I once knew a woman who claimed to know the Sanders Original Recipe of “11 herbs and spices” because she had worked in a franchise outlet in Grenada, Mississippi for three months while her husband was in the local lock-up for beating up a used car salesman.
She didn’t really know the recipe, of course; her fried chicken tasted nothing like it, though it may have had to after her bottle of vodka. But Harlan Sanders’ original recipe was finally made public in August, 2016, when the Chicago Tribune reported that a nephew by marriage–by marriage, mind you–of Harland Sanders claimed to have found a copy of the original KFC fried chicken recipe on a handwritten piece of paper in an envelope–an envelope, no less–in a scrapbook of an assuredly familial nature .
As journalists of fortitude, integrity, and no small degree of puckish abandon, Tribune staffers tested the recipe before publication, and after “some trial and error” they decided that with the addition of an unspecified amount of MSG, the following seasoning mixture produced fried chicken “indistinguishable” from the fried chicken from a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.
By way of covering their ass, they recommended that the chicken should be soaked in buttermilk, coated once, then fried in oil at 350 degrees until golden brown.
Mix with 2 cups white flour:
2/3 Ts (tablespoons) Salt 1/2 Ts Thyme 1/2 Ts Basil 1/3 Ts Oregano 1 Ts Celery salt 1 Ts Black pepper 1 Ts Dried mustard 4 Ts Paprika 2 Ts Garlic salt 1 Ts Ground ginger 3 Ts White pepper
A misty rain was falling on Bourbon Street outside the Night of Joy nightclub where Our Hero, Ignatius Reilly and his mother, Irene, had sought refuge from the police after a chaotic entanglement in front of D.H Holmes. Among the bar’s few customers was “an elegantly dressed young man who chain smoked Salems and drank frozen daiquiris in gulps”.
This fop happens to be Dorian Greene, who spills his daiquiri on his bottle-green velvet jacket. When Irene calls to the bartender for a rag, he tells her not to bother and added, with an arched eyebrow, “I think I’m in the wrong bar anyway.”
It soon becomes clear that Dorian is indeed in the wrong bar. In fact, we soon begin wondering how Dorian could have made the mistake of wandering into the Night of Joy at all.
The few other customers in the bar included a man who ran his finger along a racing form, a “depressed blonde who seemed connected with the bar in some capacity, and a snarling bartender. When Irene suggests that he should “stay and see the show” (“see some ass and tits,” the blonde prompts), he “rolls his eyes heavenward,” and in their ensuing conversation—prompted, somewhat, by her insistence on buying him a drink to replace the one he spilled—it becomes obvious that “tits and ass” are the last things Dorian Greene is interested in. Irene persists in engaging the young man.
“‘That’s sure pretty, that jacket you got.” “Oh, this?” the young man asked, feeling the velvet on the sleeve. “I don’t mind telling you it cost a fortune. I found it in a dear little shop in the Village.” “You don’t look like you from the country.” “Oh, my,” the young man sighed and lit a Salem with a great click of his lighter. “I meant Greenwich Village in New York, sweetie. By the way, where did you ever get that hat? It’s truly fantastic.” “Aw, Lord, I had this since Ignatius made his First Communion.” “Would you consider selling it?” “How come?” “I’m a dealer in used clothing. I’ll give you ten dollars for it.” “Aw, come on. For this?” “Fifteen?” “Really?” Mrs. Reilly removed the hat. “Sure, honey.” The young man opened his wallet and gave Mrs. Reilly three five-dollar bills. Draining his daiquiri glass, he stood up and said, “Now I really must run.” “So soon?” “It’s been perfectly delightful meeting you.” “Take care out in the cold and wet.” The young man smiled, placed the hat carefully beneath his trench coat, and left the bar.
The young man is not a dealer in used clothing. When he and Ignatius meet again—much later—he reveals that the hat “was destroyed at a really wild gathering. Everybody dearly loved it.” He later reveals that he goes by Dorian Greene. “If I told you my real name, you’d never speak to me again. It’s so common I could die just thinking of it. I was born on a wheat farm in Nebraska. You can take it from there.”
When Ignatius arrives at Dorian’s address on St. Peter Street to attend the kick-off party for what appears to be global gay insurrection, he discovers a three-story yellow stucco building.
