Brown ribbon, its shiny surface spinning, a neon crimson bead the size of an insect eye
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Brown ribbon, its shiny surface spinning, a neon crimson bead the size of an insect eye blinking as the sour smell of three-day-old noodles lingers from a slimy sink, rats scuttling, roaches doing the 40 and hurdling motels. You’re crazy as hell to go into journalism. Go to a shrink. Kill yourself. Go to a pastor. Get help. You're going to need it in this global cage of non sequiturs. I'm too drunk to catch it. Swan-diving on the insect couch, I check for the spins with luck, so coherence keeps me conscious as the answering machine rewinds to the beginning of my first message. Have you ever sobered up so quickly you vomited before reaching the toilet? It’s a long run - longer than the walk into a baptismal pool. Walking in on a live message is always so embarrassing. You feel so very awkward for the caller; it's like walking in on someone else's conversation. I feel guilty for hearing it late. It's like Daddy said after 60 years without an answering machine; “If you call and I'm not here, call back. You'll get me sooner or later.” Syrupy Southern drawl. A male, maybe in his 30s. Caucasian. A visceral, instant recall of voices in my coral Meandrina reef. I’m starting to feel severely agitated, losing what’s left of hangover intoxication. It’s a dark dread, an apprehensive panic that I might recognize the voice. The real trepidation is when you cannot for the life of you recognize who it is leaving an anonymous message. Cloaked in an invisible hideout, the perp feels safe, knowing you don’t know, or at least hoping you won’t discover his address. “Fear is the parent of cruelty,” J.A. Froude said. Ever feel like killing your parents? I wasn’t frantic yet, but after I called all my crazy friends, I knew he would remain free from my alarm here in Mullins, S.C., 100 miles from Cape Fear. “You're dead. You hear me? You're a dead man.” Sandra used to always tell me that it's the threats you never get or hear about that one should be frightened of. But she never was one to get threats because she never was threatening as editor of the Watauga Democrat in Boone, N.C. It’s why I liked her more than any other editor - it could be that I work better for women, or maybe it was her protective sense. It made sense the first day she told me that, and the second time she dredged it out for a rerun, so by the third utterance, the arcane logic of such an editor's twisted logic was revolting and totally inconsistent with known fact, the proven blips on the cardiac EKG of journalism. I’m 51 today, nearing my 52nd Dec. 16, 2007. I’m the oldest of three boys, all Eagle Scouts. I flunked out at Appalachian State after an electrifying bad acid trip. I am bi-polar to the 1,000th degree, 250 pounds, six feet, blue eyes, brown hair. I’m not the usual journalist you meet on the street, the kind that cowers to power and bosses. I am a hammer journalist. Ears buzzing, I still hear Butch's voice in my grandmother's yard, daring me. “Go ahead, I dare you.” I love dares. Proving your insanity can be uplifting. Dares are hard to explain, especially the one born in my home state in 1587, the first yard ape born of English parents on Roanoke Island, but Virginia Dare disappeared in 1591 along with the members of the Lost Colony Andy Griffith used to recreate in an outdoor drama. Butch and I were only five years old, old enough to know how sweet Grandmamma Sanford’s magnolia tree's blossoms scented the East Laurinburg lawn, drowning out the harsh aroma of musky North Carolina tar down at the railroad track out front. I had a rock in my hand. It was perhaps the biggest wasp nest I'd ever see. Gulping, it was impossible to mask my fear as I stepped up to the plate, two yards from the humming hive. Don't ever dare me. “Here goes....nothing,” I yelled, winding back with a fast ball Willie McCovey Stratomatic- style couldn't hit. Unfortunately, my aim was true, and the rock sank into the soft cardboard shell, signaling the Rapture to a few hundred imbecile soldiers who took flight like the monkeys from Oz, butts in the air, stingers dripping poison. My grandmother was making her Lipton's, heavy on the lemon juice and strong enough to pucker the cheeks, and the pressure cooker was whistling over the roast while the pastry, what I called chicken 'n' dumplings, boiled in the steam-filled kitchen. There were turnips boiling too. “Pot liquor” is what Uncle Norman called it. My shrieks quickly persuaded my relatives to run out on the porch with Quicksilver feet where the sight of a child's swollen face, ears and throat must have struck the Methodist fear of God into their hearts. Bees have always scared me since that day, and it's hard to forget the pain, surge of poison and delusional madness that turned me into a mush puppet at Grandmamma's. Humming drowned out my shrill shrieks and my family's screams as I ran around the yard in circles, my brain and throat swelling. The wasps are still buzzing in my head, and the whorehouse is still open to this day five years after that horrible phone call. ************ 1989 The sound of sand sifting off your plastic construction helmet in the bowels of a small 20-foot pit is terrifying. I'm digging with a red-haired co-worker as the boss's face and sardonic grin is shielded in darkness from the