Between Wrecks (32 page)

I would be remiss to forget whoever it is in Oak Ridge that runs the free summer concert series downtown so that everyone in Roane and Anderson counties can experience some culture. Listen, the first time I encountered the Amazing Hundred Member Marching Jew's Harp Twangers, I worked on
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
over at the library. I struggled, and couldn't find anything in the stacks that might offer to me what I deemed necessary knowledge as a biographer, at that point. I still have no clue what “Squid in the pot without the squid” means, which is what Columbus Choice had typed out under the Homemade Soups part of his menu.

As I sat there at the study carrel holding my head in my hands, I thought I heard a thousand old-fashioned twin-propeller fighter jets buzzing overhead. I thought I heard a thousand small school children all yelling into a window fan. I thought I heard a thousand bee hives stacked together at dusk when the workers come home. I thought I heard the emergency broadcast system playing a low-pitched siren so as to not alarm local dogs. Maybe one of the nuclear reactors is about to blow a la Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island, or the others one that have probably been kept secret by various governments around the world. Perhaps some kind of aboriginal tribe passed through armed with their melodic and sacred didgeridoos.

I heard what I thought had to be a thousand Buddhist monks Oming their lungs out.

But like I said, it was only the Amazing Hundred Member Marching Jew's Harp Twangers out of western North Carolina performing their spectacular tribute to Led Zeppelin. What brought me onto the library's steps was the opening to “Whole Lotta Love.” Walking down to Historic Jackson Square, I fell into step with “Heartbreaker,” and by the time I took a seat on the ground amidst forward-thinking members of the community who'd brought along folding lawn chairs with them, the band—made up mostly of ex-hippies who now worked as bankers and architects and lawyers in Asheville—went straight into “Living Lovin' Maid.”

Sitting cross-legged, Native-American-style, on the grass, the sounds that the Amazing Hundred Member Marching Jew's Harp Twangers helped me realize that A) anything's possible; and B) Columbus Choice would've dug them playing these Om sounds over and over at his restaurant.

After what I imagine will be an extensive and demanding book tour, I might write a scholarly treatise comparing Buddhist monks to Appalachian musicians adept at producing the soulful, resonating backbeat hums of the Jew's harp. I won't make any promises. There's no telling how many innocent victims will be lynched by that time, good people whose stories need to be known by all.

You would think that a biographer consumed and obsessed with the story of Columbus Choice would not have time for trivialities. It is true that during the decade that I worked on
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
, I did not join the Oak Ridge Fitness Center and work out daily. I didn't go for long treks on a mountain bike, though there are some wonderful trails in and around Frozen Head State Park. I didn't get involved with those TV reality shows, or many of the situation comedies. Who thinks anything's funny whatsoever after thinking about Columbus Choice's life every waking moment for approximately 3,650 days, when he wasn't thinking about Abby's grievances in the marriage?

I didn't become absorbed with learning Spanish, though I should've. I didn't watch major league baseball, attend the Chattanooga Lookouts minor league games like my old long-snapper buddy Chester Clabo did only because he had a crush on a woman who worked the Cajun boiled peanuts stand, or collect baseball cards. I didn't play video games, online poker, regular poker with ex-colleagues from Tennessee Valley Community College, drive up yearly to Lexington to watch the Kentucky Derby, or squirrel away money for scratch card tickets and daily lottery drawings.

I never ran, unless I felt that someone chased me—and that happened more times than I could count, probably because there are people out there who don't want me to tell Columbus Choice's story. I didn't take up painting or sculpting or whittling. Not once did I think it necessary to learn how to play a guitar or trombone in order to become a well-rounded person, though I might've started playing a Jew's harp if I'd've ever run across one. But I didn't. When I had a car, I didn't spend every weekend washing, waxing, and detailing the thing.

I didn't write poetry.

