Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir

  “Naw,” Freddy says. “It’s nine hundred. I’ll give you a shitload for nine hundred.”

  Can I argue with a lying drug dealer named Freddy Business who has all the drugs and all the money and all the guns? Not really.

  But I do.

  “Freddy Business,” I say. “There is more than a thousand there, man. There’s twelve hundred. I know there is twelve hundred. I fucking counted it.”

  The driver looks over his shoulder at me. A threat?

  “Maybe it’s twelve. Yeah, it’s twelve. I can give you four large and four small, a little extra for your trouble and continued patronage.”

  Yes it’s a sign of trouble when the drug dealer gives you a deal. But who ever sees the signs until it is too late?

  I never do.

  Freddy drops me off in front of Pete’s Tavern on Irving and I call my friends and tell them to meet me there, and they will because I just spent all their money on drugs. My pockets are literally bulging with drugs.

  This allows me time to consider how I got to this place, how I got to Sixteenth and Irving in Manhattan with twelve hundred dollars’ worth of cocaine in my pockets, enough drugs to send me to prison for a fair stretch of time; even though it’s not crack and I’m white, I could still spend a lot of time in jail for the drugs in my pocket. I couldn’t just explain it away.

  “I pulled on someone else’s jeans this morning, Officer.”

  But I don’t have the answer to how I got here. I don’t even know where I am. Once I was married, once I lived in a beautiful house in Iowa City and I was married to a beautiful woman and then we lived together in a beautiful house in Portland, and then I fucked that all up, destroyed it, and I hate myself, and rather than think about that I go downstairs at Pete’s Tavern, the Place O. Henry Made Famous (how did he do that, by doing blow in the bathroom?), and I do some more drugs because it’s easier, so much easier to do drugs than to think about my old life, that old good life I ruined.

  But I think about it. No matter how hard I try to blow my brains out, I think about it. I think about the various good lives I have lived, how long these periods usually last, and I wonder why, now, in the richest city in the world, in the loveliest city in the world with the most beautiful women in the world and the best food and some of the best architecture and the best art and the best parks, and the most money that I have ever had in my bank account and a piece of real estate in this rich city and five hundred bottles of wine in my cellar, why, of all the cities on Earth, I am here now fucked up on drugs and deeply depressed in this great shining city on the island?

  I come back from the bathroom and some blue shirts have taken my place at the bar, so I leave. I tell my friends to return to the Swan but they never left, so I walk there.

  One friend is still doing yoga on the sidewalk. The other friend is mumbling into his own hands at the bar. And I talk to the girl reading Sophie’s Choice, and she tells me her name is Sophie but I assume this is a lie.

  The drugs are passed around and Sophie joins. She says she never does this stuff, just maybe sometimes on weekends and holidays or when her mother is in town.

  Much later Sophie comes home with me. I do drugs with her all night and read Styron aloud, and I’m in bed with her and during sex breaks I read more Styron. We spend the morning taking turns reading the entirety of Darkness Visible aloud, and I wonder if Styron would get a kick out of this, a writer in bed with a twenty-year-old, high on cocaine, reading aloud Styron’s book about the crippling effects of his depression and his years of self-medicating.

  9

  Genesis: an Imagining

  For a not-wealthy man of twenty he wears a fine new suit. It is not borrowed. The suit is black, and a thin gray tie parts the white sea of his shirt. The young man is handsome, and if he were smiling the smile would be large and welcoming, a bit crooked to the left, and his teeth would be in perfect shape, a gap between the front two. His white skin is lightly tanned; this is not a laborer’s tan but neither is it a banker’s. His nose is thin at the bridge and widens considerably at the nostrils. His blue eyes look like jewels. Beneath the hat his hair is thick, dark, and wavy. Sweat has begun to darken his collar. He stands with other similarly attired and sweating men. The women wear black dresses and cool themselves with silk fans but the women do not sweat.

  His wife died a few days earlier. And here we join him at her graveside. The graveyard is the Old Auburn Graveyard in Auburn, Alabama, for whites only. It is July 24, 1941.

