Derby, Alabama

Proof sent from the 1990's of a lingering obsession with death...

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NOTE: My last Food Fight post was a complete failure. It was supposed to have been Washington DC 2025 set in my middle school in 1982. I was trying to come to a simplistic understanding of how easy it is to turn into the types of people who are leading our country right now. Either food fight starters, food fight participants, or the extremely rare person who has the self-confidence not to join in mob mentality behavior. I was also thinking about how strong the pull of chaos is. It is very strong. I freaking love chaos, but not this kind of chaos. Most folks (two out of the three who read it) thought I was telling a real story about me starting a food fight in middle school - which never happened. So again - that post was a full fail and it won’t be the last…. - onward! Or in the case of this post, backward!

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- Written sometime in the early 90’s…

For a moment the pulse surges. I watch a gliding bulge in the blue vein running up his neck as if the blood is stretching arms up to lift the slack gray skin above its head while traveling single file up to his brain. For a moment I heave a sigh of relief. Maybe he will come back for a spell. Perhaps he’ll return for long enough to finish his last story. I put my finger against the inside of his wrist and think I feel something. I do. I feel the cold dead wrist of a man whose last word was a wretched flem cough full of pain and resignation. A limp exclamation point at the end of a very long and interesting sentence. My fingers enclose the rail-thin arm of a man who is no longer a man, who has ceased to be anything but one hundred and forty-five pounds of organic material already starting its decomposition into fertilizer. I suppose we’re never permitted to finish our last stories. Instead, the world fills with unresolved symphonies, poised with scorpion tail on their last note, leaving the stage with no warning or ceremony, the last chord never sounded.

I drop his arm which props itself out, like a storm-broken mast stuck in the rigging of a deserted ship. I sit perfectly still and stare at his chest which plays practical jokes by seeming to rise and fall.

I reach down underneath the old wooden bed frame and pull out a bottle of ancient absinthe, which trails a tail of dust like an antique comet.

This bottle is a treasure the old man saved from his years before the war. Years spent whoring his way through Eastern Europe and writing wild things in insane slanted handwriting, upside down and sideways, crammed into hard-cover notebooks and bound with brittle leather straps. The old man told me that absinthe was a magical liquor made from wormwood, it causes hallucinations and seizures, a drink for writers and artists who only keep from going mad by actively participating in their madness, by pursuing it. And as with anything magical, this potion was banned long ago, along with its happy cousins- opium, cocaine, and cannabis. The old man had wanted to save that bottle for something special. For an occasion that truly merited breaking open such a rare and valuable spirit. But nothing ever really came up. It’s difficult to notice a unique moment when you’re inside of it—when it is surrounding you.

I’m not convinced that the old man’s passing is a worthy occasion to open it, but he isn’t looking—or at least isn’t seeing—and I really must have a drink.

I sit on the wooden chair beside the bed and tilt back against the wall. I gaze at the old man through the liquid which is brilliant green- it even looks magical. I break the brittle paper seal and then pop the cork. It smells like black licorice. I take a tentative sip. It’s bitter but warm and nice. It doesn’t fight going down. Another larger one. The old man just lays there. I wish he would tell me again about all of the brilliant men and women who went mad from the stuff. It seems so odd for him to be so still.

Even after he became sick, and was stranded in bed, he still never appeared static or still. Maybe it was the way he spoke, with such energy and nervousness. His voice would leave his mouth and ricochet against the back wall and then fly all over the room, embedding itself like tiny bullets into every surface. It didn’t matter what he said. He could make the description of his last painful bowel movement as interesting as that page in a novel that somehow describes your own life and makes you feel connected to the universe.

This old man had lived such an extraordinary life and had told me about it in such an extraordinary way. It’s hard to look at a pitiful old wretch and realize that they have an entire life within them, that they were once beautiful, and that they may have done things that might be affecting us right now.

He would bring me to where he had been and show me what he had seen. He could make me understand the way the light felt, the texture of the road, the glint shining from a glass window, and the hint of cherry pipe smoke coming from a man chatting with a waiter in a sidewalk cafe. With words and the timbre of his voice, he could hold a scented scarf under my nose, or produce a child’s voice from three alleys over, laughing and screaming. He sculpted a dimensional world just by vibrating cords in his throat and upsetting air molecules which passed the story from one to another until it reached my ears.

He picked me up hitchhiking three years ago. I wasn’t hitchhiking at all. I was just walking down the road when he drove up from the opposite direction. I don’t know why he stopped, and I don’t know why I hopped in. But he did. And I did. We never talked about it. I guess we never will. I got in the car and the first thing he said to me was that I looked like a woman he met in Derby, Alabama when he was young. I am a male and not effeminate in any way that I know of, so I suppose I should have been offended. But he told me this in such an honest and matter-of-fact way that it didn’t occur to me to be insulted. Maybe the woman he met in Derby looked like a man, but I didn’t picture it that way. I can not tell it as he did, and so shouldn’t bother, but will. This liquor puts you in a telling mood.

He never told me exactly what his business was. I never thought, until this moment, to wonder where his money came from, although it must not have been anyplace where a lot of money was. In his stories, he was wild and wandering. An international nomad who drifted from country to country, city to city.

He’d arrive in a place and become entangled with a small group of people who would perform intricate dramas with him. He would become interwoven, a piece of the thread that made up the fabric of these groups of friends- always artists or actors, activists or whores. As he said, these are the people of value in the world. Then, always suddenly and without a word he would disappear, on to the next place. His comfort came from knowing that men and women from countless places were wondering where he was, and what had become of him. Talking about him with each other as if he had been one of their closest and fondest friends. And perhaps he had been.

