“Don’t rub it up, goddamn. Look at it. Whichen is it?” the man said. He leaned on a house cue stick so warped it could’ve been used as a bow. I saw a knife blade spack glare from his other hand.
I said, “I don’t know.” I looked down to see a perfectly carved visage on one side of the chalk. “Yeah, it’s one or the other. But I’m not so sure I’d know Stonewall Jackson or John the Baptist if they both walked in the door.”
This old man jerked his head once and held out the hand with his knife in it. I handed over the chalk. Two men from a fruitcake company—they wore work shirts with various candied ingredients sewn above their pockets—started a game of eight ball. The one who broke barely made the rack move, as if he was challenging Newton’s action and reaction theory.
“It’s one or the other, I believe, but I can’t remember. And I carved the son-bitch,” the man said. “Goddamn it to hell, I’mo have to get my book out again and see who this looks like. I got a book I keep at home. It’s got famous people’s pictures in it. Everything I carve ends up looking like somebody, somewhere.” He handed the miniature near-bust back. “You figure it out and let me know.”
Then he walked out. When he got to the door, without turning around, he yelled out, “If Stonewall Jackson and John the Baptist came in this bar alive and you couldn’t tell the difference, I feel sorry for you, boy. One would be a-rolling and one would be a-strolling.”
I had my back to the two pool players. One of them said, “I bet Brother Macon’s on his way to the schoolhouse. They already told him he couldn’t steal they chalk no more.”
I went over to the four-stool bar and ordered a beer from a woman who wore the expression of a Rose of Sharon bud about to blossom. “You a buyer?” she asked me.
I said, “No ma’am. My last name’s Dawes.”
“Huh,” she said. “That’s not what I ast you, but that’s aw-ight.”
MY NEW BOSS, Marcel Parsell, suggested that I start in Claxton, move my way north to Tallulah Falls, Georgia, then drive east to Chimney Rock, North Carolina, south to Denmark, South Carolina, then back west. He said I could then go inward, always traveling clockwise in a smaller and smaller circle. This was my first real, not-gotten-by-my-father job. I was working for a disgruntled ex-editor of Fodor’s travel guides who wanted to put out a book about places in the United States to avoid completely. From what I had gathered, from this year onward he would hire fifty or sixty new high school graduates every June to write sarcastic thousand-words-or-less articles about towns that offered no real cultural, artistic, or dining experiences. It was supposed to look like we’d gotten a scholarship, I guess. “A book like this will make everyone in bigger cities feel better about themselves and their lives. Plus, this idea has trade paperback bestseller written all over it, from here on out.” I had answered an ad that read, “Like to travel for money?” Imagine that. How come my high school counselor never veered me toward a class in economics or ethics or logic, or ever took one herself?
I said to the bartendress, “I’m here because I’m writing a book on little-known places you might want to visit.” I didn’t want to end up being lynched for making fun of whatever slight populace inhabited places like Claxton, Georgia. And, since I hadn’t taken that ethics course at Forty-Five High, I felt no remorse about lying outright.
Marcel Parsell—who had studied both geography and culinary arts—told my new colleagues and me that, just as it was okay to exaggerate how wonderful a city might appear, it was all right to exaggerate its limitations. “A local roadside diner that brags on its pork-flavored ice cream isn’t a bad thing for our purposes,” he said. I took notes.
“That man gave you piece chalk ain’t like our regular people around here,” the barmaid said. “Don’t judge Claxton or its peoples from crazy Brother Macon. He says God told him to carve what he could into people God blessed before. He chose chalk ’cause it’s made down in Macon. He seen a reason and connection.”
I said, “I won’t judge y’all by one man’s vision.”
“Hey!” she yelled. “This boy here’s writing a book about us!”
At first I thought I’d’ve been better off only skimming the outskirts of all my tiny prearranged towns, that I should’ve been objective while detailing odd Catfish or Bucktooth festivals. Marcel Parsell handed all of us a ten-point dos-and-don’ts bulletin that included not falling in love with a local and not believing mayors.
