by Jim Knipfel Yet whenever I head
back there, for whatever reason, maybe as a result of having gotten
myself all cultured up in New York, I find myself filled with the Great
Dread at encountering, once again, what America is all about. Laura's mother had
died fourteen months earlier, on Easter Sunday. That was the last time
I'd been back. Now that her father had died, the routine was still fresh
in my memory. Laura and I weren't exactly married anymore, but there
was no question as to whether or not I'd make the trip to Grand Rapids.
Had to, if only to try and protect her from the vultures who would be
descending on her and her father's estate. (While I was on
the phone, getting a bereavement-fare plane ticket from American Airlines,
the operator informed me, "This is, of course, a fully refundable
ticket." "What," I asked, curious, "just in case
he comes back to life?") In many ways, it
was a carbon copy of her mother's funeral. Thing is, I don't know how
common this all is; whether or not it's a specifically Midwestern or
a specifically familial thing. Folks I've spoken to seem to find it
strange: A collection of four viewings and a memorial service in Grand
Rapids, then a 600-mile road trip to a little town called Bland, MO
(some 2 hours south of St. Louis, nestled uneasily in the Ozark foothills),
where there were a few more viewings, another memorial service, and,
finally, a burial. It was like a six-day marathon of death. It got me
thinking--and looking. When you're involved
in a funeral from the get-go, yet you're not a part of the immediate
family, you're job is to do absolutely nothing. Sit and do nothing,
stand and do nothing, ride along and do nothing, eat ham and do nothing.
Oh, maybe you'll chat with someone, some stranger, now and again, but
that's about it. Most of Laura's extended family had no real interest
in talking to me, given that word had obviously spread that she and
I had split up. So I spent my time sitting around, listening to folks
chat about death in its varied forms. "When I was
a girl, maybe fifteen years old," one aunt was saying to someone
during the second viewing, "my sister died of diptheria. She was
at the house at the time, and since the whole place was quarantined,
y'know, because of the diptheria, the doctor had to perform the autopsy
on the kitchen table." That was followed
by a slew of "bodies on the kitchen table" stories from the
others. In other corners of the room, friends and relatives shared tales
of heart attacks, strokes, cancer and farm accidents. "Willie,
see, he fell in front of the tractor..." The one thing that
made it interesting was the fact–and I don't know if I've mentioned
this before--that all of Laura's male relatives bear striking resemblances
to major literary figures. Her father looked like W.H. Auden, her uncle
Elmer like Henry Miller, uncle Ivan like Louis Ferdinand Celine and
uncle Gene like Norman Mailer. A photograph would make it appear to
be the greatest collection of writers ever gathered in a single room.
But given that they're all from Ozark country, when they open their
mouths, what comes out is a strange mishmash of redneck mutterings.
After Laura's Mom died, and it was my job to help keep these folks entertained
while Laura took care of her father, Elmer, Gene and I got drunk around
the kitchen table one night. They told me all about the time when they
were kids that the two of them got a coon dog drunk on moonshine then
jacked it off. My own tales of cow tipping in Wisconsin just didn't
hold up. After the memorial
service in Grand Rapids, and everyone came back to the house, it was
my job, once again, to entertain. But things were different this time.
Something'd changed. I sat around the same kitchen table with the rest
of them, all of us working hard at the jug of Canadian Club, me telling
my stupid little stories. But this time, instead of laughing and throwing
stories back at me, they just...stared. Just a few sentences
in, and I could already see their eyes die and their faces sag. They
kept looking at me, but now they were looking at me as if I was some
kind of alien creature, telling them all about life on my home planet,
Zamchot. While my mouth kept telling the stories, my brain was telling
me, "Shut up. Just shut up. Stop talking. Just make some cheap
excuse and go into the other room and never come back. Do it now."
I didn't, and they just stared. I was ready to be lynched. But, thankfully,
in time they made their own excuses and left. At five-thirty the
next morning, Laura and I packed up her father's car and headed out
on the ten-hour trip into Deliverance country. We brought a thermos
full of coffee and a cooler full of food in an attempt to avoid having
to leave the car. Things get spooky out there. South of Chicago
and north of New Orleans, all along the narrow band of highways that
snake through the Great Dead Heart, the independent restaurant vanishes.
Poof. Just doesn't exist. Chain restaurants, chain banks, chain gas
stations, chain gangs. That's America right there. Nothing unique about
the notion, but when it slaps you across the face, you can't help but
be disturbed. Dead highways ripping through nothing. We struggled to
find anything worthwhile on the radio, just to keep our minds off the
emptiness around us. Of course, we've been trying to do that for about
fifteen years now--and we finally found it, just south of St. Louis,
with a signal strong enough to carry us those final two hours into Bland. WHNQ, "Your
All-Seventies Radio Station." Now, this is the music that both
Laura and I were tortured with when we were kids, so for the most part,
this is the music that means more to us than, say, the music of the
Eighties, let alone the Nineties. The difference, of course, between
our reaction to “Funk #49” by the James Gang and the yuppies'
reaction to “The Big Chill” soundtrack is that the yuppies
get all misty and nostalgic when they hear The Rolling Stones or "Heard
It Through the Grapevine." The reaction we had to the songs on
WHNQ was pretty much a universal "Ewww...Christ Almighty."