sun's halo above us. “It's caving in,” I said. Suddenly a huge wall of large brown dirt clods breaks loose from the hole's wall above us, and I grab him as the heavy downfall misses us but seals our steel-toed boots in captivity on the future site of a paper mill. “I'VE GOT A BOOK LEFT IN ME! IT'S NOT MY TURN YET!” We celebrated our freedom from captivity with mega-brews a .22-shot away at the bar in a motel lounge where there is a “certain smell mixed with bleach and pine-scented cleaner. It's known up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Everyone's talking about Randy Travis from Marshville, the local cattle market and a love-obsessed bulldozer operator at the bar. We're at Trucker's Motel. It's a whorehouse, the most famous brothel on the Eastern Seaboard. A group of Lumbee Indians are gambling at one table as to who will collect the pot, a mound of cash which will pay for a blowjob. “You don't have anything do you?” “No! Never have. Those are sexy panties.” “You like? It'll be $50. You can have a half-and-half. You look like you had a hard day.” “It was rough on that bulldozer today. One guy got hit by lightning. We got off early.” “I'm going to get you off good. What's under those jeans? Looks like a big package.” Strawberry papers had gone out of style years ago, but Christy was still using them. “This is the third time this week. You must be really horny.” Wildman was developing a solid crush on this prostitute. Every night at the bar he'd sit, Slack-jawed, chin in palm with a Miller at arm's length. All he talked about was this chick on breaks. It was her name he was screaming when my apartment door on Parsonage Street flew open, his brown hair illuminated by a strange orange backlight, his eyes wide and bloodshot. Wildman was a deeply religious fellow. You see, he'd always have a talk with the Lord every day. However, on this particular day, we had been rained out, and his talk with Lord Calvert had gone south while taking a breather on the sofa during a French fry deep oil feast. His apartment was on fire. “Christy! Christy!” The bottle almost broke against my door as he shook me, confused and very intoxicated, not knowing how to prevent this wooden, two-story 1960s building from burning down. The stovetop's greasy blaze was about to light up the cabinets when I quickly grabbed his sheets, running water on them, and placing them over the roaring pot. Thick black smoke filled the room, as I knocked on doors, and guided him down the stairs. I was hocking up black oysters and blowing soot out of my nose for days. Wildman's fire today was below his belt, as his imaginary lover unbuckled his pants, mouthing her lips against his wet jeans' crotch, giving him a rise. “Can you use the warm water and that tin dish? It feels good.” “I know you're clean.”
“Why?”
“You know. It never strikes twice.” Christy went through the motions running her tongue over her teeth, suggestively, cupping her bosoms, twisting her nipples as Wildman bit his lip until it bled. “Can you give me a hickey?” Ten strokes left. “You sure you're not a cop?” Wildman smiled, slapping her on the butt with both hands, enough make them pink. “What'd you do that for?” “I ain't no cop. I swear! This place will never get busted. It hasn't yet, has it?” “You never know.” Five. His pulse was 120, blood pressure steady at 140 over 90. The fluid was building at the base as his tensed groin milked and pumped. Grinding, she could see it in his eyes. Four. Glazed, his toes tickled her's. He pinched her, grunting. Her breasts were glistening with perspiration. Three. Now she let it fly, humping fast as she could, feeling him harder inside. “I'm not a cop! Are you going to come with me this time?” “You can't never be sure!” she yelled, grinning as the radio's reception faded into static. Gurgling, the backed up sewer burped a bubble up into the bathroom's commode. Two. While most of the other customers visualized two other hookers joining them nude, sucking and caressing at this point, Wildman was fantasizing of wedding bells, a tux, his family and the surveying crew as his best men. “Give it to me! I want you to come! Shoot it! My pussy's hot!” “Could we go out sometime?” “No! Absolutely not! Keep your mind on your cock!” His sweaty stomach was trembling, hard with tensed muscles, as he felt her teeth bite into his neck, her finger shoved way up into him as he stopped concentrating and went limp, letting his genitals go on overdrive by themselves. One. On the last thrust, she did what he paid her to do every time, the tip. She hopped up off the bed and stood there, fingering herself on his order as he ejaculated on his own, groaning and calling for his mother. As Christy used her white cotton terrycloth robe to dry him, she licked his Harley tattoo. “You sure ain't no cop.” Wildman was sobbing, holding his face in his hands, telling her to get the hell out of the room. ************** “Thank you suh.” That's what Jim Ed Williams of Laurinburg and I used to say to each other when we were 14 working in the hot cornfields detassling seed corn stalks. I had a Social Security card at 13. “You're fired!” “Thank you suh!” One of us would start it off with that in honor of the way I defied my football coach, our boss in the field, during the summers between football seasons. Once I drove a detassling machine in a ditch of curdling nasty standing water - on purpose - earning us a bonus 30-minute break in the 103-degree 1 p.m. heat. “Thank you suh!” we would retort after getting a fake firing order. Well, I just got my 112th one today on the Sabbath. Just got called into the editor's office and fired for telling the truth which no one owns. Everybody just shares the truth in a collaborative effort. Nobody has a franchise on the truth like Col. Sanders does on his secret recipe of herbs and spices. It was a solemn session. No histrionics. Just Frank, Bob and me in Frank’s office. Bathos. Panther breath on your neck. Frank was my editor at the Florence Morning News newspaper. I started my newspaper career at The Appalachian, the campus rag in Boone, N.C. at Appalachian State. Then I worked at the Hickory Daily Record for a year, writing under a nom de plume of Kid Charlemagne at FOCUS in Hickory. Later I moved to the Marion Star after living at the whorehouse for a while. When the paper wouldn’t publish articles I wrote about a female murderer, I took my work to the Florence rag. In Frank’s office I thought I'd feel noble and happy and proud, but instead I feel depressed, embarrassed and semi-high on a six pack. I couldn't help myself. I had to go with it. There was no other alternative. I respect no authority because it doesn't respect me. Nobody tells me what to do. I suppose I've let everybody down except myself. I'm proud of my work. It's the best on the planet, and no one can tell me otherwise. I feel better writing about it. I kept my mouth shut. “Do you admit that I told you to lay off this story?” Silence. “Your employment is terminated as of today. Have you got the key to the building on you?” Reaching in my pocket, I felt the sharp corners of a Bud bottle cap, a few paper matchsticks and my key ring. If you can measure a man’s worth by the number of keys on his key ring, my worth was sinking, and the key ring would be lighter once I returned home and bought an illegal Sunday six-pack at the local package store on my revolving credit account. I know now how far power extends in this state. It's like I told Peggy Jordan our backdoor childhood neighbor during a Sunday night prayer meeting on her family's porch. As we held hands in a prayer, we were each to say what we wanted. I said I just wanted to make sure that my life touched a lot of people and that I had a positive effect on the world. What am I going to tell everybody? My parents are going to be so pissed off. Mamma will go silent with the Amish treatment Daddy has mastered and talk to me in short sessions for several months until I get a job. When I lose a job, my mother usually doesn’t talk to me at all or call for a few months, and when we make contact, her demeanor is brief, curt. And my girlfriend is going to go ape . She will become my wife a year and a half from this point. I suppose I need to hit the job trail at 7 a.m. tomorrow after I finish throwing up vomit all over the white bathroom tiles. I've got to remember to hold my head up high in honorable regal splendor and hide my anguished pain. It feels like I've just been naked in front of 10,000 laughing citizens. At least I'm not a public figure anymore. It's time to slink back into the wormy citizenry of meaningless, powerless orphans of political prowess. Move over Rover, let Timmy take over. Somewhere, somebody is on my side. Something supports me in a teeny tiny corner where the cockroaches inch in through the sandy piles of dirt, a place where only the worthy, the wise, the brave and the tall cower in lonely isolation. All fall down. Every last durn one of them. The heck with every one of them, the sorry baby rapers. I don't give a hot crap what anybody says. Sorry no-good criminal mothers. I feel like I've beendrilled in the ass. Gorilla head monkey mothers. Hardhead, diehard blowhards. Censor me, will you? Well, the heck with you! Drill you in the ass, you slimy piece of feces. I don't need your sorry slipshod editing skills anymore to mess up my stories and butcher them beyond readability, slandering the poor and worshipping the rich Republican powerhogs. Take that, you sorry excuses for human flesh, in the balls, and don't ever censor with me again because you'll be sorry. Nobody messes with me. I don’t take crap any more. Nobody. There goes my New Year's resolution. I told myself I wouldn't use the Lord's name in vain any this year, and I won't anymore, but I had to get that last one out. I won't do it anymore - I promise, okay? I seek forgiveness for everything bad I've ever done, and I hope you can find it in your big blue heart to say I was right and everybody else was wrong for once in my life. Maybe I can get some writing done now. A fresh outlook. No, I'm still depressed. I'll deal with this tomorrow. The ultimate procrastination. These humongous balls of mine need a rest and a rubdown. At first, I was extremely paranoid and lost sleep, having trouble getting to sleep and imagining that someone was outside my window or at the front door, or worse, the back door. The most frightening reoccurring nightmare I've ever have that I could recall was one that started when I was very young. It was when my parents and I were living at 315 First Street in Laurinburg, a modest wood home with a front porch, back yard and garage. This was in 1958 or so when the milkman was still delivering those large-lipped thick glass bottles on the front porch full of cold