I got paid fifty dollars for every article that made it into a book that ended up being called Wish You Weren’t Here. I got paid five bucks for the towns Marcel Parsell decided against. This was 1976. I had no clue about money and saw myself getting about three grand over a two-month period, then moving on to work for the South American, European, and Australian versions of the same book, working college summers. It didn’t occur to me that if fifty travel writers each got fifty thousand-word essays published, the book might be a little on the thick side. I didn’t realize that staying in twelve-dollar-a-night motels went way beyond extravagant, that maybe I should’ve considered KOA camp grounds or the backseat of my old Jeep at roadside rest areas.
I never got the chance. What I learned immediately in Claxton—the Fruitcake Capital of the World—was that there were citizens who would pay decent money to have their place sound utopian, and just as many people who would offer favors to keep strangers away.
“Oh, I’ll tell you all you fucking want to know about a place people elsewhere think we make fruitcakes for door stops,” one of the pool players said.
“No, no,” said his opponent. “This is a good place to raise children. Come talk to me about here.”
Not that this has anything to do with my story, but over the years I’ve learned that any human who brags about his or her town being a good place to raise kids only says so because that particular town has no art museum that kids might beg their parents to visit. There’s no theater without the word LITTLE on the sign. The horrendous school system doesn’t offer after-school field trips and activities outside of dollar-admission sporting events. Nothing dangerous exists that might cause parents to think and act in these places. I was brought up in the town of Forty-Five, South Carolina, by God—the Raise Children Here Capital of the World.
Maybe my future background in anthropology jaded me, though.
I stood in the Rack Me roadhouse bar and fingered my carved cube of chalk. I didn’t mention how I wasn’t really writing a book solely on the Fruitcake Capital but tried to emit an air that, at any moment, I might change my mind and load up the Jeep, find some people to talk to in the Pecan Roll Capital of the World.
The barmaid opened a drawer beneath the cash register and handed me a dozen carved blue pieces of Brother Macon’s chalk. The best one looked like Mount Rushmore on all sides and the bottom. The worst might’ve been one of those famous pirates, or a Cyclops, or James Joyce.
LOOKIT: THE AD went, “Do you want to make money and travel?” Then there was a non-1-800 number to call for a preliminary interview. For all I know, everyone who called made it through the first hurdle. I was asked to send a biographical essay, a descriptive essay about my hometown, an argumentative essay concerning my views on cats versus dogs, and a comparison-contrast essay about any two fast food chains. I almost told the truth about myself, Forty-Five, and dogs because I got kind of tired of the whole process. My final essay went, “I only know diners and home-cooked meals built over a fire out back. I’m from a town called Forty-Five, named after a piece of vinyl that revolves second-fastest.” The stuff about my place of training wasn’t all true, of course, but I feel certain now that it got me the job.
I didn’t tell Marcel Parsell any of the other theories, of course, dealing with community theaters and art museums or the lack thereof. He called me, went over the payment situation, and said I could start immediately. He sent his ten dos and don’ts—my favorite, rule number nine, went, “Never let them see you spit out food”—and I drove to Claxton with a suitcase, some Mead c
omposition notebooks, a cheap handheld tape recorder, and a camera.
I returned from Rack Me to my motel outside Claxton, a little L-shaped place called the Fall Inn. It advertised free TV, radio, and telephone. The dozen doors to the place were each painted a different pastel shade, which I learned later was symbolic of the different colored candies in a five-pound fruitcake.
I wasn’t in the room five minutes on my first night when the phone rang. I expected my dad, or my imaginary girlfriend checking up on me, or Marcel Parsell wanting to offer congratulations on my first day at Wish You Weren’t Here. I cleared my throat and said, “Mendal Dawes,” all professional, like I had seen Frank Sinatra do in a 1950s movie that showed up at the Forty-Five Drive-In Theatre in 1972 or thereabouts.
It was the desk clerk. She said, “I’m calling to see if there’s anything you need, hon.”
