When I originally left Gruel I promised myself never to return. When my father died in a tragic accident that involved a neighbor's favorite bull, a series of groundhog holes, a swarm of yellow jackets, and some unskilled emergency room attendants at Graywood Emergency Regional Memorial Hospital, I told myself that anything I inherited in Gruel could fall to the ground for all I cared.
I said to my wife, "What idea? What idea could work only in my near vacant hometown that wouldn't work in a town where people know that the Civil War ended?"
Charlotte said she only needed a computer, printer, Ziploc bags, and small irregular chunks of gravel. She said, "And I love you, Phil. Why would you not want me to even know you better? I never even met your dad. Why won't you let me in on your past, so that I can love the whole you?"
That sounded all nice and lovey-dovey, I knew. I didn't say anything to Charlotte about how, to love the entire me, she might have to visit a drain hole inside Dr. Guilford's office.
When we had no real afflictions it didn't matter that we went shirtless, of course. After Dr. Guilford got done with us, we showed up on court, our heads hung low, and to a team player it didn't matter what happened next. Before, the referees would come up and say something like, "Do y'all want to be Shirts or Skins?" and Coach Father Nick always shot his arm up and yelled out "We'll be Skins!" as if he worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Against the Ninety-Six Quakers, though, he only shrugged.
We got to be Skins again, but it didn't matter. No moles, boils, or nipples caused those peaceful basketball opponents of ours to recoil. Cleve wasn't even there with his matching birthmarks, for he readied himself homebound for some kind of skin graft operation.
At the tip-off I stood with my back to our goal, but I saw the Ninety-Six Quaker center offer his hand toward clear-skinned and electrolyzed Ray Sanders and knew it would be a long, bad game. The Quaker said, "Peace be with you," or something like that. He said something about good sportsmanship, and love for humanity, and may the better team win, and what goes around comes around, and whatever happens is God's will, and big buckles atop hats are cool no matter what anyone in Gray wood County says, I swear.
The Quaker took the tip-off. It went to this little guy guard of theirs who flew down the sidelines, and veered toward the lane, then made an easy layup. One of the Dickey boys threw it in to me, but I was used to no one being within ten yards of my four nipples, and this other Quaker flew right in and stole it. He, too, got a layup. The other Dickey brother took the ball out of bounds, tossed it lazily toward my friend Slick Koon—who used to be covered in a few weird warts but no long held them—another six-foot center who had to take the place of Ray.
You might wonder why we didn't play Kenny the Albino. Well, with everyone else looking kind of okay, he dropped right off the team before the play-offs. He met us in the locker room and bandied his head around like a blind man, then announced that he didn't care to be made fun of, to be the only weirdo on what used to be a team of freaks. Kenny the Albino said, "If y'all win the church league championship trophy, I hope you let me touch it, but I understand if you don't, seeing I am what I am."
Let me say right now that I almost cried for poor Kenny the Albino.
But it didn't matter seeing as we all knew that we couldn't win anymore—more than likely not if we got picked Skins, and certainly if we got picked Shirts.
The Quakers ran all over us. I'm prone to think that those boys were so fucking nice that they wouldn't have been affected should we have still played them when we still owned all our weird and ugly defects.
I threw a ball up right before halftime from midcourt that somehow went in, and that gave us two points—this was a time before the three-point line. Then I tried a weird hook shot at the end of the game, but it went somewhere in the stands. We lost 82 to 2, no lie.
None of us wanted to shake hands with our opponents—who ended up losing 62 to 36 to Forty-Five First Baptist in the finals, thus proving that they weren't all that great from the beginning—but we did. We couldn't believe that anyone would want to touch us!
I hate to say that it kind of felt good. I have no sociological or psychological or homophobic studies to back up my losing team's slight newfound self-confidence in regards to appearance, but there's something to that theory that human touch heals. We shook hands, got patted on the shoulder and back, and left for the locker room probably feeling better about ourselves than we ever did after a still-physically blemished victory.
I hung up my invisible jersey after the one church league season and never played basketball again. Oh sure, Coach Father Nick tried to make all of us sport fake warts, moles, and nipples made out of Play-Doh the next year, but none of us agreed to his little scheme. Me, I studied hard, and got the hell out of Gruel.
