All Over but the Shoutin' (21 page)

On Saturdays, after a few hours sleep, it was college game day. I flew a million miles in single-engine planes with pilots who learned to soar in Vietnam but were prone to doze at the controls in the boredom of a Mississippi sky. I got food poisoning from a box lunch in Starkville, got run over on the sideline on an end-around in Tuscaloosa. I stood like a jackass and waited for some nineteen-year-old to speak a truth that I could include in my story, which would have been unbearable if I had been much older than nineteen myself. I was deafened by that damn cannon they shot off after every touchdown in Mississippi, and strained to hear Bryant mumble out of his post-game press conferences to a small army of reporters who would cut their wrists before they would ever write one negative word about that old man or the institution he represented. We worked eighteen-hour days, got paid twenty-one cents a mile to drive our cars to Martin, Tennessee, and Philadelphia, Mississippi, and stayed in hotels where you found palmetto bugs belly-up in the bathtub and Cheetos on the bedspread.

God, I would love to do it all over again.

Football is a cliché, down here. I do not believe that sport is the very essence of Southern life—I know God and work and family precede football, except perhaps on Alabama-Auburn game day—but what it really is, is the grandest of escapes from that life. For me, that escape took on a whole other meaning.

I would never have been a writer if not for it. I never, ever would have gotten into a journalism school, what with me having a C average and all. I am sure I would never have gotten a job. Some newspapers see sports as the toy factory, not serious journalism, so it can be trusted to those who did not go to Harvard, or even to the dentist regularly. All I know is, it was my way in, and looking back I realize that I never realized how lucky and blessed I was.

I wrote of heroes. The most popular man in Alabama most of my young life was not George Wallace but Bear Bryant (or, if you lived in the flatland to the south, Shug Jordan of Auburn). Even now, if you go to a bar or restaurant in Birmingham, you will eventually hear the water joke:

Saint Peter welcomes a man into heaven. The new arrival spots an old man in a houndstooth hat walking on water. “Is that Bear Bryant?” he reverently asks.

“No, that’s God,” Saint Peter says. “He only thinks He’s Bear Bryant.”

He had his own television show, sponsored by Coke and Golden Flake potato chips. You knew that because at the beginning of every show he opened up a bag of potato chips and set an open bottle of Coke on the table in front of him. He would mumble about how proud he was of this boy or that boy and what fine parents his momma and daddy were down there in Opp or Enterprise or Sylacauga as the game highlight film played across the screen. Then, in mid-mumble, one of his linebackers would separate some ball carrier from his spine and Bryant would shout out “Bingo!” like someone had jabbed him with a fork.

He was one of our legacies that we could be proud of, in a state hurting for them. What he died, my newspaper sent me to interview the man who dug his grave.

Until I was twenty-three, at progressively larger papers that never reached more than 30,000 in circulation, I wrote of sports. I dropped out of college because I had accomplished what I wanted from it—a coat-and-tie job—and lent my meager talents to the
Talladega Daily Home
and then the
Anniston Star.
They did not care that I did not have a college degree. I could spell, sort of. I worked cheap. I needed the work and loved the work too much to ask for overtime.

At nineteen, working for the
Talladega Daily Home
, I went on a road-trip to Atlanta to cover a stock car race with the immortal Tommy Hornsby, who was the sports editor and a drummer in a country rock band. He took me to my first topless bar. The dancer—there were only two and one was drunk—had long, pink scars on her wrists, and her breath smelled like Marlboros. I learned a lot from Tommy.

At twenty, I was working full-time for the best small newspaper in Alabama and one of the best in the country, the
Anniston Star.
The sports editor was a talented writer named Wayne Hester, who told me once that I could write some, and let me. I came to work the first day in a white pair of pants, a white shirt and a white slip-on tie. I looked like I was selling ice cream.

