Title TK

Okay, so I’m in school to write a book, so

I. Am writing. A book.

Phew! Glad that’s outta the way, Henshaw. Good golly day, as VC Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic protag’, the starving, incestuous sister, woulda put it.

My book’s about memorializing the dead in the South, and it’s going to be really good. I know this, but I have to convince various organizations of this, too, so they can realize that what they want to do is give me money so's I can travel and do research.
And I stopped, literally, in the middle of a line, with
“My book,”
Uhh. My book, what? Fred? Not Harry and the Lady Next Door; that’s been taken as I understand, and that’s a real shame.
So I started a list just to get m’self a working title, even. I emailed friends, asking for suggestions. Enter entropy, devolution, and of course, hijinks.

Here’s a short list, (the last two courtesy of Marshall):

Confederate Corpse

Oldest Living Confederate Corpse Tells All

Southern Deathtrap! Southern Suicide Rap!

Pig Pickin’ n’ Reef Ballin’

Dixie Dying

Kickin’ it in the Gloryland

How do, Death?

Papaw Looks Funny with Makeup On.

Your Tuna Casserole Won't Bring My Husband Back.

Even better is a title with a colon, of course, rendering that neat Before/After feel. So cut and paste the above as you like and let me know what you come up with. Perhaps Confederate Corpse: Kickin’ it in the Gloryland. Actually, that’s not bad. Actually, it’s terrible. Actually, I can’t tell anymore.

Okay; I really have to get back to work, now. There is so much work to do. There’s a freaking Iron Man to go before I sleep.

All of the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth*

…are, curiously enough, here, in Beachtown, Carolina.
This was what I was thinking last night, driving down the town’s ugliest strip, all dotted with its car dealerships, strip clubs, Carrabas and Hooters and gas stations—twice.

My friend had this idea for all of us to go ice skating last night, and reserved a time at the town’s one rink before any of us had every been there. And so last night, he and I are driving down this town’s Strip of Ugly looking for the place, and marveling at all the headlights around us, all the radios blaring their different stations. Who were are all these people, what were they doing here and where were they going, in this off-season?

And another mile and another and still, no rink. And before we know it, we’re on the freaking *highway* out of Beachtown, without an exit for miles. And so had to loop back around again and ten minutes later were spat back onto the Strip of Ugly, again, laughing hard at all of this. The invisible ice rink, the poor sign situation here in Beachtown and the heinousness of our surroundings. A strip resembling exactly the Gawdawful-Fest that is Piedmont Avenue in Atlanta, or the seediest side of the strip in Myrtle Beach: obscene with its exhaust backlit by bright fluorescence and dirty movie stores and just as weirdly magnetic and electric with nocturnal restlessness. I hate these streets of America and I am drawn to them, at least to driving through them, protected by metal and music and chrome, and maybe a nice beer buzz.

And here, amazed by the way which all this gives way so fast, to empty. To swampland, a different mode, entirely. Or, if you make a different turn, to the ocean. Our bright little self-destructive island of Us Us Us trying so hard to sing so loud. It’s like flying over Las Vegas at night. The desert is still the blackest. Here on the edge of the continent we call continent, the stars are still the brightest.


We found the rink. Skating: fun, and also made me think of futility, around and around that rink. The word rink. Maybe it was the beer, again, but I never fell, even though I think I’ve been skating three or four times, maybe, ever. And I felt more graceful and alone and untouchable than I had in a long time. We went in a group, but there’s always that solitude to skating; you group up and break off; you shout at one another over the terrible pop music, but mostly, you’re by yourself, watching the ice bump along under you, and you think about this flying, and you think about this solitude and circling, circling back to the same place. It just is what it is.

I came back home after skating and found Carmelita had graduated to Queen of the Night at the full-blown bash our earlier small cookout had exploded into. Early Who was blowing the living room speakers ragged and new people populated our kitchen and looked at me like I was strange when I came in. “You’re home!” Carm’ shouted at me, holding her Pabst/Miller/Yuengling aloft. “Didn’t you leave, like, ten minutes ago?”

I fell into conversation, into more beer, into trying to explain the politics of the skating rink to an endearingly smashed Carmelita, whose high spirits translated into her hitting me, hard, again and again--
Alice: So, it was fun, but—
Carmelita (interrupting, whapping Alice on the shoulder-blade and doubling over with laughter): Oh, Alishhh. C’moutside.

Some girl whom we all realized to be a waitress at a town breakfast joint had taken a mug of mine and drawn all over it in blue Sharpie and then insisted to me it was Dry Erase. I tried to scrub it off in the bathroom, but failed. I opened another beer. We all talked and talked. We played a lopsided version of Tammy Faye Cornhole, and everyone left by 11:30 or so, leaving Carmelita and me to eat a couple hotdogs and ibuprofen before staggering off to bed. I was grateful for this end, Henshaw, for this homecoming after the restlessness of the town strip and the rink. It was one of those nights of weird longing and I was grateful for this camaraderie, for the forms it took: the inebriated, bruise-rendering physical affection of my roommate, thumping me again, hard, on the back.

