Between Wrecks

by George Singleton

  I didn’t write poetry.

  But I cannot honestly say that I didn’t occasionally veer from my main focus. Whenever possible—whenever I had access to an electric outlet, television set, and VCR, I lost myself in the cutting-edge, miraculous, absurd film productions of writer-directors Jim Jarmusch, Ethan and Joel Coen, and David Lynch. I don’t think it takes a protégée and/or devotee of Dr. Sigmund Freud to understand that perhaps I needed to “actively participate” in such masterpieces as Blue Velvet, Down By Law, Raising Arizona, Eraser-head, Elephant Man, Broken Flowers, Night on Earth, Barton Fink, and the Big Lebowski in order to feel that my life wasn’t as horrendous as it could be. Miller’s Crossing. Twin Peaks. Mystery Train. I suppose this notion goes all the way back to Aristotle, but last time I checked he didn’t have a medical degree and background in psychiatry à la Sigmund Freud, and all that crap about “catharsis” that they teach in the English courses.

  Now, I understand that I could be accused of sucking up to these absolute geniuses, but after reading No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee, I think that anyone would easily say, “You know, that would make a great movie!” Hell, it would make two great movies, if you ask me. First off, there could be a regular bio-pic of the life and times of Columbus Choice. I doubt that any filmmaker in his or her right mind would want to call the thing—even if it became one of those Hallmark movies aired on the Lifetime or Oxygen channels—No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee. You couldn’t even get all that title out on the screen hardly. I’m surprised the art department at the publisher didn’t flinch and say they didn’t want to put out a dust wrapper with nine point font all across the top. Anyway, the bio-pic could be, I’ve been thinking, called something shorter, like Columbus, or Choice, or Columbus Choice, or Fresh Fish and Mantras, or Hang, Stab, Shoot. And then it’ll have “Based on the work of Stet Looper,” down at the bottom, you know.

  So, you got that. And then another movie could be the one of my life while I wrote the biography No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee. It would start right off inside my History 101 class at Tennessee Valley Community College, and then maybe go through some flashbacks involving my shanking a punt over my teammates’ heads on the sidelines and into the bleachers like the time we played Ole Miss, and then maybe I could do a voiceover, you know, and so on. I’d call that one something like Tennessee!, or Oak Ridge, or Between Harriman and Oak Ridge, or Legal Pads and Sterno. Or Juanita.

  I would’ve liked to have thanked the great movie director Robert Altman, but he went off and died. His movies made me feel better about myself—especially Nashville, seeing as it’s in the same state as where I live. So no thanks to good Robert Altman. I am remiss in thanking Robert Altman. You know why I don’t go to funerals? Answer: Those people aren’t going to mine.

  Juanita Wilkins, phlebotomist, says I can’t forget, and need to thank, Roman Polanski in this list. So what the hell, okay, though I can’t think of one of his movies that made me feel better. Maybe they’re not on videotape yet. Maybe they’re on that DVD thing that everyone’s talking about down at the library.

  And there must be other directors I’ll think of later.

  While I’m alluding to the this-makes-me-feel-better-about-my-self-and-therefore-I-got-the-opportunity-not-to-get-into-full-blown-manic-depression mode, I want to thank the Tennessee Valley Recreation League Baseball Association, and particularly the team sponsored by one of those interdenominational churches run by a guy with a goatee and a high school diploma who used to do a lot of crystal meth before the Lord told him to become a minister and spread the word. I’m not making it up when I say that the place was called the Second Coming United Ministries, and the poor little ten-year-olds had S.C.U.M spread across their uniforms like badges of dishonor. Another S.C.U.M.! How weird is that?—first the Southern Confederation of United Militia, and now the Second Coming United Ministries.

