Trophies For All - Part One
The Southern Culture Studies professors chosen to lead week-long seminars at Ole Miss-Taylor's one-year low residency master's degree program sat nightly around their plantation-house-turned fancy bed-and-breakfast, drinking bourbon and brandy, taking bets on which students would complete their theses and one day get published, bemoaning the virtual disappearance of Stuckey's pecan logs, Picayune cigarettes, street corner shoeshine stands, Billy Beer, the steel mills of Birmingham, the cotton mills of South Carolina, Yellow Dog Democrats, and Billy Beer. At least that's what I imagined. It also occurred to me that perhaps they made fun of us -- a dozen full-time low residency students, all adults, who normally lived scattered between Vermont and Texas, Minnesota and Key West -- as we sat around campfires on some land owned by Ole Miss-Taylor near the Yocona River. Dr. Theron Crowther, my supposed advisor and mentor, had said that we students needed to camp out in genuine Civil War tents once used by Lieutenant General John Pemberton's troops before getting creamed at Vicksburg. Dr. Crowther said it would make us better understand Southern Culture Studies. I, of course, realized that somebody made a huge profit when it came to the room and board portion of our semi-annual fees.
Our classes, if it matters, took place inside a catfish-famous restaurant called Taylor Grocery. I was immediately relieved that my wife decided to stay home in South Carolina during my first and penultimate ten-day excursion into master's-level academia, for I envisioned her sitting cross-legged in front of my fire, holding a hanger-skewered carrot, relentless on the subject of my misguided goals since giving up the family river rock business.
"I wish I'd've brought some binoculars," a woman from West Virginia said, looking up at the plantation house some three hundred yards from our encampment. "Hey, everybody look in your tent and see if there are some binoculars hanging." To me she said, "I'm Amelia Hammond," and stuck out her hand to shake. I placed my wire-handled Jiffy Pop self-contained pan down on a stump. "Did they send you a list of what you should bring here? A snake-bite kit might've been mentioned. Bug spray."
I said, "Stet Looper."
"Stet Looper?" an older man came up to say. None of us had met in any kind of formal get-together as might be protocol in other low-residency programs. Me, I drove down I-85 until I hit I-20 in Atlanta, then took that to highway 78 in Birmingham and drove until Tupelo. From Tupelo I drove into Oxford, then found the county road until the satellite campus, of sorts, for the University of Mississippi. Everyone else either flew into Memphis and got rental cars to drive the couple hours south, or jumped off the Southern Crescent rail route somewhere near Meridian and took a Greyhound across the state. Perhaps Dr. Crowther and his colleagues felt it necessary for us to establish friendships for a good twenty-four hours before being confronted with non-stop Southern Culture Studies lectures. Or maybe the professors wanted us to cool off somewhat before bombarding them with questions about our $5,000 a semester tuitions.
I looked up at the man, his face gleaming from my perfect fire made with the help of fat lighter I had found in some pine woods behind the catfish house/college classroom. I said, "Yessir."
"My first paper's about a little-known siege that took place right outside Forty-Five, South Carolina. The man in charge of the entire melee was one Colonel Kimbrough P. Looper. His men were good soldiers all intent on fighting for the cause. When Colonel Looper ordered his men to cut and run, they shot him in the back and killed him, before turning back around to fight the enemy and pretty much getting slaughtered. All but one old boy named Dill who ended up at Andersonville prison, living through dysentery, somehow escaping, and later writing up his account of what happened. According to Dill, this Looper boy ended up with so many bullets in his back from his own men, they didn't have enough ammunition left to fight the Yankees good." I shook my Jiffy Pop a few times and looked up to my classmate. "You related to Colonel Looper by any chance?"
"I see where you're going, Carnell," Amelia said. "Carnell's already got one master's degree in southern culture studies, and is working on his doctorate. Don't let him bully you 'cause he knows about the goddamn war."
The tin foil actually began to blister up on my pan. I said, "No sir. I don't believe that's my family. I come from a people so stuck between some rock sheers and a river they didn't even know the war took place," which was true.
"What did you write your first major paper on," Carnell asked me. "You doing the War Between the States, too?" He held out his palm and let his jaw slack open. "I ain't competitive, if you're picking one of my sieges or skirmishes. As far as I see it, we all in this together. We can learn from one another. We can trade off what research we uncovered and figure out what happened."
I shook my Jiffy Pop over the fire even though it seemed ready. I said, "Well, it's hard for me to say."
