Long Time Leaving (25 page)
Authors: Roy Blount Jr.
God damn parents who don't love their children.
At the time Gaynelle Howe left
The Standard-Messenger
two years ago, after thirty-four years of service to this community as a trusted staff member, the management of Southwise Media Corporation felt an obligation to be transparent as to why. As was disclosed, Gaynelle had been found for the third time to have fabricated from scratch odd human-interest items for the “Only in Our Southland” column. Her explanation, as before, was that she did it “only when there weren't any good ones otherwise.” In these days of media coming under attack for issues of believability, we felt we had no recourse but to let Gaynelle go, despite the fact she had been under stress since the death of her mother, Mama Pearl, whom she had tended at home during many years of illness.
Last Saturday night, Gaynelle passed away. On her kitchen table were found two files. One, labeled “Good Gaynelle,” contained a certificate from the county commission commending her for twenty-five years of fair and accurate reporting of commission proceedings, a letter offering her a scholarship to Wellesley College in Massachusetts (which she declined), a yellowed photograph of an unidentified young man in a perky straw hat like men used to wear, and the program from her mother's funeral. The other file, labeled “Bad Gaynelle,” contained a “note to posterity” and several dozen clippings of “Only in Our Southland” items she had made up over the years, most of which, frankly, no one caught. The “note to posterity” stated simply, “If these aren't good reading, kiss my foot.” As a memorial to Gaynelle we reprint a selection of the best of these items.
—the editors
W
hen Ridley Chivers of Love Falls, Kentucky, took the first load of clothes from his brand-new washer recently, he was dismayed to find them all yellowish and oily. “When he called the appliance store, they dispatched the man who'd installed the machine. The man ran his finger along a windowsill, found dust, and said, “Your whole house is dirty. “Where's your wife?”
Chivers said he was recently widowed.
“Well,” the man said, “there's your problem,” and he began to leave. “When Chivers remonstrated, the man said, “Okay, show me some clothes that aren't completely filthy to begin with, and run them through.”
Chivers said he wasn't about to ruin any more of his clothes. So the
repairman took off his own shirt and pants, threw them into the washer, and turned it on. When Chivers tried to call the store to complain of this behavior, the man wrestled him for the phone. Chivers got loose, locked himself in his bathroom, and called police, who took him for a prankster until they heard the man banging on the bathroom door and shouting, “IT'S NOT THE MACHINE, IT'S YOU!”
A squad car intercepted the man as he tried to drive away, in wet clothes. The store has apologized to Chivers and given him a new washer, which he hasn't had any problems with yet.
•••
We know that a major pollutant of the atmosphere is methane gas emitted by livestock. We also know that methane is the major constituent of natural gas, widely used for heating and cooking. Well, finally someone has put toot and use together. Agronomists at the University of Virginia have designed a fixture that can be humanely strapped onto a cow or sheep, which allows for solid waste elimination and yet captures most of the gas arising from the animals. Methane is absorbed in highly concentrated form by cells composed of a material developed by NASA for recycling air in space capsules. The agronomy department's experimental kitchen recently produced a dinner for eight cooked with gas produced in one twenty-four-hour period by a single cow. The entree was chicken.
•••
Oklahoma legislator D. W Washburn is a big Clint Eastwood fan. So, at a dinner in Washburn's honor during his recent fact-finding trip to the African Republic of Mali, he was delighted to hear a Malian official bring up the director Sergio Leone. Washburn launched into a spirited critique of his favorite Clint Eastwood shoot-em-ups directed by Leone:
A Fistful of Dollars
and
For a Few Dollars More.
Unfortunately, the Malian official had, in fact, brought up not Sergio Leone but the neighboring nation of Sierra Leone. What with the vagaries of translation from Oklahoma English to West African French, Washburn seemed to be boasting that he had promoted bloodshed in Sierra Leone for a paltry amount of money and intended to do so in Mali at only slightly greater expense. By the time the misunderstanding was cleared up, most of the Malians present had walked out.