He wrote every day of his life, even if it was only one letter. Every day since he was fourteen and a half. And I know this is true because I’m looking at the piles of books right now. I’ve flipped through them. I’ve scanned but never sat down with one, and never really tried to translate the handwriting into words, sentences, or stories. It was uncomfortable trying to read them with the old man around. It made me feel as I might feel watching him masturbate. Too close and he too vulnerable. Back to Derby, Alabama.

He stood on a bridge in the middle of nowhere and tied a knot in a piece of string he’d wrapped around a chicken neck. He dropped it slowly into the dark water, an estuary or swamp stream that wandered its way down into the ocean and took up the tide when it was high. It was dark water, a bloody tea. He dropped the bait in so slowly that the water didn’t ripple.

He looked down to his left and into a bucket of caught crabs who clicked together trying to get out of a place they knew instinctively they didn’t want to be. One strong crab, a freedom fighter would claw its way to the top of the pile. While reaching its giant claw to pull itself over the pail’s brim and back out into life, a weakling from the bottom of the bucket would reach up and grab on, trying to save itself, and in doing so, would only prevent the first from achieving anything at all. A biblical story. A bucket of human nature performed by crustaceans.

The old man, (who may I remind you was young at the time), reached for a bottle of brown liquor that rested on the handrail of the bridge. Before he got it to his mouth, he felt a crab sink its claw into the meat on the end of the string. The old man put the bottle down and started reeling in the string. The crab’s right claw broke the surface of the water, and then the body emerged, a shiny purple compact out of a black purse or a set appearing from below on a Broadway stage. And then the left claw rose out above the water but was holding onto something below. At first, it looked as though it was seaweed, fine and glistening green. Then, as the water drained away he could tell that it was long blond hair. The old man pulled, and after the hair broke the top of the water, a woman’s head came directly after it. It became too heavy to lift any further without breaking the string, so he tied it to a bridge post and scrambled down the bank. It was quite a sight, the string holding up the crab holding up the hair holding up the head which bobbed there in that dark water hiding the rest of the body. He said it was beautiful, like a deep purple scarf fluttering in a soft wind smelling of lilac and lavender. Peaceful. Soothing. He sat there on the bank for some time just watching. The head, the woman, whose eyes were wide open seemed to be gesturing to the old man. Seemed to be trying to say something to him. He heard it whisper, “I love you.” He answered silently in kind.

The old man (young, remember) waded slowly out into the water. The body was naked. A young woman, beautiful except for being dead, despite, or because of being dead. This is the woman who I reminded him of.

He took her hands in his and tried to warm them. Put his arms around her and just held on, swaying slowly, his eyes were shut, and hers were open. The warm water filled his shoes and he sunk down into the muddy bottom. He became anchored and closed his eyes, listening to the distant birds, feeling the sun and the water gently lapping his legs, and smelling the swamp-moss perfume of the woman he held.

The old man told me that in hindsight, he understands how odd it was. That if someone had come across the bridge and seen him there in the middle of the stream, his arms around a naked dead body, that well, they might not completely understand what was going on. But to him, the moment had been so obvious and natural. So real and genuine. He felt such compassion for this woman and just wanted her to be alright. He stood there and swayed and his skin took hours to shrivel in the way that seems to please water.

He finally tried to bring her onto the shore, maybe to bury her, he thought. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to bring her to the creek bank, but wanted badly to see her lying there in the dirt, without that black water blocking his view. He wanted to feel the sensation of her body being dragged across the rocks, he’d do it gently, but wanted to feel it. He wanted to lay her out, across the pebbles and see the sun fly directly into her open eyes. He wanted to be there, standing over her.

But the crab would not let go of her hair. He knew he could have broken the string or pulled the crab apart, but somehow- no he couldn’t. It was either get the crab to loosen its grip- to let go, or leave things as they were. The crab had seen her first after all. Chivalry was not dead.

So he waded out of the water and onto the bank, alone and crying. He looked back, blew a kiss, forgot his brown liquor, his bucket of desperate crabs, and walked away. Walked in the opposite direction of the road, deeper into the swamp. Wet and increasingly cold as the sun went down. Thinking about how unlucky he was. That if he’d just met her at a time before she was dead. Wondering what could have been. Wondering if even through death’s wall she could sense what he felt for her. And back underneath the bridge, the crab could still not let go. Holding on deep in its nature. Deep in our nature.

That’s where my nickname came from. Gives me the chills now, but didn’t ever before. He called me Derby from the moment I met him in his car, minutes after he’d picked me up. It seemed right to me then, but doesn’t anymore. No, it seems wrong now.

The absinth is gone and I’m in the bed holding the old man as he must have held my name-sake. I’m feeling what he must have felt. The yearning for time to untie itself, to disrobe and allow us to touch places and things that are now gone, to witness events that we missed because we were on a different path heading in a different direction. Realizing that death’s claw will never loosen its grip no matter how we pull and beg.

I slip off the bed and walk to the pile of hardbound books. I tear out one page at a time and cover the old man with pieces of paper, scribbled on with his own illegible handwriting- covered in himself- all that was left. The words in all colors of ink and pencil swirl and pulsate, making his chest look as though it was heaving again as I cover him in his own story. I stuff pages into his clothing and under the mattress. I put the booklet covers under the bed. I strike a match and stand there, staring into the heat until the smell of burning flesh becomes too much.

The road is postcard black with a bright yellow line gleaming down the center and disappearing over a hill. The grass smells green and the sun is a teacher patting my back for doing my best. I realize that most things that ever were, are now dead. I’m headed south with my thumb outstretched toward my destination. I turn to walk backward, look out across all that I’m leaving, and watch for the twinkle of chrome from a car breaking the horizon.