I wrote about everything from high school wrestling to country club golf, but what I loved was racing. Our newspaper office was a twenty-minute drive from Talladega International Motor Speedway, the world’s fastest enclosed speedway, but the spirit of the sport then was strictly backwoods. Most of the drivers had learned it running likker in the mountains of the Carolinas, or had learned it from people who did. I wrote about Fireball Roberts, Richard Petty, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, Buddy Baker, Junior Johnson. Even the names were grand. Coo Coo Marlin. Lake Speed. And, of course, my all-time favorite, Jimmy “Smut” Means, the one who was prone to hit the wall at Talladega, and live.

They ran bumper to bumper and door to door at two hundred miles an hour, and now and then one of them would die. Usually, but not always, it would be some no-name driver in second-rate equipment who just could not handle the speed, that fantastic speed. He would wobble a little on the turns that were banked so steep it was hard to even walk up them, and spin out, and meet Jesus on the wall, or on the bumper of a car that hit him broadside, what they called “gettin’ T-boned.”

They would be, unless they were famous, only a footnote in the story, because the race was what was important, and the winning of it. We always wrote them the same way, those stories. In the third or fourth paragraph would be: “The race was overshadowed by the death of (insert name here).” I didn’t know any better. I should have done better. I should have written, in the first paragraph: “A man died here today, and a race was run.”

But Lord, it was thrilling. The sound alone would rock you, like a billion angry hornets in a giant bucket, and every time the cars flashed around the track, death was just a twitch away.

I was slowly beginning to realize that the only thing that was worth writing about was living and dying and the trembling membrane in between. I have never been a ghoul. I have been so sickened by killing and dying that sleep was just one more dream in bed at 4
A.M.
But even then, I was drawn to those stories. There was something about the rich darkness of it, of that struggle by people at risk, people in trouble, that made all other stories seem trivial. They were the most important stories in the newspaper. I wanted to write them, only them.

T
he managing editor of the
Anniston Star
let me move to the state desk when I was still in my early twenties, into a newsroom dominated by Harvard, Yale, Columbia and assorted other pointy heads who came South for the invaluable experience they would glean from writing about people that some of them held largely in contempt. The
Star
drew them down here because of its reputation as a great place to learn. The paper’s owner and editor, H. Brandt Ayers, got some good stories out of them before they moved on, because while some of them treated the South as if they were on safari, some of them did great work. They caught people doing bad things. When some grinning crook on the county commission tried to abuse his power and line his pockets, they wrote about it. They did about two years on their tour of duty in the heart of darkness, living in the pool houses and basement apartments of the well-off people on the East Side, and then moved on to the bigger but not always better newspapers. People like me, without any academic credentials on us, would stay behind. It was the system, or at least it always had been, and I did not even try not to be bitter. I had long talks with the sage senior editor, Cody Hall, who made it plain that I should be proud of who I was. “Life is too short to dance with an ugly woman,” and my ugly woman was my own envy.

But the fact is, on hindsight, the Yankees were mostly okay. I ate barbecue and coconut pie with them, and beneath their Yankeeness, I found genuine concern for people who were poorer and weaker. The
Star’s
founder, Colonel Ayers, had believed it was a newspaper’s responsibility to be an attorney for the least influential, the weakest, of its readership, and there were many, many people who passed through the doors of that place who read those words on the editorial page and took them to heart. I worked for the state editor, a young man named Randy Henderson who had the patience not to fire me, a smart and decent man with ethics you couldn’t dent with a wrecking ball. But mostly, like I said, he was patient. It is a great virtue, where I am concerned.

The first story I wrote as a news reporter, I wrote about deer hunters who were killing themselves in the woods by accident, at a record rate. I described a man’s attempt to drag his friend out of the woods, bleeding to death, after he shot him. It was hard, harder than anything I had ever done. The managing editor, Chris Waddle, told me it was a fine newspaper story, and I had my first taste of that odd mixed emotion, of pride in the work, of seeing your story at the top of the page, and of that terrible sadness that the words contained.

Because I was a working reporter, I did a lot of other, less dramatic stories. I covered the county commission in Cleburne County, and city council meetings at Anniston, where my favorite politician of all time, Pink Junior Wood, a barber by trade, sat on the dais. It was one of the grand things, of being a newspaperman in the South: just being able to write at least once a week the words “Pink Junior Wood.” I wrote about speed trap towns and cockfighting rings and accidents on the lonely, twisting roads. I interviewed the mayor of Montgomery, Emory Folmar, who was so conservative that he compelled black people to vote in droves for George Wallace.

