There was also one of those beer signs in Steve’s where the little strands of color danced across the sign.
“How does that work?” I asked Steve one night.
“It’s magic, kid,” he said, and went back to talking to my mother.
I went to the rest room one night at Steve’s and noticed a strange machine on the wall. There was a place to put a quarter for what was described on the machine as a “Ribbed French-Tickler—Drive Her Wild.”
My mother wouldn’t allow me near the pinball machines, but here was my chance to do a little gambling on my own. I happened to have a quarter, which I put in the slot. Lo and behold, I won. I received a small package and immediately opened it. There was a balloon inside. I filled it with air, tied a knot on the end, and walked out with it.
“Look, Mom,” I said. “I put a quarter in the machine and got this balloon.”
“Gimme that,” said Steve, trying to take my balloon away. He ordered the waitress to bring me another Coke. In addition to the balloon, I also got a Coke out of the deal, so I figured the quarter had been well invested.
After the urge to open a truck stop when I grew up passed, I even had a brief flirtation with the idea of becoming a minister. My grandmother was always talking about her sister’s boy, Arnold, who “made a preacher.”
I wondered, how hard could it be being a preacher? You figure there’s Wednesday night prayer meeting, then the Sunday service. Throw in a few weddings and funerals here and there, and that’s about it. Also, somebody would always be trying to get you over to their house to eat, and nobody serves anything bad to eat to preachers. Plus, you’d never have to cut your own grass.
Only a few days into my thoughts of become a minister, however, an older cousin explained to me a minister wasn’t allowed to do all the things I was looking forward to doing when I became an adult. Namely, drinking, smoking, cussing whenever you wanted to, and, since by that time I had learned what the balloon in the machine at Steve’s truck stop was all about, I figured preachers likely would be denied that little pearl, too. I got off the minister thing in a hurry.
At this point, we finally have arrived at where this chapter was headed. I tend to run on now and then, but that is called “expanding a theme,” which really is nothing more than vamping, which is nothing more than stalling, for which I apologize. But it has always been one of my weaknesses. I showed up at all three of my marriages late and, as a writer, I am notorious for putting off projects for as long as I possibly can. I should have written this book, for instance, five or six years ago, but I stalled, hoping someone else would do one of those unauthorized biographies of me and include all this, so I could stall around on something else.
I’m doing it again.
As I said, Uncle Grover couldn’t read. But each day when he and Aunt Jessie left the mill to drive home for lunch, a quarter-mile away, they would stop by the post office, which was next to the knitting mill. There they would stop to pick up their mailed morning edition of the Atlanta Constitution and bring it home with them at lunch. Atlanta was a lot farther from Moreland back then than it is now.
When I was ten, it was at least five thousand miles to Atlanta, because I knew my chances of ever getting there were quite slim. Today, it’s thirty-five minutes by interstate. My grandmother’s yard looks a lot smaller to me when I see it now, too, so you know what time does to a lot of things. Shrinks them.
By the time I was ten, my brain was well on its way to being consumed by baseball. A lot of boys are like that, of course, but I may have gone to extremes heretofore unachieved. I never actually ate a baseball, or any other piece of baseball equipment, but I did sleep with the baseball my grandfather gave me for my birthday, and probably the only reason I didn’t eat it was I knew my grandfather certainly was not a man of means and might have had a difficult time replacing it with any sense of dispatch.
There was a marvelous baseball team in Atlanta when I was ten. They were the Atlanta Crackers. For years, I thought they were named the Crackers because they had to do with, well, crackers.
Later, I would learn that the term came from the fact Georgians were bad to carry around whips in the days of Jim Crow and slavery. And whips go “crack,” and, thus, the name of the ball team. But at ten, in 1956, my world was an almost totally isolated one, and I finally decided the name had something to do with saltines, but I didn’t have time to figure out exactly why or how.
How I came to fall in love with the Atlanta Crackers, I just remembered, should have come earlier, but remember my admissions about stalling.
Remember the part about Uncle Grover getting the twenty-five big ones for diddling with the machine at the knitting mill and how he bought a new Pontiac and took Jessie to the Kentucky Derby?
Well, that’s not all he did. He also bought the first television set in Moreland. When word got out, people came from as far away as Grantville, Luthersville, and Corinth to get a glimpse of Uncle Grover’s and Aunt Jessie’s amazing box. It had about an eight-inch screen, if I recall correctly, and you had to sit real close if you wanted to see any detail, such as whether or not someone on the screen actually had a head. The adults would watch John Cameron Swayze on the national news and Vernon Niles, who claimed to be his second cousin from Corinth, would always say, “If that’s John Cameron’s head, I’ve seen better hair on fatback.”
Even my grandmother became interested in television once she witnessed TV Ranch, a musical show that came on an Atlanta station each day at noon.
TV Ranch featured Boots and Woody Woodall singing country music as well as a comedian named Horsehair Buggfuzz, who probably said a lot of funny things, but I can’t remember any of them.
What my grandmother enjoyed most about TV Ranch was the closing number, which featured Boots and Woody in the day’s “song of inspiration.”
This was your basic hymn, like “Rock of Ages,” “Precious Memories,” “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder (I’ll Be There),” or “Shall We Gather at the River?” But every now and then, they’d sing a comedy-hymn Horsehair Buggfuzz wrote, like “When the Lord Calls Me Home, I Hope Mildred Haines Ain’t on the Party Line, ‘Cause He’ll Never Get Through If She Is.”
The second most endearing thing to me about Uncle Grover and Aunt Jessie’s television was Lucky 11 Theatre, which featured a western movie each afternoon at five.
Johnny Mack Brown would walk into a crowded saloon and say, at the top of his lungs, “I’ll have a milk!” which always seemed to me to be inviting trouble.
In the first place, if it was milk he wanted, why did he go into a saloon? I would spend a great amount of time in saloons later in my life, and I don’t remember anybody ever walking in and ordering a glass of milk, although I did know an old trombone player once who drank scotch and milk. After a few drinks, he’d play air trombone, which I like to think of as spiritual father to the air guitar.
Why didn’t Johnny Mack Brown hit a convenience store if he wanted milk? Oh, there weren’t any convenience stores in the Old West. There were all those cows, though. If Johnny Mack had wanted milk so badly, he could simply have pulled one off of the range somewhere and self-served himself all the milk he wanted.
But no. Johnny Mack Brown had to walk into a crowded saloon where there were always ornery galoots.
As soon as he’d order the milk, the piano player would stop playing, the