  The man’s thoughts are a swirl of hatred for God, forgiveness for God, guilt and shame, and love for his newborn son. He does not hear a word the Southern Baptist preacher says, but later at the reception at his in-laws’ home the guests will tell him it was a spirited sermon and that for certain her soul left her body at the end of it, rising to the great heavens above.

  The man shovels dirt onto his young wife’s casket. The sound is hollow, a fist of knuckles against pine. He buries the spade in the pile of dirt and balances himself with the handle. He looks at the gathered crowd: his wife’s mother, her sisters and brothers, a smattering of nieces and nephews, a few of her dead father’s colleagues from the university. The man is poor and these people are not. He suspects they have designs on his baby son. He has sent word back to west Georgia that a cousin should come fetch him sometime in the next week so that he can return to Georgia with the baby boy.

  He thinks, “Lord, God, our eternal savior, take from us now the soul of Annie Swofford. She is yours. Her body belongs now to the earth. She died with the love of Christ in her heart. She will be renewed in your Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.”

  John Columbus Swofford walks through the streets of Auburn in the procession mourning his wife, Annie Swofford. The sweat on his body feels like devil spit. He wants a shower. He wants to put on a pair of work trousers and boots and a white cotton undershirt, and he wants to go out to the woods and chop down an acre of pine. But he must go home and take care of his month-old son.

  JOHN COLUMBUS SWOFFORD first met Annie Howard when she stopped by the little gas and sundries station he owned and ran out by Ridge Grove. To say he owned it gave him pride but it wasn’t exactly true. He’d worked there a year for Mr. Shanker, and then Mr. Shanker died and his widow told John Columbus to take it over and give her 10 percent of the monthly. And so he did. But he felt like an owner, kept the books, ordered the gasoline and the Coca-Cola and the ice cream and the hard and soft candy and work gloves, fan belts, and motor oil and tires.

  Mr. Shanker had had a side business of moonshine, doing his part to whet and supply appetites in this dry county, but after taking over the station John Columbus lined those thirty liquor bottles up at the edge of the wood behind the store and plinked them one by one with his .22 rifle. He’d left one standing and named it Temptation but in a year he’d never given in.

  When a man asked for moonshine John Columbus said, “Plumb out, fella.”

  And when Adolphus Rickman came by each month with a new supply John Columbus said, “Mr. Rickman, with all respect, we don’t traffic ’shine no more.”

  John Columbus considered affixing a name to the station, J. C. Swofford’s, something of the like, but the store had never had a name, it had always simply been “the station at Ridge Grove,” and the old-timers might not think it right if a name were attached.

  One afternoon John Columbus sat in his stoop chair, shading himself from the sun, thinking about the future, thinking about a chain of J. C. Swofford’s stores, and a trucking company, because he had the sensation that the roadways were gonna be big. He had plans.

  A Ford coupe pulled up and out jumped a girl of about seventeen. The car pulled off and left the girl in a cloud of dust. All the girls he’d ever seen around there were in Opelika or Auburn. Other than stocky old Miss Shanker he’d never seen a woman at Ridge Grove, except maybe in the backseat of her daddy’s car. He’d never seen a girl in a pretty white dress standing in the middle of his gravel driveway.

  ?
??Sir,” she said.

  He stared, dumb.

  “Sir?”

  He stood. His deep baritone boomed, “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I got me a flat tire driving my car back to town. I was coming in from Slaughters, where my cousins live. Ain’t this a gasoline station? Ain’t you a mechanic?”

  He said without really thinking about it, “I’m the owner, not a mechanic, but I know a thing or two about changing a wheel.”

  He pointed to his dilapidated flatbed Ford. He opened the passenger door for her. Inside the cab of the Ford it looked as if two raccoons had gotten into a fistfight. Only the faintest rumor of upholstery remained on the seats, and the floorboards were even less of a rumor.

  “Hold yourself a moment,” he said, and ran inside the store and grabbed a package of clean white shop towels.

  He covered the passenger seat with the towels and ushered the frightened girl in.

  “There ain’t hardly no floor,” she said. “Where do I put my feet?”

