Two nights ago, I stayed at Jackson’s Trace motel in Sylacauga, Alabama. In the morning, Alexander from two doors down told me he had chest pain and that he’d had open heart surgery, he yanked down the neck of his t-shirt to show me the scar. The shirt was stained and already so stretched it didn’t take much yanking. He said his house had burned down and his car had been vandalized and that he needed to meet with the judge. Cornelius, another neighbor, was born and raised in Sylacauga and wanted to talk about the Revival. He’s unemployed looking for a job.
I stopped at Heart of Dixie Harley Davidson in Pelham, Alabama to pick up a quart of oil. They have at least one black customer.
Heart of Dixie Harley Davidson
White guy in golf shirt, Bermuda shorts, flip flops in a parking lot asks about The Revival and me. I said I was here to talk with people I might not agree with, to try to break through the media filter. He said, “I’m with you. I watch Tucker every night”. He was on his way to the waterpark with his wife.
I motored past a roadside stand selling jellies and pickles and turned around and went back. I got some blueberry jelly for Jane and some sweet pickles for me. Jayde was a victim of sex trafficking by men in the Marine Corps and unable to escape. Her mother hadn’t believed her. She’s 36 and has been in the program for two months. She talked for several minutes.
City of Lights Dream Center is a 12-month support program for drug rehab, victims of domestic violence, poverty and the like. They asked me to write about them. Photo left to right: Jordyn, Jayde, Kim, all in the program. The jam and pickles were twelve bucks, I gave them a twenty and told them to keep the change.
I chatted with Hehe last night at the Redwood Inn while I was doing my laundry. She’s fourteen going into her sophomore year. Her parents are from Mumbai and own the motel. She’d never been to India and wanted to hear about it, wanted to know if I’d liked it. I told her that Jane and I were engaged at the Taj Mahal. Hehe has three sisters, two are in college. It looks like Grandma lives here, too.
In the Army, Billy T was a friend and roommate. He was from Chattanooga. I thought I’d try to look him up.
In Leeds, not too far from Birmingham, Vicky owns a cafe called Laney’s. Her daughters, Sharon and Laney, do the managing and cooking, Sharon’s daughter, Lillian, makes the biscuits. Hot and buttery and crispy brown on the outside, served with pepper gravy, those biscuits are so worth the sore butt of getting there.
They were sitting at a table near the coffee pot and when I filled my cup and they asked about my trip; I told them I was wandering the south talking politics with people I might disagree with.
Laney told a story about a cop escorting her out of a local dirt track car racing event for being overly affectionate with her girlfriend. She told it like it was a family story she’d told many times. Her mother and sister laughed with her as she told it.
I parked the Revival and walked the streets of Marion. In the drugstore, the girl behind the cash register said hello. I said my wife worked in a drugstore when she was in high school and we got to talking. She’d graduated in May and is going into the Air Force in the fall. I told her that I’d joined the army after high school.
There’s a fine line between curious and creep. Two old ladies approached the register. Rather than skulk around while they paid, I told her to take care and we bumped fists, enlistee and vet, and I got back on the bike.
Two or three miles down the road from Marion, I stopped to talk to TJ sitting on his horse, Red. TJ lives on a farm down the red clay road from where I pulled over. He lives with his folks raising cows and sheep and growing melons. He’s ridden bulls in the rodeo, just a couple of times, and sometimes races Red. Red’s a fast horse. TJ graduated in May, he’s thinking about welding school in the fall, but sounded tentative. I told him about the girl at the drug store. She was a classmate.
I pulled off the road and down a little track under a bridge to pee. There was pickup parked there. Twelve years ago, Cleveland retired from his job in Cleveland, he’d been a mold maker in a foundry. He grew up near Greensboro and now he’s home, fishing for catfish. His daughters and grandchildren are coming from Ohio to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday on Tuesday. He already had two nice fish in the bucket. I didn’t ask him how he came to be called Cleveland.
Chris woke me up this morning at 6:00 when he started his truck just outside my window. It’s a diesel flatbed and damn it’s loud. Chris’ company is CH Mechanical out of south Georgia. They’re moving a veneer drier from Camden to Greenville, they’ll load the last semi this morning. Chris has horses and a wife in Georgia. He talked a lot about the horses. And about a broken neck he got in ‘95 that partially disabled his right arm. After the holiday, he and his crew will spend another six weeks living in motel while they put the drier back together. When I talked to him last night, Chris was slurring his words, lean-on-the door jamb drunk.
