“I would pay a million dollars to have courtside seats for your story time,” Brent says, slipping into his David accent slowly, like one does into a still too hot bubble bath after a long day’s work. “Ok, kids. Tonight’s selection is Farmer Dixie and his Very Happy Farm. Every morning Farmer
Dixie wakes up to the smell of crackalackalin’ bacon fat, his favorite! See kids, there’s Farmer Dixie smiling as he wakes up from his straw bed. Farmer Dixie always sleeps with no shirt on so the half American flag/half Confederate flag tattoo on his back, and the bald eagle tattoo on his chest, can be seen. That’s so you know he’s a real patriotic American. See kids? See the screaming bald eagle on his chest? Farmer Dixie knows the key to good health is a balanced diet. Lookie-here a closely and you see the bald eagle is eating one of ole Dixie’s favorite delicacies: two week old roadkilled possum. Dixie’s all about a balanced diet. That’s why he loves to have five sausage links and a grits’an gravy smoothie with those ten pieces of bacon fat. Doncha’know, kids? Eatin’ soy and phytoestrogens and all kinda shit like that makes a man a lil womanized no balls bitch! After breakfast, Farmer Dixie gets on his computer and spends three hours trolling various websites associated with the Democrapstick Party, libtards, Illuninazi Obummer…oh, wait, my sincerest apologies. Computer? Who am I kidding? Technolologies are thuh way the government spies on its freedom luvin citizens. Always bury your life savings in a tin can twenty feet below the barn, kids. Farmer Dixie can’t even write his own name or count to ten. Well, not without ten shots’a Jack anyways! Give him eleven and he’ll start’a speakin fluent Russian.”
“Brent,” David says. “It’a started off promisin, but’eye-m tellin ya, s’not workin.”
“Bullshit,” Brent says. “I personally know a least ten people exactly like that made up dipshit farmer.”
David laughs and, momentarily he can’t stop. His laugh builds steadily in volume like intermittent rolling thunder getting closer and closer. “I been wonderin’ somethin’, though” he says. “Howd’you kiss your mother with thah mouth? Always cursin’ an’talkin’ bout sex.”
“David,” Brent says, quietly, almost whispering and in an intentionally absurd and patronizing tone. “Dayyyy-vid. I don’t kiss my mother on the mouth. I’m Brent, remember? Not Oedipus Rex.”
“Edd-pis. Who’s Edd-pis?”
“You know what your real problem is?” Brent says to me. “It’s not this pathetic holding out for some imaginary fairy-tale wife. It’s your faith, period. You ever read Wise Blood?”
I look up at Brent. He has caught me off guard. I’ve heard his atheist rants so many times that I’m just waiting for “religion is the opiate of the people” or “man invented God,” etcetera, etcetera, bullshit, Feuerbach, etcetera. But here’s something new.
“You read Flannery O’Connor?” I ask him.
“I’m a literature professor. I read everything.”
“Yeah, I’ve read Wise Blood.”
“Hazel Motes has it right,” he says. “Religion is a trick. Christianity is this big trick on people, people like you stupid enough to buy it who then ruin their lives chasing myths and campfire stories. And that’s your real problem. It’s your whole ‘faith,’ not just this one asinine part of it.”
“What’ya mean it’s a trick?” David asks.
I respond, to Brent,
“You do know that Hazel Motes, the atheist Hazel Motes, who like you and all atheists is obsessed with God— and let me tell you that’s precisely what I think a good definition of atheism is: a person clinically obsessed with God, God-haunted to the enth degree—ends up having a type of strange religious conversion at the end of the book before he ends up dead in a ditch?”
Brent opens his window and spits.
“What’ya mean it’s a trick?” David asks, again. Neither Brent nor I answer. We keep driving down the road.
There aren’t a lot of roadside options on 45 South. When we finally do see one, we stop. We are in Buckatunna, Mississippi. It’s a little over two hours from Pensacola. We’ve stopped at a Chevron gas station/diner/convenience store.
“Grandpappy’s from here,” David says, cutting off the ignition.
“He’s from this gas station?” Brent asks.
I laugh.
“Nah,” David says, “from the town. Buckatunna.”
