OLD WOLF IN THE DARK

It’s 4:30 when the rain shakes me awake. It’s not an alarm, just a gentle pat on the shoulder, almost tender. Go back to sleep, I tell myself. You are not a coal miner, you don’t have to get up before dawn. The rain begins to thrum. I look at the phone and the radar shows a laser beam of death, the curve of the blade over Jackson. It looks like a Sith lightsaber, neon red and yellow, arcing over the River and through the Pines.

Camaro, Karns, Tennessee, Polaroid 600 (all photos 2022)

Nearer fifty than forty, there are few thoughts in the morning. Gone is the gnawing hum of my thirties, where mornings were suffused with deadlines and timesheets, or guilt from the night before. There’s just quiet, muscle memory. I walk to the kitchen in the dark to make coffee—squinting my left eye so the blaring-white-lights of the router won’t get me—and grab a New Yorker off the coffeetable from where I think I piled them up.

By the Little Tennessee River, Polaroid 600

My friend Tracy had a name for what happened when you got behind on reading your New Yorkers and they started piling up: you got Nyorked.¹ I’m three behind so I’m pretty Nyorked. Swirling in the dark are thoughts of old steel. Maybe I could get a Camaro again, is one. (I last had a Camaro a quarter century ago, pieces of it strewn in a ditch in Oktibbeha County). Next is I bet I could find a C3 Corvette on the cheap, one of those that smells like an old record store from leaking t-tops, and I think of that giant old place in New Orleans that was by the Half Moon, and maybe still is, since New Orleans is both its old self and its new at all given times (just like parts of Manhattan).

Jim Gray, Dolly Parton (1987) (detail), Sevierville, Tenn., Polaroid 600

In the background on the stereo, the old magpie sings they say the darkest hour / is right before the dawn. It’s pitch black outside, and the rain is still humming. I look at the phone and we are right in the middle of the lightsaber. There is a tap-tap-tap from the roof, from what I guess is the shiny metal around the vent over the stove. The darkest hour. The end of the song speeds up, then slows down again, either from a warp in a decades-old piece of plastic or just because. The coffeemaker shudders with a final burst of exhaust from the top.

Cheowah Dam, North Carolina, Polaroid SX-70

One of the places in the phone has collected different opinions on how Alabama will fare tonight against the hated Tigers of Louisiana State. Which team will show up? is the repeated question, as if there are different people with the same names, in the same crimson and white jerseys. They have been different on the road. Aren’t we all. How secretly refreshing to see that recognized, that people might be dramatically different year to year or because of changes. Not who he was last year is an acceptable reality if you’re a wide receiver, never the same after she got hurt if you’re a point guard.

Perhaps it would be better if there were thinkpieces and commentary on lawyers and accountants the same way. Last year’s move to a new apartment really threw her for a loop, Joe, you might hear. While the building has a pool, you can hear the upstairs neighbors day and night. “Well she’s just dealing with those stupid neighbors,” you would say to yourself if she blew a deadline on a report, the same way if Michael Thomas had a hitch in his route for the Saints while you knew his toe was all messed up.

Sevierville, Tenn., Polaroid SX-70

The phone buzzes with news of a friend’s Wordle score, a 5. The problems have been tricky lately, with the energy of a regular starting word like SLATE or CRANE being mostly deflected. You just have to throw some letters on that thing and take a shot. The record player clicks off as the sky flickers. The coffee is gone. It’s two minutes to dawn.

“OLD WOLF IN THE DARK” is this week’s installment of GORJUS, a newsletter devoted to art and life in the South on instant film. If you like it, consider sending it to a pal. Just like anything, some weeks are better than others. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see more Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.

1. Spellings differ, with some preferring Nork, which is wrong.