had someone coming the opposite way, on the other side of the highway, tried to turn through our line fast, onto that road, she’d have been smashed. In my rearview mirror, she looked scared, so I did the only thing I could and gradually, with each jolt of the traffic, nosed my car over to the side of the highway, until I could edge the front right bumper up onto the grass there, giving the woman six or so feet to scooch up and out of harm’s way. It was no act of heroism on my part, but nor was it an act of sneakiness and cheating, which is what the wiry, drunken, super-pissed-off Mississippian who appeared at my side window accused me of, in the most furious tones. “I saw what you did, asshole,” he said. He’d actually climbed out of his own car and walked a good ways up the road, just to unload on me.
“What do you mean?” I said. “I haven’t done shit but sit here for hours.”
He was pacing around in the road next to my car, pointing his finger at me. The line of traffic was that motionless, that he could do this without worrying about his own car.
“There’s people in this line that have been waiting for miles,” he said. “You can’t just jump in the fucking line.” He’d seen me execute that little maneuver, you see, to make room for the old lady, and he’d assumed (not irrationally) that he was witnessing the final stages of my inserting myself in front of her, from the side road.
Who knew what the guy had been through in the last few days. His face was bristled with long stubble. His flannel shirt was filthy. The way he wouldn’t stop moving, it looked like he was in the desert, raving at God.
The reptilian thing that takes over at moments like that told me not to get mad, but to keep explaining what had happened. I said, “You have to listen to me, man! I’ve been in this lines for miles. Let me explain—”
Mainly he shouted over me, but each time I repeated the story—the light, the old lady—it seemed like another sentence would slip through his shield of outrage, and slowly he began to calm down. Finally he walked back to his car. At least I thought he was doing that. In reality he was going back to interrogate the old lady about me. I watched them in my rearview mirror. She was shaking her head and clearly saying the word no over and over, looking at my car and saying, no. Was that old…?
My tormenter returned. Others in their cars were watching and listening. It was embarrassing. “She says she’d never seen your car,” he said.
“What?” I turned in my seat and looked back at her with an exaggerated How could you? expression. The woman just looked scared.
The guy kept cursing. “Go back to Tennessee!” he shouted. “You got plenty of gas up there.” I didn’t live in Tennessee anymore. How did he know I once had? The license plate on the rental—I hadn’t even noticed it.
In the end I rolled up my window and blasted the music, and he melted away. There was no option, for either of us. The gas got me to more gas. But I was thinking, the whole rest of the wait, this is how it would start, the real end of the world. The others in their cars, instead of just staring, would have climbed out and joined him. It would be nobody’s fault.
GETTING DOWN TO WHAT IS REALLY REAL
It was maybe an hour before midnight at the Avalon Nightclub in Chapel Hill, and the Miz was feeling nervous.
I didn’t pick up on this at the time—I mean, I couldn’t tell. To me he looked like he’s always looked, like he’s looked since his debut season, back when I first fell in love with his antics: all bright-eyed and symmetrical-faced, fed on genetically modified corn, with the swollen, hairless torso of the aspiring professional wrestler he happened to be and a smile you could spot as Midwestern American in a blimp shot of a soccer stadium. He had on a crisp, cool shirt and was sporting, in place of his old floppy bangs, a new sort-of mousse-Mohawk, just a little ridgelet of product-hardened hair emerging from his buzz cut.
In the parking lot, just past the Dumpster on which some citizen had written in white spray paint MEAT MARKET—BITCHES, a chalkboard sign told passersby that the Miz was inside, if any felt ready to party. He was whipping back gratis shots of some stuff that looked like flavored brandy and chatting with undergraduate girls, more and more of whom were edging closer and closer every minute. As he grinned and chatted with them, he looked so utterly guileless and unselfconscious as to seem incapable of nervousness. Granted, I’d already joined him and the owner, Jeremy (who was a good bro of the Miz’s), in doing some generous shots, one of which the Miz had marked with a toast that involved his trademark saying, his motto, as it were—“Be good. Be bad. Be Miz”—prompting a skinny, bearded fellow who was doing the shots with us, as well as several on his own, and whose surname must have been Flangey, to blurt out, “Or be FLANGEY…” But I hadn’t done that many shots, and to me the Miz looked pumped. Later, however, he would write in his online diary that he’d been nervous, for the simple reason that I was there, with my notepad and my judgments and my dubious but sincere claim of being a “hard-core fan” of MTV’s The Real World and its various spin-off reality series (of which the Miz is perhaps the best-known and best-liked cast member). And although these club-appearance things are usually cool, are typically bumpin’-bumpin’, “sometimes, like, only eight people show,” and the scene gets grim. What if tonight were like that and then it were to be written about in a magazine? That would be a fiasco. Or, as the Miz might put it—has put it, in fact, in describing a separate incident on that selfsame diary—a fiascal.
He needn’t have worried. The place filled up so fast I thought maybe a bus had arrived. It was like those Asian noodles that explode when they hit hot oil. I went to the bathroom in quiet calm, and when I came back, there was hardly room to lift your drink. It was jumpin’-jumpin’. There were loads of the sort of girls who, when dudes ask them to show their breasts and asses, show their breasts and asses. One girl—a beautiful Indian girl who couldn’t have been older than nineteen; I wanted to call a cop and have him drive her home—requested to have her right breast signed. The Miz was given a Magic Marker. He showed, I must say, admirable concentration on his penmanship. Another of these girls—a Hooters employee who was saving up for college in a not-too-nearby town—had driven a long way alone.
