The Bright Star, Bessemer, Alabama.

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.

(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.

He doesn’t look like he goes
walking very much. Once I saw him
through the smoked glass of a
gray Tahoe, his dough-colored face
twisted and angry, yelling at
a man as fat as him, but
with a baby face, with
too-tiny librarian glasses jammed down
on his ruddy cheeks.

Baby Huey, my dad would have called him,
which makes me laugh, even as I sneeze,
walking on this fine spring day,
I don’t go woggin much myself
yet something yanked me out today,
made me dig through
bottom drawers in search of mesh shorts
and a ripped Bama tank top.
It’s all pretty embarrassing.

I’m sneezing so hard my ears ring, mashing
on my iPod to get it off this Hole
song, why the fuck do I have any Hole songs.
Where did that even come from.
Even if it’s “Awful,” which I kind of love.

Woggin, woggin, knee poppin
Don’t want to have a mean old Baby Huey face
like the fat man on the teevee.

Suddenly this lovely thick perfume wafts
over me, there’s a break between songs &
the honeysuckle is in full bloom, and I
think of me and my sister back in Sandusky
running through the woods in the backyard
and trying to get the most out of
each honeysuckle, those two or
three precious drops of
nectar, little red-haired bees,
freckled buzzy baby bees
running around in the pine straw and the kudzu,
chubby Leia and Luke in our own private Endor.

We had a Honda 50 that was better than any
speeder bike. We buried a buffalo nickel beneath a
rotted log and called it pirate treasure. This was
quite a long time ago, when we were very young.

The Beatles warble in on my little reverie.
“A Day in the Life,” but from underwater, an early
version scraped from somewhere on the internet, probably
Captains Dead or You Aint No Picasso.
The Kinfauns demos they call them,
although I can’t recall why,
I don’t try as hard to remember any more.

Now there’s another fat man walking towards me, immense
like a giant in a fairy tale, mouth pursed in an
O, thick red gloves on each hand, the kind with
weights jammed in them, to make you
healthier, he’s walking fast and he waves at me
with a giant red paw, we are just two
dudes out woggin, gettin healthie, trying to fight back our
natural inclinations, which is to sit in the sweet a/c and
watch the Twin Peaks movie on YouTube.
Okay that’s my natural inclination. God—

Jesus Mary Mother—

sometimes I hate the Shuffle on this damned thing,
what goddamned algorithm says follow up
the Beatles with the fucking
Anti-Nowhere League screaming “So What?”
Actually Hole to the Beatles to Anti-Nowhere League
is just pathetic. That makes no sense at all. Hole to
Beatles bootleg. Eight gigs of Cupertino plastic and it’s
all rigged against me. I’d rather have a Walkman and
know what was coming up next, yes these are nominally
my songs but not like how it used to be when my
“library” was sixteen cassette tapes in a Converse
shoe box on the nightstand, two of those Robert Johnson
collections. I did not make myself go walking then.
I did not have to have a fat rich man on teevee
tell me to go walking then.

My back hurts. My left knee keeps popping. I smeared
sweat all over my eight gigs of Cupertino plastic, which
probably doesn’t hurt it but always stresses me out.
(If it died I wouldn’t know what to do, those poor souls
with status updates of “library crashed, haven’t backed up
since ’07,” and all the comments are like “dude need a
DISLIKE button so hard” etcetera etc. &tc.)

I am sick of woggin.
I want some Pizza Shack.
Fuck that, I just want cheese sticks from Pizza Shack,
forget the pizza, I just want bread and cheese and
butter.
But that’s why I have to go woggin.
Looks like rain.
Cupertino plays me a twelve second clip
from the Simpsons, Dr. Frink squawking about
math, filler for mixtapes I quit making
a decade ago. This is the
worst walk ever, at least I’m almost home.
Wow, twenty-eight minutes, I’m
Arnold in Hercules in New York.
I’m Mark Ingram, I’m
Johnny Musso.

I catch a glimmer of perfume again, and
look at the honeysuckle.
I don’t go get one, I don’t try to
get three drops out of it,
I go up the stairs to my
apartment and stand at my kitchen counter
and eat a sandwich with vegan baloney and
turn on the fan and the a/c and
lay on top of the covers.

I flip through some Shelby Foote and
feel guilty.

My knee is pulsing like a turn signal, blinking
in the night.

I forget to plug my phone in and sometime
in the night it dies, and I oversleep
the next morning.

There’s a carful of dumbasses &
I kick yr seat some more & you
cuss me for the fifteenth time. At a
stoplight I yank the headrest out and
jam it in backwards. You cuss
me some more.
Mudhoney sucks.

