PrettyFakes

so saturday morn i hop in the jetta and head over to that fabled land of ladies and mystery, columbus, mississippi. well, fabled to some folks, anyway.

i’ve heard stories from old state alum about the dark days as mississippi a & m college (as it was known then), when they banned all females after riot in the library in montgomery hall over who would pull out the chair of the lone female present. and how they knew there were girls . . . just a few miles over, at the mississippi university for women.

problem being, these were the days when cars weren’t as prevalent as now, and there was no direct train service from starkville to columbus. so an intrepid a & m cadet would sling his travel bag over his shoulder, stick out his thumb, and start walking. at best, you’d get a ride over pretty quickly, and skulk around the outskirts of the guarded campus or hoof around downtown, and meet up with a lissome coed, maybe convince her to sit in the balcony with you at the princess theatre. sure, you’d sleep in the back of some farmer’s truck, or in an alleyway, but it would be worth it.

the worst case scenario was rain. or not getting picked up. or getting picked up, but not finding a lass in sight around the w. or not getting a ride back, and missing monday-morning drill, earning yourself a host of demerits and ridicule for nothing.

thank god time’s changed all that. i think i only even knew a couple of guys who even dated w girls—one of them post-college. the prevalance of cars eradicated the desperation a bit, and even gave young folks a place to, uh, hang out.

but i wasn’t in columbus checking out the ladies—i was loading up a ryder truck with its very own loading dock-type elevator-thang. “none of those sucker ramps for me,” wes said, “i’m ee-LEC-trified!”

so we haul out boxes and boxes of kc’s books—satre, santeria, patti smith. we eat donuts and listen to cassettes—the cd player’s already packed, so we get love & rockets, the english beat, siouxsie sioux. we work our rears off, but it’s good work, and fun.

then the dynamic duo treated me to little tokyo columbus, which was clean, efficient, and very good. the aspargus rolls, which i rank my sushi by, were almost too good—i rank them on how much sliced almond is present, and these were crunchy like cereal! they were great.

on the way there we passed this wonderful shut-down chinese restaurant. it had been closed for years, by the look of it, faded sign, busted window. it was a “traditional” type look, none of that formerly-a-kentucky-fried-chicken business, and some of the faded green rooftiles had fallen off, and a tree was growing right through the side of it.

i pitched a fit, hollering that i wanted it to be my superhero secret-hide-out, were i a super-hero. what cooler, less unsuspecting place could be my lair? nothing!

we headed back to college street and shouldered and elbowed more boxes, for a few hours anyway, and when its over we sit on the front porch—which faces the w—and drink a can or two of budweiser and talk about scary t.v. shows we’ve seen.

wes nominates a macgyver that scared him real bad, where he reconstructed a skull with pencil erasers. i opt for a mork and mindy where mork channels mindy’s mom, cementing my fear of mindy’s mom for fucking ever. kc just looked at us like we were stupid the whole time.

hmm. i just now remembered a terrifying episode of lou grant that absolutely screwed me up. i’m not kidding. lou grant, dog. i don’t remember the exact scenario, but it involved some sort of porcelain doll face and a broken-down stroller. i can say no more.

it faded until i was twelve, when we moved into a new house in hueytown, from my sandusky hood. i was busy exploring the new house, especially the crawl space next to the half-basement. i shined a flashlight deep into the bowels of the house, and it flickered across a broken and rusty baby stroller. KEE-RIST!! i ran past that damn hole for years. for some reason, we never threw it out. who keeps rusty haunted baby strollers in their basement, for god’s sake?

we started down the t.v. haints route after i asked k.c. if her house was haunted—it had the look of one, and certainly should be haunted, as any genteel tumble-down mansion in a fading mississippi town ought to be. she said there were rumors of the ghost of a dead girl, which instantly freaked me out, but that she’d never seen evidence of it—other than a relatively suspicious door-locking incident a while back that may have been a real-live girl, her daughter, rather than a specter.

i headed back to ford manor to get cleaned up, excited about our dinner plans for anthony’s, easily the best eating in the golden triangle. it started life in the early 20th century as a grocery store, but finds itself catering now to a more upscale crowd—with amazing prime rib, catfish, and filet mignon entrees. still on a concrete floor. and it’s the type of place you see folks you went to college with that were pretty good guys but weren’t, like, your best friend—hell, i saw two boys i was freshmen with that night.

my dish at anthony’s is the fettucine alfredo, which is just alright on this night—but their new fried grits are spectacular. the whole table—me, o’steen, steve, bill, susan, wes, k.c., and ben—pestered our server for the recipie. she demurred initially, but then slowly told us the secret, which is not really a secret at all: cook some grits, and let them harden in a pie pan or other circular pan by placing them in a refrigerator. then cut them into slices, perhaps put a dash of batter on them, and dunk them into a deep fryer. voila! perfection.

despite kfb’s teasing, you can get a decent pinot in starkville—although not at the bottle shop by dave’s we stopped at. o’steen went in—drunk on the wine we drank in the car—and stamped her foot, saying “i want the most expensive white wine in the place.”

the clerk, nonplussed, pointed her to a half-full cooler of eight-dollar chardonnay. well, then.

so by the time we got to anthony’s we were fairly impaired, fighting less over music then normal—just over whether we would listen to “ask” or “girlfriend in a coma.” yes, we were smiths drunk. which didn’t dull the amazing generosity of o’steen, who picked up the check—for the entire table.

howls of protest, heads shook in disbelief! she just blushed a bit and ducked her head slightly. “thank-you for having me,” she said to bill & susan, hosts extraordinaire. “it really means a lot.”

so we stagger out of anthony’s and head to—where else?—dave’s dark horse tavern, where we go to watch the irrepressible, inscrutable hogleg, a veritable supergroup of, uh, folks.

well, my boss is a’hollerin’, gorjus babies, so it’s that time again! yep, back to the law mines! i’ll finish up this’n later!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2003 at 10:20 am and is filed under Gorjus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.