My wife visited every business establishment in the county, signed them up for special ads, came home, designed and printed the ads on colored paper, shoved said advertisements and two pieces of gravel inside generic-brand Ziploc bags. Then she drove around and threw the bags onto people's driveways. The rocks kept her bag and advertisement from blowing away.
Get this: Businessmen and -women alike paid upwards of a hundred bucks for one week's—which meant one day's—worth of advertising. The army-navy guy ran a special on fleece-lined boots; Jeff Downer ran a buy-five-get-one-free hot dog special over at Roughhouse Billiards. Some guy who started up a housecleaning service offered free window washing with four steam-cleaned rooms of carpet. The man who ran Gruel BBQ_and Pig-Petting Zoo advertised free All-U-Can-Eat pigs in a blanket for children under the age of twelve when accompanied by two parents ordering buffet. And so on. Dr. Bobba Lollis at Gruel Drug ran a 10 percent off coupon for Whitman's and Russell Stover Valentine's Day candy boxes, seeing as it was mid-June. Paula Purgason, amateur real estate agent, said she would throw in the first lawn mowing and gutter cleaning for any house sold. Maura-Lee Snipes offered a free crescent roll with every Jesus crust Jewish rye loaf sold out of Gruel Bakery.
"Four nipples," Charlotte said. "Goddamn. That explains why all your pots, bowls, vases, and wall hangings had that little guy on it with tits falling all over the place. Am I right or am I right? How come you never mentioned this before? I bet it's been bearing down on you subconsciously forever."
We drove down Old Old Augusta Road, past fallen-down houses, and fallow land that couldn't sell for a hundred bucks an acre. On the passenger-side floorboard set a good two hundred plastic bags, each filled with ads and gravel. I said, "Did you figure fuel costs into this little business venture? Man, it seems like it's hardly worth it to drive this far. You never had to deliver papers as a child, did you?"
My wife put our car into fourth gear and said, "The Gruel Inn's up here and we'll have to throw out thirteen bags, Phil. Get ready."
The twelve-room Gruel Inn now housed a dozen real-life imported gurus who waited for aimless, rich, bored, last-strawed, wit's-ended, born-into-wealth, trust-funded, restless women to show up from New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. The thirteenth woman was named Bekah Akers, a crazy woman who tried to transform the town of Gruel into some kind of New Age mecca. Word was she killed her husband Novel Akers, took on baker and lover Maura-Lee, and they went off twice a year to San Francisco.
We approached the place from Charlotte's side. Me, I had to lob hook shots over the car roof. The first one I threw barely made it into the parking lot. My wife said, "Give it some testosterone, Phil. You can do better than that."
Oh I had some flashbacks as to when I threw that last two-nippled hook shot against the Quakers at the end of my last game. I threw the next one better, but it landed on the roof About this time a Chinese man wearing what looked no more than a fancy diaper came out of room 3 and yelled out, "Hey, we're trying to meditate in here, motherfucker!" like that.
Charlotte pulled off to the side and I got out. She said, "Phil. Goddamn it, Phil, get back in the car."
I don't know what happened but I approached t
he half-naked guru and screamed out, "You dumb fuck. I'm one of the top ceramic artists in America. I'll kill you, shithead."
Right before the guru slapped me upside the head with the back of his heel I noticed that he had two weird birthmarks right below his nipples. I'm talking I was just about to say, "Hey, I used to have four nipples," but then he went into some kind of kung fu stance, then waylaid me hard.
I wasn't sure if I dreamed it or not, but I'm pretty certain that Charlotte threw a bag of advertisements his way, trying to stop the occasion. And in between his wild side kicks to my temple and karate chops to my neck, I'm pretty sure that this half-naked man took the time to open up Charlotte's Ziploc, pull out the advertisements, and read out loud, "Hey, a free crescent roll with Jesus crust bread! I like that Jesus crust bread!"
