I always get (what is left of) my hair cut at Tim’s. Frankly, it is not because of Tim’s skill with the scissors. I go because Tim is a good storyteller. And the men who hang out there also know how to spin a yarn or listen to one. I hear some good insults there too: “Are those your legs or are you sitting on a chicken.” And streams of invective that make we wish I had a tape recorder. That was the case one afternoon when Tim referred to a woman who put her cigarette out in his ear during a heated discussion at a restaurant.
The shop is kind of a shack and there stuff all over the yard. Like an arm and hand sticking out of the ground (from a glove factory), a plastic palm tree, a couple boats, rabbits, dogs, and chickens. Once Tim was short on change so he just gave me a dozen fresh eggs.
For a while, a small, three-legged dog was in residence. Tim found him while he was hunting. Apparently an alligator bit off his leg and, abandoned by his owner, (that dawg don't hunt!) the little guy had survived in the forest on his own and eventually found his way back to the lodge. Of course they named him Tripod. I am glad to say that Tripod is now the mascot of the local Pet Helpers.
Story-telling seems to be cherished in the South. I have seen a line of folks at a grocery checkout patiently listen while someone tells the person at the cash resister a story. I have a friend who introduced me to his friends, “This is Richard, he tells good stories.”
Tim is also a good source of information of all kinds. For instance he says that the tsunami from a few years ago tilted the axis of the earth slightly, putting Charleston forever out of the paths of hurricanes. Sounds right to me.
He is also privy to everything that happens on James Island. A few months ago I found a dead person out on the marsh where I walk my dogs. It was comforting to see how fast police and rescue arrived—about four minutes. The story was not in the newspaper, so to find out what happened, I went and got a haircut. Tim knew all the details: he was a young man from off, out of work, painful divorce, staying at his brother's, depressed, took his own life. Antifreeze, Tim said.
I’ve noticed that when I start to tell a story to my friends in L.A., they get kind of glassy-eyed, and don’t notice when I give up the idea stop in mid-sentence.
At Tim’s, they have regular symposia. One afternoon the topic was, “Should one step between two biker-girls in a bar fight?” I heard three different scholarly opinions on the subject, roughly corresponding to yes, no, and none of the above.
One day it was a ghost story. Not that anyone was consciously telling a story, but that they were telling the truth, as they knew it. It concerned a house that was haunted because of a terrible crime that occurred there. Each man would tell the story. The others, about five of us, would listen. After the speaker was through, one of the guys would say, “No, that’s not the way it happened. Here's the way I heard it,” and he’d proceed to tell his version. Tim’s version had a feminist twist, since the woman who had committed the crime was suffering from post-partum depression. It was like Rashomon at the barbershop.
Of course, Tim is the subject of many local stories. Here is the latest. A friend asked him what he wanted for Father’s Day. Tim said he wanted to go fishing with his grandfather, his father, and his son. All of them passed on. “That’s sad,” his friend said, "but also impossible.” “Not so,” said Tim, and I’m gonna do it.” So on Father’s day Tim took a cooler of beer and four fishing rods to the cemetery . He spent the day casting onto the lawn, drinking beer, and talking to his folks.
Speaking of Southern stories, a couple of years ago I started to see poems, mostly in Poetry, that seemed to be set here in the Low Country. Very good poems, unique poems. The poet had the unusual name of Atsuro Riley. Japanese? Irish? My favorite poem of his, a prose poem, “Map,” is full of South Carolina low country slang, and may be a record for the use of gerunds in a single sentence.
Map
Atsuro Riley
Daddy goes.
Trolling and trawling and crawfishing and crabbing and bass-boating and trestle-jumping bare into rust-brackish water and cane-poling for bream and shallow-gigging too with a nail-pointy broomstick and creek-shrimping and cooler-dragging and coon-chasing and dove-dogging and duck-bagging and squirrel-tailing and tail-hankering and hard-cranking and -shifting and backfiring like a gun in his tittie-tan El Camino and parking it at The House of Ham and Dawn's Busy Hands and Betty's pink house and Mrs. Sweatman's brick house and Linda's dock-facing double-wide and spine-leaning Vicki against her WIDE-GLIDE Pontiac and pumping for pay at Ray Wade's Esso and snuff-dipping and plug-sucking and tar-weeping pore-wise and LuckyStrike-smoking and Kool only sometimes and penny-pitching and dog-racing and bet-losing cocksuckmotherfuck and pool-shooting and bottle-shooting over behind Tas-T-O's Donuts and shootin' the shit and chewin' the fat and just jawin' who asked you and blank-blinking quick back at me and whose young are you no-how and hounddog-digging buried half-pints from the woods.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=31310
After living here a while, I finally understand that last reference to stashes of moonshine. Last year I got to meet Atsuro, and he does come from near Charleston, although he lives in California now. His father was a G.I., a good ol' Kentucky boy, and his mother is Japanese. Talk about stories, he has some great ones about his childhood in the Low Country.
He gave a reading to a rapt audience at our local watering hole and poet-hangout, East Bay Meeting House. They host a great poetry-spoken-word- story-telling-and-music night, Monday Night Blues, curated by Ellie Davis. Atsuro’s first book of poems, Romey's Order, is coming out next spring from the University of Chicago Press. His work has been compared to that of Hopkins. After the reading host Jim Lundy said Atsuro had set a Monday Night Blues record for use of the hyphen. You can see several of his poems on Poetry’s website, and he has a new poem coming out in the next issue.
Monday Night Blues:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Monday-Night-Blues-Charleston-SC/59321182120
Ellie Davis has a new book out, The Humours of Folly, a poem with photographs of Folly Beach by Frank Braden.
http://www.jogglingboardpress.com/books/humoursfolly.html
I am often surprised at how little narrative there is in my student’s poems. One section of a seminar I gave recently was titled, ‘For Christ’s Sake, Make Something Up!”
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