Brown ribbon, its shiny surface spinning, a neon crimson bead the size of an insect eye
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| rookies ushered the defendant through the two glass plate doors, I raised the 35mm,
aimed it and waited until the first cop passed by me. The suspect was between the cops as they passed the adjoining hallway, and he was so close to me I could tell he had spotted my camera and was about to object with wholehearted conviction. “Don’t point that camera at me, durnit!” At that point, I took it upon myself to start clicking. I can’t recall how many snapshots I took of that bastard, but my finger had a mind of its own. The cops slowed down, stopping as I got my fill and the battery began to lose power. By the time I had finished, that guy’s eyeballs must have been full of strobing icicles while he did the “celebrity shield.” I think one of the cops was grinning. I had stopped using cocaine a year earlier, and the last time was with Merle Watson, so I had started criticizing my friends who used, whether it did any good or not. I never did it much, only on my birthday with champagne and a steak. The police station can be a boring place because cops seldom are able to loosen up to talk freely to you because you’re not their type, they hate journalists and they’re pent-up to begin with. Usually they’re sizing citizens up, even council members, making them go on the defensive with that detective demeanor, but with us, they just make you feel unwanted, like second-class trash. *************** Strobes of sharp, piercing alabaster light streak lightning shards into my glazed eyes, blurred forms shifting. “I can’t find it.” A female voice. I’m so weak. I’m going to vomit. It’s impossible to move my hands, feet or head. Pain shoots up my arm as a nerve transmits a gripping surge of an excruciating ache. There had been a finty pin prick halfway up my arm behind my elbow. “There’s one. Keeps closing up on me.” Cool water - suddenly my arm feels an icy channel of chilly fluid, and as the bubbles escape from the plastic IV, shapes in the room slowly turn into white forms, moving slowly. “You won’t feel anything, sir. That nauseous feeling will be leaving soon. You’ve been throwing up all day, poor thing.” I can’t remember who I am. There is a total loss of coherency, thoughts bombarding my consciousness, colliding into no meaning, my dry, chapped lips are moving, but no words are exiting. “What’s he saying?” “I don’t know. He’s been mumbling and screaming for two days. The fever’s gone, and he had gotten up to 103. Something about his wheels. A shipment and a deadline.” Then - total silence. Eardrums tingling - then itching. There comes a warm flush of fever across my body as the shapes revert back into blobs, melting as total darkness flashes a few times when I think I’m going to pass out. There are no questions now. Only an answer. I must be dreaming. “What’s the blood pressure reading? Is it still dropping?” “Watch out for a code blue. Call the doctor on duty. Get the station nurse on the double.” Chrome is so pretty - reflective and beautiful, shining, glimmering in this fantasy. It’s a vision. The silver metal has an outline - two mounds, sideways, a larger hump and two long supports. There is a black background. Brown globs of wet mush speckle the black flap as it snaps, to-and-fro, the chrome figure dancing. I hear a buzzer now, maybe a horn. Two ghosts at the end of my feet are holding each other - one appearing male, the othe female, and there is a small head at one’s hip. “More glucose. This bag’s almost out. I’ve never seen one look so thin like this one. And he’s smiling. That’s weird.” Rising, my body is now hovering a foot above the bed’s damp yellow-stained sheets. The nurses are below me as it seems I’m lighter than a feather, weightless at the ceiling, a physician below with two fingers on the wrist of my earthly 102-pound shell. A bright light erases the images below, and at where the wall reaches the stucco ceiling there I can see a long-haired fellow with a beard. He looks like a hippie, and his long fingers are outstretched, beckoning. The tie-dyed room is going blank - dark. There is no more light. Not for a long time, if ever. I am still waiting for the light. No colors. No feeling. My thoughts are clear now. No more nightmares of criminals stalking me, the rapture of annihilation from nuclear twilight or shadows at the window. “Flat line. He’s gone.” The male nurse is crying, and the couple and the child have already left Room 44. “He kept