  Anyway, these kids were absolutely dreadful. Not even Michael Ritchie, who directed the classic movie The Bad News Bears, could’ve brought any hope or humor into these children’s lives. If you’ve ever seen little kids out in the outfield staring up at the sky, or chasing butterflies, or looking into the stands forlornly because their fathers didn’t show up, or picking their noses, or talking to themselves, or holding their peckers thinking that no one can see them out there, or pretending that they’re running a standard muscle car through the gears, or running over to tackle one of the other outfielders on the team because of seasonal confusion disorder—if you’ve seen this, and multiply it by ten, then you’ll understand the Second Coming United Ministries Fighting Laymen, whom I’m pretty sure had been instructed to speak in tongues while in the field. How can a kid speak in tongues? If you got those kids to speak in tongues at the same time that the Amazing Hundred Member Marching Jew’s Harp Twangers went into something like an instrumental version of “Smoke on the Water,” I do believe that specters would emerge from inanimate objects and take over the planet.

  On a side note, I always thought they should’ve been called the Suckers, or the Bags.

  Anyway, I could’ve never finished Columbus Choice’s bio, I doubt, without watching the S.C.U.M. Fighting Laymen lose games, on average, by twenty runs. I don’t know why, but that touchy-feely rule employed in more liberal, understanding, fore-sightful No Child Left Behind states wherein if a Little League team gets behind by seven or ten runs then the game’s over—places like South Carolina, even—never found its way to this particular region of Tennessee. I’d go watch a game and then always go back to wherever I lived at the time and crank out something like a thousand words pertaining to Columbus Choice. If baseball season lasted year-round, and the Second Coming United Ministries Fighting Laymen played daily, I would’ve finished the biography in a hundred and twenty days.

  I want to thank the Second Coming United Ministries’ choral director, Ms. Emilia Perkins, for a couple things. First off, although I do not believe in that Bible stuff whatsoever, except perhaps the story of Job, I have found it uplifting to listen to Ms. Perkins’s choir selections, which lean over into what might be called the “African-American gospel.” Those songs where everyone’s clapping, swaying, and wailing out things. I have no evidence as to whether Columbus Choice enjoyed this kind of music. As a child, I know for a fact that he attended an A.M.E. church. Before his stint in the military, he probably attended Sunday and Wednesday services like most people in the South. Anyway, when I hear the Second Coming United Ministries choir—it’s purely a coincidence that I happened by the front door of the ex-storefront on Sunday mornings—it causes me to know that there’s a joyous reason to give the world something like No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee. And I’m happy that it makes people like Juanita Wilkins, phlebotomist and soprano, happy to be singing, gyrating, and verging toward seizure.

  I’m grateful to goatee-wearing high school graduate ex-meth addict Reverend Frankie Spigner for sending off to one of those places in order to get a license to marry people.

  Fearless and curious dogs have enough problems, but a dog forced to live in questionable places—say, at the Frozen Head State Park Campground, drinking tainted water straight out of the stream and eating renegade campers’ leftovers that fall out of trash bins—surely risks more diseases and parasites than the normal suburban-living poodle. My dog Dooley wouldn’t still be here if it weren’t for the good people at Intervet manufacturing all the way over in Vienna, Austria, and distributed by Intervet, Inc. of Millsboro, Delaware. To be more specific, I want to thank Intervet for their wonderful product, Panacur C, a canine dewormer with fenbendazole granules. Listen, all those other over-the-counter products might work for roundworms and hookworms—and I stress “might”—but Panacur C eradicates those tough-to-kill whip-worms that live in the soil, plus tapeworms.
You’d think that a dog wouldn’t get bored living at a campground, but he does, at times. What does he do when there are no squeaky toys around with which to play? He eats dirt. He digs for moles, and he eats dirt. And gets whipworms.

  People who read long biographies out there, you do not want to be stuck in a two-person pup tent on the banks of Flat Fork Creek with a dog suffering whipworms. I won’t go into great detail, but the whipworm’s effects on a dog’s alimentary canal is about the same as what happens to a human after a barium enema, or after drinking a glass of Epsom salts, or after drinking the most tainted water possible down in Mexico, or after eating some good Christian family’s left-out-in-the-sun-too-long macaroni salad and potato salad on a picnic table while they go for a hike up to the lookout tower in order to view the Cumberland Plateau in one direction and the Great Smoky Mountains in the other and to thank God for giving them such a spectacular existence.

