In these “shortest short stories,” our guest editor, Wayne White, offers windows into his coming-of-age in Tennessee, visits to Mamaw and Papaw in Alabama, and his first glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice in New York City.
Essays & Art by Wayne White | Photographs by Brinson + Banks
A person tosses a baseball in the air and hits it to one or more players on the field. My old man was a master of the art. Long fly, line drive, pop up, hopping grounder, smooth grounder. He would effortlessly do each one on request. I spent hours playing this with him in our giant green backyard, usually with my sister, cousin, or neighbors. My sister was quite the softball jock. A star. She cheered him right up. He just stared at me in mute disappointment. I was a mediocre bench warmer in the Dixie Youth League. Yep, our Little League was called Dixie Youth. Daddy was a star coach, but thankfully never mine. I was a disaster in the Strong Silent Southerner scenario. I would get misty after I struck out. The shame was too great. I quit when I was 13.
Eight years later, I am a dedicated avant-gardist in the International Capital of Art, Murfreesboro, Tennessee. There’s nothing to do in the summer of 1979 except wander down to a baseball diamond a few blocks away and maybe play Fungo. You know, ironically. I now hate all sports but I still have my stupid Sears first baseman’s mitt and a baseball. My minimalist printmaker roommate Mark has a glove, too. But no bat. We need a bat. I was a big mooch in those days — cigarettes, beer, gas, food. I was never shy about asking for something. I knocked on the door of the identical twins who lived in the ground-floor apartment. “You guys wouldn’t have a baseball bat we could borry, wouldja?” It was the first words I had ever spoken to them. They were short, nervous fellas with identical horn-rims, high and tight haircuts, and pocket protectors. They just stared at me and muttered something as I followed them around the back of our wooden frame flophouse. Their big, wide early ’70s Buick was parked in the alley. Without a word, twin number one popped open the apartment-sized trunk. Seventy-five fresh virgin baseball bats. No wood-burned logos and no varnish. Fresh off the lathe. Twin number two muttered something about them working in Louisville, Kentucky, before they moved here. And then me and the two little workingmen threw our heads back and laughed. That was the most fun I ever got out of baseball. They gave me a few. And then I played Fungo for probably the last time.
Louvin Brothers, 2014
Cheap Christmas gift guitars and Mel Bay instruction books helped thin the herds of adolescent guitarists of post-Beatles North America. “Red River Valley,” snapped strings, and your career is over. It’s now a dusty prop in the corner or under the bed. I try to play my big sister’s out-of-tune five-string relic but it hurts. Soft fingertips can’t push the buzzy cables down far enough. The pick falls down the woodsmell hole. Homemade music is forgotten until junior high. Your new Yankee friend who moved into the golf course subdivision has the ultimate ax — a 1970 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop. The kind Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, and Rick Derringer are always making faces with in Circus Magazine. He bar-chords up and down the neck a sloppy “Smoke on the Water.” He’s not good and it’s not fair. Garage bands from East Brainerd play at the sock hops of Hixson Junior High. Stratocasters, more Les Pauls, and Gretsches. James Taylor wannabes strum 12-string Epiphones perched on stools at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor out on Hixson Pike. They’re everywhere. Fuck it. I’m gonna learn the banjo.
Me and my sister, Melissa Mitchell, at Mamaw and Papaw White’s farm in Henagar, Alabama. It’s probably a Saturday and we’ve driven the 40 miles south from Chattanooga to get my head shaved, eat peas and cornbread, and sit in awkward silence visitin’. I can still smell the corncrib by the barn. There’s the ’59 white Ford Fairlane that will smash us all to bits four years later on a rainy Thanksgiving morning on that same southbound route, slanted up the side of Sand Mountain.
International House of Pancakes at Northgate Mall in Hixson, Tennessee. A Sunday morning, maybe 1975. You are the short-order cook at the happy blue chalet. You come in at 7 a.m. Hot greasy machines pinging to life and freezer-burned boxes of hash brown potato shreds grabbed from the walk-in. Ponytail your hair with bacon-slimed fingers. Smoke a Winston cigarette. Here comes the church crowd. They smile shyly and wait to be seated. You hate their guts. From 10 to 1, you don’t leave the hotbox cave. Everyone wants them pancakes. Those doughy disks squirted from the aluminum squirt bucket. International because of cough syrup in little pitchers at every table. And they want them eggs. You are a juggler of eggs. You are vain about the egg. You can crack it with one hand, right and left at the same time. Flip three over and back in the shallow pan without busting the tender, over-easy heart. You do that a thousand times. They’re lined out the door now. You work five orders at a time. Ding! Pickup! The waitresses, your high school classmates, all have flushed faces from the pink heat lamps on the copper top runway. They bring stuff back. Said it’s too runny. Shit. It will not stop. It’s like a trance now. You sip your fifth Coke that never has enough fizz in it. The dishwasher looks at you with no hope. One of the waitresses is an old lady. She’s at least 35. She slips you some trucker speed. There are only two in line now. Maybe a cigarette? A First Baptist bus pulls up in the parking lot. Will this day never end?