babbling about his Mack truck rig. A fill-up. A truck stop.” “Yeah, he was a trucker - made us keep that scanner on all night long. Claimed it was the only thing that could put him to sleep in the end.” This was my final nightmare. There’s nothing better than the last nightmare. ************* Well, at least he didn’t stick his greased finger up my rectum today - pain in the belly again, and the doc says he might have to knife me and to get ready. Same day. A Wednesday. That day you’re always excited about the video store getting a new shipment. Well, I got a shipment. Old boss sends the new boss a letter to the editor demanding a “public” apology, as opposed to a private one, and a retraction of my story on the Angus lawsuit. Batching it. Got Neil Young on. Couldn’t watch all the Skynyrd concert tape, but I’ll finish it later. “You know a lawyer?” the new boss says. She was scratching her cheek until it started bleeding on the front desk. I got a doctor’s excuse and came home. I’m getting a lawyer to look at it. I also had to turn around the other day while I heard the DJ launch into his diatribes about my story. Just in time to tape it. Prima donna crap. I wish the article had something false in it, so we could apologize. Schizoid posturing. When lunatics get control of what they call a newspaper, watch out. When they get on the radio, duck. First time I met the publisher was the day I drifted in on a layout day, a Wednesday, to apply for a job. Three years later I have to hit the road at 5 p.m. on a Friday because the job was downsized, eliminated by the “new owners.” There had been rumors for months, almost a year prior to the sale or change of ownership. People were asking us about it on the street, but we were told not to say anything. Once the publisher accused me of talking about it, but we didn’t know much. The daily, The Sun News, was scared it was Thomson which owned the Florence Morning News. That rag had surfaced in Conway last year in boxes, and it had everybody talking. Sometimes a fellow would stick plastic in the slots just for fun. John McCain is coming into town Friday. It’s a bad time to get shy in public, so I can’t duck but so many events before I run into the Dynamic Duo, that awkward moment when I’ll just have to smile real big and strut. Good thing I bought the seconds Banana Republic photojournalist vest. That beige, khaki thing is getting me by, gives one a certain respectability. You look like a blasted photographer. I’ve decided that the only way to get photography out of my way and to keep it from interfering with my writing is to start looking like a photographer so people won’t think of me as a writer. People always want to get their picture taken, but they don’t necessarily want you to write about them. They have to wait and think for a minute before they speak, and they usually say they’ll have no comment. On Sunday after the Loris Post Office ceremony, I rode to Laurinburg in X-Way at a pig farm where my friends were throwing a Super Bowl Party, and en route through Rowland, it became evident that the snow was getting higher as the rain pelted drooping snowpersons. At the party I’m trying to convince my Scotland High School quarterback to let me look through the reels in a box in his garage. The film contains footage of our 1973 varsity season and other years. He’s on the school board now, and I’m trying to convince him that the new millennium holds great financial gain for school boards through lawsuits in the “world of greed.” Saturday night, Feb. 5, 2000.... McCain sucked. It was great at Medieval Times, where the horse crap usually smells to the high heavens while waitresses, known as “wenches,” pass out the “dragon toes” and grog. The weary senior citizens stood in the chilly weather as a Vivitar flash kit smashed on the sidewalk, sending splintered black plastic and recharged batteries flying. The line is around the building, and most won’t get in. I barely squeak in, and the fire code inside has been shot to hell. Wall-to-wall, shoulder-to-shoulder, these Republican freaks, including many young people, have come to pay tribute to a war hero, one who claims he is not a war hero. I had been under the impression he was. Horry County Republicans are hanging from the rafters. One guy is standing on a chair. National media members are perched on risers across the room from my final resting spot behind a concrete wall right behind the stage. Our state representative, one from North Myrtle Beach, where’s I’m now writing, is introducing the vet. Some vets