Some prosperous Frenchman had built the house in the late 1700s to house a menage of wife, children, and spinster tantes. The tantes had been stored up in the attic along with the other excess and unattractive furniture, and from the two little dormer windows in the roof they had seen what little of the world they believed existed outside of their own monde of slanderous gossip, needlework, and cyclical recitations of the rosary. But the hand of the professional decorator had exorcised whatever ghosts of the French bourgeoisie might still haunt the thick brick walls of the building. The exterior was painted a bright canary yellow; the gas jets in the reproduction brass lanterns mounted on either side of the carriageway flickered softly, their amber flames rippling in reflection on the black enamel of the gate and shutters. On the flagstone paving beneath both lanterns there were old plantation pots in which Spanish daggers grew and extended their sharply pointed stilettos.
When Ignatius asks Dorian where the money comes from “to support this decadent whimsy of yours?” Dorian replies, “From my dear family out there in the wheat. They send me large checks every month. In return I simply guarantee them that I’ll stay out of Nebraska. I left there under something of a cloud, you see. All that wheat and those endless plains. I can’t tell you how depressing it all was. Grant Wood romanticized it, if anything. went East for college and then came here. Oh, New Orleans is such freedom.”
Yes, Dorian found freedom in beautiful, decadent New Orleans, as have so many thousands of gays from the hinterlands. John Rechy, in City of Night (1963) echoes Dorian with his description of the annual gay pilgrimage to New Orleans during Carnival season:
“. . . fugitives will have felt the stirring of this call to brief Freedom. New Orleans is now the pied piper playing a multikeyed tune to varikeyed ears. In those same dark cities equally restless queens, wringing from their exiled lives, each drop of rebellion, will fell the strange excitement . . . Hips siren curved, wrists lily-delicately broken, they will stare in defiant demureness from theater screen and home screens all over the country; and those painted malefaces will challenge—and, Maybe, for an instant, be acknowledged by—the despising, arrogant, apathetic world that produced them and exiled them.”
And, so, Dorian Greene. A comic exaggeration? Yes. A gay stereotype? By any standards, most certainly. Yet Dorian, in Ignatius Reilly’s New Orleans, and, as it so happens, so many other gays in the New Orleans we all know, has found the freedom to be who he needs to be. And Toole’s acknowledgement of this freedom for gays in the city he portrays provides evidence if not of his own sexuality, then of his intimate knowledge of the city he loved.
Roving Google Earth is a fascinating experience, particularly for those of us who, for whatever reason, will never be able to visit the far-flung edges of the globe. It’s one of my favorite diversions, and that’s how, when bouncing between the Timor Sea and the Great Australian Bight, to my astonishment I found, on the southern tip of Western Australia’s “Golden Outback,” Mississippi Hill.
Mississippi Hill is in Cape Le Grand National Park in the extreme south of Western Australia, 35 mi. east of Esperance. The southwest section of the park is dominated by rock outcrops of gneiss and granite. These form a distinctive chain of peaks including Mount Le Grand (1,130 ft.), Frenchman Peak (860 ft.), and Mississippi Hill (590 ft.), named by a British explorer, Edward John Eyre.
In February,1841, Eyre began one of the great treks across the Australian continent, passing over 1000 mi. from Port Lincoln, South Australia, to Albany, Western Australia through the arid expanses of the Nullabor Plain. Nearly 800 mi. into their journey, exhausted, near starvation, and eking by water from sporadic rains, on the 2nd of June, slightly east of today’s Esperance on the south Australian Bight, they climbed a rocky hill and saw a ship at anchor, barely 7 miles away.
It was a French whaler, the Mississippi—the French had been invested in Mississippi for some time, e.g. the Mississippi Bubble—and the ship’s captain, as luck would have it an Englishman named Rossiter, pressed supplies on them – cognac and Dutch cheese – and they continued the 280 miles east to the British settlement of Albany.
For his trek, Eyre was awarded the Royal Geographic Society gold medal and has had a number of geographical features named after him, including Lake Eyre and the Eyre Peninsula. And while I have yet to hear back from the Western Australia Parks and Wildlife Service—of course I did—perhaps it’s safe to assume that the rocky hill from which Eyre’s company spied the ship that saved them was named “Mississippi” out of gratitude.
When I was a boy, I won an essay contest sponsored by the local library committee in my hometown in the north Mississippi hills. The speaker at the awards presentation was a lady from some literary society in the Delta.
This woman just radiated dignity and graciousness from the top of her pill-box hat cum veil to the bottoms of her sensibly modest heels. She even wore little white cotton gloves with mother-of-pearl buttons. The ladies on our library committee were just undone by this exotic creature (the local women’s apparel store sold out of teeny-tiny white cotton gloves the very next morning).