We go inside. Everyone uses the bathroom and then does the obligatory stroll through the aisles of cookies, overpriced beef jerky, sunflower seeds and pork rinds. Brent walks through a few times before heading up to the counter.
“Excuse me,” he says to the clerk, an older white man, probably in his sixties, with sun-beaten skin and a full, black beard. He’s wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and a green and yellow John Deere hat. He didn’t hear Brent. Brent says, again,
“Excuse, me.”
The clerk walks up to the cash register. “Yes’um. Can-eye help ya, son?”
“Yes. Your store wouldn’t happen to have anything organic, would it?”
The clerk looks puzzled.
“Organic,” Brent says. “Some fruit, maybe?”
“Fruits?” the clerk says, huffily. “We’ain got none them fruits round these parts, son. Damn librulls.”
Brent drops his head. “No, fruits. Fruits, the kind you eat. Do you have any fruit?”
“What-tin thuh’hyell is oreo-gonanic?”
Brent walks away from the counter. David, who’s been watching with amusement from a few feet away, walks up to the counter and tells the clerk. “Sorra-bout that, suh. My friend’s a Yankee.”
The clerk nods and mumbles something under his breath. We had back to the car and get back on the road. Brent complains the whole way to Mobile.
We arrive in Pensacola a little past three in the afternoon. David took care of the travel arrangements. He did good. He rented us a vacation home, the three of us splitting the cost, on Santa Rosa Island, a few miles away from the tourist bustle of Pensacola Beach. It’s perfect.
We get groceries before arriving at the house and spend the rest of the day swimming and playing catch with a football on the beach. David brought some board games, too. Brent—who complained about how dumb that was on the way down—makes us stay up past midnight playing Scrabble. He laughs beer out his nose when David tries to earn a triple word score playing “YINKENYONKER,” a country term, he claims, for a farmer skilled at milking three cows at once.
We get up early the next morning. After a long breakfast—chocolate chip flapjacks drenched in 100% pure maple syrup and covered with sliced almonds and fresh raspberries, thick wads of double-churned butter on top with French pressed Dark Roast coffee alongside milk and honey and orange juice on the side—we do some more swimming and just lay around, at rest.
We leave the beach by one and are on the road for New Orleans a half hour later. Because we take the coastal highway, we get to New Orleans about an hour later than if we had taken I-10. It’s worth it for the views. We arrive at Uncle Bill and Aunt Anne’s house on Magazine Street half past six in the evening.
Bill and Anne live in a tiny house. Not a “tiny house” like tree huggers build in the West. Size wise, it’s just a small house. From the street you can’t even tell it’s a house. It’s in between a tattoo parlor and a bar and you have to duck your head to make it through the doorway. Bill is waiting outside, directing us where to park. He runs over to us.
“You made it!” Bill says, smacking the back of my neck with his open palm as he brings me in for a massive hug. He kisses me on the nose and shakes me, laughing.
“Hey, Uncle Bill,” I say, “these are my friends, Brent Woods and David Porter.”
Bill shakes each of their hands, a big smile on his face the whole time. “Come in. Let’s get you something to eat real quick and then we’ll hit the town. Y’all hungry?”
Bill is the kind of guy who commits fully to everything. He is as Idaho as the potato but now that he lives in the South he’s going to be Southern, dang’it. Probably because he is so committed
, and so jovial, y’all doesn’t sound strange rolling off his tongue.
“Nah, thank-ya, sir,” David says. “I juss ate.”
“Okay,” Bill says, “what about you guys?”
Brent and I say the same thing. We’re about to enter the house when a man, sitting by the outside of the bar, calls out.
“Who dat dere?” He’s an older black man, scraggily dressed, with a noticeable hole in one of his socks and a massive toothpick protruding from his mouth. As he speaks, the toothpick bounces around in his mouth from side to side. It bounces with such a controlled and repeatable rhythm, in a fashion almost hypnotic, that it appears there is no possible way this man is just gnawing on a random toothpick. It’s got to be a long standing, time-honed personal signature. “Bill, dat you? Dat you, ja’dumb stupid cracker’ass white wannabe blackass crackity cracka?”