are in wheelchairs. Things were going splendidly until McCain called the media “Trotskyite communist supporters.” I didn’t think that was too funny. Maybe they should have tortured the old boy a few more years, then made him a jungle god and poured honey on him for the ants to feast in the hot Vietnamese sun. I didn’t realize I was a communist. The last time someone called me a communist was in Boone, N.C. when Armfield Coffey, the Republican publisher, did so. I promptly went downstairs into the morgue and photo lab. “What was that?” a staff asked upstairs. My clipboard splintered, its cardboard backing splitting, but still hanging together from the ASU stickers and decals I had pasted on it. It felt better. Those are fighting words. Where I come from, if you call somebody a communist, you had better have proof or at least have Keds to get you in transit in a hurry. ************ At Christmas I visited Tommy Condon’s Irish Pub in Charleston, and in the din of December reveling from customers, the sandy-haired guitarist’s lyrics were garbled in thick brogue, but suddenly I heard a word or two that attracted focus. He was singing pro-Irish Republican Army terrorist songs. At a club at Broadway at the Beach on St. Patrick’s Day a couple of years ago I heard a duo singing the same songs about bombs, patriarchal terrorism and clannish spirit. No tips in the jar from me. After crawling out of bed last Thursday, I never realized I’d be having lunch with Jonathan Alter, a reporter from Newsweek and NBC, but as my black plastic spoon scooped stroganoff, I noticed the dude sitting beside me on the concrete bleacher was eyeballing my book “Terry Sanford.” “I didn’t know that was out,” said the Chicago native. “How old are you?” “Forty-two.” “I’m 44.” As we talked, I interviewed him, but he started questioning me about who I was voting for and what the political climate was in Horry County and South Carolina. “I’m talking about more anecdotally, you and your friends,” he said. Like Hannibal The Cannibal from “Silence of the Lambs,” I choose a quid pro quo. What’s it like covering a presidential campaign? “In South Carolina this is as good as it gets in American politics because it is so pivotal and so important. Now there have been other years in which it has been important, but never like this year. It’s like the whole thing pivots on Saturday. In other words, I think if McCain were to win big, he would basically be the nominee and very possibly the next president. “If he wins narrowly, we have a dogfight for the rest of the primary season. If he loses narrowly, I also think you also have a dogfight for the rest of the primary season. If Bush wins, then Bush is the nominee. It’s amazing how there are a lot of other states that have a little bit of influence, but really this year there are only two, New Hampshire and South Carolina, that are pivotal states. So it’s really central to who the next president’s going to be.” Any funny things happen on the trail? “I think the funniest thing is just being aboard McCain’s bus and being able to kind of fool around with the presidential candidate once and a while. He can be pretty funny. Personally I think it’s funny when he goes into his Manchurian Candidate riff, but you have to be a fan of the 1962 John Frankenheimer movie to really get what that’s all about. Bush actually has a good sense of humor also. He jokes around pretty well, the Democrats, to a lesser extent. “McCain is the only one who gives you a backstage pass to his campaign and travel on his bus. You are with him all the time. Now the interviews are pretty serious and sometimes pretty tough. Yesterday they had a political cartoonist of the Atlanta Constitution sketching all of us. I don’t mind him talking about the communist Trotskyite thing. On Tuesday I interviewed him on ‘The Today Show.’ I did a live interview with him. Right off the bat, he calls me, ‘Good morning, you communist.’ If somebody had told me I’d get a big laugh out of being called a communist on national television, I would have told them they should have their head examined, but I did think it was kind of funny.” You have to feel sorry over the blood spilled during the S.C. Republican Primary. My phone has McCain and Bush messages; the mailbox is packed with literature. I told my lunch date that South Carolina is crooked. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in, well, really, three weeks,” he said. “You’re talking to someone who has had an average of three hours of sleep,” Candy Crowley of CNN told me. “It feels pretty tiring. There are adrenalin rushes in between. That’s what reporters go for. It’s a pretty good story right now, what’s going to happen in South Carolina. New Hampshire was a really big story. Those adrenalin rushes I can relate to - I felt one the day my mamma called me and asked me if a story of an ex-mayor’s arrest in the Charlotte Observer was related to the same S.C. bordello I was fired over at The Florence Morning News. John Berman of ABC told me it was company policy for him not to comment to the media. It’s better to shut up sometimes. A Bush aide made me turn off the tape recorder in my shirt pocket because Bush couldn’t see it. The Texas Rangers were assholes at the university, pushing us around. Picking up our car and its new clutch at the shop, I brag to the lady about covering George Bush. “Who’s that?” she asks dead serious. What do you say? “Oh, just some guy,” I respond, embarrassed. My wife just called, saying there’s a message on the machine - “Hello, this is Sen. John McCain.....” Click-up. Dial tone. They won’t give up. I’m turning my beeper off. Phone call. Wife again. “You’ve got to hear this new message. It just came in.” A Bush call. Time to call it a week and forget about harassing political calls and missed CAT scan vein pricks, and read GEORGE magazine, listen to the new Warren Zevon and wait for next week’s new Steely Dan CD. Over and out. Thirty. Inside the Bush rally was like pinball jailhouse boogie. A fellow in a suit and a green lapel pin bullied me at the back door where I awaited the entrance of Bush and former Gov. Carroll Campbell with their entourage. “Who are you?” he asks. “Ah, who are YOU?” I reply. He mumbled something about being a Ranger, so I figured he used to be a hockey player who had to retire because of a life-threatening injury, so I ignored his boorish behavior for that of an invalid jock. “You’re not planning on getting Mr. Bush to sign that book are you?” “I brought something to read.” It’s clear he’s going to move me, so I look the other way, never looking into his Chuck Norris eyes. It was a good thing I had asked their advance girl to give me an extra press pass for my scrapbook. I might need it. Always ask for an extra press pass because if you get kicked out of an event, you’re going to need it to get back a side door. Then this sucker reaches into my brand new Banana Republic photojournalist vest, replete with pockets galore in which I can’t ever retrieve anything anymore. It’s like the Smithsonian. There’s a pair of $1 dollar-store reading glasses, 1.25, inside the lining, and I can’t get them out. It’s like they’re stuck in the Twilight Zone or something. He’s pulling out my orange press pass. I moved the spare to a secret compartment. He’s studying it like it was written in an ancient Egyptian script like the one Linda Blair spoke backwards in the Peter Blatty chiller. Turning up the Eric Clapton “Journeyman” now. “Is this you?” Hello? Hey there, motherraper! Sure nuff. No it’s Spiro frigging Agnew. “This is where the motorcade will be coming soon, and I’m not sure if anyone is allowed back here. You cannot enter this secure area from back here.” “I don’t want to go in.” He’s getting on my nerves now. I’m playing my hand cool because I’ll go in if he calls out the heat, but I’m a resident, and he hasn’t got any right to hassle me, and he knows it, and he realizes that I know it. I’m polite, but staunch. He gives up, looking stupid with my press pass in his hand, so he gestures toward my pocket, stopping an inch in front of the flap. I’m staring at his hand. I feel like biting it off. Then it comes to me he had been telling me that he was a Texas Ranger. I love that show. I love Chuck Norris. But Chuck Norris wouldn’t be frigging with me like this, and I would definitely bust the ass of Chuck Norris and pull out some high-fangled Southern karate on this sucker if need be. Members of the Horry County Fire Department are a rock’s throw away. “You may want to put this back.” He hands it to me. I have to put it back. It’s just like a traffic stop on the highway in the swampy sticks, like the S.C. Highway Patrol trooper who beat the hell out of a black lady on the interstate and his drunk cam caught it live. “Thanks.” I reach out to shake his hand. He doesn’t shake, but walks back into the building. I know he’ll return. Ten minutes later he comes back with a very important message. “I’ve just been in contact with their bus, and the campaign manager has said that there will be no media back here. Sorry. You’ll have to