Being a brash thirteen years old, I was totally unimpressed; I just wanted to grab my $25 check and dash, but I had to sing for my supper by sitting through (poorly) selected passages from Lanterns on the Levee. Somehow, I don’t think our girls—who, I’ll remind you, played a big hand in the literary life of our little town—were listening; they had only one thing on their mind: “What all’s she got in that purse?”
But I listened, and as I did, it slowly dawned on me that this lady was proselytizing; she had set her beady, be-vailed hat towards bringing the gilded prose of Percy to us heathen hill folk with the flattest, longest vowels possible with all the fervency of Luther bearing a hammer.
My Aunt Robbie Rae made me stay for the reception (cookies and Kool-Aid with a discreet splash of Evan Williams for everyone but me). The grande dame, to my mind, seemed just a tad bit patronizing to the other ladies. (They didn’t notice, of course; they were too busy pumping the old girl for the best places in Memphis to shop.) As our august speaker left, she came up to congratulate me, and even though I was as tall as she was, she patted me on the head.
To me that bit of petty patting summed up her whole attitude. By the time she left I was ready to lead the next revolt of the rednecks. I would have been willing enough to dismiss this exhibition of arrogance as an individual aberration until I met others from the Delta.
You see, I was so ignorant: I didn’t know that the Delta was as close to the celestial as geography gets and that its denizens were canonized at birth. I did not know that my forehead automatically slopes when I mention that I am from Calhoun County.
But now I know better; I know to speak of the Delta—”DAY-uhL-Tuh”–and have come to acknowledge the exclusivity (if not quite their quasi/semi/demi divinity) of its children, many of whom (he hastens to add) I love with all my heart. Occasionally I slip and call them Bourbons, but they shrug it off, thinking it’s a slur on their thirst rather than their politics.
This Alice B. Toklas Cookbook recipe was omitted in the first American publication (1954) but was included in the second (1960). Here’s Alice’s recipe from the 1984 edition:
Haschich Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day)
This is the food of Paradise—of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises; it might provide entertaining refreshment for a Ladies’ bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by un évanouissement revelle’.
Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts; chop these and mix them together. A bunch of cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.
Obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as cannabis sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everywhere in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called cannabis indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.
As a librarian in Tupelo, a colleague and I were in charge of taking books to those who couldn’t come to us. Every Wednesday we’d load up our trusty little station wagon and drive around the city dropping off new checkouts and picking up returns.
Our main destinations were nursing homes, and they were all, without exception, far from the dismal environments some people might imagine. As a matter of fact, those under care were often robust enough to elbow a neighbor out of the way to get the best Cartlands, Christies, or L’Amours, and if we didn’t have enough copies of the latest John Grisham potboiler, they’d fight over them.
We once had to disarm a dame wielding a plastic knife. During one of these feeding frenzies, a blue stocking with pink hair sniffed and said to me, “They shouldn’t have been taught how to read.”
My partner Beverly, a seasoned veteran, rarely instructed me on nuances, so the assignment was full of pleasant surprises and lessons. We often picked up returns at the nurses’ stations, which are always a nexus of activity. I remember once early on reaching a station just as a produce man was dropping off three bushels peas in the pod.
Being a fugitive kitchen grunt myself, I expected some surly person to appear, haul them in the back, and begin the tedium of shelling them, so I was astounded when at least a dozen ladies came out of the TV room, ripped a pea sack open in seconds, filled up their colanders, and retreated—just yakkin’ up a storm the whole time—back into the TV room.
I was trying to take it all in while Bev started packing up the returned books. Finally I tapped her on the shoulder and asked, “Bev, are they in there shelling peas?”
She looked over at the TV room door and said, “Oh, yes. They love watching soap operas and shelling peas.”
Sure enough, a squadron of ladies had settled into their seats with peas and bowls in their laps and paper sacks on the floor at their sides. They didn’t even look at the peas as they shelled them; their eyes were glued to the drama unfolding before them. The nurse on duty told me that the shelled peas were collected before dinner (I had a vision of some old lady trying to stash HER colander of peas in a bottom drawer), bagged and kept in the refrigerator until cooked or offered to visitors, but “sometimes there’s so much in there, we just end up taking some home to keep them from being wasted.”