When I checked in, she’d not spoken at all, just taken my cash money and handed me a crude flyer explaining check-out time and how I shouldn’t leave lights or the TV on unnecessarily. The woman looked to be my age, and held her face in a way that told me she didn’t hold fruitcake-working people in the highest regard. I said, “I’m fine.”
“This is Cammie at the front desk.”
I said, “Yeah.”
“You sure you don’t need anything? It’s free. Soap, towels, a big old bucket of ice.” She paused and lowered her voice. “You know. Anything you want.”
It’s hard to be a man and admit that I didn’t recognize nuance at the age of eighteen. I said, “I wouldn’t mind a beer, I guess, but y’all don’t sell them in the Coke machine and the only store I’ve seen out this way won’t open until morning.” I took all of Brother Macon’s carved cue chalks out of my pants pockets and lined them up around the rotary telephone. One of them looked exactly like Cammie—at least how I remembered her, all slack-jawed and blank-faced at check-in time. It might not have been carved at all, I thought. Or maybe Brother Macon had carved a Night of the Living Dead character, I don’t know.
Cammie said in a drawl that could come only out of a southern, southern woman with a mouth full of honey, “Beer. Well, at least that’s a start,” and hung up.
The television received two channels. One showed the local news. Before I finished watching a piece with Claxton’s mayor explaining why the jail needed two more cells added on, Cammie let herself in with a passkey. She carried two quart bottles of Schlitz under one arm, and held an ice bucket. I said, “Okay. All right. Come on in. Make yourself at home and tell me all about your lovely hometown.”
She set everything down on a chair. “So word is you’re the famous man come down here to write about all us. Call me patriotic, but I want you to know what a friendly place we got.” She took out a church key and opened one bottle. “Don’t think we’re only fruitcakes here. They’s much more to offer for fun.”
I got off the bed and found two wax-paper-wrapped drinking glasses from the bathroom. I called out, “Oh, I know that. I’m only supposed to find places like this that’re misunderstood.”
I don’t want to come across as crude or insensitive—and I need to make a point that I didn’t instigate what occurred soon thereafter. The only other thing I remember Cammie telling me was, “We have field days all the time down at the rec center. It’s a great place to raise children. I won the sack race one time. Back then I still went by my given name, Camellia. My momma let me change it when I turned old enough.”
I’m pretty sure that’s what she announced. I wanted to call up my father and tell him what I went through on my first real job. I wanted to say a bunch of things concerning the life of an artiste.
I focused on the television, though. The local weather man said it would be another hot and humid day.
MAYBE 1976 CLAXTON ran similarly to those backwards southern TV-sitcom towns where everyone eavesdrops on party lines, I don’t know. But on my second day of full-time work I drove into town and hadn’t gotten even close to the chamber of commerce office before I was stopped by people from all walks of life eager to exaggerate their hometown’s worth and/or drawbacks. I couldn’t figure it out, unless when Cammie left my motel room by midnight she’d called her best friend or mother and had her information stolen by half of the population. A woman at the drugstore, where I went to buy batteries for the tape recorder and headache powders for my hangover, said, “I can tell you that we have the clearest water between the Mississippi River and Richmond, Virginia, at least.”
Out on the sidewalk, a Lion’s Club member selling straw brooms said, “I’ve lived all over the place: Savannah, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Talladega. Not one of my neighbors in any of those cities ever asked me and the wife over for a barbecue supper. Here in Claxton, it happens almost every night. You got any children, son?”
I smiled and shook hands with complete strangers and nodded. A woman from Claxton Flowers ran out of her shop and gave me a boutonniere. A man from Claxton Gulf went out of his way to offer a free oil change and tire rotation. A cop came out of nowhere and handed me two complimentary tickets to the Claxton Policeman’s Ball, which turned out to be a square dance held at the VFW. I got stopped by a man and woman in front of what appeared to be a vacant theater of sorts. Both of them wore Bobby Jones alpaca golf sweaters, and they shifted their weights from leg to leg. I slowed down. “We want you to know that people have come out of here and done good for themselves,” the woman said.