Bill takes his hand off the doorknob and looks to his left, in the direction of the man speaking. A smile comes onto his face and he says, in a faux-accent I have never heard,
“I-bee dog. Wa-yall, I-bee dog. Marvin? Ol’Marvin Bates, dat you, son? Marvin, ya’stupid no good bum runnin’ fake black cracka from a’way back a backa?”
We walk over to Marvin whose deep laugh soon turns to wheezing, the residue of a lifetime of smoking. Marvin is laughing so hard there is probably real danger of him spontaneously urinating any moment now.
“Marvin,” Bill says, in his normal voice. “I’d like you meet Brent Woods, David Porter, and my nephew, Rhett.”
“Which’one y’all, Rhett?” Marvin asks.
I nod.
“Oh, boy, ja’uncle sho talk it up bout you. I done heard so many stories bout you feels like’ya kin.”
I smile. “Marvin and I play music together,” Bill says, “down in the Quarter every Saturday night.”
“We be fixin playin’ this night,” Marvin says, standing up, “bout four hours now, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Bill says, “every Saturday night. I’m going to take these boys for a night out in New Orleans. Rhett’s been with me a few times.” Bill then looks at Brent and David, “you guys been here before?” David nods. Brent says no.
“I didn’t know you played music, Uncle Bill,” I say.
“Oh, yessuh,” Marvin says. “Y’alls uncle trumpet on-‘em gon out control. Oh boy, he can pump it.”
Bill looks at me and smiles. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Rhett…Hey,
Marvin, what do you call a white man who bursts into flames?”
Marvin shakes his head.
“A fire cracker.” Everyone laughs. Marvin slaps his knee twice.
“Whatchu,” Marvin says, “what’you get when ya cross a black man wit a groundhog?”
Marvin looks at all of us as a grin slowly comes onto to his face. “Six more weeks’a basketball.”
Everyone is laughing again, laughing hard and this time David the hardest. I find out later from Bill that making racial jokes is his and Marvin’s “thing” together. It’s what they do; besides playing music, hanging out and talking, having dinner together with their families, occasionally working together, watching games together…
Bill makes the white jokes and Marvin the black jokes having decided that jokes are usually if not always funnier when you’re making fun of yourself.
“I love that one, Marvin,” Bill says. “I heard a Polish version of that very same joke,” smacking my arm. “What do you get when you cross a Polak with a groundhog and a light bulb?…Six more weeks of eating kielbasa in the dark.”
More laughs. Hearty, laughter is the best medicine, laughter. David is the only one who doesn’t get it. I have to explain the jokes about Poles and Polish intelligence and the inscrutable perennial puzzle they never seem to be able to solve. An enigma of perpetual befuddlement: turning on or screwing in light bulbs. The very puzzle that appears over and over again in Polish jokes. Polish people are, like, morons? David asks. Yes, I explain to him, a bunch of morons. People like Marie Curie, Czesław Miłosz, Edmund Biernacki, some guy named Wojtyła, Chopin, a veritably inexhaustible list of moronic imbecility.
We go inside Bill and Anne’s house. The house has low ceilings and feels more cramped than it even looks. The front room is painted a bright orange and there are four mirrors, two crucifixes, and a bunch of candles all over the place. An inflatable mattress is lying on the floor and takes up half the room. We duck around the corner and into the kitchen, likewise tight, but equipped with a stove, microwave, a toaster, a standard coffeemaker, and three French-presses on the counter. A tiny office is in the back of the house, inside is a desk with a small bookshelf above a computer. Anne and Bill’s bedroom is to the right.
The house is a work of some kind of modern maybe postmodern maybe not yet definable art. The bright orange front room leads into a yellow kitchen and the bedroom is painted sky blue. It sounds like a loud mess but it somehow works; and (somehow?) invokes an internal tingly feeling of unmistakable childlike joy. The, It’s really fun to be here!, feeling, subliminal yet strong.
Bill’s talent as a contractor, and really as a jack-of-all-trades extraordinaire, is on full display in the bathroom. You don’t even notice it when standing in the kitchen but it’s there, through a small tan sliding door opposite the bedroom. The bathroom is narrow but decked out in this beautiful sand colored cement tile from top to bottom. It’s the best shower I’ve ever had in my life. I’d come to New Orleans just for the shower at Bill and Anne’s. I’d pay them one hundred dollars for five minutes in their shower. The water pressure is strong enough to feel like a great massage without ripping your skin off and Bill somehow made the temperature dial sensitive to the tenth of a degree. If 101.3 degrees is your sweet spot but 101.6 is too hot and 100.8 is freezing, you’re in luck. Unlike the showers where one wrong slight turn of the dial and your scalded or iced.
