Doom doom doom
go the footsteps of the king
down the flagstones of his palace, doom doom doom.
Matte steel scrapes against
limestone. There is
a squeak in the corner.
The king grits his teeth &
looks down. The king is always
gritting his teeth.
He doesn’t see limestone, hasn’t since
he was little, sleeping to the gentle
squeak of the wagon. The king sees
CaCO3, not limestone, he sees
calcite and aragonite, chalcedony and
jasper. The king sees that which is
there and not there.
He thinks of Hercules’ Cudgel, of the
dead fool in Giza, of the souls who
tore the limestone from the mountain
two miles hence, and dragged it here
with ropes and pulleys, donkeys and
sweat, carved blocks from Latverian
fossil, built his home.
While the king is staring at
his feet the little mouse
in the corner
makes her
escape.
You got to run the window unit, she said. And put the fan on too. I did. Her teeth were kind of bucked out, in a sexy way, like how Lauren Hutton has that gap thing. I know you’re too young to know what that means but it used to be a big deal.
She didn’t have to tell me to turn on the damn a.c. It was August in Alabama. If you weren’t running the a.c. it was because somebody had stole the window unit off the sill or you were poor. I had been in both situations before but we were in good shape for the moment. The Redmond Motor Court had little bars over the window units so nobody could get at them. Plus the electricity was figured in with the weekly rent. I didn’t mind the heat outdoors so much but if you were inside you couldn’t really breathe.
We need to go get some beer, she said, which we did, and I said okay. I told her to put her shoes on and she made a face and made a point out of walking out into the parking lot in her bare feet and leaving the door wide open.
She wanted to drive and I said okay, it was her car after all. She put on the radio, which was always playing the same Aerosmith song on Rock 99. Either that or that damn Queen opera song. I used to like Aerosmith just fine but all of a sudden they were always on tv and had a video for every song they had out. I thought they used to be a real rock band but I have been wrong about a lot of things. Anyway she declared that the song that was always on was “our song,” that it really spoke to her, and I wish that I could ever understand what that meant.
When we got back to the Redmond she squeezed my hand and said baby I want a little alone time and I am not the jealous type so I said okay and took the High Life and went on in and watched tv. The Redmond had HBO real big on the sign outside but all that was ever on HBO when we stayed there was Overboard and Innerspace. I had gotten where I had probably seen both of them four or maybe even five times a piece and neither one of them really stood up to that much rewatching. I was partial to Innerspace because I liked science fiction quite a bit but I cannot stand that Martin Short. He just about ruins the whole experience.
So I just sat there and listened to the movie and sipped on a couple of High Lifes and when the sun went down I didn’t turn on the lights and I just laid there on the bed. All you could hear was the fuzzy sound of the a.c. and the hum of Highway Eleven. I guess you are supposed to call it the Super Highway but I never figured out what made it so much better than the other highways.
Even though she wasn’t with me there was still the smell of her everywhere, a good smell of that perfume she got at the Big B, plus a summersweat smell from riding in the Datsun with the t-tops out. I know that perfume is probably cheap but that don’t mean it’s sorry. Peanuts are cheap & they’re good. M&M’s are fifty cents and they’re good. Peanuts M&M’s are the best and they’re the same price as normal M&M’s plus you get peanuts. It’s a real bargain.
I got to wondering about that Aerosmith song and whether it was a good or bad to have as our song. I pulled out my wallet and counted out how much money we had left. I figured maybe we could go down to Carnaggio’s, which was our special place to go, and spend the rest of it on some lasagna, pretend like we were in The Godfather. I wondered if she’d ever seen The Godfather. They didn’t show it on HBO. She didn’t really like to sit through a whole movie. She liked Overboard pretty good though.
I heard the Datsun rattle up outside. The door flung open, and she was there smiling with those cute buckteeth, eyes all bloodshot. She made a little noise and jumped onto the bed, hopping up and down and knocking my beer over. It was so dumb I had to laugh. Then she yelled bodyslam and bellyflopped on me and I would have been mad but it was funny and she didn’t weigh nothing.
