Long Time Leaving (12 page)

Let there be no misunderstanding: Room-temperature Krispy Kreme doughnuts are not bad. If your tooth is sweet enough, they are quite good. They are just not heavenly enough, I find, to beguile a lipid-conscious adult into feeling that a few can't hurt you. “Whereas eating Krispy Kremes fresh off the line is comparable to eating sweet corn fresh off the stalk. One can no more
expect
that Krispy Kremes be hot all the time than that life be sweet all the time. That very element of serendipity is one reason people who grew up with Krispy Kremes are so fond of them. An honestly nonconstant
HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW
sign is the last vestige of unpredetermined marketing, neon or non, in America today. It is actual hard consumer information
from the company—
as if
automobiles assembled on days when the workers were neither getting over a weekend nor looking toward one were so marked.

Now Krispy Kreme has been caught flirting with Enronism. In 2000, the company went public. Its stock soared by 400 percent …then began to decline. In February 2002, the
New York Post
reported that the company had moved debt off its balance sheet by means of “an accounting gimmick.” The very next day, according to a subsequent story in the
Post,
“The company backed off its unconventional accounting by saying it will move a $35 million expense …onto its books instead of trying to conceal it with a shell device called a special purpose entity.’ ” The “change was made,” reported the
Post,
“to keep investors from worrying that Krispy Kreme could wind up like Enron and its phantom debts.”

Remember that old expression, “I'll bet dollars to doughnuts”? If you ask me, high finance and doughnuts don't mix. And I'll tell you what I'm afraid the next revelation is going to be. Let us couch it in terms of testimony before a congressional committee by an old boy named Harlan Berry, say, as follows:

We were all right as long as we were in just worms, themselves. My wife, Ineta, had painted us a real pretty sign out front, inspired by the fact being that a worm has both sexes. Ineta's sign showed a circular worm with a male face on one end, winking at a female face on the other end, and that gave me and “Worley Pettus the name of our little old shop down by the lake: Familiar Face Bait.

And, okay, bobbers and so on, I could see the sense of diversifying that far. A man comes in, gets a couple dozen red wigglers, and says, “How they catching 'em lately with these?” And I'd say, “What seems to be working best here lately is, take you a bobber and put it about six inches up from your hook—weedless,” you know, and maybe we'd have an extra bobber or weedless hook we would lend them, and sometimes they'd be people not from around here that we'd never see again. And even people we'd known all our lives, they'd have lost the bobber and they'd say, “Oh, we thought you meant to give us that,” and you know good and well they knew better, but since they were regular, we'd mark those bobbers off to customer relations. So it made sense to start selling bobbers, and hooks, and light tackle generally. When it came to crickets, though, I put my foot down. I said, “Worley, we are staying away from crickets. I have worked with crickets and I know—they die on you, and when they don't, they get loose all over everywhere; don't tell me about crickets.”

But I didn't know enough about modern business practices to prevent what did get away from us: worm derivatives.

The problem was, Worley didn't like dealing with the general public. By that I mean people who actually come in and buy things from you. “I don't like customers,” he'd say. “I like investors.” And he didn't like investors in person, either. He liked them in the abstract. “Worley's just not a people person.

For instance, back in the old days Fielder Lomax would come in all the time and just hang around and come up with sayings. Like, “If somebody's buttering you up, watch out. They're fixing to take a bite.” Or, “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. But don't let him soak too long.” I remember one day after Worley and I had gotten off into all these derivatives and instruments and one thing and another, Fielder came by and said, “Don't let the sizzle stray too far from the cow.”

I didn't know what he meant exactly, but I didn't mind it. Whereas Worley barred Fielder from the place. “He is not a quality individual,” Worley said. Worley had started reading a lot of business books, and referring to people as “individuals.” I'm not putting all this on Worley, but the truth is, he's not much of an
individual
person either.

