6:17 a.m. - 2022-10-09
DNA
This recent skid towards the tangential, this unstemmable tide of blather...it's tempting to blame it on isolation. To speculate that after 10 years of living alone my “inner voice” has grown tired of pacing ever-smaller circles in its cell and asserts/inserts itself now upon the page? Possibly. But it could just as well be the booze, taking its toll. It could be that the hot winds of inspiration no longer fill a sail set on course, but whistle idly through the desicated spine of a dead cactus; that the topsoil of this fallow field drifts now where it may. I suspect though that there's another factor in play: a die cast before I was born, a hand dealt before I had fingers. That this new penchant for relentless reminiscence may be a result of me turning, inevitably, into my grandfather...the kid in the passenger seat of that old trash-filled Impala turning into the driver.
~ ~ ~
The gas pedal was a gestalt extension of his narratives. Moments of introspection would slow us to a crawl—the Chevy creeping from lane to shoulder and back again as the story took the wheel. Likewise, tales of triumph or adversity would find us well above the speed limit, still drifting alarmingly from lane to shoulder. So the duration of a journey could depend on the topic at hand and a five-hour drive to the coast could become an all-day affair. His approach to climate-control was just as erratic, only less nuanced. The heat or AC was either on full-blast or off completely. Freezing or sweltering, the man was oblivious to discomfort. This apparently included his sense of smell...because in addition to strong flavors of cigarette, coffee and dog, his car harbored a permanent whaff of stinkbait.Stinkbait is a mix of congealed blood, expired chicken livers and ripe cheese, bound together with oatmeal or flour. Its effectiveness increases as the ingredients decay. In other words; the more it makes you want to throw-up, the more enticing it becomes to a catfish. And it works...just don't leave any in the trunk of your car. For a week. In the summertime. So yeah, that stench haunted his ride, competing aggressively with the cigarette smoke. Of which there was no shortage because my grandfather always kept one burning. Curiously, I can't recall him inhaling...he just always had one, balanced between his long fingers or dangling like an afterthought from the side of his mouth. And while his ashtrays always spilled-over with butts, I never saw him “ashing” in one. The fate of those cinder snowflakes was left to chance, and they lay where they fell. In my breakfast, for example... (Many was the morning where I'd find my grandfather standing over a cast-iron skillet, making me a batch of his signature [impossibly thin, impossibly heavy, cooked in bacon grease] pancakes as the Pall Mall parked between his lips ashed casually into the batter.)
Anyway, this tendency could reach absurd extremes when he was reminiscing-while-driving. Because he'd never interrupt himself to tend to his smoke, he just parked it upright in his hand, motionless. Inclined ever-so slightly, just enough to burn down in entirety while maintaining an epic tower of ash. These calcined pillars, often with still-smoldering cherries, would inevitably tumble, scattering ash and burning yet-another hole in the upholstery. But my grandfather wouldn't notice, he was years away, lost in story...
~ ~ ~
Hitchhiking north to report for training camp, maybe...not because the football team that had signed him out of college hadn't wired him bus-fare, but because he'd stopped in Dallas and blown it all on booze and presents at his brother's wedding. So he had to ride his thumb up to New York, w/just enough change for a few cups of coffee, and enough charm to convince the diner waitresses to bring him an extra cup, filled with hot water...into which he'd mix ample quantities of ketchup and black pepper. This “hobo soup” kept him alive until he reached his destination; five pounds lighter than when they'd drafted him. But this would prove to be a moot point, as the U.S. would enter the war before the season started and an entirely different draft would take precedent...Or perhaps he was recalling a letter he'd written to my grandmother, the one containing the clue that slipped by Army censors; the one containing a personal detail intimating the date when they were to hit the beaches at Normandy. A fraught and historic landing that he was lucky to survive and that would beget, understandably, so many stories. As did the time his division was surprised and outnumbered in the frozen terrain of the Ardennes Forest, during what would become the deadliest American campaign of WWII, the “Battle of the Bulge”. But he survived yet again, to live out yet more stories. Tales of battling Nazi frogmen as he crossed the Rhine, and of skirmishes with an increasingly desperate enemy as the Allies pushed ever-deeper into Germany...
Years later I would get to hear about all of it, often more than once. Freezing or sweating in the passenger seat of his Impala, slightly nauseous from a combination of tobacco smoke, dog stink, bait stink, and erratic acceleration. Leaning my head against the window as he rambled on and a relentless horizontal procession of cotton fields scrolled past...I was a pretty lucky kid, in retrospect.
