bookfraud

And now, for something pretty much the same as everything else. Yet another entry in listing the reasons I’m a masochist writer.

I was all of 19, home in Memphis for the summer in an unpleasant 1984, and in a perpetually bad mood. For “home” was a city where I hadn’t lived for seven years, knew not a soul, and had to take two jobs to pay off my freshman-year debt. That entailed about 80 hours or more of work a week, which left very little time for fun. Bookfraud was a dull boy indeed.

One of those two jobs was a government “internship” with the county government. My job was to sit an a car and help catalog tax-lien properties. It paid minimum wage, offered nothing in the way of personal fulfillment or actual experience to help in the job market, and entailed driving into parts of town that were less-than-savory.

My partner in crime was an older man, a man whose name I will not reveal here except that it is so perfect for a character, it’s a shame I can’t use it. I will allow that he had been a colonel in the Air Force, his nickname was “Bubba,” and that Col. Bubba was so over-the-top that if I were to make him up as a character, you would never find him plausible.

He was about 65, stood about 6-5, and would have weighed 650 pounds if he’d had his beloved pork barbeque sandwiches every day for lunch. Suffice to say he probably tipped the scales at 250. He wore houndstooth jackets and fine leather shoes, shiny silk ties that looked like they’d served time since the 1960s, and his combed-back hair looked like he’d cleaned out the local Walgreen’s of Grecian Formula.

Col. Bubba sounded like a stereotypical southern sherif: “Boy…” he would start sentences when addressing me, managing to stretch “boy” into three syllables.

He loved to give me a hard time about my attendance at a college north of the Mason-Dixon line — “This here boy goes to a Yankee school, but we’ll forgive him for it” he’s say by way of introduction to others, not to mention my relative ignorance of the ways of the opposite sex.

“Boy, lemme tell you, when I was runnin’ my own oil company, I had all the poontang thrown at me I could shake a stick at. But most of them was married women, and I never do it with a married woman. I’d rather beat the meat than do it with a married woman” — which, in Colonel Bubba’s world, was worse than dying a virgin.

His favorite (actually, his only) topics of conversations were sex, his adventures in the Korean War, his life in business, and the 1942 University of Tennessee Volunteers football team, “coached by the great General Neyland, undefeated, untied, and unscored upon,” on which he played defensive end.

There was plenty of time to talk. We would usually catalog three or four properties by noon, finding them on unnamed and deserted streets, and drive around for the rest of the day. I can still hear him reproaching me, saying, “Boy, we’ve already done three for the day. If we do five or six, bossman will expect us to do that every day.”

He occasionally used the word “nigger” in these conversations, as in “There’s a nigger on Lamar Avenue that makes some fine barbeque.” I would tell him it was wrong to use that word, and he was genuinely surprised — “I don’t mean anything bad,” he would say, and he was as perplexed at my protests as I was of his use.

Don’t pick a fight with the Colonel

But he seemed to know a lot of black people — in the office, at restaurants, at the stores and shops we’d frequent while wasting time. He would embrace them, figuratively and literally, treating them with dignity, and if he didn’t think of them as his equals, he didn’t act like it.

I daresay he was an oddly complicated fellow ("three-dimentional," as they say in workshop) and far more intelligent than he let on. One minute, he would tell me ribald tales of encounters with Korean prostitutes, and the next, he’d be quoting A.E. Houseman. He was funny and witty, but bitter as well, twice having lost money, once in oil, the other in his own airline company. Or so he said, which was why he had to suffer the humiliation of working at a government job when he should have been retired.

There is a reason for reavealing all this, and it’s not to explain away Col. Bubba’s use of the n-word or his casual sexism. It’s that perhaps you get to know perhaps two or three real-life people like him in your lifetime. They’re burned into your brain as if you were cauterizing a wound. No matter how you feel about them, there is no getting rid of them.

In the end, all one can do is immortalize them. And if you don’t or don’t want to, you probably have better things to do than sit before a keyboard and summon the muses.