A better sort of history
Summer of '07 just popped back into my head in the shower. The memories were so fresh for that first couple of months afterward, but since then they have been far removed from me. Given that some of the most amazing things in my life happened on that trip, I am going to start telling those stories again to make sure they stay alive in my memory; to make sure that academic thought--sterile and fixed as it is--doesn't supplant the living, thriving, cyclical fact of being in the world that oral history represents. So here goes, to my knowledge the most bizarre, memorable occurrence of the whole 2,000 miles:
We pulled into Wilmington, North Carolina early afternoon in the hopes of catching one of Don's friends, one Kenny. It took some time to get a hold of him, and in the time it took to contact him and find out that he was out of town for one more day the sun had gone down and here we were in a strange college town filled with drunk students and an infamously high homeless population. What to do? Though typically thrift was the word, we didn't want to sleep out on the streets in this town because man it was skeevy. Half the people we meet were weirdos and the stories we heard from the seemingly normal folk all screamed, "DON'T SLEEP OUTSIDE!" So we started cruising the streets looking for motels. Every motel is booked solid. UNC Wilmington's Graduation weekend: families sleeping in town to see the big day, kids booking rooms to celebrate with drinking and raucous fucking all night long. No motel, no sleep, sunset. Considering our options with a growing sense of gloom, we are led by the morbidly obese Southern hand of fate to the door of the only 24/7 establishment in town...
WAFFLE HOUSE.
The staff grows to like us as we stay there drinking coffee. One hour, two hours three elapse. Questions about why we are some grungy fuckin' dudes and what's with the bikes. Lots of playing chess, I get my ass kicked every single time. Midnight passes us by and I start on a short book, Crome Yellow by Huxley. By the time we get out of Waffle House (which by 1AM was filled with drunk college folk thanks to it's sole claim to perpetually open doors) we have both tried to sleep IN THE WAFFLE HOUSE to no avail. We go next door to another motel to check on availability of rooms. Finding our luck run out and 3AM passing quickly to 4, we just fucking pitch the tent outside of the motel in the grass and tie up the bikes. If we get kicked out, oh well. If not, well, sleep is sleep. Morning rolls around and we are slow to wake up after the long and pretty stressful previous day.
The story gets good now, so pay attention. A relatively normal looking fellow approaches me and we get to talking about the whole biking thing and he seems pretty chipper. You know, at this point it's like a good number of days since my last shower and my skin feels like it is absolutely crawling. So when I complain about it, the dude offers to let me use the shower in his motel room. Okay yes alarm bells go off in my head but boy oh boy does a shower sound nice. I go back to the tent to get a change of clothes and slip my knife into the pocket of my jeans, and go inside to get a fucking godsend shower. When I come out Don is sitting on one of the beds talking to the dude, and BAM now there is another dude. This is when I notice (how did I not before?) the empty beer cans and prescription pill bottles all over the room. I sit down and talk pleasantly with these guys, who reveal themselves to be Jackson Pollack (the fellow I met first) and Joe (the new guy). Let me describe the men before I progress this story further:
Jackson Pollack- Late 30s something with a button down shirt, long sleeve. Semi-professional looking, done up brown hair. Not heavy set but slightly above average build. All in all the sort of guy who gets lost in a crowd
Joe- What the fuck prison movie did this guy step out of? Skinny guy with kinda gross saggy skin, super bald head. Lanky and tallish, absolutely COVERED in tattoos. What sort of awesome tattoos you ask? FUCK THE D.O.C. (Department of Corrections for those not in the know) across his back from shoulder to shoulder; chicks with huge titties (spellcheck accepts titties? AWESOME) holding Confederate flags; a big circle-a on fire; and the coup de grace, the star on the top of the Christmas tree: HATE in capital letters spelled out with...
...with SKULLS.
Jackson bemoans his current financial situation. He has been laid off by his evil asshole of a boss for fucking his bosses wife! Depression and financial ruin brings him to motels to scam them by buying one room, then another, then another, then skipping off without fully paying. Or so he says. Joe, well, we don't know how those dudes knew eachother and they didn't seem ready to tell us, but Joe was right pissed about his buddy. That boss owed Jackson money for his hard work! (flinging paint?) and damned if they weren't going to find the punk and take the money. Do you doubt Joe's ability to the take the money? DON'T DO THAT. Between bouts of smalltalk Joe proves his craziness with stories about prison and violence, but in particular he returns to this one point:
"Hypothetically speaking, say right here on this nightstand there was a little red button that would immediately summon the police, right? I don't mean call them I mean you push the button and boom police are there are the door. Now, now answer me this alright. Do you think you can get to that button, do you think you could press that button before I got my hands around your throat? I don't think so. But look man, there isn't even a button. There is NO BUTTON."
He was very smug about it, but I don't think it was the empty sort of smug a libertarian or "green" consumer has about them. This was an EARNED smugness, a smugness brought about through sheer pride in animal cunning and ability. Joe was the fucking man, basically. And he even had a wife! A nice woman who clearly sensed that Don and I, who were looking back and forth at one another like 'what the fuck?' between exchanging yeahs and cools with our hosts. She even got us McDonalds. But we wanted to get out of there before more weirdness went down and also because it was already afternoon and we hadn't had a chance to call Kenny. The leaving was long and drawn out, almost painful. Jackson really needed money and he started pestering us about helping him out, hoping the burgers and shower would soften us up some. But fuck that, we extracted ourselves and got to a coffee shop to try and think about what had just happened. We managed to get up with Kenny later and had a place to sleep that didn't suck cocks.