  It would be remiss of my not mentioning this: Panacur C, which comes in 1-, 2-, and 4-gram packets (one gram per ten pounds of dog body weight), carries a warning that goes “Keep this and all medications out of the reach of children.” I guess it’s some kind of FDA approval law. I don’t want to become relentlessly graphic, but right before I finally sold No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee, when things were looking bleakest, maybe I had no other choice (no pun intended) but to keep Dooley’s medication “within my reach.”

  An amateur psychologist—which means any person living on this planet only the width of a piece of paper away from being a “certified” psychologist—might say that I cried out for help. This is just to say, as that poet wrote in that famous poem, that I took the last of the dewormer. And now I have one less problem to worry about when I’m on a jet, flying around to book signings and festivals.

  Goody’s 520 Milligram Powders, made by Goody’s Pharmaceuticals over in Memphis, with their Tamper Evident Safety Overwrap. BC Powders. Aleve. Tylenol. St. Joseph’s Baby Aspirin. Rite Aid Lightly Coated Easy to Swallow 325 Milligram Aspirin Tablets. Bayer, of course. Excedrin. Advil. Anacin.

  I need to thank all of these products. Deep down, I know that Columbus Choice would want to thank a number of anti-inflammatory agents, too.

  Flora, my mother’s cousin—which makes her my second cousin, I believe—deserves my thanks for giving me a book of etiquette for my high school graduation present. While every other family member gave me money, fancy pen and pencil sets, and study lamps, Flora understood that I needed Amy Vanderbilt’s tome so that I might learn social skills. I understand that she only decided on the etiquette book after I had eaten potato salad with my hands and kept my elbows on the picnic table after one of those family reunions, but it’s as if she possessed some kind of extra sensory perceptions. It’s as if she knew that I would one day go on book tour and be required to attend fancy dinners in my honor with local newspaper book critics, mayors, city council members, NAACP bigwigs, card-carrying members of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and bodyguards to protect me against hate group morons. Second Cousin Flora—who died, oddly enough, in a Japanese restaurant when she mistook a giant chunk of wasabi for a length of avocado, had a coughing fit, then a well-meaning diner nearby thought she choked and during his attempt to perform the Heimlich maneuver broke her ribs, which punctured one lung, which got her sent to the hospital where she caught a staph infection and never got released alive—somehow had a hunch that I would make a fool of myself should I not know which fork to use, or if I reached the wrong way and drank from a tablemate’s water. So thanks to Flora, and to Amy Vanderbilt, and in a weird way to the guy who squeezed too hard performing the Heimlich maneuver, because now I know that there’s a fellow traveler roaming this planet who understands how best intentions usually go unrewarded at best. A good Taoist knows that aphorism that comes out translated something like “Never do anything, so that everything will happen as it should.” It’s unpronounceable in the Chinese or Mandarin or whatever dialect a good Taoist might employ. It sounds like “Oooooway er Booooo-weway,” and this dishwasher who used to work for Columbus Choice evidently said it all the time when he stuck those dipping-sauce bowls into the Hobart.

  I’d like to give a shout-out and offer my props and raise the roof to Sportstar for their ingenious product, Eye Black Stick-Ons (with marker for writing your own message). You’ve seen these things primarily beneath the lower eyelids of college and professional football players. In the old days, sometimes I blamed a shanked punt for my faulty, old-school eye black consisting of beeswax, paraffin, and carbon. Maybe I had too much on my hands. Maybe it worked so well that the football’s lace’s disappeared, and I didn’t connect my foot to the ball correctly. Anyway, at times I felt, while writing, like I couldn’t concentrate due to the glare of the lamp when I lived in a house, apartment, or trailer. I got headaches from having to squint so much while writing at a picnic table at the Frozen Head State Park Campground. I thought to myself, What would help me out in regards to this situation, outside of spending good money on a pair of, say, Suncloud Habit Polarized PS UV Protection sunglasses, which is what I’m going to buy and wear while skipping around the country on the imminent book tour?

