From quesera23 at yahoo.com Fri Feb 27 23:27:22 2004 Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 21:27:14 -0800 (PST) From: Will Gorham Reply-To: johnny at charm.net To: jlist Subject: Just A Late Night Mississippi Gas Station Moment My daddy smoked five packs of Lucky Strikes a day -- nine if he was gambling -- and he lost both of his legs to a crooked surgeon. You think about that when you walk. This was what the man at the gas station told me tonight. I've been living in what is commonly called the "deep south" for almost three years now and I've seen some strange things at gas stations. For one thing, there's booths. People eat at gas stations down here and not just corn chips and sodas. People eat full meals, prepared behind the counter by some sweat-soaked pre-teen who, if stories are to be believed, would be a dynastic southern belle if it were not for Reconstruction, not to mention chain stores. Her face was caked, like all healthy first-world children of her age with the oily remnants of various designer creams and the inner residue that comes from the stress of the ordinarily privileged. That, and the off gassing from the deep fryer on the corner shelf where the culinary delights are manufactured for the mostly late night crowd of famished drunks and college kids and both. Deep fried pickles are the strangest ones to my Yankee sensibilities. But there's also the traditional triple cheeseburger with the works. There's the improbably appealing chicken-on-a-stick. And for the odd southern vegetarian, the deep-fried potato wedge. Somehow it always seems to be a Chevron, though I can't imagine the threat of an economic monopoly based on such a diet. I had just finished dinner with the local writer-in-residence, a self-described environmentalist radical from Georgia. She grew up in a junkyard surrounded by the rapidly diminishing long-leaf pine forests of the greater -- Greater! -- southeast, and has written an unexpected bestselling work on the subject of her dual life. She told us over dinner that before her book was published she needed to get a release -- a "permission slip" she called it -- signed by her family, since the book was nonfiction and they were the major players. Her father, a man unfriendly to her radical leftist ideas, yet still a kind, encouraging parent, had written at the bottom of the release, under his signature, the words, "this is not MY truth, but it is hers and so I give my permission." We had quite a conversation about Truth at that point, amidst courses of organic red wine and delightful fresh-noodled vegetarian lasagna. At the beginning of the meal she had us hold hands and pray in a circle, promising in turn to the person to our left the words "may the love from my heart pass from my hand to yours." Even I, the grandest and coldest cynic at the raw wood table, felt the weight of the words when minutes later, her husband, a rough Vietnam vet, delicately rinsed a bit of spilled tomato sauce from my sleeve with his wetted napkin, apologizing for the thinness of the sauce, as though he himself had dribbled the offending red glob onto my clothes. This is MY truth, he said to me and -- I admit, it might have been the wine -- I recalled Agamemnon saying to Achilles that although Zeus had made him take Achilles' woman, it was his responsibility and for that he would atone. Wasn't this the pinnacle of all human interaction? Couldn't this moment, if studied closely and forever, resolve all of our terrible disasters waiting in the wings? Walking into the gas station an hour later I spotted my old landlord behind the counter. What a sonofabitch he had been! He was not working the register, just leaning back in a plastic white party chair as his buddy rang me up. He didn't recognize me. All the better. I never knew until I met him the significance of the second syllable of landlord. He looked up at me and, I could tell, was about to make another one of his patented snide comments, one of those quick jabbing phrases from an otherwise stranger that could absolutely ruin what had been an otherwise lovely night. He was about to bring me all the way back to early high school with maybe five or seven words. He meant to make me fear again the shame of the locker room in gym class, I could tell it. His mouth was open and his eyes were wide and full with the promise of blood. Just then the other man -- I hadn't seen him until then, on the other side of the counter -- told me about his daddy smoking five packs of Lucky Strikes a day -- nine if he was gambling. You think about that when you walk he said, and I took his cue, said Thank You and slid out the door before the sad old man who had been my landlord had time to cut me down. Moments like this give me hope. I need more of that in my life. Will Gorham A'98 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools