People
People talking people.
The Quitman Legacy
John Quitman owned 400 people
Captain Caviar
In Morgan City, Louisiana I stayed at the Morgan City Motel, a small, lonely $60.00 room.
Colonel Sawyer
Captain Sawyer was my Commanding Officer when I arrived at the 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, the 1/1 Cav, at O’Brien Barracks in Schwabach, West Germany
The Chicken Farmer
Ursula is fifty-four and has a son and some ex-husbands and lives alone in a pre-fab house on two acres of sun-baked scrub grass in eastern Tennessee
I Have a Friend Named Titus
Titus showed me one of his rifles, a Masterpiece Arms .338 Lapua Magnum with a Defiance action and Trigger Tech Diamond set at 1 pound with a Valdada Recon G2 optic 4.8-30x56mm scope
The Wedding
As it got dark, John lit the twenty-five foot tall bonfire he’d spent the previous day constructing
Best Fried Bologna Sandwich in the Galaxy
The Star Motel is one of those privately-owned brick motels built in the sixties with tired carpet, frayed towels and a clogged bathroom sink.
My Brother, My Brother
Greg can no longer assemble coherence
Shelly
Shelly’s husband committed suicide thirty years ago that day.
A Breakup Letter to a Former Friend and Coworker
You shouldn’t read shit from delusional people.
Hannibal to Cairo via East St. Louis
At breakfast, I met Angela and Alijah, Alijah is Angela’s niece and has a week off from school. Angela delivers school busses for a living. They’re from Atlanta and are on their way to St. Louis. The bus has a gasoline engine and no governor and they’re doing seventy-five.
The Small Motel
You don’t meet interesting people at a Holiday Inn Express
Ivory
She’s sixty-two and remembers as a child helping her great-grandmother pick cotton, dragging her small sack through the fields following after Big Mama.
Naked
The Terrace Motel in Natchez, Mississippi costs forty-five dollars a night. Cash.
The East St. Louis Monitor
On the wall, centered on that narrow passage at eye level is a photo. Arriving at work in the morning, coming back from a coffee break or the restroom or a meeting, he can’t sit down without looking at that picture. And his visitors, as he fields questions from his chair, are forced to confront it, to think about it, to lug that image out in their memories when they leave.
Judgement
Don (he titles himself Jah’ Don) makes Caribbean soul food. His mission statement is to make food with “flavor you can feel.”
Born in 1964
James and George are HIV positive
The Mineral Springs Motel
One of our two waitresses complained that eating raw broccoli gives her gas so bad she can’t breath
The Road to Ripley
Russ was drafted
The Four Seasons Motel
Vincent is my neighbor two doors down. Forty-seven, untrimmed beard, divorced, four kids, three at home with the ex.
American Motorcyclist
Bessie Stringfield, a Black woman born in Jamaica in 1911 (or North Carolina in 1912, depending on your source), made repeated solo motorcycle trips across the continental United States.
Broken Michael
Michael went to jail for the first time when he was fourteen. Since then, he’s spent almost five years in detention or jail. The girl he had a crush on when he was a freshman in high school was shot in the face with a shotgun at a house party.
Ever Wild
The hair, the tie dye, the dirt and dust, the incense and pot smoke, the tents and sleeping bags, the costumes and clothes (and lack of clothes), the music, the energy, the raw sensuality; it was 1973 and I was just seventeen.
Cody, Justin and Cole Porter
Cole Porter is from Peru, Indiana. Apparently the town is reluctant to celebrate its most notable son because he was gay.