Long Time Leaving (50 page)

“He'll shake everybody's hand but mine!” cries the bishop. “He knows I'll take out that demon! One day, I run him all the way around that MARTA station, but he wouldn't take my hand!”

“He
ain't no revund,” huffs the Reverend I. (for Inez) Will, who has been preaching on this corner herself for six years. She and the bishop get along, but brother Webb (if that is his name) is forever plaguing them. “I'm a prophet,” says Reverend Will. She shuffles three densely hand-lettered signs, hard to decipher linearly. The word
WOE
stands out, and
THE OLYMPICS IS NOT OF GOD
.

“Atlanta will be done away!” she says. “I been tellin 'em for six years! But people'd rather it snuck up on 'em!”

A young couple bop by, grinning. “That's right, you laughing,” she says. “I
know
you ain't praying, 'cause you got that nekkid gal!” The gal is wearing a scarcely daring skirt and tank top. The Reverend Will is wearing a white hat, a white sweater with lace trim, and a long high-necked bright-blue-red-and-green flowery dress. She's been arrested four times, she says. For coming down too hard on long-haired men and underdressed women, her colleague the bishop explains.

She gives me a steady look. “God showed me a storm coming down that street! He showed me a jail building blowing up! He showed me a train climbing steps! A train can't climb steps!” A couple of stairway-levels below us, a MARTA train rumbles.

“This Olympics is the end,” she says. “I
know
it is. All Atlanta care about is money! Atlanta with her attitude going to blow up! I been trying to warn 'em and they laugh. It tears me up! I can't stand it!”

The nonverbal man swoops in again, holding up a newspaper clipping and pointing to a figure quoted in it: $297,640. Then he gestures inclusively toward himself and the bishop and the Reverend Will and shakes his head. (I'm going to say it's merrily.) None of
them
is getting any of that money.

Nor do they ask their listeners for any. They get by. They have places to live. Lots of other Five Points people don't. For years, Woodruff Park has been bedroom to the homeless. Twenty-four men and three women were sleeping there during Friday night's opening ceremony.

Uncounted others have been driven away from the downtown by police pressure (there's a local ordinance forbidding “acting in a manner unlike a law-abiding individual in a parking lot”), by the new sprinkler system in Woodruff Park, by the demolition of three or four shelters during Olympic construction, by the conversion of the soup kitchen at St. Luke's Episcopal Church to Big Al's 50s Cafe, which wasn't pulling in anticipated Olympic revenues at lunchtime Saturday. I was the only customer. Nine dollars for a bad hamburger, a package of potato chips, a pickle, and a cold drink.

Word in the street is that military vans have been rounding up homeless men and stashing them in warehouses at Fort McPherson for the Olympic duration. None of the homeless advocates I talked to could confirm that rumor, but Anita Beaty of Atlanta's Task Force for the Homeless says the Olympics have caused a net loss of “hundreds of beds, when we already had thousands too few.”

She also says that 28 to 38 percent of people who call her organization's twenty-four-hour hotline in immediate need of a place to sleep are working men. Many of them have helped build Olympic venues. But they're being ripped off by temporary “labor pools” that contract out the men's work at $11 an hour, then pay the men minimum wage—less deductions for food and transportation. “Our modern slavery,” says Beaty.

“I didn't
want
to be in Atlanta,” says Anthony Knowlton, “I was
extradited
here. That's how I lost everything.” He does have a place to sleep, at St. Luke's, and he keeps busy informing other dispossessed people of their rights. “IT'S LEGAL TO BE HOMELESS” says a paper he carries. “Police can't arrest you in a public place if you: Sleep. Smell bad. Talk to yourself. Eat garbage. Police can arrest you in a public place if you: Beg. Cause a Disturbance. Obstruct a sidewalk. Spit on a sidewalk. Urinate.” He says, “Georgia will give you food stamps. But how can a man use food stamps if he's living in a parking lot? The concept of that criteria is fundamentally polluted. So he'll sell the stamps.”

“Then, if you get on drugs,” an affable but vague-looking young man, who was on them, told me in Woodruff Park, “then they really got you. Atlanta's a nice town, though. I helped build where they're holding the boxing.”

