All Over but the Shoutin' (23 page)

But someday, I promised her, I would make it happen. We were sitting in the living room of that house where I could stand in the middle of the borrowed living room and touch both facing walls, and I told her: “Momma, one of these days I’m gonna buy you a house.” She just nodded, as if to say, “That’s nice, dear,” and I shut my mouth. I know that, to her, I might as well have said that Jesus had just ridden down Quintard Avenue on a bicycle. She didn’t believe me. She just thought I was dreaming again, like that boy in the field searching for four-leaf clovers. She is a woman who has learned not to believe in promises, or dreamers.

I do not want to sound ungrateful to the people who, through their charity, gave us a place to live. If it were not for them, I am sure we would have been the first homeless family in Calhoun County. For decades, my aunts and uncles helped pay her electric bill. My uncle Ed gives her twenty dollars a week, holding it out of the money he tithes to the church. He figures the Lord won’t mind.

She never said she wanted a house. She never even hinted. But if you could have seen her face when we rode down the rural roads of our county, heard her talk about how this house is an A-frame and that one is a Victorian, about how this one will need painting in a few years and that one has just got a new covering of aluminum siding, you would know. For a woman who didn’t get out hardly at all, she knew every house on Nisbet Lake Road, on Roy Webb Road, on Cove Road, any road. She knew who lived there then and who used to live there. She would look at the roofs and pass judgment on whether it was worn out or just stained by the sweetgum trees.

She is the daughter of a carpenter, after all, a man who lived his whole life building other people’s houses and never owned one of his own, either. I guess she never expected to own one; maybe a little bit, before my daddy, when she still dared to dream.

When I was a teenager, she used to order catalogs from the Jim Walter Company, which was famous for building “affordable housing.” These were not fancy double-wides made of tin and particle board, but neat, nice, small, real-wood houses, usually white, with porches. She would flip through them like a child flipping through a toy catalog, wishing. But there was no money for land, even if we could have ever saved enough to build anything bigger than a dog house. You can dream on welfare. You can hope as you take in ironing. It is just less painful if you don’t.

I could have bought her one on credit, could have been careful with my money and made the mortgage payments. But like her, I am wary of things that seem too good, too much. I was afraid that I would get her in a decent house, and something would happen, taking away my ability to pay for it, and she would have it taken away.

Nothing that has ever happened in my own life explains why I felt that way—I had been lucky as sin my whole life—but if you really do grow up as what some people call white trash, you grow up knowing that it might all turn to shit at any second. The only way I knew to make sure of it, was to buy it outright.

I got started late, almost too late. I had never saved a dime. When I was married, we squeaked by like everyone else, month to month. When I was single again I wasted much of what was left from rent, bills and barbecue on 1966 Mustangs, anchor women and former Shades Valley High School majorettes. I have never lived lavishly. I still don’t. My possessions, then and now, consisted of homemade book shelves, books, a couch, a chair, a TV, a stereo, a softball glove and just enough clothes to get by. I never owned a suit until I was twenty-nine. I owned two ties, then, but I’m up to four now. I didn’t wear jewelry; still don’t. My cars, never top-tier classics but rolling, pretty junk, seldom cost more than four thousand dollars, and I bought them on credit.

I seldom took a vacation, and then only to Fort Walton Beach, for a few days. I had never been out of the country, except one trip down to Mexico, when I was covering a football game in Texas. If it hadn’t been for women, hell, I could have been a monk or at least a Hare Krishna, for all the money I spent. I already have the tennis shoes.

The problem was, I picked the lowest-paying profession in America.

Then I compounded it by waiting, I guess because I was selfish. I should have sold insurance, maybe, or worked in a bank, or maybe gotten on at Goodyear, or the mills in Birmingham. Instead, I wrote stories.

In 1987, I opened a savings account in Birmingham.

W
e were men by now, my brothers and me.