Amelia said, "I'm pretty proud of what I got finished. I did a study of one-eyed boys in the South. At first I had hypothesized that most of them got shot accidentally with either air rifles, .22s, or bottle rockets. What my research uncovered, though, was that most nine-toed men came that way due to such catastrophes. The one-eyed boys -- now some of them got shot in the face -- but most of them were either born that way, or fell down while running with sharp sticks, just like we know not to do. Especially in West Virginia, where the mining people were so poor they couldn't afford store-bought toys." She handed me an ex-pickle jar of a moonshine I had never encountered. It smelled like rosemary. Or kerosene.
I thought, I'm in trouble. I foresaw ridicule coming my way, starting the next morning when we all sat in on a lecture entitled "Heaven or Hell: How Old-Timey Gospel Song Themes Influenced the Either-Or Tradition of Nashville Musicians Vis-à-vis Being Home and Wanting to Be Elsewhere, or Being Elsewhere and Wanting to Be Home," by guest professor Harlan V. Chadwick from Vanderbilt University. Up to this point, over four months, I had begun and never completed research papers on the meteor fields of the lower Carolinas and their economic impact on small businessmen enthralled with the "Guinness Book of World Records;" the Modestine Duncans who thought hand printing the Book of Revelation on their house trailers protected them from tornadoes; a photographer who catalogued his giant collection of debutante ball pictures and tracked the success or demise of Republicans-to-be; a general store-owning amateur comedian who told jokes about his one-legged wife; a man named Hiram who might've been involved in killing an entire family, then eating a cat and a monkey; and how a small-town police force explained the skeletal remains found near a barbecue shack as that of gnawed rib bones thrown out from cars windows instead of a young lynched boy -- all prompts and exercises mailed to me from Dr. Crowther over our initial correspondences.
It took me six days to drive the five hundred miles between my house in northern South Carolina to Ole Miss-Taylor. Along the way I hoped to see something worthy of a Southern Culture Studies essay. Maybe, indeed, I came across such topics and didn't know it at the time. Outside of watching some woman cry uncontrollably while her husband took a leak off to the side on the foundation of Elvis Presley's childhood home in Tupelo, only one thing hit me, so much that I knew I had no choice but to make up some documentation before entering the hallowed halls -- or overgrown paths between Civil War tents and portable toilets -- of Ole Miss-Taylor.
I said, "I haven't made up my mind yet. I've been thinking about writing a paper that compares and contrasts river rock and bricks. And wood. Vinyl siding. In the South."
I tore open the Jiffy Pop container with a stick. Most of the kernels were burned up. Somebody four Civil War tents down yelled out, "Who needs to put his socks and shoes back on?"
During my fruitless trek to Taylor, Mississippi, aware that I needed to locate and recount some facet of Southern culture unparalleled in the remainder of the nation, I took the 285 Perimeter around Atlanta, certain that everything within the bypass had been discovered and revealed to the masses in at least the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I needed to come across not only traditions and unspoken codes outside Southern cities' limits, but outside the sprawling vinyl-sided suburbs. I planned on taking I-65 up to the outskirts of Chattanooga in hopes that I would encounter some mountain fool speaking in tongues, juggling vipers. Whittling corncob pipes, and granting personal tours of his melungeon relatives' abodes. I passed a hand-printed sign advertising one-of-a-kind jewelry made from bat guano, deer droppings, fox scat, and chicken squat, and made a mental note, but my cell phone rang and -- though I had read up on how idiot cell phone users drive like drunks reaching .20 on a breathalyzer -- I flipped it open. My wife said, "Where are you?"
I looked up at the green signs, arrows pointing left and right for road exits to downtown Atlanta and Cumming, Georgia. Above me spanned a digital sign that reported how crashed vehicles should move to the emergency lane, that a ladder was across the road ahead, that the estimated time to the I-20 exit was between ten and fifty-five minutes. I said, "Best I can tell from all the signs I'm in the middle of Cumming."
Abby said, "Hello? Hello?" She said, "You're breaking up."
The line indeed crackled. "I'm in the middle of Cumming," I said louder. I wasn't making a joke. It's where I drove, somewhere between Kennesaw Mountain and the Chattahoochee River. No Southern Culture-worthy essay notions abounded. "I've been taking my time, I guess, enjoying the scenery."
The connection cleared up enough for me to hear, "Are you driving with your knees?" She said, "What kind of scenery you looking at? Is there some kind of drive-through strip joint along the way?"