End story.
We pulled into Wilmington, North Carolina early afternoon in the hopes of catching one of Don's friends, one Kenny. It took some time to get a hold of him, and in the time it took to contact him and find out that he was out of town for one more day the sun had gone down and here we were in a strange college town filled with drunk students and an infamously high homeless population. What to do? Though typically thrift was the word, we didn't want to sleep out on the streets in this town because man it was skeevy. Half the people we meet were weirdos and the stories we heard from the seemingly normal folk all screamed, "DON'T SLEEP OUTSIDE!" So we started cruising the streets looking for motels. Every motel is booked solid. UNC Wilmington's Graduation weekend: families sleeping in town to see the big day, kids booking rooms to celebrate with drinking and raucous fucking all night long. No motel, no sleep, sunset. Considering our options with a growing sense of gloom, we are led by the morbidly obese Southern hand of fate to the door of the only 24/7 establishment in town...
WAFFLE HOUSE.
The staff grows to like us as we stay there drinking coffee. One hour, two hours three elapse. Questions about why we are some grungy fuckin' dudes and what's with the bikes. Lots of playing chess, I get my ass kicked every single time. Midnight passes us by and I start on a short book, Crome Yellow by Huxley. By the time we get out of Waffle House (which by 1AM was filled with drunk college folk thanks to it's sole claim to perpetually open doors) we have both tried to sleep IN THE WAFFLE HOUSE to no avail. We go next door to another motel to check on availability of rooms. Finding our luck run out and 3AM passing quickly to 4, we just fucking pitch the tent outside of the motel in the grass and tie up the bikes. If we get kicked out, oh well. If not, well, sleep is sleep. Morning rolls around and we are slow to wake up after the long and pretty stressful previous day.
The story gets good now, so pay attention. A relatively normal looking fellow approaches me and we get to talking about the whole biking thing and he seems pretty chipper. You know, at this point it's like a good number of days since my last shower and my skin feels like it is absolutely crawling. So when I complain about it, the dude offers to let me use the shower in his motel room. Okay yes alarm bells go off in my head but boy oh boy does a shower sound nice. I go back to the tent to get a change of clothes and slip my knife into the pocket of my jeans, and go inside to get a fucking godsend shower. When I come out Don is sitting on one of the beds talking to the dude, and BAM now there is another dude. This is when I notice (how did I not before?) the empty beer cans and prescription pill bottles all over the room. I sit down and talk pleasantly with these guys, who reveal themselves to be Jackson Pollack (the fellow I met first) and Joe (the new guy). Let me describe the men before I progress this story further:
Jackson Pollack- Late 30s something with a button down shirt, long sleeve. Semi-professional looking, done up brown hair. Not heavy set but slightly above average build. All in all the sort of guy who gets lost in a crowd
Joe- What the fuck prison movie did this guy step out of? Skinny guy with kinda gross saggy skin, super bald head. Lanky and tallish, absolutely COVERED in tattoos. What sort of awesome tattoos you ask? FUCK THE D.O.C. (Department of Corrections for those not in the know) across his back from shoulder to shoulder; chicks with huge titties (spellcheck accepts titties? AWESOME) holding Confederate flags; a big circle-a on fire; and the coup de grace, the star on the top of the Christmas tree: HATE in capital letters spelled out with...
...with SKULLS.
Jackson bemoans his current financial situation. He has been laid off by his evil asshole of a boss for fucking his bosses wife! Depression and financial ruin brings him to motels to scam them by buying one room, then another, then another, then skipping off without fully paying. Or so he says. Joe, well, we don't know how those dudes knew eachother and they didn't seem ready to tell us, but Joe was right pissed about his buddy. That boss owed Jackson money for his hard work! (flinging paint?) and damned if they weren't going to find the punk and take the money. Do you doubt Joe's ability to the take the money? DON'T DO THAT. Between bouts of smalltalk Joe proves his craziness with stories about prison and violence, but in particular he returns to this one point:
"Hypothetically speaking, say right here on this nightstand there was a little red button that would immediately summon the police, right? I don't mean call them I mean you push the button and boom police are there are the door. Now, now answer me this alright. Do you think you can get to that button, do you think you could press that button before I got my hands around your throat? I don't think so. But look man, there isn't even a button. There is NO BUTTON."
He was very smug about it, but I don't think it was the empty sort of smug a libertarian or "green" consumer has about them. This was an EARNED smugness, a smugness brought about through sheer pride in animal cunning and ability. Joe was the fucking man, basically. And he even had a wife! A nice woman who clearly sensed that Don and I, who were looking back and forth at one another like 'what the fuck?' between exchanging yeahs and cools with our hosts. She even got us McDonalds. But we wanted to get out of there before more weirdness went down and also because it was already afternoon and we hadn't had a chance to call Kenny. The leaving was long and drawn out, almost painful. Jackson really needed money and he started pestering us about helping him out, hoping the burgers and shower would soften us up some. But fuck that, we extracted ourselves and got to a coffee shop to try and think about what had just happened. We managed to get up with Kenny later and had a place to sleep that didn't suck cocks.
End story.