cow juice. The nightmare would begin and end at different points as I grew older, but the effect was still chilling each time and wrenching. I'd be asleep or at home alone or the only one up when a knock would come at the front door, which was shielded in reality by an off-white curtain. As I approached the door in my pajamas, I could always make out a shadowy figure on the other side. Sometimes the wind would be blowing. Others rain pelted the front porch as tree-sized lightning bolts cracked, illuminating this mysterious figure. My tiny hand reached out to grasp the door knob and unlock it to see who was at the door and answer it. The person is knocking all the time. Continuously. It's not loud. It's audible from the living room, a rapping at the pane. Then I start getting scared. I'm terrified and frozen as an arresting force captivates my spinal cord like a bedsheet's tickling my back in a tender spot or something. I'm frozen. I can't move, and I'm standing there like a deer in the headlights. The visitor may be man. It could be an old lady, but I could never tell. It always seems inhuman with the half the anatomy of a beast. Then comes the ghoulish part. “Who's there?” I sound off. The intruder is not a force of good, but one of dark evil, a messenger of devilish power. I can't move as the visitor unmasks his sex by laughing this haunting laugh, a loud chortle that reminds me that I'm in a dream because it's not waking anybody else up, and I may be the only one hearing it. I awakened many times as a child, perspiring and shaking and crawling in bed with my parents as an earache or illness choked my psyche. The German measles were rough, according to my mother, and so was the appendicitis and earaches. The door begins to open very slowly and the illumination of the streetlight floods into the room from the front porch, and I still can't move because the figure is black and unreadable. The hideous laugh continues as he walks in closer to me. This is about the time that I've wet the bed, and I'm praying to the cub god of Celestial Seasonings’ Sleepytime to rescue me and save me by allowing me to seize consciousness and awaken by biting my lip. He always came close to me, but he never actually touched me that I can remember, and I'm glad about that. The dream's end usually came about the time and the age when I became a professional wake-up artist, pinching myself, grunting in REM. The Dark Avenging Demon never got me, and I stopped allowing him to interfere with my rest process at about age 10. But he's still there, and whenever I have a nightmare now and there is always a figure behind a window in another dream, I know it's him. He's waiting for me, and one night he'll find me like an accused murderess is probably planning to do while she's spending her incarceration over the stove cooking chicken bog. Let's go meet Miss America. Should I softball it? She's from South Carolina, Aiken, but I'm actually an expatriated Tar Heel living in exile here, so we're even. ********* 1994 As reporters we're taught that (c) “Public record” includes all books, papers, maps, photographs, cards, tapes, recordings or other documentary materials regardless of physical form or characteristics prepared, owned, used, in the possession of, or retained by a public body. It's public information. The S.C. Code of Laws puts it like this: SECTION 16-15-90. Prostitution; lewdness, assignation and prostitution generally. It shall be unlawful to: (1) Engage in prostitution; (2) Aid or abet prostitution knowingly; (3) Procure or solicit for the purpose of prostitution; (4) Expose indecently the private person for the purpose of prostitution or other indecency; (5) Reside in, enter or remain in any place, structure, building, vehicle, trailer or conveyance for the purpose of lewdness, assignation or prostitution; (6) Keep or set up a house of ill fame, brothel or bawdyhouse; (7) Receive any person for purposes of lewdness, assignation or prostitution into any vehicle, conveyance, trailer, place, structure or building; (8) Permit any person to remain for the purpose of lewdness, assignation or prostitution in any vehicle, conveyance, trailer, place, structure or building; (9) Direct, take or transport, offer or agree to take or transport or aid or assist in transporting any person to any vehicle, conveyance, trailer, place, structure or building or to any other person with knowledge or having reasonable cause to believe that the purpose of such directing, taking or transporting is prostitution, lewdness or assignation; (10) Lease or rent or contract to lease or rent any vehicle, conveyance, trailer, place, structure or building or part thereof believing or having reasonable cause to believe that it is intended to be used for any of the purposes herein prohibited; or (11) Aid, abet, or participate knowingly in the doing of any of the acts herein prohibited. SECTION 16-15-100. Prostitution; further unlawful acts. It shall further be unlawful to: (1) Procure a female inmate for a house of prostitution; (2) Cause, induce, persuade or encourage by promise, threat, violence or by any scheme or device a female to become a prostitute or to remain an inmate of a house of prostitution; (3) Induce, persuade or encourage a female to come into or leave this State for the Download 2.99 Mb. Share with your friends:
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