Get out of the damn bed until you take a shower, I said, because she had been running around all day with her flip flops off and had grocery store feet like a little kid. She poked her lip out and I said I didn’t care, those feet were gross and I didn’t want them on the bed. They are just on the bedspread, she grinned, and I almost gave in but I think when your feet look like that it makes you white trash. Come on, let’s go get some Italian, I said, acting like I was all put out, and she squealed and hugged me.
The perfume was called Star, I think. Boy I sure loved it. It really almost made me love her.
The good doctor
has his fingers in the mouth
of a red-haired man.
Repeat after me, the good doctor
says to the red-haired man: this vindictive creature, he
swallows the delicate flower.
It beat counting pills, it all
beat counting pills.
He was fine with being a
special guest star, fine with
being the villain. As long as he
wasn’t down in the Bronx,
counting pills.
The red-haired man squints &
mumbles. The doctor spreads his
cheeks, pinches his tongue: Again, Carlos. Repeat after me.
For a few weeks now I’ve been working with Anna Kline and the Grits & Soul Band on a design for their forthcoming record. Anna and the guys play what I call old timey country music—mandolin, hand clapping, real macaroni & cheese porch music. I sat around on the porch at Sneaky Beans recently and listened to them roll away and you just sit there and smile and sweat. It just feels real.
Anna really likes the intricate hand-lettering and feel of early 20th century sheet music and hymnals, so I tried to capture that feel for a design for the “Flood Waters” single. We sat around her house the other day and this is what we came up with.
This is just a sneak peek from the forthcoming record—Anna + the band will reveal it when it’s final. You can like the Grits & Soul Band on Facebook, or check out their Reverb Nation profile. Anna also tweets at @gritsandsoul.
They used cracked and splintered
porch doors as stretchers for the bodies,
for the mommas and cousins and math
teachers.
(Whatever would do. They were out of
proper stretchers, and bandages, and
morphine. The Red Cross was set up
at the Piggly Wiggly. You don’t get
choosy in wartime).
The house where we played Neuromancer
on the Commodore
was gone.
The house where you’d put my hand
under your black bra
was gone.
The house where we’d listened to Tesla
was gone.
But these were just places, just
gray plastic and dull copper,
Dothan brick and Bessemer steel.
Fresh cut wood, that’s what my daddy
told me it smells like after the storm, after
the phone lines are back up.
(He told me this on April 27, 2011, as I stood
in the middle of Saint Mary Street and stared
at the sky, biting the insides of my cheeks).
His house didn’t get exploded, he wasn’t
left with shatterered femurs twisted under
concrete blocks, he didn’t have to ride on
a busted porch door to the Red Cross shelter
down at the Piggly Wiggly.
They don’t even give the damned tornados
names like they do their slow, fat-assed cousins,
lumbering in from the Gulf, chewing up
everything in sight, names so kind, almost
mild: Camille, Hugo, Katrina, the names of
mommas & cousins &
math teachers.
I flinch for like the sixth time while passing the exit to Yazoo City. It’s one of the organ donors that does it do me this time; he’s alone, clad in green Kevlar, riding without a pack, bobbing and weaving in between the battered Corollas and single-headlight F-150s. For the hundredth time I think that anybody riding a motorcycle this fast on the highway in Jackson must have a sincere desire to go out the old-fashioned way: with a joyous spray of arterial blood over the spiderwebbed windshield of an elderly Baptist deacon driving ten miles under the speed limit while buzzed on Mad Dog and Kools.
When I drank I never used to flinch. I used to bob and weave in traffic like the organ donors on their chopped & screwed Kawasakis and Ducatis. I’d have the windows down in the Camino—the windows were always down—with a Miller Lite tallboy between my legs as the little cassette player struggled to cough up enough decibels to get over the sputtering engine and roadhum.
I’m singing along to Stevie Wonder asking for Heaven to Help Us All when my phone buzzes. I miss y’all. I am at a country western bar that is playing rap music. I grin so hard that I don’t even flinch when a two-toned Caprice edges me off the highway by riding down the middle of both lanes, a dense heartbeat of bass throbbing and Dopplering behind the Chevy as it roars into the distance, painted yellow by a hundred sodium vapor lights. There are no taillights.