“Folks in our office waiting for shelter watched the opening ceremony on TV,” Beaty says. “They loved it. They're very docile people. They're used to waiting for a place to sleep. I step over women and little children's bodies on our floor, and I look down the street and see
the new stadium lit up and the fireworks going off, and I can hardly stand it.”

Standing things ought to be an Olympic event, at least the way it's practiced around Five Points. It would restore an element of amateurism—maybe not in the highest tradition, but amateurism has always been a function of what people can afford. A man I talked to in Five Points would be hard to beat in that competition. He declined to give me his name, partly “for security reasons” and partly because I had never interviewed Mike Tyson, “and if Mike don't trust you, why should I? See what I'm saying?” He did tell me a story.

“Somebody come after me trying to tell me I owe him money. He's got a pool cue in each hand. I said, ‘Man, I ain't got no money. Come after me with
two
pool cues in each hand, I
still
won't have no money. Do I
look
like I got any money? I hate to think how many pool cues you'd come after me with in each hand if I
did
look like I had any money. But I ain't ever looked like I had any money. And even if I
did look like
I had any money, I still wouldn't
have
no money. I
ain't never
had no money.’ I got him to where he gave me one of them pool cues, finally.”

I
know, as an abstract proposition, that the Atlanta area is where I grew up. But when I go back there, I wonder. “When I was a boy, did Atlanta even have a skyline? Not that I recall. Now it bristles with skyscrapers, in various far-flung clumps. Decatur, my hometown, used to be on the outskirts of Atlanta, but now it's way inside the perimeter highway, I-285, which itself can't contain the sprawl. Everybody's back-home area changes, but when I go back to mine, I have a hard time getting my bearings, even.

Driving in from the airport on I-75/85, I could be anywhere—until I exit on North Avenue, across from Georgia Tech, and arrive at the shiny curvaceous red-and-yellow exterior of the Varsity: “The “World's Largest Drive-in,” established 1928. Maybe the peg that you hang your recollections on is a church steeple or a tree carved with certain initials. For me, that peg is a chili dog, and trimmings, at the Varsity. “When I go back to my old high school or one of the houses I lived in, it's spooky,
it's different, I don't know what to do there anymore. At the Varsity, I know. Eat.

Daddy would drive the family there. When we pulled into the parking lot a carhop—isn't it fine when people do something literal? A carhop would hop onto our car. He'd stick the card with his number on it under our windshield wiper and ride us to our slot.

We knew, as everyone knew, that those carhops had at one time included Nipsey Russell, who went on to become a star of stage, game shows, and
Car 54, Where Are You?
We knew that the sashaying carhop with the crazy hat—a hat that might have fruit or tennis shoes on it—was known, though he was a man, as Sophie Mae.

Our carhop would take our order and hustle away and hustle back to hook a tray into the driver's window. And Daddy would pass the food out item by item as the aromas filled our car and our mouths watered. Don't spill it now, my parents would caution, as if anybody would.

When you reached dating age, you'd go to the Varsity after the movie. Nothing was sweeter than a pretty girl's lips flecked with traces of Krispy Kreme, but that didn't match the full sensorium of kissing after the Varsity. And after taking her home, you'd get back in your car and receive a bouquet—hints of domestic perfume, a base of relatively innocent musk, and, pervasively, essences of good things well and truly fried. Life was going to be endlessly appetizing.

Later, when I worked in Atlanta, I would lunch at the Varsity alone. Walk there, a mile or so, or, if I drove, I'd park in the lot and dine inside. That's what most people do these days. The carhops are fewer and less flamboyant. Inside, though, the atmosphere is essentially as it has been for as long as I can remember.

“What'll ya have?” Red-and-white tiles, chrome, shiny-clean mirrors, and sociable anticipation. The main room is aswarm with kids in Catholic school uniforms, dusty workingmen in gimme caps, rangy youths wearing letter jackets, hip-hoppy boys in wear endorsed by Out-Kast, businessmen in white shirts and ties, a bedraggled white-bearded man wearing mismatched sneakers. Altogether a dozen or so people at each of the seventeen indoor stations, lined up and moving along briskly, because the people taking the orders are rattling off the time-honored question: “Wuddle-ya-have, wuddle-ya-have?”