We got into the locker room and Coach Father Nick pulled down his pants. He took down his white underwear. He said, "Well boys, it could be worse. Y'all had the marks of Satan before this game, and now you don't. Think about what I've had to live with. People always wonder why priests become priests. Look at this thing. Look at it! In Luke it is said, 'And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth.' But that's not true, always, is it? We shalt not have rejoice at our birth. And in Ecclesiastes it is said, 'For he shall not much remember the days of his life,' blah blah blah. Do y'all know what that means?"
I said, "Please don't tell us that we have to play baseball."
"Look at this!" Coach Father Nick said, wiggling his one-inch pecker. "Not only is it little, I got a mole on the end of it, which makes me pee sideways! At a urinal I have to stand facing anyone who's beside me, as if I'm about to pee on his leg."
Well of course it was more than I could handle. I came home, but didn't tell my parents what happened. My father said, "You had a good season." He said, "Not that I'm all that religious, but I think that it's in Ecclesiastes where they go, 'To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,' or whatever. Well that's what you had, Phil."
I said, "Can I go down by the creek and pull out some of that gray clay in order to make a bowl for art class?"
My mother said, "You can do anything you want, son."
I went behind our house a hundred yards and scooped out what I would later learn to be a good Edgefield clay used by Dave the Slave to fashion his stoneware back in 1850.
Back in the basement I made what my art teacher Mrs. Cathcart would call a pinch pot, though I didn't know it at the time. Later on she taught me how to coil clay, and even later she tried to make me paint replicas of religious paintings first done by Girolamo Savoldo, but that's another story.
I finished my pinch pot and squeezed it on two sides, turned it a quarter way, and did the same. It looked like it had four flattened nipples. When I took it into class Mrs. Cathcart said, "You should glaze a figure around those little outcroppings you got there on each side."
I said, "Yes, ma'am," not knowing how I'd use this advice for my entire career. I said, "Yes, ma'am."
She said, "What are those things?"
I said—this was tenth or eleventh grade—"I call this bowl 'Portrait of Dr. Naismith, Inventor of Basketball.'" I'd been reading American history. Hell, it looked like one of those peach baskets he set up.
Mrs. Cathcart said, "You're a different kind of student, aren't you, Phillip."
Some of my classmates at Gruel Normal tittered at this remark; some of them rubbed their open wounds beneath their shirts, and tried, like me, I'm sure, to figure out if it's better to be a star with flaws or a physically flawless nobody.
I never thought about it again until, back in my hometown, I saw a mailbox with SANDERS neatly spelled out, at the mouth of a pine straw—strewn driveway. Through the trees I spied a white clapboard cottage with perfect green shutters. I asked my wife to pull over before I threw out advertisements. There in the front yard sat Ray Sanders, reading the weekly Forty-Five Platter newspaper, in a makeshift Adirondack chair, a normal-looking auburn-haired wife to his side, a beautiful hound dog at his feet. He wore khakis, but no shirt; she wore a lime green pantsuit that I'd seen in one of the catalogs. Were they sipping lemonade, iced tea, mint juleps? It appeared so.
"You want to go down and see them?" my wife asked.
I held the plastic bag outside my passenger window, but didn't want to throw it and break their tranquillity. I asked my wife to drive on.
Soles in Gruel
THE MOST IGNORANT MAN in the state legislature, Howard Purgason, banged his hand on the desk and yelled out how he wanted all elementary schools in the state to take the N, A, C, and P out of their classroom alphabet borders, seeing as the NAACP boycotted South Carolina. Representative Purgason represented all of Gruel and a part of Forty-Five. He almost knocked his tobacco juice cup onto the floor, but none of his fellow legislators noticed. The second most ignorant state representative—a lay preacher from northern Greenville County who went by Brother Fain—always tried to introduce a bill that would cause schoolchildren to say the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord's Prayer, then sing the National Anthem and "Dixie" each morning. This day, though, Fain balanced atop his swivel chair and yelled out how all foreigners in the state should have to wear a parachute on their backs at all times, so that they could understand how the government could send them back to their homelands at any moment. No legislator mentioned education. There were no motions concerning health care, the environment, jobless rates, state taxes, infant mortality rates, or unsafe roads.