(*name of song by The New Pornographers on their weird, meandering album Challengers that only now&just now, am I beginning to listen to nonstop and nonstop. Okay, Litza; you win.)

Saturday in Bizarroworld
If I told you yesterday, that today your maintenance man would make you cry and you would make him cry, what would you have said?

This morning dawned bright and clear and January-Indian-Springy. Not that I would have any clue about this, nor would Carmelita, since we both slept till eleven, having driven the night before to Chapel Hill to see the inimitable Nina Nastasia play at the Local 506. It was the first time I felt pure, unhampered happiness in too many moons, Henshaw. It was a perfect show, the perfect evening all around, and I awoke to the sunny morning feeling all shiny-fresh-slated and contented.

But onto the tears!

The first thing I heard was what I thought were repair guys talking and knocking around outside my window, since this house is under perpetual repair at one corner or another, always. I went into the kitchen where Carmelita already stood, and she shushed me and pointed to the window.
“I had to crawl past my window, out of bed,” she said.
I looked out the window and saw our neighbor-man and a lady with a red face, screaming at each other in the small parking lot. They’re probably in their late forties, a fact which made the woman’s slurred words and the man’s open crying a step beyond sad.
“Oh, god. That’s horrible,” I said.
“Yeah. They’ve been at it for at least an hour, just walking all over. They were outside my window for a minute, then I came back from the bathroom and we kind of saw each other and I guess they realized that people, like, live here.”
“Why don’t they go inside?”
“I dunno. I’m sure they started there,” she said, opening the fridge and scanning its contents, “but they’ve taken that show on the road, today.”

The sad fighting couple were fighting right outside our back door, so fifteen minutes or so later, when we went down to the basement to get our bicycles, we were forced to walk right past them. When I opened the screen door, the four of us glanced around the vicinity of one another’s heads for a moment, then everyone looked away and we walked on by, leaving them the illusion of their private fighting bubble. They turned back to their fight with the same intensity at a lower volume.

I hadn’t been down in the basement in months. It’s a truly creepy place. Myriad offshoot crawlspaces shoot off and snake around in all directions under the house, creating the perfect homes for ancient bedframes, rats’ nests and probably escaped mentally disturbed convicts like in the movie Session 9. When we moved in, we put our bikes up against a wall near the front of the basement and trotted quickly back up the wooden steps, to the bright day above. Carmelita's taken her bike out for periodic rides and tune-ups, but since we moved here, I haven’t ridden mine once.

This morning, our bikes were gone. In their place were boards and sawhorses. A can of turpentine sat on top of Dangercat’s cat carrier, leaving a ring of stickiness when I lifted it off. We went up and got flashlights and shined them down those dark, twisty corners, but our bikes hadn’t been moved. They were just not there. I stood for a moment, thinking about my pretty cherry-red cruiser and how I’d abandoned it to the scary basement, all those nights it spent alone down there, and I felt sorry and I felt served right. Marshall bought me that bike, and that made it sadder. But Carmelita was feeling something different. She’d ridden her bike, which she’d spent a summer lovingly constructing, herself. It had an antique French frame, a shiny bell and mirrors, and she’d ridden it just days before. I looked over at her and as she spoke, her voice shook. “If Billy moved my bike. If he touched my bike, I’m going to. I’m going to put a hurting on him.”

Billy’s our maintenance man. And with a phone call, Carmelita found out he had not moved her bike. He had tossed it out into a dumpster that’s since been hauled away from our house, assuming it was trash. The sound of the drunk lady’s shouting was nothing, nothing, nothing, compared to Carmelita’s rage-filled screaming. She started crying right away, but this did not compromise the precisely-crafted stream of invective that rang out, across the veranda and across the world. Do not cross Carmelita.

It turned out my other roommate, Ginger, was having a rotten morning, too. Her grandpa was in ICU because a routine operation had gone horribly awry, and it was more or less the hospital’s fault. So a little while later, after Ginger made plans to hop a plane to Alabama the next day, the three of us loaded up into Carm’s car, to drink Coronas at a restaurant overlooking the ocean. In the car, Billy called Carmelita back.

She paused as he spoke, then said, “Don’t worry, Billy. I was angry because I worked hard to build that bike, but it’s okay, now. I forgive you, and I’m sorry for going all ape-shit.” He spoke then, and she turned to us. He’s crying, she mouthed. Then, into the phone. “No, I mean, you and me, we’re cool. It’s okay now, man. We’ll work it out, totally.” They finished talking and she hung up. There was silence for a few minutes. Then she said, “Now I feel bad for him.”

And it turned out that he hadn’t seen my bike down there in months. He tossed Carmelita’s, but mine disappeared sometime, somewhere back in the months that’ve gone by. Stolen or turned by neglect into another of this houses’s ghosts; either way, I feel more guilty than Carmelita.