  Sometimes when I came across conundrums such as this I went walking down at the rec center baseball fields in order to unknot my brain cells. I don’t want to call it a miracle, or an act of God or whatever they’re calling it these days, but on this particular occasion, with no money to buy sunglasses or eye black, I entered the empty baseball diamond, looked down, and saw two black strips with “Proverbs” printed on one, and “23:14” on the other, right there on the ground next to first base. I’m no soothsayer, but I did take a logic course one time and I envisioned two outs in the bottom of the ninth, boys on base, and a kid grounding out to end the game. Then he ripped off his Sportstar Eye Black Stick-Ons (with marker for writing your own message), and went crying back to the dugout.

  I don’t want anyone having to cross-reference my Acknowledgments. Proverbs 23:14 goes like this: “Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.” Little League baseball is getting a little too serious, if you ask me.

  Anyway, I stuck those eye-black strips atop my own upper cheekbones, and looked straight into the sun. Who invented these things? I thought. I thought, If I had any say in it, I’d nominate this man or woman for one of those Best Invention of the Twenty-first Century lists.

  I walked to the empty dugout, where I sometimes found spare change, or a catcher’s mitt, or unopened candy bars, and—Lo!—that same kid, I assumed, had left eighteen stick-ons and the marker right there on the wooden bench. It was a prize worth $5.99 times .90, seeing as ninety percent of the package was usable.

  I looked around, put the package down my pants, and got out of there as quickly as possible before some beaten-with-a-rod kid returned with his twice-angry father.

  Call me nostalgic and superstitious and a rationalizer, but I began writing about 3,500 words a day minimum while wearing Stick-On eye black. I wrote about Columbus Choice’s purported illegitimate child living somewhere in Vietnam. I wrote about the time Columbus Choice was accused of using Chicken of the Sea in a hamachi roll. Then one day things came to a halt writing-wise and I got out that marker—up until this time I’d written things like “Abraham” on one, and “Lincoln” on the other, or “Martin Luther King” on one, and “Jr.” on the other. Anyway, when the struggle returned, I wrote, of course, “Fuck” on one, and “Me” on the other.

  And went out for another one of my walks, down to the rec center.

  I want to thank Deputy Marion Pelt, of the Roane County Sheriff’s Department and volunteer coach for one of the Tennessee Valley Recreation League Baseball Association, for believing my story, and for gently leading me off the premises while all those mothers and fathers yelled “He’s a pedophile!” and “He’s a child molester!” and “That man over there has a rod to spare on our children!” et cetera. />
  So if it weren’t for the Sportstar people and their fine product, and Deputy Marion Pelt, I would’ve probably never finished my tome. So I thank them endlessly and somewhat apologetically for appearing to use stick-on products for personal gain, though I didn’t mean to do so. Because I felt threatened later on in public, I pretty much stayed in my tent for the next month or so, writing, writing, writing. Finishing up. Doing what I didn’t even know that I’d been called to be done. I wouldn’t have ever finished Columbus Choice’s biography if I’d never—rightly or wrongly—felt as if a lynch mob of my own waited for me to come out in public.

  I will wear eye black at my book signings, should I lose my Suncloud Habit Polarized PS sunglasses, say, while skimming over one of the lakes in my new used Sea Ray.

  I would be rueful to exclude my appreciation to John Cage for his groundbreaking piece 4’33”. Silence and brevity. As I wrote No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee, it occurred to me often that there weren’t enough writers out there who understood silence and brevity. Nor editors. Politicians. Everyone. Having John Cage’s 4’33” running through my head on most days probably kept my biography stripped down to less than 2,000 pages, which would probably run about 660,000 words, which would mean about 3,540,000 characters not counting the spaces, which would mean about 4,340,000 characters counting the spaces. John Cage, you have, even in your death, become a beacon for the Environmental Movement, by indirectly helping me from killing off trees. Maestro!