In A Whiz Bang Blur
In North Carolina at an antique store I bought a branding iron with the two initials that are most often associated with Bernadette when she exists outside the role of my fictive travel partner through hellfire and damnation. The Jeep aged three thousand miles in these last ten days. Bernadette joined me for the last 1700 and now we are leaving each other alone for a brief period of time here at this imaginary world known as Mt. Pleasant. To Texas and back and beyond in a whiz bang blur, only stopping briefly for a wedding and then after, still suited up, the U-Haul in Garland for a 5X8 enclosed trailer which we drove through a Dallas rush hour into the heart of Lake Highlands, where we loaded up the last of the personal belongings attached to my Texas upbringing. A good friend was storing these things for the last year, in his house. I don't truly love stuff and have mixed feelings about stuff. As words go, stuff is a great word for stuff. Stuff almost exactly describes how I feel about my stuff. In a moment of pique at the wedding reception I had told a brother that I might not even rent a trailer and would just set my stuff on fire, after of course first removing it from my friend's house. There is no reason my friend should suffer the incineration of all his lovely possessions just because I suffer from stuff ambiguity anxiety.
We stayed the final night at a somewhat worn out Hampton Inn in Addison, Tx. and headed out in the morning. Two nights before, Bernadette had gotten to see a trio of quintessential Texas Barbie's working the hostess station at a nearby trendy Mexican joint a block up the road from the motel. Different people say different things about what triggers memory. Some say it is smell, some say taste, but for me there is nothing like the visage of a Texas Barbie to trigger those emotions that remind me of being uneasy in Texas.
We stopped in Hope and started to look for Bill Clinton's house. I had not looked for it three days previous but then at the same time we came to the same conclusion and just said "I think we get the idea," and went to the barbecue place for lunch. And drove. On the road I loaded up a plastic spoon full of pecan cobbler and handed it to Bernadette, the driver of record for this stretch. Hmm (not mmm), that is sweet, said Bernadette.
Took a quick look at Little Rock but nobody was home.
Zipped through Memphis and sometime later stopped in Jackson, Tennessee and stayed at a place that had a pool and wifi but only a partial bottom sheet on the bed, and a certifiably suspect bathroom with a tub faucet that dripped heavily into a stained tub and had only two small towels, haphazardly stacked on a metal wall rack.
We went to a sports bar near the motel for ice cold beers and a burger on Texas Toast. We could not say for sure but there was just the faintest hint that the establishment was a gay bar. A sign out front said biker's welcome which for all I know is a well known euphemism for gay is okay. I was wearing a Paul Smith fitted shirt and was perhaps the gayest looking person in the place (if you kicked out the "biker," the "musician," and the country gentleman sitting to my right) and therefore possibly the inspiration for some other tourist's "I think we walked into a gay bar" speculation. The man to my right was a cotton gin repairman from Seymour, Texas and I had a teenage memory from Seymour which involved cases of beer the night before a high school junior varsity basketball tournament and this memory I shared with the man. Bernadette quizzed him about cotton gins. All the while the Yankees prepared to beat the Red Sox in extra innings, on three large screens. Bernadette thinks the male bartender called me ''hon" but I am not sure that that is what he said. Still, to play it safe and maintain that essential balance of correctness I deem essential to my concept of correctness, I contributed to an upper end tip pool just like I would if it had been a female waitress or bartender calling me "hon.," which I am on record as saying is a thing I like.
Arrived at Arnold's in Nashville around 10 the next morning and walked around the mostly industrial neighborhood while waiting for it to open at 10:30. That was some good food. We had liver and onions and fried chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy and collard greens and corn off the cob and chocolate cream pie and lemon cream pie and sweet and unsweet iced tea. You could probably get by with splitting one of those desserts though.
We stopped and bought 230 dollars worth of fireworks before leaving Tennessee and just before that I bought a brittle 1872 collection of Robert Browning poems with an upside down fly page at an antique store in Kingston, for nine dollars. Bernadette bought two more rug beaters. Much later that night and almost close enough to make it home to Mt. Pleasant I got grumpy enough to want to strangle Bernadette, for no reason really, so we got a room and food and a martini in southern Virginia and she did not suffocate me with pillows in my sleep, which I think would have been justifiable.
Arriving back to Mt. Pleasant on Tuesday afternoon and maintenence work to last year's ambitious landscaping project was occurring. It became quickly obvious that this current project was becoming a bit more ambitious than just maintenence, my Latino brothers from last year were all back, and staying in the cottage, so Bernadette and I bunked up in the Tower Room at the bighouse. Guests were reportedly coming the next day or the day after and I was feeling a little cramped so after doing a few chores we jumped back into the Jeep and headed to North Carolina.