  “On the edges,” he said. Rust-chewed floorboards accessorized every vehicle he’d ever driven and he knew that this girl had never seen such a thing.

  His tires tore the gravel as he pulled onto the hardtop.

  “May I ask why that gentleman in the Ford didn’t help you?”

  “He was a salesman of some sort, Bibles, maybe, brushes, I don’t know. But he said he was already late to Opelika by an hour but he’d drop me to your station. The car ain’t but around the turn up here. It’s a, what they call it? A Cadillac.”

  “Your daddy’s?” he asked, with hope.

  “It is.”

  “He let you drive that big car all the way to Slaughters and back?”

  “Ain’t that far. But he don’t know I’m gone. He’s with the university choir on a competition down Montgomery. And my mama never notice nothing.”

  “Your daddy sing in the university choir?”

  She laughed. “No. ’Course not. He’s a professor of musicology. He lead ’em. He writes hymns and they sing ’em.”

  “You sing in the choir?”

  “Not in the university. At the church. Opelika First Baptist.”

  John Columbus had been to First Baptist to hear the preacher a few times. He’d left unimpressed. After two years in town he was still preacher-shopping. He’d never paid much attention to any choir. But now he would.

  Off to the opposite side of the road was a black 1938 Cadillac.

  He pointed at the Cadillac. “That your daddy’s?”

  “Yes it is.”

  He drove past it and then flipped a U-turn and pulled up behind the gleaming Caddy. He knew this car. He loved this car. It was a 1938 Sixty-Special. That first year it had outsold every other Cadillac on the market. John Columbus thought the car a bit daring for a university man, but quiet men often took dares with their automobiles.

  He’d pumped gas into a Sixty-Special before, but no man driving a Caddy would let a redneck grease monkey play around with his car at backward Ridge Grove—A rich man more likely to push his fancy car all the way to a proper mechanic in Auburn than allow me to fool around it, John Columbus thought.

  Once he’d nicked an owner’s manual from the glove compartment of a Sixty-Special while the man used the toilet.

  John Columbus sat up at night reading that manual, memorizing it and hoping the man would come back someday so he could return the manual, but that had never happened. And last night, after reading the Bible for an hour, he’d glanced through the manual and had in fact been studying the whereabouts and the functionality of the jack, and the location of the spare tire. It was as though a divine intervention had occurred and here was the result: a pretty girl in a white dress with a flat tire on her daddy’s Cadillac and no one in ten miles to fix the flat but him.

  She didn’t know his name because he hadn’t offered it nor had he inquired of hers. She stood near the right front wheel of his falling-apart hauling truck, her arms crossed, and she watched the man work. He removed his checked button-up and set the shirt on the backseat of her daddy’s car. His brown cotton work pants were clean and the white undershirt fit his body tight. She wondered if he had a woman, a mother or sister, who took care of him, or if he was a wanderer, a Southern vagabond of the type her father had told her to stay away from.

  “Beware the man with a big smile and a box of tools and no home address,” her father had once said.

  This man beneath her daddy’s car seemed unschooled but overtly and severely polite.

  He jacked up her daddy’s car. The muscles in his forearms rippled with each heavy turn of the crank, and the monstrous car slowly lifted from the earth. She smelled the dirt and the pine from the woods and she thought she might smell her own body. On the ride from Slaughters she’d sweat a thunderstorm; the sun had beat from the west into the back window, the car had become an oven. Or maybe she’d already been burning up for this blue-eyed man before meeting him. She stared at him and enjoyed the effect, a rugged handsome face: long nose thin at the bridge but widening at the nostrils, wide strong forehead, sharp chin, sly smile of white teeth. His body lengthy and fit.

  He stopped cranking the jack and looked at her, pleased with his work, shot her that smile, and stood.

  “Well, miss.” He stopped. “I do believe I’ve failed to properly introduce myself. I’m John Columbus Swofford. And you are?”

  He stepped forward, offered a slight, awkward bow. No man had ever bowed to her. She didn’t know how to respond. She curtseyed, and flirted with her eyes.

  “Mr. Swofford, my name is Annie Laurie Howard, of Auburn, Alabama. I’m pleased to meet you.”