"I'll agree with my brother from Greenville if he'll include the singing of the alphabet the way I want it to go," Howard Purgason yelled. "It ain't gone be that hard—B, D, E, F, G, H, you know. It'll be shorter to sing in school, then there'll be more time left for prayer and patriotic hymns."
The Speaker of the House banged and banged his gavel. He'd come from family money, gone to law school, been a prosecutor, a district attorney, and rose within the ranks of the Republican Party. He yelled, "Order, order," and after a pause said, "We supposed to be talking about how we need to protect our state's water supply from all the terrorist cult cells thriving in Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. I read it on the Internet just last night." He banged his gavel again, then asked every journalist to leave the chamber. He dismissed pages, secretaries, and the casual capitol visitor wanting to view government in action.
He stared at Purgason, then Brother Fain. "We can't have no chaos. We already getting too much bad press in those other forty-nine states."
The third dumbest member of the state legislature, a man named Case—who once introduced a bill saying that all boys should take at least three years of shop in high school, all girls three years of home ec—stood up and reminded everyone that it was their ancestors who fired the first shots on Fort Sumter. He said, "Look how far that got us, now."
Then he fell over dead from a massive heart attack. The connection between his utterance of "first shots fired" and his subsequent collapse caused half of the state legislators to dive under their desks. All of them said they swore they heard gunfire, that they thought Eugene Case succumbed to snipers.
As all of this occurred, I read a couple of days later on page D4 of USA Today, my wife and I readied ourselves for a trip to Gruel, South Carolina, so that she could look into buying as many vacant, crumbling, dilapidated Victorian houses that weren't burned by Sherman. Evidently, according to some of the lesser-known Civil War history books, he'd been a classmate and friend at West Point with a boy who grew up to be Confederate minor hero Colonel Dill, and Sherman enjoyed hearing Dill's stories. So he crooked his troops over somewhat and aimed for Columbia instead. I liked to believe that Sherman missed Gruel only because of its name—that he figured any people who would name their town after lackluster porridge didn't need extra problems in their lives.
"I still think there have to be other near ghost towns that we can go reconstruct, Mayann. Moving back to my original hometown will make me feel like I've wasted life, given
up, and lost altogether."
Mayann said, "Go get your tennis shoes. You're not packing your tennis shoes, are you? Go fetch them so I can put them in the refrigerator." Already she'd ditched milk, eggs, sour cream, and every other item with an expiration date past Saint Patrick's Day, the earliest that she foresaw our return. Mayann took every fresh vegetable out of the lower bin and tossed them outside for our near pet rabbits. What remained, as I remember, was yogurt and cheese shoved off to the side of the top shelf. Then she placed about a dozen pair of black Dansko clogs on the shelves. My one pair of favorite Converse high-tops—the only other footwear I owned outside of some rubber-soled Nunn Bush almost-dress shoes—went where celery once took up space. Mayann placed a box of baking powder in the vegetable bin, too. "It's for good luck, you know," she said. "We're going to need good luck, especially being outsiders."
I rolled her suitcase to the edge of the kitchen. "I'm not an outsider of Gruel. I lived there until sixth grade. There are memories of Gruel branded in my mind that I wouldn't wish on anyone. Hell, about South Carolina."
My wife had undergone a vivid dream a month earlier. She felt certain that she and I needed to leave Knoxville for good after finding a town that seemed to be on the verge of implosion, both financially and spiritually. Mayann said that ex-president Jimmy Carter offered this vision, and handed her a hammer, handsaw, and a child's coloring book that didn't have page folios. Nevertheless, the president kept saying, "The answer's on page twelve. Look at page twelve," and so on.
Mayann, up to this point, had been a shrewd, compassionate, and successful ACLU lawyer. Over the dozen years of our marriage—to Mayann, Jimmy Carter's "twelve" reference and our length of betrothal meant something—she'd garnered millions of dollars for injured workers and discrimination sufferers. Then she thought that there had to be more to life than helping people who may or may not have fallen down on purpose, or led a boss on to calling his secretary "sweetheart" or "honey."
Drowning in Gruel Page 18