•••
Celeste, Alabama, has declared itself the sister city of Heaven. This June, Celeste will hold its first annual Pearly Gates Festival, with a parade of heavenly floats, a Mr. and Miss Littlest Angel pageant, an ambrosia competition, and an essay contest on the topic, “What Heaven Is Like and Why.” Long-range goal: a honeymoon and conflict-resolution center. Asked about potential church-state problems, a Celeste spokesperson said, “Oh, it's not just a religious thing. We want Celeste to be a mecca for everybody who dreams of heaven.”
•••
Just outside the Nashville, Tennessee, airport, a little hilltop parking area affords a good view of planes taking off and landing. But now it's closed, and not for reasons of airport security. Police, routinely driving by to make sure nothing more nefarious than light petting goes on there, noticed that the number of parkers was way up, and that the great majority of them were elderly men.
It seems that word had got around among heart patients that you can somehow upgrade your pacemaker, and your own physical vigor, by sitting for extended periods near the big rotating radar screen situated near the parking lot. Devotees of this folk therapy claim that after an hour or so they begin to “feel the beam” every time the screen comes around.
Cardiologists, however, say radar has no medical value and, what's more, that so-called “beaming up” may account for a recent surge in fatalities from overexertion among area men with pacemakers. So authorities have blocked off the lot.
A protest organization has been formed called HORSE: Hearts Operating on Radar-Screen Enhancement.
•••
Bruxism. Nocturnal dental gritting and grinding. For two out of five Americans today, it is a chronic complaint. Dentists and psychotherapists do what they can to treat it. But for a growing number of communicants, bruxism is a fulfillment of the biblical prophecy: “There shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.” In Louisiana alone there are now more than a dozen Bruxist congregations. “We are not, quote, ‘Holy Grinders,’ ” says a spokesman for the sect. “We do not, quote, ‘speak in teeth.’ We do take widespread nighttime gnashing as a sign. That the last days are at hand.”
•••
“I'll tell you where I got the idea,” says “Wade Beacham, the Midland, Texas, oilman who founded Rain Forest Fellowships, Inc. “I took a fishing trip on the Amazon, and saw how our native guides lived. I came back to Dallas and a friend of mine said he was worried about his son, he was off in college and wanted to be an environmentalist, devote his life to saving the rain forest. I said, ‘Tell you what. Let's set up a program.’
“So now any Texas college student who's developing these environmental leanings, and whose daddy has $18,000 to spare, can go spend a semester IN the environment, and see what it's like—with these Indians down there, who kill and eat everything they can and chop down anything they feel like. In other words the rain forest is just as much a jungle as the bidness world. Those kids go down there wanting to hug a tree, and they come back mean as snakes. It's refreshing.”
•••
At Fernbank High in Philatobia, Mississippi, Howard Nitze—four foot nine inches tall at age sixteen—wasn't bullied, just treated as a mascot.
“Itsy Bitsy” Nitze, they called him. They would put him up on top of things—the trophy case, a flagpole—and he was a good sport. On the bus coming back from the basketball game in Vestal Springs last week, they had undressed him and were painting him blue and gold, the school colors, when the bus slid down an embankment and got wedged in so the door would barely open. And who was able to slither out, climb to the highway, and flag down a passing truck?
“I saw this tiny blue-and-gold guy, wrapped in this gold thing, turned out to be a cheerleader's skirt,” says the driver. “I started not to stop.”
“Itsy Bitsy came up huge,” says head cheerleader Jacey Pepperell. “Oops, I mean Howard.”
•••
The following item appeared last week in the “Corrections” column of the
Marcell (Florida) Dispatch-Citizen:
“A headline in yesterday's early editions, Overholzer Naked to Ceremonial Post,’ should have stated Overholzer Named to Ceremonial Post.’ The first sentence in the accompanying article, ‘Miriam H. Overholzer was naked Mistress of Revels yesterday in a ceremony at the Senior League Arts Center,’ should have stated ‘Miriam H. Overholzer was named Mistress of Revels yesterday in a ceremony at the Senior League Arts Center.’ The photograph that appeared above the headline was not of Mrs. Overholzer. It should have accompanied a review of the Episcopal Dance Society's presentation
of
Eve Embracing the Tree of Knowledge
which appeared on page twenty-eight with a photograph of Mrs. Overholzer holding a gavel. The dancer, who is from Chicago, was wearing a full body stocking. The
Dispatch-Citizen
regrets any confusion these errors may have caused.”