On the way we tooled around Charlottesville for awhile.
Right after parking on the street a man walked up to me and said we should go to the Sally Mann exhibit, which happened to be a block away. But we did not do that. I could not remember who she was but Bernadette reminded me (that she is--the provocative photographer), and as I am barely able to handle the provocation of everyday life I chose to be disinterested and Bernadette, pretty well smothered by art in NYC, also chose, at this specific point in time, to be disinterested. We mingled with the hordes on the historic old town pedestrian mall and then made a couple more required stops before heading off to a farmhouse outside of Lynchburg, where we had dinner with two cats, several beagles, and a couple of New York ex-pats, one of whom had beaten the major league baseball pitcher, Roger Clemens, three times, at pool, in a bar. I had to admit that that was a pretty cool accomplishment but could not resist telling the young woman, I bet you could not hit his fastball.
We were on our way to visit a former NBA basketball player and his wife and two kids residing outside of Burlington, NC.
I own, with a friend, a small house off a gravel road on two acres about forty-five minutes northeast of there, which I have not visited, or maybe have visited once, since leaving it in 1994. We rent it to a former house painting buddy of mine. We have settled on it being okay that they make only about nine of the twelve monthly rent payments each year. By doing this we are buying them the majority of their Christmas presents every year, a thing we do despite never receiving a thank you card.
So that's where Bernadette and I stopped first, the old forgotten rental property, on our way to visit the former NBA basketball player, after of course stopping at the tank museum in Danville, VA. If you only go to one tank museum in your life, go to the one in Danville.
My rental house is in a rural area in northern North Carolina not exactly in the middle of nowhere but close to exactly in the middle of nowhere. The house is off of highway 49 and I wasn't sure I would be able to find it but after zigging down back roads from Danville and finally intersecting 49, I immediately recognized the area and as it turned out we were, thanks to the navigation of Bernadette, only about 400 yards from the gravel road leading to the house at its end.
The house on the left looked the same and the vacant wooded lot on the right was just as I remembered it. All of the several properties on each side of the road were neat and tidy and well cared for, with the neat and tidy of the year award going to the house across from mine, at the end of the road on the right, formerly owned by the neighborhood busy body and possibly now owned by her heirs. It looked like it had been completely done over and was a shining jewel in this modest rural one street neighborhood, a neighborhood by itself butting up to thousands of undeveloped acres of hardwood forest and farmland and the occasional tobacco field.
Behind the large pontoon boat in my front yard and across the beaten down dead lawn, came running four barking boxer dogs and an albino boxer puppy. There was stretched low to the ground what appeared to be a hot-wire and the dogs would not cross it. I could not tell for sure if they were angry dogs. They appeared to be uncertain about me as well. There were no cars in the driveway but there was one or two rusty ones on the edge of the woods. A vintage swing set occupied the space in the front lawn not occupied by the pontoon boat. An extra boat was over by the woods by the abandoned cars. It did not look like it had seen anything but rainwater in a long time. I cannot describe everything else that was in the front yard and side yard because I am now a few days later moving slowly towards denial. I did not take pictures because I knew instinctively that I would soon be needing to move toward denial and the pictures would be a hindrance to that trip.
The slumlord merit badge was mine. And every neglectful act of my entire life was now compressed and formed into a totally hokey, not altogether believable white trash movie set. I could not though take my eyes off of the scenery, if for no other reason than that there was so much of it, so much detail. Then, like a low budget commercial break to an even lower budget made for TV movie, up the road came a slightly overweight teenage boy driving a golf cart. And he pulled into the driveway.
It was my old painting buddy's son. He was still in his mamma's belly when I had left, 13 years previous. He was a reticent boy, polite, but of few words. And scared of me it seemed. I tried to comfort him by saying I was an old friend of his father's but that, if anything, only seemed to make him feel worse. Then I dropped the bombshell--actually, I own this property, I said, and that seemed to also bring no level of comfort to the boy. I asked him if I could look around a little and he mumbled something which I took to be assent even if it wasn't. As it turned out the barking dogs were bootlickers and they followed us around as I headed to the backyard, and beyond that to the ten thousand square foot garden, which was nicely maintained. Bernadette was waiting in the car and the boy had that attitude like he was in the principals office so I made this first time in thirteen year visit a short one. I left him a piece a paper with my name and phone number on it and said goodbye.
On the way to visit the former Olympian and NBA player I worked out in my head the required first steps towards kicking my old friend and his family out on their asses. So I have that to look forward to.
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