Mr. Handy’s Blues Hall on Beale Street in Memphis.
Aaron walking out of Jake’s Apartment in Jasper.
Kris Hitchcock playing “Gimme Three Steps” Tuesday night at Fiddle & Steel in Nashville. The bar hosted an open jam session that night. Put your name on the white board and they would call you up. Kris, a buddy from Kalamazoo who gigs around Michigan, stayed on stage for several songs.
Rounding Indianapolis we find a fellow journalist on the road
We popped the bottle of Popcorn Suttton’s moonshine. A mason jar with triple X we bought in Nashville. We cracked it after a 12-pack of high life and a pint of Jim.
We cracked it in the cabin in the middle of southern Illinois while Nick looked for Kerouac’s “mad ones” quote, and I read from Exley.
“The only ones for me are the mad ones…” Kerouac being read in a cabin in southern Illinois.
Nick was eating a grapefruit Tuesday morning. To watch Nick eat a grapefruit is to know how prehistoric man handled his freshly killed dinner. Once peeled, the wedges are ripped apart, their juicy insides sucked out like tender meat from the bone. The pieces, parts, rinds, skin, vacated citrus are piled up on his plate.
He raved about his Tuesday morning Nashville grapefruit. After a heavy night in Jasper and several drinks in the country bars and pool halls of Nashville, the ruby red was getting him right.
And Aaron took notice.
I saw Aaron the night before, Monday, when we checked into the Music City Hostel on Patterson in east Nashville. His hair was a mane, mighty and black. In a washed-thin t-shirt, he sat at the table in the lounge pecking away at his laptop.
“If you like grapefruit, you should try black beans,” he said to Nick that Tuesday morning.
Nick and I, later recalling this exchange, both thought he meant together, grapefruit and black beans, mixed, some contemporary west coast — Aaron was from Seattle — Asian fusion dish we Midwesterners knew nothing of but soon would.
“Whenever I’m not right, I head straight to the bean aisle.”
Aaron dropped out of college and went into the scissor business. “Shears,” he politely corrected me. He studied business and marking and was helping out a company that designed and engineered shears for hair salons. The company, Aaron discovered, did not know much about selling and marketing the shears. That’s where he came in, travelling around the country hucking the product to stylists from L.A. to New Orleans to New York. Ten months on the road, 25,000 miles in his old Mazda truck, hostels for his home and black beans for his dinner.
He preaches ambition and decries the lack of it in people. His friend wanted to start a flower shop in southern California but wouldn’t do it because she didn’t think she could. Aaron wrote her a business plan on a piece of notebook paper and drew a flower in the corner.
I don’t know if his friend ever started that business, but Aaron would have.
Aaron was in Memphis on business but that Tuesday morning we played Jenga in the hostel lounge until the afternoon.
***
Nick saw the name of town nearby mentioned in a Tom Waits song on the map. We decided to go to Murfreesboro for the day but then decided to visit a Civil War battlefield near Murfreesboro instead.
Aaron jumped into our truck when we left the hostel and rode with us 45 minutes outside of Nashville to the battlefield of Stones River. It rained. It was cold. It was, outside, much like the last days of 1862 when the Confederates attacked the Union boys still drinking their morning coffee.
“They were really whipping the Yankee’s socks,” said the park ranger.
The Confederates couldn’t push through for the victory, losing by the equivalent of a last-second 52-year field goal. The Union won, but with the eighth bloodiest battle of the war staining the cotton fields of Rutherford County, 3,000-plus dead, nearly even on each side, Tennessee brothers fighting Tennessee brothers, it was not much of a victory for either side.
Aaron walked around with an American flag he found in the backseat of the truck. Washington wasn’t even a state when American fought it out for the right to own slaves.
In the corner of the battlefield, near the train tracks and a cement plant, outside the walls of the proper memorial to the Yanks who died there, is the grave of black soldier who fought.
History takes time to change.
Leaving, Aaron asked if Waffle House had good food.
“Nope,” Nick and I must have answered in unison.
We decided that if we found a place that served fried chicken and waffles, we stop, but there wasn’t such in Murfreesboro. Nick played the song that inspired the side trip.
“I was full of wonder when I left Murfreesboro. Now I’m full of hollow on Maxwell Street,” sang Tom Waits.
Vince Johnson warms up his harmonica at the Tap Room on Beale Street in Memphis
We pulled off for coffee on State Highway P among the cotton fields of southeastern Missouri. An olive loaf in the cooler caught my eye, and I asked the lady behind the counter if she’d make me a sandwich. Olive loaf, Colby cheese, mustard, lettuce and tomato on white bread. Nick got bologna.
We sat and eventually slathered the sandwiches in sweet bar-b-que sauce at the table.
Walking back to the truck, we saw her. Walking behind an older man, who was dressed in head-to-toe hunter’s camo, she had on a fatigue-colored green t-shirt and camo pants that matched the man’s. Her rich black hair wrapped around her olive-tinted face.
For someone dressed like she just got out of the woods or the field or swamp or duck blind, she turned heads. She looked like Danica Patrick done up for a photo shoot. She looked like those woman positioned to sell beer to men.
I’m not sure who said “wow” as she walked past the truck. If she did notice us, she regarded us with contempt. She wore the look of a woman who had been starred at and cat-called by men at the truck stop before. She didn’t like it.
We pulled out and back onto the highway. I thought she was the prettiest.
Sun Studios is the building at 702 Union Street where Rock n’ Roll was recorded. Johnny Cash didn’t walk into the radiator shop next door. So we went there to pay our respects to the gold records on the wall. “We’ve all been born and reborn in this birthplace of rock n’ roll,” I wrote to a friend. Nick bought a cup of coffee for a dollar nine, and I sat on the bench outside. First morning in Memphis and the sun said hello. The further south we moved the further the cold gripped north seemed. Talk the night before was of the five inches of snow that fell in Jackson. Power lines crashed down when the rain turned to ice. Roads were ice rinks and cars played hockey against one another. We drove to Mud Island and to the banks of the Mississippi River. I dipped my fingers in its muddy waters, connecting with the country north to south in one stream and spilling in the oceans of the world. We crossed the river on I-40 west into Arkansas with plans for Little Rock that day. Hawks sat in trees and on fence posts along the highway. See one and spend the rest of the trip looking for more. Majestic and muted, poised for the kill, beauty ready to erupt into violence. Through Jonesboro, I asked Nick to look up what happened here. The name Jonesboro was linked with massacre in my mind, but the details escaped me. In 1998, 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden pulled the fire alarm at their Westside Middle school and hid in the wood with guns stolen from Andrew’s grandpa’s house. They shot at students and teachers as they filed out of the school. Natalie Brooks, 11. Paige Ann Herring, 12. Stephanie Johnson, 12. Brittney Ryan Varner, 11. Shannon Wright, 32. Killed. Ten others, nine students and another teacher, were injured. After their arrest, Mitchell told investigators he wanted to scare some classmates who had teased him. No one would get hurt, he told Andrw. “They had reached their emotional boiling point,” Nick said, reading from a newspaper article. “At 13 and 11, their emotional boiling points?” Nick’s voice was shocked. Both were in prison until their 21st birthdays and then released. “We could meet these guys,” Nick said. We didn’t. We wouldn’t. We drove through to Little Rock.