“Grainger Koon’s in the movies. He’s got a list of credits longer than our telephone directory. He played Crazy Customer in one movie,” the woman said. “He’s played Man at Bar, Man on Bench, Man without Glasses, and Man with Goat—all in the same year. I forget what movies, though. What were some of the titles, LaFoy?”
“I don’t recall, either,” LaFoy said to me. “But you’d know him if you saw him. He’s got a good face. He played Man Who Falls Off Dock in one of those teen movies. Me and Peggy here, we both taught him singing and dancing lessons. At the rec center. Grainger was in a Munsters episode, too.”
“It’s a good place to raise children,” Peggy said.
“That’s what I understand,” I said, but didn’t go into my theory about people who make such claims.
I walked and waved like a returning hero, or at least like a celebrity who had returned home after appearing as Scary Man in Park. I picked litter off of the sidewalk and carried it down Main Street until I found a receptacle. The hardware-store man came outside and handed me two complimentary yardsticks, and a beautician offered me a haircut. I could only wonder what these people would do should a rock star or visiting dignitary happen by. I kind of stood in front of the local bank, waiting for a teller to come out with a bag of unmarked currency.
And it was in front of the bank that a woman pulled her 1976 Pinto into a parking space and wiggled her finger for me to heed. I leaned down to the closed passenger window and heard her say, “Get in.”
I did, what the hell.
Her name was Lulinda. She worked at the fruitcake factory, but her husband drove an eighteen-wheeler coast-to-coast. “I heard that you were in town, and I thought you might want to know what most people down here won’t offer up.”
I said, “Okay. I appreciate that.” What could I say? She wore a polka-dotted cotton dress, the hem of which might’ve come down to her knees had she not hiked it up past mid-thigh.
She introduced herself and drove in the direction of my motel room. That’s where I figured we were going. I kind of wished that I had more than one old high school friend to tell all of these stories about Claxton women.
“We won’t keep you long, but we wanted to make sure you knew why no one should visit here, among other things.” I caught the we. I tried to remember if, in the movies, hostages opened a moving vehicle’s passenger door and tried to run, or if they covered their heads and rolled like crazy. I said, “I can’t be gone too long. The mayor’s expecting me. And the police chief,” which wasn’t true. I wondered what I should do with the yardsticks I
had leaned against my right side. I glanced over at Lulinda’s panties more than once.
We passed the Fall Inn and ended up at Rack Me. The parking lot was full. Lulinda said, “They ain’t nothing to worry about. You ain’t gone get hurt none,” and smiled. She parked a distance from any of the pickup trucks and said, “I don’t want anyone backing up into my car and exploding it.” I carried the yardsticks inside but left the boutonniere on Lulinda’s cracked dashboard. I went over kung-fu moves in my mind, how to deflect pool cues with my own two weapons. At the door of Rack Me the only thing I thought about was how difficult it would be to keep my Claxton, Georgia—Fruitcake Capital of the World—essay down to a thousand words.
Brother Macon stood at the bar, across from the barmaid I’d met the night before. The same two pool players were there, too, along with a group of a half dozen men wearing blue jean jackets. Brother Macon tossed me a cue-stick chalk and said, “This is for you, son. It’s Marco Polo. He traveled around writing about places, too.”
“It ain’t too early for you to join us in a beer, is it?” one man said. He reached over the counter and pulled a can of PBR from the cooler. “My name’s Gerald. Just like our president.”
I said, “No sir.”
Lulinda went back to the door and locked it. I could feel my knees shaking, just like any other normal cartoon character. My palms sweat so badly I went ahead and leaned the yardsticks against a barstool.
“You can’t write no story about us, saying how Claxton would be a perfect place to bring the family on summertime vacations,” another man said. He took the can of beer, opened the pop-top, and handed it to me. “We’d rather not go into detail, so let’s just leave it at that.”
Lulinda said, “It has to do with things changing, and things staying the same, and things changing. And then staying the same.”
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