Sam, that indestructible object that the worst of life had failed to even nick, was building his life like a man laying brick and didn’t need me or anybody. He had married Teresa, a thoughtful, quiet girl who made strawberry shortcake that would literally melt in your mouth. I went to the hospital to see their baby, Meredith Marie, named for my momma, Margaret Marie. She was so tiny I quickly passed her over to an aunt, afraid I would break her. Sam had life by the throat and was squeezing it. He would be fine until he gave out, and I knew he would never, never do that.

In many ways, Mark, my baby brother, was a stranger to me. I had known he had quit school, but that was not exactly unheard of in our world. I figured he would make a living with his own sweat, like Sam. Instead of trying to talk him out of it, I put on a bad tie and wrote stories for strangers, about strangers.

I heard about him only through my momma’s worries. He drank too much, but considering our heritage, it would be remarkable only if he did not drink, and cuss, and fight.

Only the years would determine whether he would reach some uneasy peace with life, as some of us had, or whether it would burn him up.

I should have seen the signs sooner that there was no peace in him at all. He had a souped-up Chevy Nova he bought from our cousin Charlie Couch, and every time he took me for a ride he pushed it as hard as it would go without blowing up, not just driving fast, but punishingly so. I noticed there were always beer bottles in the back floorboard, always, and not three or four, but piles, and a six-pack of warm beer. He didn’t give a damn that it was warm. That should have told me a lot.

But I always drove home to Birmingham more or less assured that, unless he broke down on a railroad track some night, he was fine. My uncle Ed gave him steady work. My uncle John helped him buy some land over near Websters Chapel, and he began to build a house.

I wrote stories and played softball and spent time with a twenty-one-year-old Catholic girl on long, sweet weekends in New Orleans. Some of the big papers started to notice me. They sent me letters, asking me if I had ever considered exploring the opportunities of journalism outside Alabama.

When I finally bothered to pay attention to my little brother again, when I finally bothered to halfway give a damn, I couldn’t find him. The boy had vanished, swept away on that same river of alcohol that carried away our father. Just looking into his eyes, those unfocused, too-old eyes, broke my heart right in two. And for the next ten years I would hold out empty hope that he would change, quit, find Jesus, do anything except destroy himself, a swallow at a time.

I
have never had a drink by myself in my life.

I drink in crowds. When I was younger I thought whiskey made me charming, and bulletproof. Once, in a bar in Birmingham when I was twenty-five, and stupid, I drank so much of it that I took a pistol away from a man who was waving it around at the clientele, convinced that no harm could come to me.

But I never, ever drink alone. I am afraid I will like it too much. I am afraid it will numb me and warm me and soothe me and ultimately seduce me. I am scared to death that it will take the pains and the doubts and the fears away, that it will make me like myself just too damn much.

I fear, mostly, I would find in it the absolution that people on both sides of my family have found, for generations. It is a thing in my blood, in my genes, like blond hair and blue eyes. And once you embrace it, behind some closed door, you will never escape it.

I believe it made my daddy not care, that it made him leave her without milk or money or a way to live, or to see a doctor. I believe it. Because whatever weakness he had in him, whatever devils rode his back, a man just don’t do that sober.

I remember a time. I was in a hotel room in Miami, late at night, dog tired, keyed-up and sick. I was just back from a few months in Haiti, from writing about killing, mostly. I couldn’t sleep, my head hurt too much to read and the television just jangled my nerves.

I sought distraction, if nothing else, in the mini bar. I slipped the key into the little refrigerator and it swung open to reveal a wonderland of liquor, in neat rows of tiny bottles. There was amber Scotch and yellow tequila and clear gin, and a vodka that seemed almost silver. They were pretty. I reached in and got a baby bottle of Wild Turkey, cracked it open and poured it in a water glass. I distinctly remember raising it to my lips, and the smell, like smoke and brown sugar and something stronger, The Spirit in it. And I gagged. I poured it into the sink and rinsed the glass.

Then I got me some jelly beans and a glass of water, and I watched
Rat Patrol
and infomercials until the sun finally fought its way over the dark line of Biscayne Bay.