Yesterday morning at Waffle House, Inez was my waitress. I told her I liked her name, she smiled and told me it was her grandmother’s name. She had a gold tooth.
Once in a while, when the road is good and the air temperature and humidity and the thrum of intake, ignition and exhaust are just so, motorcycling creates its own ethereality. Yesterday was like that.
Last night I walked from my motel down the hill to the Chevron station and bought a can of Corona. I handed the kid at the counter some bills and change and he noticed that one of my coins wasn’t a quarter, it wasn’t a US coin. He offered me a quarter for it. I told him that it’s probably worth fifty cents some place, but he could have it for a quarter. He’s gotten a lot of wheat pennies and a couple of silver certificate dollars over the years. The beer was cold.
I had some conversations yesterday. I mention Roe a couple of times below, it wasn’t me that brought it up.
At Jim’s Cafe, Jimmy (presumably no relation) and Debbie parked their shiny new pickup next to the Revival and sat at the the booth next to mine. Jimmy was on the phone and I chatted with Debbie about scuba diving in Cozumel and horses and horse hotels, their five-year marriage, the second for both of them, and not believing in vaccines and having Covid this spring and now she’s on three kinds of blood pressure medicine and it’s worth it because they’re her antibodies fighting the virus.
Jimmy, wearing a pink golf shirt, got off the phone and started talking to me, loud, motorcycle guy to motorcycle guy. He’d been cancelling plans for Sturgis. They’d been to Sturgis last year, trailered the bikes, great time, Sturgis, great music, great people, couldn’t wait to go back, ah, but this year a friend couldn’t go. Horrible. Very disappointed. Was really looking forward to Sturgis. He looks me in the eye over his bacon and grits and asked me, motorcycle guy to motorcycle guy, if I’d ever been to Sturgis. I told him yeah, I’d been to Sturgis. Forty years ago.
Ronald Lee Anderson was sitting on a bench in front of Jim’s Cafe and when I came out, I sat on the bench next to him and we got to talking. He told me about places he’d lived and jobs he’d had and how he supported the SCOTUS decision on Roe. I asked him why and he pointed to a book of scripture on the bench next to him, the binding shredded, the cover torn and the pages piled loosely. I said the bible has nothing to say about abortion. He said, “thou shalt not kill.”
My goal on this trip is to listen but sometimes listening is too hard.
I said, ‘That’s bullshit. Loving a fetus is cheap and lazy. I’m sitting next to a guy who just asked me for five dollars for breakfast, what about him? Where’s his unconditional love? Where’s the pro Ronald Lee Anderson life movement? Who’s picketing and protesting and raising money for him? Where are the billboards? Where’s the fancy speeches and big gatherings and powerful politicians demanding Ronald’s well-being?’ He got quiet. I’d asked him directions earlier and after a minute he stood up and he told me how to get where I was going and he walked away. I rode passed him and he didn’t wave.
I pulled off the highway into a little park and there was a Sheriff’s SUV parked there and I parked beside it. Nick Phillips is a Greenville County Sheriff, a vet and a native Apache, his grandfather as a child had been sent east from the reservation to go to school. Nick talked about the high rate of crime in Greenville, about the police and the local chapter of the Vice Lords having an informal agreement, ignore prostitution and drugs, focus on rapes and murders. The agreement worked for everybody until local politics and a new police chief made a mess. And Roe was going to make it worse. Because all these families living on the edge are going to have more babies they won’t be able to care for. More desperation. More crime. Nick is moving to Memphis with his wife and child and getting out of law enforcement.
In Rosedale, Mississippi, I sat in the shade on a concrete ledge on Bruce Street and had a conversation with John Wright. Rosedale was immortalized by Robert Johnson’s recording of “Traveling Riverside Blues” and made famous by Eric Clapton and Cream in their later version of the song which includes the line, “goin’ down to Rosedale.” In its heyday in the ‘30s, Bruce Street was lined with juke joints. Today, it’s vacant, crumbling structures and concrete pads where the joints used to shake, bluesmen strummed and wailed and people danced night into day.
John Wright
Apologies that this is so long, I ran out of time.