Before you even put it in, Tad
does too. We drink flat
Mountain Dew & munch
Cool Ranch Doritos. None of us
die on 9/11, most of us will
get divorced, there’s a little
rehab in the future, a little
regret, no visible
scars, but
it turns out that jammed in
backwards headrests really
lower the resale value
of 1986 Honda Accords.

Mea culpa, mea culpa.

. . . Contessa had her mind on her business, y’all.

Visitation has attracted a fair amount of critical attention over the years, including some very worthwhile studies by Robert McRuer, Suzanne Jones, and George Hovis, among others. My essay is about the curious silence in the criticism on the subject of the novel’s dense web of allusions to superhero comics, science fiction stories, and general geekery; while critics have been quick to tie Kenan to William Faulkner, it makes just as much sense, I argue, to tie him to William Gibson—maybe more, given that one of the novel’s epigraphs is from Neuromancer. But ultimately the piece is about how Faulkner v. Gibson is a false dichotomy, about how our notions of what constitutes “southern culture” can be enlarged and usefully complicated if we think of, say, reading Batman comics and participating in a hog slaughter as mutually informing aspects of the experience of living in the South.

The essay was a ton of fun to write and research—I got to dig through old Avengers back issues at LSU’s Hill Memorial Library in search of a particular reference, which Kenan was generous enough to confirm for me. And of course anyone who followed our roundtable on Jujitsu for Christ, or read my interview with Jack Butler in Mississippi Quarterly, knows that this issue is a source of ongoing fascination for me, and one around which I’m hoping to build a larger project.

(This is essentially the academic version of my shorter, quasi-semi-autobiographical piece “Tony Stark in Belzoni,” soon to appear in Lost Battles alongside the work of some swell writers.)

This ends the self-promotion. For now.

Polaroid Sun600 with Impossible Project PX 600 Silver Shade film, a little typing from an old Smith-Corona, Atlanta, Ga. 2010.

In 1993 I was eighteen and starving to death for music and gulping down whatever there was—Metallica, Lucinda Williams, Pearl Jam, the Beatles, Mother Love Bone, anything. I had just started watching live music in Birmingham and had no idea what I really “liked”—I just liked everything. Basically, I wore flannel shirts wrapped around my waist and had swoopy Slater-skater hair and a diamond stud earring in one ear and oh my God I actually drove a Camaro unironically,* and oh yes, I was terrible.

One of the best bands I remember from that time was the Gristle Twins. They lived and died in that horrible little gutter right before the internet—where recording was expensive as hell, where putting out a cd was impossible, and where having your music on a construction-paper covered cassette was a reasonable option. The Gristle Twins were the first band I ever saw live that were probably artists—not Eddie Vedder ripoff fiends howling their way through teenage angst, but folks who listened to “Song for a Future Generation” and Ziggy Stardust and cut sideways bangs in their hair but called it straight and wanted out of Alabama no matter what, just like me.

The Gristle Twins struck a chord I didn’t even know I had, I still had a Wolverine poster up in high school, sure there was a Robert Johnson one too but Arthur Adams Wolverine. I didn’t even know I needed saving yet.

The one recording of theirs I can find right now is “Mr. Scissors,” a wacky tale about an evil teacher that features some great guitar. I recall thinking at the time that this studio version was a little inferior to the demo I had on cassette because the vocals were too reverby. It was on the 1993 Birmingham compilation Balkanize Now, which most notably featured a band called Shallow, with a cover portrait of the Birmingham artist and music promoter Rebecca Davis.

The demo cassette had “Mr. Scissors” and a song I think was called “David Bowie”—”David Bowie, he ain’t no fool, David Bowie, he’s so cool.” It may have also detailed how the erstwhile Mr. Jones rode in a limousine to a Piggly Wiggly. Man, I don’t know, I barely knew who Bowie was, let alone put him in my head for a daydream punk song, I’m telling you that this stuff was good. I’m going to Alabama in a few weeks and I’ll plunder my Pop’s basement and see if I can find the tape—and with it, the names of the folks in the band, which are lost to memory and certainly not listed on Balkanize Now’s meager packaging.

There’s a special type of joy in going back and finding music that changed you when you were a teenager, and realizing that there’s some magic to it still. GRISTLE TWINS FOREVER. And thanks, whereever y’all are.

MP3: The Gristle Twins – Mr. Scissors

*In my defense, it was a totally awesome 1969 Camaro, not an IROC or something.