Bill Neale suspected that the Lord invented porches and television to make pea-shelling easier. My mother Barbara, as a young bride, was out on her porch one afternoon sweeping when she saw her husband’s Aunt Bess walking down the road with a sack and crying her eyes out, going to her sister Ethel’s, who was Barbara’s mother-in-law. Not being one to impose (at that point), mother assumed the worst and started cooking. After about an hour, with two casseroles and a cake in the oven, she called up Daddy and said, “Jess, your Aunt Bess just went over to Ethel’s just bawling her eyes out. I think Uncle Ed’s finally died.”
So Daddy ran up to Ethel’s house, assessed the situation, came out sweating and said: “Barbara, Ed didn’t die, Bess is just all wrung out over some soap character dying—her and Momma both.” Then Daddy handed her a bag of shelled peas.
“Here,” he said. “I told them to come over for dinner tonight. You need to start watching ‘Days of Our Lives.’”
Thank you for submitting your work, The Existential Tomato, to the University Press of Missitucky.
Your book received a great deal of consideration. Our assistant senior editors, Mr. Pastel and Ms. Brawn, engaged in a lively debate on whether a vegetable can be considered “existential” with Mr. Pastel contending that it’s not the vegetable itself that is existential but rather the perception of the vegetable that is of an existential nature whereupon Ms. Brawn threatened to tear the rug off his head and shove it up his ass.
Ms. Ergot, who manages most of our culinary titles, said that while The Existential Tomato does have many farm-to-table aspects, the recipes for the most part seem to be more in the grandmère à petit enfant vein, which while a valid culinary movement, is little known and even less understood in this country.
Our graphics editor, Mr. Waters, was quite enthusiastic, and prepared no less than nine prospective covers, none of which depicted anything even remotely resembling a tomato. The copy editor, Mr. Yawn, said that your writing, while crisp, clean, and incisive, not only had too many semi-colons and long dashes, but was also peppered with such unfamiliar words as “macerate”.
While lucid, amusing, and informative of the state of mankind in the early 21st century, The Existential Tomato does not meet our criteria at the time.
Consider this as a guide. It is by no means exhaustive.
1. When you’re driving past your neighbors, you wave at them. This sends a signal that says “I am one of you, I belong here, I see you”. It also sends another, arguably more important signal that says “I promise not to scrape the left side of your F150 with the left side of my F150”.
2. Yes, everybody here drives an F150. Yes, every single one of those F150s is absolutely necessary (according to the owner).
3. The sweet tea is going to be sweeter than you expect. No matter how sweet you expect it to be, it’s going to be sweeter.
4. “Corn from a jar” means moonshine.
5. “Y’all” is a contraction of “You all” that means “You guys” or “all of you”. “Ya’ll” doesn’t mean anything, as far as I’m aware.
6. Mississippians WILL fight you if you say anything bad about Elvis.
7. Please stop making Deliverance jokes. We’ve heard them all. They’re not funny anymore.
8. It’s hot. It’s so, so hot. If you’re from a dry place, you don’t even understand what I mean when I say it’s hot. Every part of you will sweat and you won’t feel any cooler because the air is so full of water that no sweat will evaporate. You’ll just be hot AND sweaty. It’s basically a jungle. The windows fog up from the outside.
9. If you have a house with a screened-in porch, that screen is a blessing from God. Do not remove the screen to “let the air circulate through”. There is no air to circulate. There are a lot of mosquitoes, however, who are more than happy to check out your circulation. Which brings me to my next point…
10. How fast does the air move around in the summer? It doesn’t; that’s why it’s 92 degrees and 80% humidity at midnight…
11. … and it’s also 92 degrees and 100% humidity in the middle of the day! So if you’re from a place that maybe is a little less humid and you’re thinking of going for a jog outside, don’t bother. All the sweat-wicking microfiber in the world won’t save you when there is nowhere to wick the sweat to. Just go to Planet Fitness.
12. You can’t defeat the kudzu. It’ll come back next year. Save yourself the trouble and the Roundup exposure.
13. You also can’t defeat the insect life. A wasp or a beetle will get into your house eventually. Your best bet is peaceful coexistence, because paper wasps (the type you’re most likely to see) are not aggressive and keep other, nastier insects at bay.
14. There will probably be a pack of free-range dogs in your neighborhood, probably without collars. They’re friendly. Give ‘em a pat.
15. Seriously, wave at your neighbors. It’s rude not to.
16. A firework echoes, a gunshot doesn’t. This comes up more than you’d think. Except on the 4th of July, when you’ll hear both.