move to the front door area.” “No problem. Thanks.” My hand’s out, open. He shakes it. It’s as easy as that. Half an hour of my life wasted on staking out a good photo. Inside the attitude is happier. “I always liked him. I like what he stand for. I like his principles, and I like his dad and the job he did, so I think he’s the likely one to come in after these Democrats and keep things going,” said Surfside Beach Mayor Dick Johnson, soon retiring after many years of service. “It’s exciting,” said Alan Clemmons. chairman of the Horry County Republican Party. Alan gave me a Beasley T-shirt during the governor’s race last time. “I think it’s going real well. My race is going real well. There is a lot of excitement and a lot of undercurrent from the business community.” Lamont Grissette, a student, said, “I haven’t made up my mind yet. I don’t know yet. I’m sitting back debating. A couple of them are good. “Frank Curry, a World War II Army veteran, and John Baker, 54, of Columbia, were present. Baker served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, earning the Congressional Medal of Honor like Curry. They wore the medals proudly. “I received it from President Johnson May 3, 1968,” he said. “I think he’s going to be president of these United States.” “Why did I serve? I was 19 years old. I actually went in when I was 17, and I was looking for a little excitement,” said Curry, 75. He received his award in 1945 from his division commander overseas and likes Bush. It’s heinous hearing vets bitch against a P.O.W. This county’s full of them with several very active VFW posts. It’s very depressing. Makes you want to burn a flag. “I think he’s the best candidate of the two for my personal reasons,” said Curry. “I think he’s had more experience and leadership.” “He is the candidate, and I believe he’ll be the next president of the United States,” said Myrtle Beach Mayor Mark McBride. “I think it’s great to have him here in South Carolina,” said Horry County Council Chairman Chad Prosser. “I think he will have a strong showing on Saturday.” John Fogerty’s “Centerfield” blared as national media members took notes, retiring to the small gym to dispatch stories worldwide. My next quote comes from a guy I asked to sign my Hunter Thompson paperback, and I ask him to sign my book on Terry Sanford along with Bush, right below the McCain autograph. I wonder if I should ask this guy if he ever did coke with Bush, but I know I won’t get the autograph if I do. “I think it’s absolutely marvelous,” said Steve Gatlin. “He is my man. He has been my man from the get-go. I didn’t get a chance to vote for him in Texas because I’m in South Carolina. Larry voted for him because he is still a resident there. I did vote for his father. “It has to do so much with what you guys say and the spin and what happens and who gets hot and how momentums go. Senator McCain is a fine man, but my candidate is George Bush. I believe he is honest. I believe he will speak his mind. I believe he will make the right decisions in whatever happens in the next four years wherever our country goes. Plus I’d like for him to reduce my taxes.” “I want to thank you all for coming. This is a huge crowd,” Bush is saying to the crowd. “The veterans know I understand a promise made is a promise kept.” Bush recognized Curry and Baker. McCain will eventually take all the S.C. counties, so it really will not make a hoot here. “Please welcome these men,” he said. “You can judge a man by the company he keeps, and I’m keeping really good company.” Bush portrayed himself as an outsider from Washington. “I don’t want to be the federal superintendent of schools,” he said. “I believe in local control of schools. I trust the people of South Carolina to make decisions on schools.” A Florence school board member complained to him about too much paperwork. “We need a president who says what are the results because we want to know,” he said. Bush called for education rewards and cuts of funds for failed schools for accountability. “He was worried about federal policy that makes it hard for principals and teachers to keep control of the classrooms,” he said. “I intend to have a Teacher Protection Act.” It’s nothing but asses and elbows after the speech as zealous elephants and starry-eyed students surround the candidate, and I find myself behind South Carolina’s favorite son. While Gov. Jim Hodges is trying to get a lottery passed in South Carolina, former Gov. Download 2.99 Mb. Share with your friends:
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