“I’m here just to see the Miz,” she said, but there was a line to talk to him now, of both chicks and dudes, and she’d seen that the Miz and I were bros, so she kicked it with me for a while.
“Are you a fan of the show?” I asked her.
“Oh yeah,” she said, “I’ve already seen MJ here, and Cameran [two other, more recent Real World faves]. There’s been a bunch of Real World people here.”
“I’ve been watching it since high school,” I said.
“Oh, me too!” she said.
Then I reflected that, for me, this meant since the show debuted; for her, it meant since last season; which in turn caused me to reflect mournfully on what a poseur she was. Did she even remember the Miz’s cast? Probably she knew him only from The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, which—although he is awesome on that—is not the best place to get insight into what makes him such a powerful fun-generator.
On the other hand, this young lady was a veteran of the club-appearance scene, and tonight was my first time. If a little hoochie tunnel leading straight to the Miz’s presence hadn’t opened right at that moment, causing her to sprint from my side and toward his, I was going to ask her, “What’s this all about?” Because she belonged to this thing I’d heard rumors of, what I’d come to get a peep at: this little bubble economy that The Real World and its less-entertaining mutant twin, Road Rules (essentially Real World in an RV), have made around themselves.
I don’t know how ready you are to admit your familiarity with the show and everything about it, so let me go through the motions of pretending to explain how it operates. Once a Real World season ends, the cast members who have emerged during the filming as the popular ones (a status that can be achieved through hotness, all-American likability, and/or unusually blatant behavioral disorders) are invited into a shadow world that exists just below the glare of the series itself. This world has many rooms of its own: club appearances (like this one in Chapel Hill), spring break (which is essentially an amplified version of the club appearance, at one or another beach resort, with several bars and clubs jammed into several consecutive days of straight wildin’-wildin’), “speaking engagements” (at colleges, or to youth groups or antismoking groups, or what have you—especially advantageous here is if you’ve revealed some side of yourself on the show, such as gayness, alcoholism, bulimia, unhappiness over your breast implants, severe and unprovoked instantaneous anger, neediness, fainting when you see large ships, or crypto-racism, which speaks to a certain specialty population); “um, product launches”; and finally, most important of all, the highly visible and jealously guarded spots on The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, where former cast members team up to compete for—oh, fuck it! You know how it works. It’s like a ten-times-as-excellent version of Battle of the Network Stars—and of course, this being the twenty-first century and reality having long surpassed our fictions, a few of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge standouts, among them the Miz, have been cast in a revived edition of Battle of the Network Stars. Point being, one never really leaves The Real World, not if one is blessed with ripped abs or a boomin’ rack.
The agent who sets up most of these gigs, a guy named Brian J. Monaco—who’s been doing it for eleven years and is “the one we trust,” according to the Miz and every former Real World cast member with whom I spoke—told me that there are even instances of unpopular Real Worlders and Road Rulesers “hustling” on the circuit, desperately offering themselves to club owners who don’t really want them, asking only “part of the door.” And on The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, which has evolved its own shadow shadow culture, in which cast members transmit messages to one another via silk-screened T-shirts and nurse trans-seasonal grudges and self-generate weird rivalries (veterans versus new guys) that then become official story lines, I’d even seen two girls rend the veil and fight over something that happened out there, in the “real world,” one accusing the other of stealing speaking-engagement business away from her by telling a college administrator that she, the accuser, was “quite demanding” and cursed too much. A whole little picture bloomed in the mind, of all those former cast members out there, a Manson family with perfect teeth, still hanging out, still feuding, still drunkenly hittin’ that (a bunch of them even lived on the same block in Los Angeles, I’d been told), all of them just going around being somebody who’d been on The Real World, which is, of course, a show where you just be yourself. I mean, my God, the purity of that …
A lot of the young people yelling questions into the Miz’s face seemed mystified by the particulars of it all. They’d ask him, “What are you doing here?” and the Miz, who’s a pro, would always say, “Avalon brought me here.”
Apparently stunned, they’d ask him, “Are you getting paid to be here?” And the Miz would say, “Yeah, I do all right.” And they’d say, “Just to party?”
Some of the youngsters badgered me, thinking maybe I was the Miz’s manager or something. “Does he go all over doing this?” two sophomore dudes in polo shirts wanted to know.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “he’s huge.
”
Then they asked me, “Why are you here?”
And I said, “I’m writing about him.”
And they said, “What about him?”
We turned and looked at him then, as though in his face we might find the answer. He was all goldeny. For a moment, it seemed we were unified in the humor and puzzlement of it all. There was music that sounded like a rabbit’s heartbeat in the core of your brain. There was a gangster-style guy onstage, sort of conducting the crowd, making them sway from side to side with his hand. “Are you an undercover cop?” one of the two dudes asked me. When I said I wasn’t, he said, “Then why is your hair so short?” It gave me pleasure when the Miz refused to buy those two little fuckers beer.
He’d broken away from his fans for a minute and was resting with his back to the bar. One couldn’t help but marvel at how fresh he looked. He’d been drinking since he got off the plane. The owner had picked him up and whisked him off to a cookout, where everybody did tequila shots. Then there’d been stops at a couple of bars in town, at the first of which I found him slurping martinis (an activity the Miz referred to as “a little pregame warm-up”). For a minute there, before he decided to put on his “big-boy pants,” the Miz had wondered whether he’d even make it to the club. And not only that, but things had been even wilder the night before, in Austin, where the Miz had done a tag-team club appearance with MJ and Landon, two male cast members from the Real World season that was currently airing on MTV. There were, like, 280 people at that one. It was thumpin’-thumpin’.
Pulphead: Essays Page 8