They are enforcing the equally time-honored Varsity injunction, “Have your money in your hand and your order in your mind.” But you don't feel harried, you feel that you are sustaining a tradition. Out of courtesy to those behind you, and respect for the institution, you do your
part to help the Varsity function. And while you're doing it, you chat with your fellow pilgrims. In the line next to mine, a willowy young black woman with Condoleezza Rice hair is marveling at the sight of a teacher keeping a busload of field-trip kids focused. “I could not do that,” she says. “My nerves are too bad.”

“I know how you feel,” responds a blockish white man in coveralls. “I got five grandboys from three to eight, and I can't stand 'em more'n an hour at a time. That's some list you got there.”

“I work out in Buckhead, and I said, ‘Anybody want anything from the Varsity?’ I shouldn't have said anything.” She reels off her order: “Nine chili dogs, five chili burgers, three BLTs, a burger with pimento cheese—”

“I never tried that,” the man behind her says. “I'll have to try that.”

“…a chili slaw dog—”

“Oh
yeah, now my stomach's growling.”

“…three fries, three rings, three frosted oranges, and three apple pies.” Within four minutes, it's there for her, piping hot, in “walking boxes.” I notice the bill is $52.16 with tax.

The Varsity is to a great extent transparent. When you give the “wuddle-ya-have” people your order, they call it back behind them to the Hole, where you can see people slicing buns, assembling sandwiches, and scooping fresh rings and strings out of fresh grease (canola oil, these days). The Varsity has its own lexicon. “Gimme a naked dog and strings.” “Gimme a glorified steak and rings.” “Yankee dog and an F.O.” A naked dog doesn't have anything on it. Why anybody would order that “is beyond me,” says the Varsity's owner, Nancy Gordy Simms, but some people do. A Yankee dog, also known as a yellow dog, has just mustard on it, a yellow streak. Hey, a little retro regional humor.

Here is what I have. Main course, a chili dog. All the way, which means accompanied by a big handful of chopped daily-fresh wax-paper-wrapped onions.

The bun of the chili dog is so fresh and yeasty that, when sliced (on the premises, bun by bun as called for), it embraces the fresh-cooked weenie cozily. Back in the Depression, Louis Bryan, who would marry my mother after my father's death, delivered buns to the Varsity. They were unacceptable if they couldn't be wrapped around the finger of the Varsity's founder and proprietor, Frank Gordy, without cracking. That is still true with regard to the finger of his successor, his granddaughter, Nancy.

Atop the weenie is a neat yet generous layer of beanless, fine-textured,
just-spicy-enough chili, cooked from scratch that day, which if it exceeds the bun does so just slightly, so it's fully sufficient but won't ooze off.

Precisely down the middle of the chili is a stripe of yellow mustard. Frank Gordy insisted on precision here, and so does Nancy, who runs the place, hands-on, with her son, Gordon Muir. “I broke down a bunch of dogs just now,” she says, “because they didn't look pretty to me.”

And these are my sides: order of fries (“strings”) and order of onion rings.

In one respect, the fries are like snowflakes: each individual fry is different. Unlike snowflakes, they are almost (but not quite) too hot to bite into right away, and they have bits of skin on them here and there, and …Well, they look like they have been cut from an actual potato on the premises that day, which is the case.

As to the rings: elsewhere, one of two things is wrong with onion rings. Either they are frozen abominations in which the onion has disappeared into the batter, or they are sloppy and fall apart as you try to get them in your mouth. Varsity rings are fresh onion slices in a creamy batter that holds the slices as lovingly as the bun of the chili dog holds the weenie. My one complaint about Varsity onion rings, historically, has been that they were too salty. They aren't anymore! Nancy has changed the batter's formula—her father's tastebuds in his last years demanded a bit more salt than most people would prefer. As happens in so many families.

It may surprise you that Nancy has a permit from the city of Atlanta to demolish the Varsity, which she renews every six months. But that is just so the city can't register it as a historic building. So the city can't tell her how to preserve it. Good. You want your talismanic chili dog to stay fresh, not get calcified.

This is my drink: a large Varsity orange. You think any orange drink is like any other. No. This one has a secret formula.

(And this, when I finish the above, will be my dessert: a scoop of black walnut ice cream and a scoop of lemon custard ice cream and a scoop of banana ice cream. Separate. Very creamy. And I know nowhere else in the world where you can count on getting those flavors.)