  “The pleasure is mine, Miss Annie Laurie. If you’ve got ten more minutes to spare I’ll have you on the road back to Auburn and let’s hope you beat your daddy home from that singin’ competition in Montgomery.”

  “Well, sir, the car don’t look a bit movable right now, so I’ll give you ten minutes or twenty if you need ’em. But I do must beat my daddy home, if you can be of any help.”

  He moved quickly, assured of every action, not stopping to chat nor waiting for comment from her. He lowered the car back to the turf, stowed the jack in the trunk. He leaned against the open trunk, his right arm wide and high above her, holding the flat in the other hand.

  “Miss Annie Laurie,” he said, “you’ve got a predicament. Now if I place this ruined tire back in that side panel, one day your daddy is gone be driving and get a flat, and go for his spare, and find his spare is also flat. Not just flat, but looks to me like you run on it a few miles at least, it’s got teeth marks of a hyena all over it. Every man I know stay attuned to the whys and hows of his vehicle, and your father would, I’m guessing, find this mangled spare a queer event, not to mention a major inconvenience.”

  “What do I do?”

  He knew. He’d been thinking it with every crank of the jack. But he paused; he knew not to seem too eager. He looked to the woods. He looked to the ground. He played his chin with his fingers.

  “I think I got it. Figuring two days from now is Sunday, and you’ll be at Opelika First Baptist with your family, what I could do is drive down tomorrow, get a proper Caddy tire on this wheel, and while you are in church with your family on Sunday, I’ll return it.”

  “That seems like a perfect idea, Mr. Swofford. You’d do that for me? But I’m a stranger. Oh, my daddy would be on fire, as much fire as he ever get, if he knew I’d took his car out to Slaughters. You’d save me an awful lot of trouble.”

  “Consider it done. How early your family gets to church?”

  “Bible study starts at ten and the service at eleven. We try to get there by nine forty-five.”

  “Well then, I think you’re ready to get on home.”

  “How will I know you’ve replaced the tire?”

  “If you see me in the pews, listenin’ to you singin’ to the Lord, you’ll know.”

  He slammed the trunk shut and leaned the wheel against his truck. He grabbed h
is shirt from the backseat of the Sixty-Special, and opening the front door waved Miss Annie Laurie toward the driver’s seat.

  She sat down with a flourish, a bit of pomp, and he closed the door.

  Through the open window he watched her start the car, and heard the beautiful purring of the V-8.

  “You drive safe now,” he said.

  “What I owe you?” she asked.

  “Nothing just yet.”

  She smiled and headed home.

  JOHN COLUMBUS SLEPT in the tiny storeroom at the back of the station. His sole belongings: a camp cot and linens, a lantern, a Bible, ten undershirts, ten button-ups, three pairs of work trousers, a pair of dress trousers and almost-matching sport coat, two ties, one pair of black wing tips that he kept in a paper sack, and the owner’s manual to a 1938 Cadillac Sixty-Special. He did not have to live this way but chose to. Back in Lafayette, Georgia, his parents lived in a big country house. They were not wealthy people but they were “of means,” as would be said.

  John Columbus felt he should strike out on his own when he reached eighteen. He sent small amounts of money home when he could. He’d wanted to design airplanes but didn’t have the schooling and didn’t have the patience to get the schooling.

  He’d spent a year doing highway work for Georgia, and then at the state line he took over work for Alabama, and the road crews pushed their way west, eventually to settle on the outskirts of Auburn, near the train tracks, waiting for work.

  After a month he grew tired of the tent city where the road authority housed him, grew tired of the drinking and whoring and gambling that most of his cohorts took to as a profession, and he left the camp, and after a few days of wandering around, sleeping in let rooms, and asking questions of anyone who might listen, he ended up spending the night in the let room of a Mr. Shanker. Didn’t take long for the men to hammer out the details of his new employment.

  And now here he was.

  Tonight he’d give the Lord a rest. Every page of his Bible marginalia and eraser smudges evinced a man working hard for the Lord. John Columbus never proselytized but he knew his Bible better than most men. But tonight he’d spend more time with the Sixty-Special.