PrettyFakes

I.

I fell in love for the first time when I was eighteen years old.

Behind the post office on the State campus there’s this wonderful grass-covered series of hills, and I was walking down the sidewalk beside them almost holding hands with this girl who threw her head back when she laughed and had sparkly eyes and loved R.E.M. There was music all around the sides of her voice when she talked.

I had never met a girl who threw her head back when she laughed, or had eyes that sparkled like hers, or one who loved R.E.M. It was the fall of 1993, and I dared her to roll down the hill, and she did, and I did, too, and at the bottom we fell into each other (which was the whole point of it, anyway) and we kissed, and there were flecks of grass dancing around her throat like emeralds, and I fell in love with her. Just like that.

II.

It is 2001 and my sister Pinky is in intensive care at UAB after being airlifted in from Mississippi. They don’t know what’s wrong with her. Her lungs are filled with something, so much something that no air can get in.

I am in a recliner at my father’s house, watching the morning Law & Order. Her daughter, Sarah, is asleep on my chest. She is only six months old. I whisper in her ear, your momma is not gonna die, every time I get scared. I take her little foot and press it onto an ink pad and roll it into the inside cover of my new sketchbook. I quit my job and take care of her during the day, until my stepmom gets off of work.

They always act like it’s such a big deal to take care of babies in the movies. It’s not so hard if you really like them.

III.

I grew up in Birmingham and had a wonderful and large family filled with barbecue and Crimson Tide football and cousins and sleepovers and a Golden Egg at Easter that had a one dollar bill in it.

All of my family lived there for one reason: because all of our daddies were coal miners.

IV.

It’s the summer of 2005 and I’m at Roxie’s in Starkville on a Friday night. It’s so damn hot outside that it’s hot inside, despite the fact that it’s nearly midnight, and my shirt is sticking to my back as I leaf through the latest Free Press. A guy in the corner is warbling through a Pink Floyd cover, and even though he looks pretty lame, he’s doing a decent job of it, and “Wish You Were Here” is meant to be butchered by awkward teenagers in Southern college towns, anyway. Despite him singing, I got Lucinda Williams singing “Crescent City” in my head: “my brother knows where the best bars are.”

Ben Agent comes in and hugs me and musses up my hair, and he’s got himself a damn fine haircut—spiky bleached with shreds of black all through it.

“What the hell are you doing here, my man?” Ben hollers over the twang.

“Pinky got married,” I nod.

“I have heard this. This, I have heard,” he says, and walks behind the bar, and brings me a pint glass filled to the brim with Sierra Nevada. Everyone else in the bar is drinking out of plastic.

He throws me the devil sign and smiles over his shoulder and walks over to the corner and talks to a beautiful girl who has dyed her bangs a bright magenta color, and when he walks up she grins and blushes.

V.

VI.

When Big Gray & Mame got married, they had a friend perform the ceremony. You can get ordained for free on the internets now, and it’s so much more intimate then having some preacher you’ve never met talk stand up in front of you and talk about a God you barely know. A formal ceremony becomes a celebration, and becomes that much more meaningful.

After his ceremony, Big Gray performed Dr. Wagner’s wedding to his wife, and then Sally married Herman & Vendela. When Sally & Larry got married, they asked me to do it.

I read a story at Herman & Vendela’s wedding. I cried when I wrote it, because I’m a shameless romantic. I read

Fifteen years ago, Hub City High student Herman and Vendela, of the Woodrow Magnet, both went to a punk show in Hattiesburg, Mississippi—Jodie Foster’s Army was playing, if you were wondering. We don’t know if they saw each other, or if they stood in line just a few people apart, but it was the first time they were close to each other, and I like to think that maybe her elbow brushed his arm right near the end of the show, with high school kids rushing out the door, hoping to meet curfew.

Then in college, Millsaps fraternity man Herman and Belhaven art major Vendela lived in the same ratty apartment building not too far from where we’re standing right now. We don’t know if they saw each other, or if maybe she was mad one day because his jeans were still in the dryer down in the basement, but I like to that think one day he caught a glimpse of blonde hair bouncing up the stairs, maybe just for a second.

And maybe over all those years both of them, even at their happiest, felt like they had missed something—like when you think you see an old friend out of the corner of your eye, but it’s just a coat rack, or a shadow.

Then one day I walk into Little Tokyo with my friend, State teacher Vendela, and over in the corner sits famous ad man Herman, with most of the boys you see here today. She half-ducks behind me, and whispers in my ear “who is that boy?” And even though I know which one she’s talking about, I ask her which one? And she says, “the one with all the hair.”

And all those missed moments over all those years came tumbling down over six pieces of asparagus sushi.

Which brings us here today, family and friends, to celebrate that final little twist of fate—the one where the boy finally did meet the girl, and he asked her out, and they laughed a lot, and she scared him with her driving, and they fell in love, and they got married, and they lived happily ever after.

I believe in true love. I think it’s like static electricity: you can almost feel it when you get close enough, and sometimes you can even see it, like the little hairs on your arm rustling when the crackling edge of a sweater passes over it.

VII.

Vendela was married before she met Herman. The best thing out of that whole shebang is this hilarious little pixie named Rose, who is smarter than any kid you’ve ever met and just hilarious, with her sideways glances and slow smiles. Pinky was married before, too. She got Sarah, with her pale blonde hair and bright blue eyes and a laugh bigger then her whole body, who half the time is almost more Pinky’s sister than her daughter, because it was just the two of them for so long, and her momma treats her like a real person.

Sometimes I think things don’t always work out like how we planned them, but work out anyway. What was it that John Lennon sang? “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

VIII.

During Pinky’s wedding I start to choke up, because I’m trying to tell a story about her and her boy, and I can’t quite get through it because it’s just so much. I said that:

I asked Pinky for something I could share with all of you, that would help you understand the depth of their feelings for each other. She wrote me a letter, and said that she couldn’t think of anything specific, one particular thing. She wrote “we’re simple and we don’t really have any grand stories or huge events that make us special together. It’s all the little stuff—like the other day, I was looking in the mirror, and really worrying about how I looked, and he looked at me and said ‘do you know how beautiful I think you are? Beautiful enough that I want to spend the rest of my life looking at you.’”

I can’t think of anything in any movie I’ve ever seen or any book that I’ve ever read that could top that. That’s the kind of thing you see in a movie, and John Cusack probably says it, and somebody behind you in the dark murmurs, bitterly, “No boy would ever say that.”

But, some of us do. Pinky’s boy does.

IX.

Dear Pinky,

Pop told me what your boy gave you for your surprise honeymoon! Um, a brand-new JEEP?? And a whole slew of books about off-the-beaten-path barbecues and tourist stuff all through the South, so you can just drive around and goof off for a couple weeks? Okay, that’s pretty awexxome.

I like him, Pinky. He’s a nice guy. That sounds so bland, but I mean it, and it’s a good thing: he loves you, and that’s what matters to me. May you have everything your heart ever wanted, and may he tell you every time you look in a mirror that he wants to spend the rest of his life looking at you, because you are so beautiful to him. May that never fade.

Love, your brother,
Gorjus

X.

I can’t go back to Starkville. It doesn’t work for me anymore, like a broken bottle or a flat tire, and when I’m there I feel all those old loves and hurts and it’s like I start to lose my breath a little, because I just feel too damn much.

For Pinky, though, it works. And for that, I might love it a little bit.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 7:59 am and is filed under Gorjus, In Mississippi, Poetry, Polaroids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.