Here is the story (you have a good memory) - this is an unedited version since the final seems to have disappeared. for any unknowing... here in Alabama a thing is to have many lil churches all over with signs that say... things. My english/russian friend found this fascinating and we paused to read them all over... so it plays into the story... thank you holler boy, David, for the ride... and, she (the friend) was near to death in many ways, but here to Alabama she came, and with the help of David, we took her on a ride, and this is her story...
Alabama Trapeze
First, you’re there and then, you’re not... Or, maybe: first, the world’s an oblate sphere and then it magics itself into a trapezoid. After many emptied cans of bubbling happy juice were tossed out of zooming windows into landscapes and ditches that personally mean nothing but are of import to others. Of such grand significance that as soon as the local ditch patrol see the glimmer of alcoholic detritus glint off their Alabamic noonday sun, they glower and cuss and maybe, on a good day, scrunch up your leperous trash into black bags and commit to oblivion. Or maybe not.
Whatever.
However.
I decided to take a break from the monochromic flatlands in my subsistence of an existence and clicked dubbelyou-dubbleyou-dubbelyou dot com. Booked an airticket to the beyond of backness where even the rattlesnakes quiver in fear when approached by a native. Slouching in centipedal queues at Gatwick, then expressed inspected as a high security risk after being scanned and caressed by a uniformed airport doll, I embarked, divested of my liquid elixirs. Flew across the pond on an economy-sized armchair and disembarked. Only to be fingerprinted and frisked yet again. My limp jest re wearing pastel pinks instead of my habitual black did not elicit an American pepsodent smile. :-(. Voilà! C’est moi in Hollerland, deepest Alabama of the fried Moccasin snake nuggets and the multivarious sociopathic pastimes they pass their time with. Quaint: throwing fireworks at your friends is a raucous Friday nite event. Beats nightclubbing any night. As for mud-rolling... never have I experienced such naive fun for fun’s sake. Ever. So much so that I didn’t and don’t want to leave.
But I never really arrive anywhere anyway. Not really. The most cluttered of rooms is always empty in my perception and I only pretend to be present as I parachute down dark caves of memories.
However.
Whatever.
How unlike the bubblewrapped, plastic-veneered, styrofoamed stereotype of northern (aka ‘civilised’) Americans that had scared me, some soi-disant ‘white trash’ Alabamese kindly took me on a tour of their legendary dirt-roads and graveyards, weather-beaten churches at every corner screaming billboarded slogans – GOSSIP IS SIN!. I memorised, in my OCD way, each and every church placard we passed. The hollow hollers run for miles, thin chasms in the earth as if manic bulldozers had run amok, walled in by mountain peaks. It was a matter of hours before I metamorphosed, an’ I drawled the daaaayym draaaawl while swiggin’ moonshine. With eyes and souls as wide as the Russian steppes, enhanced by a few missing teeth, I shared their momentary delight in ‘spinning donuts’ – fizzling with an emotional cocktail of fear and anticipation, ensconced inside a truck on a suitably sized dirt track and... keep yer seatbelt strap waaaaay tight an’ hold yer breath, dude... weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee roun’ an’ roun’ an’ roun’ the truck spins in a vortex of dust til a micro tornado of ground-up gravel particles forms a dizzy world of moments and I felt a toddler’s instant gratificational delight in getting up to no good yet in an innocent, albeit gauche, way. Almost as fun as running races with Moccasin snakes.
As the donut mist cleared, I spied another church slogan:
‘THANK GOD FOR JESUS PLEASE’.
So we swigged our hollerbeer and whooped at flags hoisted on the phallicest of flagpoles, all flapping in their stripey stars an’ all... daaaaayyymmm mangy pack a dawgs comed a yapyapyappin’ at our wheels, but in the land of the hollers, a squished critter don’t mean squat. Nuttin’, so they say. But I, of the weak and bleeding English-rose heart, pleaded with the driver to stop and spare these maltrained creatures their paddy-paws at the very least. He tilted his cowboy hat, clambered out of the truck and went ‘Ggggggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr’ at the dogs, who whimpered and scuttled away tails literally between their legs.
‘NO AMOUNT OF RICHES CAN ATONE FOR POVERTY OF CHARACTER.’
Next on the agenda was wooden bridge jumping. The chariot’s engine revved up into a roar as the intrepid driver flew the truck – with its shrieking passengers – across a 10 foot bridge. Things were getting exhilerating as the quantity of beer cans ejected from the windows was exponentially growing.
Whizzing past delapidating trailers which exude rumours of incest involving machetes and 9 millimetres, I was struck by how ‘here’ I felt. On this landscape as alien to me as the moon, it seemed I had finally come home. Maybe the rusty cars, piled haphazardly in front yards, neglected metal capturing the moonlight had wooed me into imagining its picturesque beauty, but for the first time in many years my heart was beating. Audibly.
‘TO HEAR TRUTH AND NOT ACCEPT IT DOES NOT NULLIFY TRUTH.’
Anyhow and anyway... Gallileo dude, that cool and chronicalised –osopher, he insisted the Earth was as curveaceous as a silicone pumped up floozy’s breast. Wrong. So wrong. Wrong then and worng now. As I found out. The world has edges in certain places. No way is it as predictably spherical as one is indoctinated to believe. Rap-a-tap-tap music pumped out of the truck’s speakers... alien American tongues twisting into the most complex syntactical formulae accompanied by squealing computer-processed noise. We howled along to it while swigging our hollersoma and, the human body being as it is... at one isosceles point in time, we all simultaneously needed to evacuate our beleaguered bladders. ‘Ahem’ and ‘amen’ and, possibly, a man...
Godlovesmeforever.
Whoeverknowswhyever.
I’m a rather reticent type and did not wish to have my urinating organs exposed by the truck’s glaring headlights. And so, while my fellow travellers were doing their business under truck spotlights, I considered it much more dignified to retreat a certain distance away from the piss-fest. Forgive my turn of phrase.
Anyhow.
Anyway.
I was trying at a moment of biological urgency to be decent and civilised in this land of inbred hollering 3rd cousins twice removed. I caught sight of some gorse bushes a tactical way away from the truck. Hurling myself to the sanctity of a private bladder-relieving locale, I ran, ran as fast as I could. Happy as the crescent smiling moon, wild as the whispering wind...
‘THE LOR D HIMSELF SHALL GIV E YOU A SIGN. ISAIAH 7-14’
I stampeded on level ground then.... zzzzzzzzzooooooooooooooom..... It has been suggested I am an angel in disguise, for I am convinced that I flied down a 100 metre mo’fakker hardcore gravel mountain. I felt a whooosh of joy, of aimlessless. Laughing in the face of gravity, if only for a nanosecond. Released from the its shackles as the moon winked at me as I plummeted downer and downer towards a guaranteed death of skeletal remains. Moi.... unremarkable and unmarked moi... fossilised in an Alabama stream for future archaeologists. Chillier than cool.
‘GOD LOVES YOU.’
Reflexes kicked out of inertia. I bow to them them ever since. I dug in my heels and scrabbled my fingernails into this steep drop. 35 degrees. Why? I don’t know. I enjoyed flying. I wanted to be a future fossil. Yet something in me prevented me from this everlasting ambition. Whatthing in me? Am I as atavistically survivalist as the rest of them? My body was ripped to shreds. My posterior in particular. Maybe I will supply photographic evidence. Perhaps: if it won’t disconcert you too much. By hook or by crook, I found a foothold 10 metres down. A relief, doubtless. Yet I was still desperate to urinate: the fear of flying had not resulted in sopping underwear. At this time my fellow travellers, having completed their functions, were trying to rescue me. So I hollered at them to avert their gazes as I released what Solzhenitsyn claims is one of the greatest human pleasures: pissing when your bladder’s overflowing.
‘FAILURE IS WAITING ON THE PATH OF LEAST PERSISTENCE.’
Back in the truck it’s silent time. I can’t even hear the radio-rap. My butt and limbs are lacerated and femme fatale fingernails torn off at the roots. A mere cosmetic quibble when compared to the soul’s suffering? If, indeed, there is such a phenomenon as a soul. But, during my sojourn in Hollerlandic Alabama, I was to learn that the world, in places, is most certainly not spheroid and it is all to simple to drop off the edge of it. And, sinfulest of all – tempting.
So tempting...
‘T.G.I.F. THANK GOD I’M FORGIVEN.’
Whatever.
However.
The Beginning
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