But I cannot honestly say that I didn't occasionally veer from my main focus. Whenever possible—whenever I had access to an electric outlet, television set, and VCR, I lost myself in the cutting-edge, miraculous, absurd film productions of writer-directors Jim Jarmusch, Ethan and Joel Coen, and David Lynch. I don't think it takes a protégée and/or devotee of Dr. Sigmund Freud to understand that perhaps I needed to “actively participate” in such masterpieces as
Blue Velvet, Down By Law, Raising Arizona, Eraser-head, Elephant Man, Broken Flowers, Night on Earth, Barton Fink
, and the
Big Lebowski
in order to feel that my life wasn't as horrendous as it could be.
Miller's Crossing. Twin Peaks. Mystery Train
. I suppose this notion goes all the way back to Aristotle, but last time I checked he didn't have a medical degree and background in psychiatry à la Sigmund Freud, and all that crap about “catharsis” that they teach in the English courses.

Now, I understand that I could be accused of sucking up to these absolute geniuses, but after reading
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
, I think that anyone would easily say, “You know, that would make a great movie!” Hell, it would make
two
great movies, if you ask me. First off, there could be a regular bio-pic of the life and times of Columbus Choice. I doubt that any filmmaker in his or her right mind would want to call the thing—even if it became one of those Hallmark movies aired on the Lifetime or Oxygen channels—
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
. You couldn't even get all that title out on the screen hardly. I'm surprised the art department at the publisher didn't flinch and say they didn't want to put out a dust wrapper with nine point font all across the top. Anyway, the bio-pic could be, I've been thinking, called something shorter, like
Columbus
, or
Choice
, or
Columbus Choice
, or
Fresh Fish and Mantras
, or
Hang, Stab, Shoot
. And then it'll have “Based on the work of Stet Looper,” down at the bottom, you know.

So, you got that. And then another movie could be the one of my life while I
wrote
the biography
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
. It would start right off inside my History 101 class at Tennessee Valley Community College, and then maybe go through some flashbacks involving my shanking a punt over my teammates' heads on the sidelines and into the bleachers like the time we played Ole Miss, and then maybe I could do a voiceover, you know, and so on. I'd call that one something like
Tennessee!
, or
Oak Ridge
, or
Between Harriman and Oak Ridge
, or
Legal Pads and Sterno
. Or
Juanita
.

I would've liked to have thanked the great movie director Robert Altman, but he went off and died. His movies made me feel better about myself—especially
Nashville
, seeing as it's in the same state as where I live. So no thanks to good Robert Altman. I
am
remiss in thanking Robert Altman. You know why I don't go to funerals? Answer: Those people aren't going to mine.

Juanita Wilkins, phlebotomist, says I can't forget, and need to thank, Roman Polanski in this list. So what the hell, okay, though I can't think of one of his movies that made me feel better. Maybe they're not on videotape yet. Maybe they're on that DVD thing that everyone's talking about down at the library.

And there must be other directors I'll think of later.

While I'm alluding to the this-makes-me-feel-better-about-my-self-and-therefore-I-got-the-opportunity-not-to-get-into-full-blown-manic-depression mode, I want to thank the Tennessee Valley Recreation League Baseball Association, and particularly the team sponsored by one of those interdenominational churches run by a guy with a goatee and a high school diploma who used to do a lot of crystal meth before the Lord told him to become a minister and spread the word. I'm not making it up when I say that the place was called the Second Coming United Ministries, and the poor little ten-year-olds had S.C.U.M spread across their uniforms like badges of dishonor. Another S.C.U.M.! How weird is that?—first the Southern Confederation of United Militia, and now the Second Coming United Ministries.