So—well, it started back in the seventies. What we now realize was the “worm bubble.” Somehow the notion arose that there was a whole new ever-expanding global market in worms. Worms were going to solve the world hunger problem by being a source of cheap protein. And worm castings (that's what, excuse me, you call their manure) is, sure enough, rich fertilizer, which somehow gave people the idea that here was a great underexploited resource. And people were baking worm cookies for their novelty value, and zoos supposedly needed all the worms they could get to feed their animals with. You'd read about it in news articles: people were raising worms at home by tossing potato peels and so on into a box of dirt under their sink.

So Worley developed these worm-farm starter kits and set up a mailorder operation, and before you knew it, our main product wasn't bait as such anymore, it was what I guess you could call worm futures. And, of course, the T-shirts and hats with Ineta's familiar-face design, those were real popular, but before I knew it Worley had reincorporated us as Famfac. In Bermuda. With a logo that you couldn't even tell was a worm anymore. And he was selling shares.

“I liked it better when it was just you and me and Ineta's worm,” I said. “That was a
pretty
worm.”

“Beauty,” said Worley, “is in the eye of the shareholder.”

But it wasn't long before there were more people producing worms to sell to other people who had in mind producing worms for all the people who were going to be marketing worm products around the world, than there were people who actually wanted worms, themselves, in any form. The boom outstripped the demand, because it turned out there wasn't one. More worm farms failed in 1979 alone than at any time in our nation's history.

That didn't stop “Worley. He was already on to the next level. Worms per se, he said, and kits and shirts and caps—they were bricks and mortar. “We are in an age of
conceptual
equity,” he said, “and there's no reason why the bottom line ever has to bottom out.” He compared worms to solitaire. “You know what's wrong with solitaire?” he said.

“It's not social,” I said.

Worley gave me a look that I would come to know so well, which said I was a man of the old economy. “No,” he said. “What's wrong with solitaire is, there's not enough rows.”

“Rows,” I said.

“Rows of cards. You put down seven rows of cards, with one turned up, right? Not enough for you to count on winning. If you put down eight, nine, ten rows of cards, with two or three of them turned up to start, pretty soon you can't lose.”

“But then it wouldn't rightly be solitaire,” I said.

“You've got to think outside the box,” he said. “You're probably of the old school that doesn't believe in pounding sand down a rathole. But what if you're selling sand?”

“Huh?” I said.

“Look at solitaire again,” he said. “Say you've got some money riding on the game.”

“I don't see any way to gamble on solitaire,” I said. “It would be hard to tell whether I was betting on myself or against myself.”

Worley gave me a wink. Said something about hedges and “signaling tough-mindedness to Wall Street.” I didn't like that wink. I missed the wink that the female end of the worm was giving to the male one. So did Ineta. It was hard on our marriage.

But she and I went for counseling and stuck it out, whereas Worley got caught down at the EZ-OFF/ON motel by the interstate, banging on the ice machine. It's true that for what they charge by the hour over there it wouldn't hurt them to provide free ice. But they say if they did, people would get ice without staying there. That's what Worley tried to maintain he was there for—drive-through ice. And he got all worked up over a
man at his level having to deal in hard currency and then for the machine to eat it. But that didn't account for him being naked. So it came out that he was there with some little old gal he met in the Wiggle Room. “Which was the lounge he had insisted we expand into. That quarter he was trying to get back cost him a pretty penny in divorce, which, of course, impacted on our balance sheet, and “Worley had all the family problems that have come out in the media—his daughter Melody, who was the promising athlete, got mixed up in this women's anticorporate collective called Ms. Ockham's Razor and was apprehended for snatching laptops, and his son Chipper joined a musical group called Crucifixion Figurine that took an oath not even to decide in their own minds whether they were kidding, or something.

By that time I didn't have any idea what we were selling. I'd ask “Worley and he'd get a faraway look in his eye and say, “Same thing country music's selling. Loss. It's a faith-based operation.”

And I just let things slide. So if I have to go to the penitentiary along with “Worley, well, anyway, it'll be social. I tell you what, though. I wish now I hadn't put my foot down when it came to crickets. At least when those little scooters get out of hand you know what it is that's keeping you hopping.

“We had to sell off our flagship, the old Familiar Face, to Fielder Lomax. I dropped by there the other day to see how the worms were looking, and Fielder said, “Well, y'all swam with the sharks.”

