driving the ’54 Pontiac when he died in the late sixties.
Now, how Uncle Grover had a part in starting me toward journalism:
My parents separated when I was six, and my mother and I moved in with her parents in Moreland. My grandparents lived next door to Uncle Grover and Aunt Jessie.
My grandfather was still able to farm twelve acres back then, and certain agricultural chores were placed upon me even at my tender age.
I was in charge of gathering the eggs from the henhouse in the morning, rain or shine. That wouldn’t have been such a difficult task had it not been for the fact my grandfather’s rooster, Garland, didn’t like me. The minute I would set foot in the henhouse, Garland would charge at me. Six-year-old boys aren’t that much bigger than a rooster. I had to gather the eggs while defending myself from a crazed rooster with my legs, my hands being occupied with the eggs, of course.
“Get back, you goddamn rooster!” I screamed out one morning, unaware that my grandmother, a foot-washing Baptist, was in earshot. After a fifteen-minute sermon, based on the Commandment that says, “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain,” my grandmother cut a switch off a small tree and thrashed me severely.
“When you say your prayers tonight,” she scolded me, “you must ask God to forgive you for what I heard you say in the henhouse.”
That night I prayed, “I’m sorry I said what I did in the henhouse, and would you please kill that goddamn rooster for me?”
Garland, however, was the Methuselah of roosters. I forget the exact year he died, but he outlived all the hens and two of my dogs.
The henhouse experience was enough to sour me against agriculture, but there were other things that made me even more certain I wanted no part of any career that had to do with dirt and attack roosters.
I had to pull corn one Saturday morning. There I was, relaxing with a bowl of Rice Krispies, when my grandfather said, “I need you to help me pull corn this morning.”
Corn doesn’t want to be pulled. It’s more stubborn than a rooster protecting his harem. Ears of corn grow on the cornstalks, and the idea is to separate the ears from the stalks. Mr. T. probably wouldn’t have any trouble pulling corn, because he can lift a Roto-Rooter van. But not me. I was a small, thin boy and my hands developed blisters and my grandfather said things like, “You’ll never make a good farmer if you don’t learn how to pull corn.”
“If he thinks I’m going to be a farmer,” I said to myself, “he is sadly mistaken, e-i-e-i-o.”
I won’t go into all the stuff about shelling butter beans and digging up potatoes and planting tomatoes and going out, as they said in those days, to pick a mess of turnip greens. Simply know that as I hurried toward an age that included double figures, I was certain agriculture wasn’t in my future.
Some might tell a youngster that he doesn’t have to pick a career until he’s older, but that’s wrong. The earlier you decide what you are going to do in life, the bigger head start you get in pursuit of same.
My father had been a soldier, but I didn’t want to be a soldier. All that marching. My mother was a schoolteacher, but I didn’t want any part of that, either. Imagine having to go to school every day for your entire life.
I toyed with the idea of driving a train for a while. The Crescent Limited ran through Moreland between Atlanta and New Orleans on the Atlanta and West Point Railroad, and it seemed all the guy who drove the train had to do was sit there and blow the horn. I mean, you didn’t have to learn a lot about steering.
After that, I considered opening a truck stop. The only businesses Moreland had was the knitting mill, Cureton and Cole’s store, Bohannon’s Service Station, Johnson’s Service Station and Grocery Store, the Our House beer joint, and Steve Smith’s truck stop.
A boy could learn a lot in a place like Steve Smith’s truck stop. Steve was sweet on my mother, I think, and before she remarried (another guy), she would take me down to Steve’s for a cheeseburger. We’d sit in one of the booths, and I’d eat while Steve and my mother would talk.
Among the wonders I saw at Steve’s was a pinball machine that truckers would pour dime after dime into. I didn’t know it at the time, but Steve paid off on the pinball machines. Let’s say you aligned three balls, you won twenty free games. Steve paid a dime for each free game. The more dimes you put into the machine, the more free games you would win. Legend had it a man driving for Yellow Freight scored two thousand free games one night and won two hundred dollars. That legend brought truckers in by the droves, and Steve was just sitting there talking to my mother getting rich while truckers fed his pinball machine because of the two-thousand-free-game rumor. Advertising, false or otherwise, pays.
There was also one of those beer signs in Steve’s where the little strands of color danced across the sign.
“How does that work?” I asked Steve one night.
“It’s magic, kid,” he said, and went back to talking to my mother.
I went to the rest room one night at Steve’s and noticed a strange machine on the wall. There was a place to put a quarter for what was described on the machine as a “Ribbed French-Tickler—Drive Her Wild.”
My mother wouldn’t allow me near the pinball machines, but here was my chance to do a little gambling on my own. I happened to have a quarter, which I put in the slot. Lo and behold, I won. I received a small package and immediately opened it. There was a balloon inside. I filled it with air, tied a knot on the end, and walked out with it.
“Look, Mom,” I said. “I put a quarter in the machine and got this balloon.”
“Gimme that,” said Steve, trying to take my balloon away. He ordered the waitress to bring me another Coke. In addition to the balloon, I also got a Coke out of the deal, so I figured the quarter had been well invested.
After the urge to open a truck stop when I grew up passed, I even had a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a minister. My grandmother was always talking about her sister’s boy, Arnold, who “made a preacher.”
I wondered, how hard could it be being a preacher? You figure there’s Wednesday night prayer meeting, then the Sunday service. Throw in a few weddings and funerals here and there, and that’s about it. Also, somebody would always be trying to get you over to their house to eat, and nobody serves anything bad to eat to preachers. Plus, you’d never have to cut your own grass.
Only a few days into my thoughts of become a minister, however, an older cousin explained to me a minister wasn’t allowed to do all the things I was looking forward to doing when I became an adult. Namely, drinking, smoking, cussing whenever you wanted to, and, since by that time I had learned what the balloon in the machine at Steve’s truck stop was all about, I figured preachers likely would be denied that little pearl, too. I got off the minister thing in a hurry.
At this point, we finally have arrived at where this chapter was headed. I tend to run on now and then, but that is called “expanding a theme,” which really is nothing more than vamping, which is nothing more than stalling, for which I apologize. But it has always been one of my weaknesses. I showed up at all three of my marriages late and, as a writer, I am notorious for putting off projects for as long as I possibly can. I should have written this book, for instance, five or six years ago, but I stalled, hoping someone else would do one of those unauthorized biographies of me and include all this, so I could stall around