Anyway, these kids were absolutely dreadful. Not even Michael Ritchie, who directed the classic movie
The Bad News Bears
, could've brought any hope or humor into these children's lives. If you've ever seen little kids out in the outfield staring up at the sky, or chasing butterflies, or looking into the stands forlornly because their fathers didn't show up, or picking their noses, or talking to themselves, or holding their peckers thinking that no one can see them out there, or pretending that they're running a standard muscle car through the gears, or running over to tackle one of the other outfielders on the team because of seasonal confusion disorder—if you've seen this, and multiply it by ten, then you'll understand the Second Coming United Ministries Fighting Laymen, whom I'm pretty sure had been instructed to speak in tongues while in the field. How can a kid speak in tongues? If you got those kids to speak in tongues at the same time that the Amazing Hundred Member Marching Jew's Harp Twangers went into something like an instrumental version of “Smoke on the Water,” I do believe that specters would emerge from inanimate objects and take over the planet.

On a side note, I always thought they should've been called the Suckers, or the Bags.

Anyway, I could've never finished Columbus Choice's bio, I doubt, without watching the S.C.U.M. Fighting Laymen lose games, on average, by twenty runs. I don't know why, but that touchy-feely rule employed in more liberal, understanding, fore-sightful No Child Left Behind states wherein if a Little League team gets behind by seven or ten runs then the game's over—places like South Carolina, even—never found its way to this particular region of Tennessee. I'd go watch a game and then always go back to wherever I lived at the time and crank out something like a thousand words pertaining to Columbus Choice. If baseball season lasted year-round, and the Second Coming United Ministries Fighting Laymen played daily, I would've finished the biography in a hundred and twenty days.

I want to thank the Second Coming United Ministries' choral director, Ms. Emilia Perkins, for a couple things. First off, although I do not believe in that Bible stuff whatsoever, except perhaps the story of Job, I have found it uplifting to listen to Ms. Perkins's choir selections, which lean over into what might be called the “African-American gospel.” Those songs where everyone's clapping, swaying, and wailing out things. I have no evidence as to whether Columbus Choice enjoyed this kind of music. As a child, I know for a fact that he attended an A.M.E. church. Before his stint in the military, he probably attended Sunday and Wednesday services like most people in the South. Anyway, when I hear the Second Coming United Ministries choir—it's purely a coincidence that I happened by the front door of the ex-storefront on Sunday mornings—it causes me to know that there's a joyous reason to give the world something like
No Cover Available: The Story of Columbus Choice, African-American Sushi Chef from Tennessee
. And I'm happy that it makes people like Juanita Wilkins, phlebotomist and soprano, happy to be singing, gyrating, and verging toward seizure.

I'm grateful to goatee-wearing high school graduate ex-meth addict Reverend Frankie Spigner for sending off to one of those places in order to get a license to marry people.

Fearless and curious dogs have enough problems, but a dog forced to live in questionable places—say, at the Frozen Head State Park Campground, drinking tainted water straight out of the stream and eating renegade campers' leftovers that fall out of trash bins—surely risks more diseases and parasites than the normal suburban-living poodle. My dog Dooley wouldn't still be here if it weren't for the good people at Intervet manufacturing all the way over in Vienna, Austria, and distributed by Intervet, Inc. of Millsboro, Delaware. To be more specific, I want to thank Intervet for their wonderful product, Panacur C, a canine dewormer with fenbendazole granules. Listen, all those other over-the-counter products
might
work for roundworms and hookworms—and I stress “might”—but Panacur C eradicates those tough-to-kill whip-worms that live in the soil, plus tapeworms. You'd think that a dog wouldn't get bored living at a campground, but he does, at times. What does he do when there are no squeaky toys around with which to play? He eats dirt. He digs for moles, and he eats dirt. And gets whipworms.

People who read long biographies out there, you do not want to be stuck in a two-person pup tent on the banks of Flat Fork Creek with a dog suffering whipworms. I won't go into great detail, but the whipworm's effects on a dog's alimentary canal is about the same as what happens to a human after a barium enema, or after drinking a glass of Epsom salts, or after drinking the most tainted water possible down in Mexico, or after eating some good Christian family's left-out-in-the-sun-too-long macaroni salad and potato salad on a picnic table while they go for a hike up to the lookout tower in order to view the Cumberland Plateau in one direction and the Great Smoky Mountains in the other and to thank God for giving them such a spectacular existence.