It’s hard to breathe when the heat blooms after it rains, and it rains all the time lately. The tomatoes are four foot tall, the limas climbed the bright green bamboo pole I cut for them, the lantana is smiling and four colors and a half inch plumper every afternoon. I can’t keep track of it all because the days seem to pass so quickly.
Backyard one night right after a storm, Jackson, Mississippi, Polaroid 600 (all of these are going to be from 2024)
But the squash died, which was genuinely upsetting. It was huge and lovely, yellow crookneck, I grew it from seed in the little utility room. And the photos have been like the squash. A few lovely healthy friends and then a bunch of Brutuses with their knives out. The color isn’t working, either from a fumble at the factory (there’s just missing colors in the chemistry to my eye) or possibly I’m the world’s worst photographer, at least according to a tiny sliver of my brain, some small little drooling creature, a Richard Scarry drawing left out in the rain and the ink run.
The one photo I made in two separate trips to New Orleans, of the federal district courthouse, SX-70
Or maybe it’s just the heat, blanket after blanket God keeps placing on our chests as we try to sleep, smiling, here you go, I got this for you, tucking us in and in again while we lay wide-eyed and muffled, wishing the ceiling fan would turn, sweat rolling off our brows into our ears, tickling, tormenting, reminding us that we’re alive but oh absolutely at the mercy of this place.
But the black and white works. It always does. Slide it into the SX-70 with a solid shudder, and suddenly you’re Walker Evans with a W.P.A. telegram in his back pocket, Eudora Welty with a checklist of places in Hinds County where maybe no one has ever taken a camera before, you’re a pioneer, you’re Tarzan swinging on a vine.
Coffeeville, Mississippi, Polaroid SX-70
When I lose the thread I go to Utica, like she did, I look for the graves she loved, oh there’s the little lamb, there’s the hand pointing to G-d, there’s the weeping willow. I think of her in ‘35, in ‘39, in ‘40, at the fairs, in the churches, in the cemeteries, smiling in her way, lifting her Rolleiflex up to her sternum, smiling and looking ahead, glancing down, eyes back up, smiling and saying just a second now, then her eyes dart down, and click.
Headstone, Utica, Mississippi, Polaroid SX-70
So I shift to black and white to see if I can still make an exposure. I follow Eudora to see if I can still frame the shot, going to Utica, Learned, Crystal Springs. I listen to the Titans to remember who I am: Siri, play Hank Williams; play Fats Domino; play Belton Richard. The backroads calm me down. Play me a song, Mr. Wolfman Jack, I start to smile, Play Etta James, too, play “I'd Rather Go Blind,” I start to remember, Play John Lee Hooker, play “Scratch My Back.” I think of Eudora in Copiah watching those boys on break from packing tomatoes, gathered around the kid with the guitar. What was he playing, I wonder, it’s on guitar but it’s 1936, it could have been “Pennies from Heaven,” it could have been a waltz, the Big Bang just happened, it could have been anything.
Maybe they’re laughing because the kid just drawled that really grown up serious talking part in “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” like how Elvis furrowed his brow through the spoken bit in “Are You Lonesome Tonight.”
I go to Merigold, I wander in Cleveland, stay in Lafayette, eat lunch in Baton Rouge. I read heartbreakers by Max Hipp, I read about Pete Candler trying to find truth in Holly Springs, I read the first and last pages of Ulysses on Bloomsday. I buy a birthday card for my aunt in Liberty, even though it’s not her birthday, just to send her a note in the mail. I snag a battered first edition of Salem’s Lot out of a free library nestled by a monument for the soldiers from the County.
Liberty, Mississippi, SX-70
I’m making a double album, no hits, all folk, I go electric, I swap to a twelve string, I play a dobro. Someone loan me a mandolin. The tour is just me in my ‘78 GMC, and you’ve never heard any of the songs before. They’re all versions of “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” but with different endings, some where Red Molly is shot trying to save James, some where they run off together, one where the bike breaks down and the spend the night in a barn like Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, and one night I play a combination where they both die in the end, but everyone boos. I’m trying as hard as I can.
Dockery Farms, SX-70
In Merigold I drink an ice cold Topo Chico and eat a fine burrito. In Cleveland I ask to hold a bright copy of Giant-Size X-Men #1, its successors neatly stacked on the counter, in my hands the paper version of electric feedback in Newport, of London Calling, of Plath pressing the keys on a baby blue Hermes 3000, onion skin curling upwards, emblazoned “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” My eyes shining I say thanks, and the clerk tells me “They were all his brother’s—he kept them carefully stacked in his dresser,” and then he put his hands to his head, “but when he brought them up here, he had stuck them all in a garbage bag!”
Learned, Miss., Polaroid 600
At a secondhand place in Crystal Springs I buy a handmade bust of the King, painted gold or maybe bronze, plus a tomato as big as a baby doll’s head. There’s a little scale by the mater stand in the store, and you write the weight on the bag. It’s on the honor system. The tomato is exactly one pound. When I cut into it the next day, Bunny bread in the toaster, mayonnaise grabbed from the fridge, it is red as blood.
Spoonbill, Lafayette, Louisiana, Polaroid SX-70
Opelousas, Louisiana, SX-70
On the way back I stop at a pawn shop in South Jackson. There’s a Peavey electric for $132 (a very specific markdown), but I think the neck is wonky, which might explain it. The last guitar I had my landlord took; it was 1997 and ‘98, we were that behind on the rent. I pawned the Crybaby pedal at Trulove’s not long after. Oh and then I see it, oh, that’s such a fine motorbike. It’s a hundred bucks. I smile and take it to the counter. It’s a bundle of Phoenix feathers, small and dark like a cherry on top of a sundae, a skeleton key that unlocks all the doors to the mansion on the hill. The clerk is wearing an LSU shirt. “What are you planning to do with this old thing?” she smiles.
Utica, Mississippi, SX-70, on June 16, 2024
On a summer day in Mississippi, with a statue of Elvis’ head belted in the front seat next to a red ripe tomato, with a floorboard covered with Polaroids, I laugh and tell her the only answer in the world.
Bloomsday, SX-70
“$100 GUITAR” is a chapter of GORJUS, a neverending love letter about art and life in the South, held fast with instant film. I know this one was a ramble and I appreciate you coming along with me.
If you liked what you saw and read, if you maybe felt a twang in your belly while you looked it over, then this is for you, and I reckon we would be friends. Consider sending this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.
The black and whites are really lovely.
I like a ramble