•••
It was Flonny'n'Ward's against Mom'n'PopCo, eyeball to eyeball, and Mom'n'PopCo blinked. In “Ward's Words,” his weekly paid-advertisement-column in the
Goforth (Georgia) New Era,
Ward Dukeheart took it to the tristate chain of convenience stores—Mom'n Pop's—that threatened his and his wife's family store, Flonny'n'Ward's.
“This soulless corporate entity,” wrote Ward, “thinks it can render extinct my wife and I. But we have served this community's short-term food and notions needs for thirty-seven years and will prevail. The little heads in that Mom'n'Pop logo? They aren't anybody. The little heads in Flonny'n'Ward's logo? Me and Flonny. And in the area of live bait, well, they'll have a
vending machine.
”
Last week, after a deluge of angry mail, Mom'n'PopCo announced it had abandoned plans to open a store right across the road from Flonny'n'Ward's.
•••
At last someone has harnessed the vexatious powers of that minute reddish larva of the harvest mite known as the redbug or chigger. A chigger gets on your skin and begins to break down and ingest your cells with its saliva, which makes you itch. Well, scientists at Clemson University have shown that the key element of chigger saliva can be isolated and re-engineered to focus on hair follicles. Is Madame's down getting dirty? A little bit of chigger spit whisks away those unwanted whiskers for good. Since chigger saliva is almost unbelievably difficult to gather in bulk, the commercial potential may seem limited, but the researchers expect they will find a way of creating a synthetic form of that key element soon.
•••
Remember back in 1961, that country record “I Saw Right Through You So I Filled You Full of Holes”? In Hot Springs, Arkansas, a rumor arose that Miss Mae Swan, the high school band teacher, had written that song.
No crime in that. Trouble was, the lyrics—“You stepped fat and sassy out of room fourteen. The blast flung you up against the drink machine,”
and so on—fit to an uncanny extent the quite recent shotgun slaying of a local man named Haskell Feathers.
When you and that machine were gushin’
Blood and Mountain Dew,
You realized I knew some things
You didn't know I knew.
The song came out right after the slaying. If Miss Mae did write it, she would have had to have written it
before
the slaying.
Asked about this, Miss Mae confessed. “Yes, I planned it, and I did it like I planned it,” she said. “And I'd do it again.”
And she served her time, and came back home, and hasn't shot anybody else, or written any more songs, since.
And she was Bill Clinton's band teacher, and used to run with his late mama. And by all accounts, Haskell Feathers was just about, barely, worth shooting. Last week President Clinton pardoned Miss Mae so she could vote again.
Asked who she would vote for, for president, Miss Mae was mum.
•••
Somebody has dug up a secret Philip Morris file concerning an attempt during the late sixties to bolster the appeal of flavorless filter-tip cigarettes by lacing them with what was referred to in one document as “human nature's prime motivator”: that is, pheromones, derived from “the sweat of an average eighteen-year-old North Carolina girl,” who was unnamed. This experiment—which of course reflects not only the laboratory's location in Durham, N.C., but also certain age and gender biases on the part of the scientists—was called off because another prominent North Carolinian got, so to speak, wind of it: the Rev. Billy Graham—who informed the head of Philip Morris (at a Nixon prayer breakfast) that the young woman in question had come forward at one of his rallies and tearfully confessed her involvement. If this research was pursued further, Graham said, he would be forced to break with the tobacco industry.
•••
Eighteen years ago, when the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded, a letter to the editor appeared in the
Anniston (Alabama) Herald-Advertiser.
It was a very brief letter, but it expressed so many people's feelings so well that it began a tradition at the paper. Whenever news was especially unsettling, that same letter would appear in a box on the front page.
“Dear Editor,” the letter said simply, “Sometimes, there's just nothing we can say. Sincerely, Ellenora Yancey Byrum.”
Miss Ellenora's letter ran again on September 12, 2001, of course.
And then last Thursday it ran once more. Miss Ellenora—who was in fact a great talker, friends say, but only ever had the one thing published—had passed away at eighty-six.