20
Under Vulcan’s hammer

B
y the time I got to Birmingham, its great story was already frozen in stone. Kelly Ingram Park is a place of statues now, quiet, peaceful, unless you are one of those people to whom history screams. Old black men sit on the park benches to feel the sun on their face, and discuss whether or not that statue of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior really looks like him. It stands on ground, what many people in this city see as holy ground, where civil rights marchers were pummeled by batons, blasted with fire hoses and gnawed by dogs, on the orders of a one-eyed little man named Bull Connor. A few feet away is the venerable old Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where a Klansman’s bomb killed four little girls. History might not scream to a white man here, but it whispers.

It is a yuppie town now. At lunchtime, 20th Street is a parade of black wingtips and sensible pumps. The sky has not been darkened by the steel mills for a long time. A world-class medical school, not the furnaces, defines this green and pretty city. The very name Birmingham will always be shorthand for the worst of the civil rights movement, I suppose, but when I was there, in the last part of the 1980s, the city had abandoned even the memory of men like Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, as I wrote then, “like a gun left behind at the scene of the crime.”

When I worked for the
Birmingham News
, I wrote a story about it, twenty-five years after that tumultuous time. I described the serenity of the park, the significance of the monuments to black people who suffered there.

“For Connor,” I wrote, “there is no memorial, no sign he was even here. If the intersection of 16th Street and Sixth Avenue North is a shrine to the civil rights movement, it is Connor’s unmarked grave.”

The night the story ran, I got a call from a man who only said: “You the one wrote that article on Bull Connor?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well,” the voice said, “you can kiss my ass.” Then he hung up, like he had accomplished something.

Sometimes in this world, you don’t get the whole dog. Now and then, you have to settle for the tail.

I would have loved to have had some part in covering the events of 1963. I know few real newspeople, of any color, who would not have wanted to be part of that story. But I was born too late for it. Instead of seeing it, describing it, I am awakened twenty-five years too late by some jackass who wants to turn back time. I laid the phone back in its cradle thinking that I may as well be living in Cleveland.

But the fact is, I learned to do the big story in Birmingham. The big story is the one that anchors Page One, the one that can make careers. I wrote them and they put them in the paper, and you cannot ask for more than that in this business. I wrote about the slow deaths of coal mining towns with a business writer named Dean Barber who had a dog named Teton and would one day learn to play the banjo. I wrote about the state of Alabama’s shameful funding of social programs that allowed thousands of children to go neglected and be abused, sharing the byline with a reporter named Mike Oliver who had a good fallaway jumpshot and damned good sources. With Mike, I went into a prison to write about the ill-conceived design plan that made it a house of glass, that allowed prison employees to be trapped, stabbed, raped. I wrote about an Alabama preacher wrongly convicted of killing his young wife, and cleared his name.

The stories were important, serious, in a time when the word
reporter
did not conjure images of some doofus asking a woman with a ring in her nose why she professed love to a man with a giant safety pin through his eyebrow and claimed that he once glimpsed Elvis in a plate of scrambled eggs. My education in serious journalism that was born at Jacksonville and Talladega and nurtured at Anniston was, for more than three years, applied here. I did not expect it to last for long—I was a fairly liberal minded young man with a short temper, working for a conservative newspaper where at least two of the high-ranking editors considered me a smartass and a showoff—but I made it hard for them to fire me.

This was a midsize daily where many people came expecting to work out their careers and retire. Most of my colleagues came from the journalism schools of Alabama and Auburn, not Harvard and Yale. I was more at home here, even though some of them hated my guts eventually, which is the sad nature of our business. That chip on my shoulder was still there. I could feel it every time some reporter with “Roll Tide” on his breath asked me where I went to school, but it was not nearly so heavy now. I was proving myself on the front page of the newspaper every few Sundays.

I had fun. I made lasting friends. I stood up with Greg Garrison when he married Tracy from the art department, and threw a bachelor party that ended ignominously when he, drunk as Cooter Brown on the one night of a man’s life when it is more or less acceptable, bit a nudie dancer on the behind and got us tossed out of the bar by one of the biggest men I have ever seen. Greg is the religion writer. I ate enough barbecue with Mike Bolton, the outdoors writer, to kill a normal man. He got some sauce on his shirt once, and used Wite-Out to repair the damage. I admired Mike.