“Where’s Aunt Anne?” I ask Bill.
“Probably glazing pretzels,” Brent says, mainly to himself. I hear it and can’t help chuckling.
“Down in the Quarter. Been selling her candles at some bazaar with her friends from church. Does it about every two weeks.”
“Will we see her tonight?”
Bill shrugs. “If not tonight then tomorrow. Let’s go,” he says, slapping David across the back. “We’re wasting time. Y’all throw your stuff down and we’ll head out.”
We’re out of the house fifteen minutes to eight. We walk down Magazine Street and Bill quickly announces that he doesn’t care if we’re not hungry or we just ate or anything like that. We’re going to dinner. He takes us for Po-boys and he and David have a good time busting Brent about being a vegetarian.
“You’re bullshitting me, right?” Bill says to Brent.
Brent shakes his head.
“How long and why?” Bill asks.
“For about five years.”
“Tayke-it easy on-im, Bill,” David says, “his balls haven’t drop’yet.”
Bill laughs hard and takes a massive swig from some beer he’s keeping in a brown bag. “Why?” Bill asks again, before going bottoms up for another drink.
“I just don’t believe in eating animals. I don’t think it’s right.”
Bill raises his eyebrows and looks askance at Brent as he goes back to the bottle one more time. “I see why you’re an academic.”
After po-boys we go to a pastry and gelato shop, Sucré, for some dessert. Bill told us walking down that the gelato was good and he was right. Bill and Brent bond over a mutual love of mint chocolate chip. Bill and David are really hitting it off. Both are contractors and as such are talking up a storm of dry walling, framing houses, ripping out sheet rock and the best wood for living room floors, all the while trading stories of demanding clients which, from hearing them talk, is everyone they’ve ever worked for. Bill tells David he’d love for him to come down and do some work in the city. David invites Bill to come up to Mississippi. That would be great, Bill says. That way he could come visit his brother and
sister-in-law and come see me, too. Because Brent’s never been to the city we go to Café du Monde. David and I are pleased. We both love beignets and I can drink coffee any time of day. We put away a few plates with Brent out eating us all.
We walk up to St. Louis Cathedral. We can only see it from the outside because it’s closed this time of the night. Bill gives us an impromptu history lesson as we walk through Jackson Square; on the square, on Jackson, the War of 1812, he even gets into Western expansion. It’s pretty good. He hits all the important points. We walk up to a lookout point over the Mississippi River and sit there for a while, staring out over the black water. Brent pulls out a tin from his back pocket and throws in a lip. David joins him. Then we all do.
We make our way down Dumaine Street until it runs into Bourbon Street and we head down Bourbon Street until we see Marvin. He’s with four other guys. All have their instruments. It seems they’re waiting on Bill. One of the guys throws Bill a trumpet. Without blinking he snags it. They start playing, just like that, playing as they walk down the street. We follow.
Soon, a bunch of people join in. Some have instruments. Some are wearing costumes. One of the costume-wearers is an old man dressed in what can only be described as a cross between the Village People, an Indian chief, and George Washington. He’s not wearing a shirt, has nothing on top save for a thick brown strap pulled across his chest. Feathers protrude out from the strap, matching those on his head. He spins round and round in circles to the music and slams a drumstick on the top of a steel pot top over and over and over again. The sound of it melds into the surrounding noise.
I don’t know how much time passes as we watch the makeshift parade. At one point Bill steps out and hands his trumpet to Brent. Brent disappears into the crowd. I’m not sure if he plays the trumpet. Everyone keeps moving.
We get back to Bill and Anne’s house at two-twenty in the morning, by taxi. Anne greets us at the door. I don’t remember what happens next but when I wake up later and check the time it reads 5:08. It’s pitch black. I focus my eyes and remember where I am. I set my alarm for 7:30 and roll over. The warm blankets, wrapping me up in cocoon-like security, ensure my immediate loss of consciousness.
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