Once about fifty-five years ago a teenager from right on the edge of Tennessee went walking with a girl. “Her name was Rosey Miller, and she was from across the River.”
South Pittsburg, Tennessee, Polaroid SX-70 (all photos Christmas Day 2021)
It’s Christmas Day and I’m in the parking lot of Harvey’s Pirate Drive-In in South Pittsburg, Tennessee. The fellow telling me this story is Harvey’s brother, him sitting in his big Chevy truck, me standing with a Polaroid. Through the grapevine he’d heard I was poking around the Pirate and the Dixie Freeze across the street (with their hand-painted sign advertising their Dagwood sandwiches) and he rolled by to make sure everything was on the level. I had been there maybe ten minutes. And that’s how we got to talking.
At first it was about how I loved that the Drive-In celebrated the local football team and all its championships. Rosey grins and tells me “We just won another a few weeks ago, and my grandson plays tackle!” We both bonded over our fathers being coal miners; his had run moonshine on the weekends to cover the costs of ten kids—“and knowing that, you won’t mind this,” he said, taking a pull off an aluminum Budweiser bottle nestled between his legs. That’s when I asked him how he had gotten his nickname, since I’d never met a grown man named Rosey before.
Whitwell, Tennessee, Polaroid 600
“So we were walking and holding hands and I really did like her,” he told me, of his ninth grade crush. But then his archrival walked by and pointed and laughed at them1—and called him by his paramour’s name. This is of course triggered a fight2, but even by the time he got up from the rasslin’ around, it seemed that “everybody called me Rosey. And it turned out, I liked the way it sounded.”
I wished him a Merry Christmas and told him I would return with my father when the Pirate Drive-In reopened, and that he would have to join us. He promised that the Dagwood sandwiches at his brother’s place were better than across the street at the Dixie Freeze.
So. Pittsburg, Tenn., SX-70
Just down the street was a mechanic chock full of dinosaurs that I had never seen or even heard of before. Ford only made the beautiful Starliner for two years, and here there were three or four in various pieces. It was like learning there was another member of the Avengers you had never even heard of growing up, like Hellcat or Swordsman.
While I was trying to get the Starliner emblem down onto film—it had been overcast and cold all day—I heard the high-pitched yowl of a dirt-bike behind me. There was someone running up and down the road doing wheelies on it. I think to myself, boy, I sure would like to take a picture of someone doing a wheelie on a dirt bike, and get back to making bad-angle Polaroids of old cars.
After a minute the dirtbike skitters up behind me, and the rider asks what I’m doing. His name is Terrye and we get to talking and agree to try to make a Polaroid of him doing a wheelie on his motorcycle. “Put the old cars behind me in the photo,” he says, which is a great idea.
It turns out this is a lot harder than I have imagined. The light being so low means the shutter on my 600 won’t close immediately, so I’m left guessing at when to mash the button, plus you can’t exactly go slow while doing a wheelie. Either the camera’s too slow or I’m too slow, or probably a little bit of both, so I end up with just a photo of the mechanic’s lot.
We decide instead to do a couple of portraits—one for me to keep, and one for Terrye to give to his momma before she headed out later in the day for her shift at the Waffle House up the road in Kimball.
So. Pittsburg, Tenn., Polaroid 600
We say our goodbyes with the dirtbike rider telling me he might need to get a camera of his own to make photos of all the caves around South Pittsburg. As I head on down the road, the sky clears for the first time and shows a little blue, and as the car passes the border, I wonder where I’m going to end up in Alabama for the night.
Hammer’s, Scottsboro, Alabama, Polaroid SX-70
“WHEELIES ON XMAS” 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.
In my mind this laugh had to be Nelson-style.
Me: “Did you whip him?”
Rosey [eyes narrowing]: “Of course I whipped him.”
Sometimes we need to lose a photo every now and then just to describe it in words. Your portrait of Terrye is amazing
Love your storytelling