I got passed by about a dozen black SUVs, all with "W" bumper stickers on their back windshields, all plastered with "In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned," "Maybe Darwin evolved from an Ape, but we came from Dust and a Rib," "This Car Protected by Smith and Wesson," and "My Child is Home School Valedictorian," et cetera on their tailgates. I placed the phone on the passenger seat and told Abby she would have to yell, while I got over in the far right lane seeing as I only went about eighty. I yelled out, "Hey! That's a great idea! I wish there were drive-through places like that so I could find something to talk about in class." I took the exit ramp to somewhere and bellowed out, "Hold on and I'll pull over."
By the time I took a right turn, and drove a half-mile to a parking lot, rolled down my window, picked up the phone and stuck my head out for better reception, Abby was gone. I called her back only to get "Connection Failed" printed across the telephone screen.
Then I looked up to find, out here on the outskirts of the outskirts of Atlanta, a store the size of an old-fashioned roller skating rink, advertising "Trophies for All." And in about the time it would take a largemouth bass to realize it had a hook in its gristly lip, I underwent -- from opening topic sentence to conclusion -- the entire 180-page argument that would become my thesis for a master's degree at a low-residency Southern Culture Studies program, and rightly foresaw my thesis getting published at an established and reputable university press, then distributed to avid readers everywhere who were perplexed, amused, obsessed, and/or fascinated with all traditions and nuances Dixie, viz., New Yorkers, Canadians, the Japanese and the French.
I put my truck in park and locked the door. I left the cell phone on the bench seat, too, figuring that Abby wouldn't be able to reach me anyway. Unfortunately -- and this wouldn't occur to me until after I had gone inside Trophies for All, talked to the owner named Rodney who didn't mind going over some of the stranger engravings he'd glued to a small faux marble pedestal, and taken some notes -- I also left my keys in the ignition.
I came back inside and Rodney said, "Let me guess: You've decided to buy yourself a trophy for asking the best questions of a trophy salesman."
I said, "I locked my keys in the truck. I was wondering if you had a hanger."
Rodney smiled, but I was pretty sure that he didn't smirk. "You got an old push button lock, or is it on the side, in the actual door?"
I said, "Oh, yeah. I kind of forgot about that. I guess I haven't locked my keys in a car since I was a kid."
I locked my keys in my car on the very first date I ever had where I could drive, as a matter of fact, with one Roberta Vickers, whose father worked for mine as a river rock "inspector," which meant he, like my father, did everything from working a crane, manning a dredge, stacking pallets, and dealing with both landscape "architects" and individuals who wanted smoother paths across their yards. Roberta lived way up near the top of Nameless Mountain, where the Unknown Branch of the Saluda River begins as a spring, and it took some lucky driving to make it up the rutted path her father called a driveway. And when I ended up locking the keys inside back then, it was that driveway I blamed, not her gigantic breasts that bobbled up and down like river buoys during floodgate hour. I picked her up, said hey to her daddy, drove down the mountain until we hit a gravel road, then got out of the truck to retrieve two six-packs of Schlitz I'd stowed on the way -- and what I had to promise to bring along for Roberta to go out with me. She and I told our parents that we were going out to a restaurant near Jones Gap State Park, though she and I knew we would only back into one of the thousand deer hunters' paths that led to deer hunters' stands. Roberta jumped out of the pick-up with me and somehow hit her elbow on the lock, as did I. We ended up drinking the beer anyway, at the foot of her driveway, and made out for a good three hours before we both staggered to her house, snuck around to her father's workshed, borrowed a crowbar, half-rolled back down, smashed the window of my father's truck, et cetera. Because Roberta's father and mine drank so much, they never smelled anything on our respective breaths. I told my father that someone from Travelers Rest High School attacked the truck while we ate, and he said that the same thing happened to him one time, rivalries being rivalries. My mother, though -- while doing Saturday laundry -- asked if Roberta and I had a nighttime picnic at the state park. I said no, and made eye contact. I asked why. She said, "It looks like a hive of snails left their tracks in your underwear."
I ended up buying one of the cheaper winged trophies from Rodney -- I think it was a generic statue, used for a variety of awards -- and pried back the passenger window an inch. He snaked through a piece of rebar and unclicked the door lock to the driver's side. I said, "All right. Hey, you want this trophy back?" It held only a short scuff mark. "Maybe you can reuse it. Surely blind people get trophies, too."
"You keep it, friend," Rodney said. "Maybe it'll be a reminder. People need they trophies, in order to be reminded, I've always said. Trophies and tombstones."
I couldn't find my pen and memo pad fast enough.