I continued to swap notions and stories and make friends with the Yankee reporters, and made fun of them even as they made fun of me. The experience of working shoulder to shoulder with so many educated and privileged young people was good for me, I am sure, but the chip I had carried on my shoulder for a lifetime grew in those years to about the size of a concrete block. To me, they had everything, and I am sure I resented it, foolishly, childishly. I could only write, a little bit.

After the
Birmingham News
hired Randy Henderson away, I worked for a metro editor who didn’t think a lot of me. I am sure he had his reasons. But one meeting still sears me whenever I think about it. The managing editor had offered me the city reporter’s job, about the best job on staff, because he thought I was good and because he did not care that I had never been to Princeton. The metro editor had another reporter in mind, a talented young woman who was better at straight news than me. The metro editor took me for a drink after work, and told me, to my face, that I was not sophisticated enough to be the city reporter. I should have cussed him, but instead I just sat there and let it pass, hating myself for it. The next morning I walked into the managing editor’s office and told him that, yes, I would like to be the city reporter, thank you very much.

The fact is that, in some ways, the metro editor was probably right. I had no business being a reporter. I had six months of college and four years sitting in press boxes trying to get the quarterback’s name right. All I knew how to do was tell stories on paper, and didn’t have even one dollop of what one respected editor, Basil Penny, called “jelly.” Basil explained “jelly” as a concoction of a lot of things, but the main ingredient was pretension. Me and him, we were just plain biscuit.

But the main reason I took the other editor’s insult was because I had no choice. I needed the job. By then I had a house payment, responsibilities. I had a $250 electric bill.

I had, by then, a wife.

18
White tuxedoes

S
he was as pretty as sunshine on roses. She was small, delicate, and her hair was almost black. She had huge brown eyes, and a big red Pontiac Le Mans she used to drive me around in when my rolling junk, third-hand muscle cars were dead on the side of the road. My girl cousins said she looked like a porcelain doll, that she was perfect. She was smart—made all A’s in high school and college—and nice, too. I’m pretty sure she still is.

Her daddy read Rex Stout novels and her momma made the best macaroni and cheese casserole I’ve ever had. They raised their only child in a middle-class neighborhood of brick houses and well-fed cats. The dogs all had collars, and didn’t bite.

We met in Jacksonville, when I was working for the
Jacksonville News.
She was a sophomore at Jacksonville State, training to be a social worker and working part-time at the Weaver City Hall, answering phones. Her daddy kind of liked me, I thought. Her momma kind of didn’t, but that is often the way of it, cliché or not.

Not long after I got my first good full-time job, at the
Anniston Star
, I proposed. I got the ring at Service Merchandise, on credit. When I gave it to her, she cried.

I proposed standing up. I would have gotten down on my knees, but they were tore up on the inside so bad from playing ball, I knew that if I ever got down there, one or the other of my knees would lock and she would have to help me up. She didn’t mind.

I was not afraid of getting married. Getting married was what you did if you were any damn good, at least in that culture I grew up in. I was not my daddy, I kept telling myself. I would not be him.

I was in my early twenties. I had a good job. I had done as much of what we tactfully refer to as “runnin’ around” as a man can, without being shotgunned to death climbing out of someone’s bedroom window. It was time, I believed.

I was no kind of playboy. It was just that, unlike a lot of my brethren, I learned early on that there is no way to make someone want you if they don’t. You can either waste time fantasizing about how to win your woman back, or you move on. It might not be the stuff of love stories, but in the time it takes to dive to the depths of misery in a bad relationship, sulk on the bottom, and then come clawing out for air, I could have thoroughly enjoyed being dumped three or four more times, as bad as that sounds. I was not a heart-on-your-sleeve kind of boy. I did not write love letters, did not sit and wonder why they left me or I left them. They came and went by an average of about two a year, often—you could time it by a clock—when they found out who I really was, where I came from.