“I guess so,” I said. “Worley was always saying, A coward dies a thousand deaths.’ ”

“Yep,” said Fielder. “A brave man dies, but younger.”

P
eople call Southern culture Gothic. As in emphasizing the grotesque. So? “What's not to be Gothic about? Life? Please. Your own parents, two people who can't even legally use the same public restroom, perform an inconceivable act together—the upshot of which is, an invisible minnow bearing all of your father's traits plows headlong into an
egg
(there is no other word for it) bearing all of your mama's; and from this hodgepodge of fish and chicken,
you
begin
to develop. Right on up through birth (don't ask), high school (where, in defiance of logic, most people are not popular), marriage (don't ask), and senility. And then, get this, you
die.
Literally. How can the South be significantly more Gothic than anywhere else?

As we ponder that question, let's look at an article that appeared recently in
The Women's Times,
which is published in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. An interview with the actress Sandy Duncan, turned fifty.

Let me just mention that nobody ever calls the Berkshires Gothic. A meeting of the Pittsfield Easter Seal Stroke Club features three local men performing “The Three Wise Men Present a More Positive You.”
The Women's Times
carries an ad for “Green Tara Healing Arts, Inc., a Holistic Health Center specializing in services for the adult survivor of trauma …Spiritually-based Therapy, Advanced CranioSacral Therapy.” No connection to Scarlett O'Hara's Tara.

Anyway, the Sandy Duncan story. “Sandy's journey begins in East Texas in the heart of the Bible Belt,” reports
The Women's Times,
and right away—I stifle my first reaction. No, you're not going to catch me defending
(yeah, yeah, how 'bout the Holistic Belt?)
East Texas. “Sandy explains that her mother, ‘trapped by the times and the locale,’ spent her own childhood following her family from oil field to oil field as Sandy's grandparents struggled to feed their children….”

The story goes on to say that Sandy made her “professional theatrical debut at eleven,” and thereafter her mother encouraged her to “market her talents” beyond East Texas. “Instinctively, Sandy knew the image of a forever young sprite with an unwavering sunny disposition would serve her well…. Slight in build, she moves quickly and gracefully, seeming to mirror such an image.” That image has stood her in good stead, the story reports, not only on Broadway as Peter Pan but also in
Roots,
for which she won an Emmy nomination. “The happy-go-lucky elf image was also supported by her starring role in …such film classics as
Million Dollar Duck, The Cat from Outer Space,
and the original
Barney
videos.”

But then she fell into a bad depression. “Sandy chose not to deny or ‘override the pain.’ Instead, encouraged to sit with her anguish, then to go through it, she courageously worked through several layers of fear. She gradually became aware that …‘I did not want to become a one-hundred-year-old elf.’ ”

Having discovered within herself “a penchant for putting pen to paper,” she has written a play entitled
Free Fall.

“Yes,” she explains to
The Women's Times, “Free Fall.
Life is a boat with no bottom.”

Is that story Gothic? I know it's not Southern. I don't even think Sandy Duncan was actually in
Roots.
I saw
Roots.
If I had seen an elf wielding a whip, or even frying chicken, I would remember it.

But here's why that story isn't Southern: the boat metaphor.

Southern life may be Gothic (murky, irrational, fantastic), but Southern figures of speech are in touch with the physical world. Wilson Pickett, of Alabama, once compared musical styles and cars: “You harmonize; then you customize. Now what kid don't want to own the
latest
model? …You got no cash for music lessons, arrangers, uniforms, backup bands, guitars. No nothin. So look around for a good, solid chassis. This be your twelve-bar blues…. And once you get known for something special,
that
would be your hood ornament.”

The late Big Jim Folsom figures prominently in any history of Gothic politics in the South, but you never heard him liken life to a bottomless boat. Once, by way of addressing commencement at the University of Alabama, Governor Folsom stood up and modestly explained that he had no education himself and didn't feel qualified to hold up before college graduates any vision of their future. However, he did have something useful to pass on—inexpensive meals that people living alone could fix for themselves. He devoted the rest of his speech to recipes, including his famous poke salad.