I cross over the Macy Dixie in 1980 in a 1971 light green Ford Maverick. It has a faulty timing chain and burns oil. I’m going to New York City to be a Famous American Artist. The Army of Tennessee, all dead with leather jerky mummy faces, black holes for eyes, don’t notice my departure.
I left lazy green Tennessee for the dark purple chaos of New York City in 1981. I got a job as a short-order cook at the fake Art Deco Empire Diner at 10th Avenue and 22nd Street so I could make money and steal food and cook all night long for Chelsea Hotel junkies and Plato’s Retreat creeps. Johnny Rotten sat for hours trying to pick up the undiscovered actresses serving up the orders from my food cave. There was an amazing orange-squeezing machine out front behind that chic black countertop right next to the coffee station. I had never tasted fresh-squeezed orange juice in my life. I’d go there and get a big old glass as the 5:45 sun was rising, and Johnny would sneer at me.
Wayne White flying, 2020
Monteagle Mountain, Tennessee, 1976. It’s called a rock face. You’re halfway, way up this very avoidable situation. The ground you walked on so innocently this morning is gone forever. One foot touches a hundred feet of air and then the other touches a hundred feet of air as you “where eagles dare it” on the sandstone, spine to the sky. Your shaky fingers are looking and pinching. Up a little. A special rope made from the spun fibers of Superman’s costume, held by Bill, who talked you and Brian into this, is clipped to a cat’s cradle of straps suspending your clenched butt cheeks above the treetop spears. The plan is he will catch you if you fall. He’s attached to the billion-year-old rock with aluminum spikes he hammered into cracks of old Tennessee. You’re 19 and from Tennessee. Nothing bad can happen. Carabiners, pitons, belay, rappel — it’s all French because they are mountain-climbin’ motherfuckers. Bill’s favorite Franco maniac is Gaston Rébuffat. He calls him Rabbit Fat. He has a coffee table book of impossible photos of the little alpinist. And now you’ve rabbitfatted to the top. The terror is over and suddenly you can call it fun. Nobody fell and screamed and died as a distant thump. Time for the “Workingman’s Dead” 8-track, a cold bottle of Sundrop and a joint in Bill’s bitchin’ yellow Camaro all the way back to Murfreesboro. He keeps talking about the next one called the Devil’s Courthouse.
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1979. In and around the nowhere campus of Middle Tennessee State University. Got those Brutalist buildings like you see in Kent State photos. Like you see in any black-and-white sad State University yearbook. All the cool kids are living out of town in 1910 farmhouses and growing gardens. Dan Fogelberg records that skip, out-of-tune guitars, freezing rooms with peeling wallpaper, overcooked vegetarian stew, thrift store dresses, and unbelievably beautiful goats. A whole herd with sly smiles and crazy coin slot eyes out back in the pasture. Then Mike pulls up in his Dodge Dart with an 8-track and he’s got this new yellow-colored tape already with the wrinkled label. It says B-52’s with a picture of guys and girls with beehives. Or maybe guys with beehives? There’s a funny and sneaky vibe. It smells like suntan lotion, artificial cherry flavor, and weed. You go riding and listen to it as the trees and the chickens and the barns blur by.
Summer 1966 on Eagle Drive in Hixson, Tennessee. The noonday sky is white with humidity. Cicadas drone on in tambourine rattles that rise and fall. You don’t even notice it anymore. The water from the hose tastes like hot vinyl. Your sister is trying to get a tan on the 8-by-8 concrete slab we call a patio. Her crappy portable TV blares the daily “Dick Van Dyke Show” rerun. The sun glares off the screen. She tried to make a visor for the TV out of a flattened Total cereal box, but she can’t find the tape and she blames you and there’s a big fight. Fried bologna sandwiches and too-sweet Kool-Aid for lunch. Neighbor Reva trudges over through the giant lawn and heat, and she and my sister drag the record player onto the front porch and listen to 45s until the player smells like hot Masonite and dust. Paul Revere & the Raiders, “Winchester Cathedral,” “Eleanor Rigby.” Your friend Dennis wanders over and you try to work on the pathetic clubhouse out in the woods behind your house. It’s just a loose pile of warped lumber. We don’t have any nails and just one hammer. We give up easily. Why do kids on TV always have amazing clubhouses and treehouses? Where do they get all that stuff? Who pays for it? It’s not fair. Plus the Batman show stinks. You’re old enough to figure out it’s just grownups making fun of stuff you take seriously. You brood on that. Comic books are kinda dumb. Mad Magazine is the new world. You draw some Al Jaffee-inspired inventions on notebook paper and dream about cold bottles of Canada Dry Tahitian Treat at Philpott’s Gulf station up the road. Will this day ever end?