17. Opossums eat ticks and are nearly immune to rabies, so if you see one making its dumb little way across the road, please do your best not to hit it.
18. Deer hunting is actually vitally important to maintain the ecosystem. We killed off all the whitetail deer’s natural predators, and now there’s just too god damn many of them. Hunting permits are strictly controlled by the state’s Fish and Wildlife Department, and they give out enough necessary to maintain the deer population.
If the deer population isn’t maintained, they outgrow their food supply and begin to starve. You may find it distasteful but trust me, it is way better than watching deer slowly starve to death.
19. The cooler you just bought has a ruler on top for measuring fish. See #18.
20. Sometimes our local politicians say terrible things. If this bothers you, you are welcome to: a. Vote for a candidate that opposes the terrible politician b. Volunteer for a candidate that opposes the terrible politician c. Write letters to the terrible politician telling him he’s terrible and should stop that d. Run for office yourself
You are not welcome to: e. Talk about how everybody who lives here is an inbred racist hick
21. Most importantly, please do not come here and think you’re going to magically change everything that’s wrong. Give the people here some credit. If there were easy solutions to the problems they face, they would have solved their problems themselves already.
Life has its own pace here, and the problems in Appalachia and the South generally are deep-seated and far-reaching. You don’t have the magic solution to the opioid crisis, racism, wage stagnation, brain drain, economic inequality, generational poverty, chronic disease, environmental contamination, resource exploitation, or any other of the issues that are endemic to this area.
It is at best insulting and at worst actively harmful to have a person who has zero understanding of this region and the people who live in it come in and insist that big changes need to happen and by golly gosh, he’s the one to make them. If you want to help, listen to the people here. Support them in their fight for justice.
22. WAVE AT YOUR FUCKING NEIGHBORS.
(This essay has been on Tumblr for a long time, and I have yet to find the original source.)
“Jack,” I said, “I’ve been reading this article about honky-tonks . . . “ “You shouldn’t read things like that,” he said, turning his head from a football game to growl at me. “It always gets me in trouble.”
Jack is my first cousin, a really great guy and the only friend I have in the family. We’ve seen one another through thick and thin. I helped him back up on his feet out of a really bad marriage, and he rescued me from a crack house in Atlanta. We take care of each other, Jack and I do, but lately he’s been feeling like he’s doing all the work, which isn’t fair of him at all. For one thing, I’m always the designated driver, and if it weren’t for me, his jeans would look like denim accordions.
“What’s that place you always go to? ‘Hippy Dick’s’? I could hear Jack groan all the way in the kitchen. “No!” he said. “You said it had a juke box?” “It doesn’t have any ABBA on it!” “Pool tables?” “You can’t play mahjong on a pool table!” “Pickled eggs, pigs’ feet and jerky?” “No! Sushi!” “Jack,” I said, “Be fair. I heard a long sigh. “What are you wearing?” he asked. “I thought khakis and a button-up Oxford, hushpuppies . . .”
Jack held his hand up. “If you go in there looking like a reject from Rush Week at Ole Miss, you’re going to end up in the Yalobusha River with a trot line tied around your feet.”
So I left the house wearing jeans, flannel, a pair of Jack’s old boots and a cap that said “Embry’s Bait Shop” with a Marine insignia. At least he let me pick out which of his flannel shirts to wear. “Lucky for you pink don’t look good on me,” he said. Jack’s got a weird sense of humor.
Hippy Dick’s was on the side of a long winding road that twisted through the backwaters of a nearby reservoir. It had big a gravel parking lot that Jack said the county kept up because Dick was the supervisor’s second cousin. It had a neon sign on top that said DICKS and a bait shop on the side.
The bar had a big mirror behind it, and two television screens; a large one near the back wall, which seemed continually tuned to ESPN, the other, smaller one, set up near one end of the bar tuned to “E!” with a bucket of iced beer on a towel in front of it. The jukebox was blaring out Faith Hill. It was crowded, about forty people. You had the sports guys crowded around a big screen television, about a dozen guys playing pool and a little more than that bellied up to the bar.
Jack ordered our drinks: a Miller Lite for him, an O’Doul’s for me. “He’s driving,” Jack explained to the bartender, a drop-dead gorgeous ginger with a gambler’s spade beard.