Ten years of one-hit wonders coming back to haunt us. Still, the notion
of changing stations never crossed our minds. We had to hang onto something
that week. At least hearing
Grand Funk Railroad's "American Band" offered me the opportunity
to explain to Laura my long-held notion about the "Natural Fact,"
as referred to in the song.. I won't go into all the details, but the
Natural Fact is something which was first proposed by Socrates, theorized
later by the likes of Kant, then later by Husserl and his student Heidegger,
only to disappear for some thirty years, before re-appearing again in
the lyrics of Grand Funk. I wish I could say that she was terribly impressed. Once we started
sniggling our way into the tarpaper shacks and trailer parks of southern
Missouri, once the road had narrowed down to two lanes, I kept my eyes
on the side of the road. While the restaurants were still all chain
operations, now and then a little independent shop of some variety would
pop up, and inevitably it would be worth noticing. First there was
"Stooge's Video and Liquor." Now, you know that two guys were
sitting around the double-wide, drunk as skunks, watching some John
Woo film and listening to Raw Power when the notion came into their
pot-addled brains to open up the joint. Better yet, just a quarter-mile
down the road, there was another shop, this one called "Jim's Gun
Rental." I told my friend John about that after I got back to town,
and he immediately decided that it was something New York desperately
needed. Neat thing is, you could just go into Jim's, rent yourself a
sawed-off shotgun, sneak a quarter-mile back through the brush, hold
up Stooge's, then go slip the gun through the night return box! If that's
not good business sense, I don't know what is. Down in Bland, the
situation for me only got worse. The friends and relatives we had to
deal with there were even more hardcore backwoods than anything that
made the trek to Michigan. The dead-eyed stares became more violent
and wicked, as I just tried to be my regular entertaining self. The
night after the funeral proper, Laura and I were staying in the basement
of a tract home inhabited by a cousin of hers. While we dropped off
our bags, I took a quick glance at the library shelf next too the television.
I always do this; it lets me know what I can expect from the folks who
are housing us for the night. Lots of pre-teen
books about sports heroes, a few editions of the Guinness Book of World
Records, some Trixie Belden and Boxcar Children, and something else. "Laura, my
God, look at this," I whispered back to her as she unpacked a few
things. "Novelizations...lots of them! And all of them sequels!
Do you realize what we're looking at here?" "You're not
going to steal anything. That'd just be stupid." I immediately realized
that I shouldn't have mentioned anything. "Maybe you
could mention it tonight, let them know what they have," she suggested. So I did. That night,
while the family was sitting around, watching some stupid made-for-TV
movie, I worked on my second beer and waited for a commercial. It finally
came. "So, uh, who's
library is that downstairs?" I began, innocently enough. Laura's cousin--a
teacher--seemed as confused as her two basketball-star pre-teens. "Oh,
we just put all our books down there. I keep getting things I think
the kids will be interested in, but I guess they just aren't readers,
much." Silently, I kicked
myself hard in the ass for not keeping my goddamn trap shut and just
lifting the books. It was too late, though--I was in it, and there was
no turning back. I went on, trying to control the wavering in my voice,
explaining how much those fucking sequel novelizations will be worth,
how rare they are, what an important statement they make in the literary
world, while all the while I'm getting that same, "My God, he's
an alien" stare. I give up. Whenever
I try to be nice, I fail. I finished my story, got silence in response,
emptied my beer and stepped into the kitchen for another. I went downstairs
and started counting the hours until my flight out of St. Louis the
next morning, Sunday, a full six days after I first stepped into this
hellhole of death and misery.
Copyright Jim
Knipfel. Published originally in the NYPress. Illustration by Russell
Christian. All rights reserved. Books
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Slackjaw
Surviving Death
in a Land Without Condiments
It's not exactly a love/hate relationship I have with the Midwest. It's
more like a pride/terror relationship. I spent most of my first twenty
years living in a double handful of towns along a very narrow band of
the country stretching between Baton Rouge, LA, in the South and Minneapolis,
MN, in the North. About ten years ago I moved East, and brought with
me a sort of sick pride in having survived the nation's heartland--home
of more madness, empty cruelty and serial killers than any other part
of the United States. We had Gacy, Dahmer, Ed Gein and Carl Panzram.
Henry Lee Lucas made a few passes through my territory. Most all the
names you remember lived and killed just a few hours' drive or less
from from one of my apartments. It's fucking scary out there. That does
something to a man over time, and as a result I never miss an opportunity
to proclaim proudly where I was spawned.