It was the year when the trees were green at the dawn of December, then suddenly exploded into a weeklong burst of gold and red and amber. On Christmas Eve all the leaves were on the ground, and everyone was outside with new rakes, scraping and rustling and sweating.
It was the year there were so many robins and squirrels rooting around for acorns in the front yard that housecats would linger in the driveway, eyes wide, like someone holding a dessert menu and saying “I really couldn’t, I’m just stuffed—but”—while neighbors scrambled to hang lights and wreaths, thrown off schedule by a late Thanksgiving.
I took to the road to see family, sleeping on twin beds and queen, with the distance meaning I spent more time in the car and gas stations advertising bootleg drugs and lotto tickets. The lottery was a big deal. Any time I went inside to use the bathroom and get something to drink (once a Mountain Dew in the bottle with a “MADE WITH REAL SUGAR” sticker proudly displayed, found while I was half looking for a Yoo-hoo), there was a line with people buying lottery tickets. I later learned the prize was a number so high it seemed unreal.
In Reform I spend some time thinking about making a Polaroid of now-closed movie store with the incredible name of Video Adventure, but an oak tree has grown up beautifully in front, spreading its branches to cover the old sign. VID ADV is now what it looks like from the street, and lettering on the door says GOLD FISH, MINNOWS, CRAPPIE, BASS, CRICKETS, WORMS, LIVER.
In Birmingham I wander off the highway to see if anything jogs my memory. I am old enough now that I can see the layers on the layers, the palimpsest of memory, vanished Italian restaurants and record shops, movie theatres subsumed into shoe stores.
This is a scan of the Polaroid I made of the closest mall to our high school, where my sister’s boyfriend worked at the Chik-fil-A and my best friend ran the ear-piercing kiosk across from the Sound Shop. One of the boys in the Sound Shop had a crush on her, and he would point us to various records we should know or special order things when we had the money, which wasn’t often. We would roam the aisles, hoping they had a copy of Bleach, never buying anything because ten dollars for a tape was a fortune and fifteen dollars for a CD was out of reach. But they had a big promo bin, and once I bought a copy of Sonic Youth’s Sister on compact disc for two dollars, although I didn’t understand it. I got yelled at for coming home with a single diamond stud in my left ear.
This photo is prettier in real life, but aren’t they all, and maybe when I get home I’ll scan it and show you how lovely the sky was that day, the 25th of December, when I stood thinking trying to think about who I was and who I cared for thirty-five years ago, but it was like catching cobwebs, like trying to remember the addresses of all the places you grew up. Melody Lane, Tower Drive, Wilcox, Normandale, I chant, but the spell is missing just a little something, and it only casts a faint glow, no longer Roman Candles in red and blue and blazing gold.
I text Tracy a photo of the Nick and say How did we ever go to these places, meaning not just the Nick, but all Nick-like places, like The Chukker in Tuscaloosa, or W.C. Don’s in Jackson, or really any place in Starkville, but probably really meaning the Dark Horse in the early days (I understand you can no longer smoke inside, thank God). “I don’t know,” she writes back immediately. “It looks like you’d get tetanus by walking in,” and I laugh, and remember that somewhere someplace there is a version of me with a membership card1 from the Nick, and I like keeping all sorts of little mementoes, like a robin digging out acorn fragments from a rose bush, but even I don’t need that anymore.
This sign didn’t exist when I was growing up, but I think it is beautiful and it catches the light better than the “real” sign on Third Ave and how massive the Alabama truly is—half a city block. A family is posing and taking photos out front and it makes me really happy to see, that this beautiful place is healthier than it has been in fifty years as it heads into its second century.
A day later, sitting in a train car in Chattanooga, I try to cast another spell, grinning, thinking of that grand coelacanth, swimming deep into the twenty-first century: The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Beautiful Life, the sweet short buzzy shock I got while once changing a lightbulb in an eighty-year old fixture, M*A*S*H, polishing the great brass rail heading to the basement, Bonnie & Clyde, The Connells with the Sugar La-Las, in ‘97 carving my initials on the back of a bench I had just painted, in ‘07 a small brass plaque with my family’s name affixed to a seat in the mezzanine.
The last time I went, it was late, and the movie had already started. I wasn’t there for the movie. It was jam packed inside and you could hear the Wurlitzer blonking and wailing, wheezing and hiccuping. I bought popcorn and took photos of the chandelier in the lobby. A kind usher walked up to me and said, “Welcome to the Alabama—is this your first time?” I didn’t know what to say. I basically lived in this building one summer, running the stairs in the dark, learning the secret doors, looking for Mercury dimes in cash registers purloined from the Parisian, wandering the Lyric in the dark, watching All My Children with Cecil and Linda and Jeannie.
“I grew up here,” I managed, “but I moved away a very long time ago, and would love for you to show me around.”
“VIDEO ADVENTURE” is a chapter of GORJUS, a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film. I wish you and yours—whether they are still with us in this place, or elsewhere in time or space—the very best at this time of year.
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.
Here is a blue Polaroid of train number sixteen at the Hotel Chalet—what we would have hollered growing up as we sped to Oak Ridge—the Chattanooga Choo-Choo.
I don’t know how it works anymore, but back in the day there was a cut off time for service. But private clubs could stay open to serve members, so after midnight or 1 p.m. or whenever they’d just slide you a little cardboard membership card and add $1 to your tab.
Boy howdy I love learning a new word: palimpsest <3