“Is this your date?” he asked Jack with a wink. “Rick, this is my cousin Andy,” Jack said. Rick reached a muscular arm over the bar, smiled and shook my hand. I couldn’t help but giggle. Jack punched me in the arm and dragged me over to a table.
“You’re going to get my ass kicked if you don’t straighten up. Why don’t you sit here and try not to fluff your hair while I play a game of pool?” “Now I’m going to have to go to the men’s room to look at my hair.” “Make sure that’s all you look at,” he said.
Having checked in the rear view mirror before I got out of the car, I knew my hair looked fine, so I wandered over to the jukebox. Sure enough, there wasn’t any ABBA, but a couple of tunes did stand out: “YMCA”, “Don’t You Want Me, Baby?” and two tunes by Madonna. I saw Jack looking at me from the corner of my eye, played it safe and picked out Reba. I was just straightening up when this woman at the bar said, “Yeah, he gave me a little rock and a little cock!”
Naturally, I froze, but nobody else seemed to notice. I turned to look at her. She was in her mid-30s, brunette, big tits, freckled cleavage. I turned to Jack, who shrugged and sank the three ball in a side pocket.
“Hey, you at the jukebox!” she said. “Come here!” Jack miscued and stood up, glaring at me. I just shrugged at him, turned to the lady at the bar, smiled and walked up to her. “Are you Jack’s cousin?” “Yes, I am,” I said. “His momma is my daddy’s big sister.” “Well, y’all sure do look alike,” she said. “Just handsome as you can be!” She laid her hand on my arm. “I just want you to know that song you played is my favorite one in the whole, wide world.” “’Little Rock’”? “Yes, honey. And do you know why?” “No, why?” “Because my husband had a little cock, and he gave me a little rock.” “That would piss anybody off,” I said.
I heard someone behind me choke on a beer, but I paid no attention, went to the other end of the bar and asked for a refill. Rick obliged with a stunning smile, but before I could thank him, a guy on a stool next to me poked me in the ribs.
I turned and found myself facing a rakish blond wearing a Saints jersey. “I like them jeans you got on,” he said. “What size you wear?” “Uh, on a good day, a 32,” I said. “I used to be fat, too,” he said, and before I could protest, he said, “But I got on that Atkins diet. You know, the one that Ozzie’s wife is always doin’ ads for.” “I’m not fat!” “Oh, I didn’t think I was either, but you got this here,” and he patted my stomach and started rubbing on it. “Nice little beer belly …” He let his hand linger a little too long. “Yeah, well, that’s mostly pizza,” I said, shifting away. “Hey, I like pizza, too, but I really like them bratwursts,” he said, with what can only be interpreted as a leer.
“ANDEE!” Jack’s voice thundered across the bar. “You’re UP!” I certainly was. “Be right there!” I said over my shoulder. “I’ve got to go,” I said to the dirt road d’Artagnan. “Maybe you can come over for a brat sometime,” he said. “Sure!” I caught Rick smiling at me in the mirror.
Jack soon decided it was time to go. He’d lost forty bucks at pool and Lady Little Rock had her hand glued to his arm. I was ready to go myself. As we were driving off, Jack asked me if I had a good time. “I sure did,” I said. “Rick gave me his phone number.”
Jackson, Mississippi shares the problems of many municipalities: urban decay, a shrinking tax base, rampant crime, and an unhappy citizenry. Other cities can usually trace these difficulties to such mundane matters as confused politicians, inept municipal bureaucracies or social strife, and while Jacksonians suffer with these in abundance, some point to a deeper, more elemental problem: a vent to the netherworld.
An extinct volcano squats about a half mile beneath Mississippi’s capital city. If it ever blows (a supposedly remote possibility; it’s been dormant since T. rex roamed the earth) the Mississippi Coliseum would be ground zero. The volcano’s dense core is a prominent structural abnormality in gravitational and magnetic surveys.
Bernadette Cahill, in her book Over the Volcano: An Inquiry into the Occult History of Jackson, Mississippi (Aardvark Global Publishing: 2010) maintains that the volcano’s dense core affects not only physical aspects of the locale such as gravity and magnetism, but it also generates a negative well of psychic energy that continually saps the city – its spirit of place as well as the spirits of its citizens – of positive and essential life forces. She also hints at even more malevolent aspects, tagging the volcano as a portal for evil from another plane of existence.
So when beset with muddy bathwater, dodging exploding sewers, or dealing with the entrenched incompetence of a corrupt, moribund municipal administration, Jacksonians should just blame it on the volcano. Might make you feel better.
