“Can you slide that box over there?” Dad said to me in the garage one bright spring day, two or three months after a quintuple bypass at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta saved his life. He was thinner than he had been since he was twelve years old, and his head seemed big on his frail body, his mustache too large over his lip.
“Sure,” I said, and picked the box up and moved it.
“I said slide it,” he bellowed when I laid the box down.
“I moved it,” I said. “Whatever.”
“It’s not whatever,” he said, lunging at me with both hands. “You do what I tell you to do.”
He grabbed me by the front of my flannel shirt and shook me.
I ripped free of him and grabbed a hammer from where it hung on the wall.
“Get off of me,” I yelled.
We stood there glowering at one another.
I threw down the hammer. It clanged against the concrete floor. I stormed out of the garage and got into my car and drove toward my friends’ house.
I parked my rusting VW Bug in an empty spot in front of a small, low-rent apartment complex a couple of miles from my house. I looked in the mirror to make sure my tears were gone. My hair had grown long, and I was wearing Dad’s old jeans, slung low on my hips, and one of his old flannel shirts over a Bob Marley T-shirt.
I walked up to the brown door and knocked on it.
A small woman with curly black hair and a little elfin face opened the door.
“Are Glenn and Hector here?” I asked.
“They said if anyone came by to tell them that they’re talking with Paco,” she said sweetly, with the same look of good-humored puzzlement she always had on her face when it came to her two boys. I knew they lived in the small apartment on her disability, and she often seemed younger than her sons.
“OK, thanks,” I said, and ran off before she even finished her sentence. Paco was the name they had given their pipe. As I got to the end of the parking lot, I could smell the weed coming from the patch of woods on the side of the building—the Grubs’ makeshift clubhouse.
“Hola, motherfuckers,” I said. “Yo hablo español con Paco todos los días.”
The three guys standing in a circle turned to look at me and laughed.
Glenn handed me the bowl. He was short and powerfully built, with big shoulders and thick black hair. He was wearing a Black Flag T-shirt and combat boots. He reached into his pocket to pull out a Zippo and light a cigarette.
I managed to coax a small hit out of the nearly cashed bowl and passed it to Hector, Glenn’s older brother, who was soft everywhere that Glenn was hard and round where Glenn was angular. Hector was always jocular and overly polite, until he got shit-faced, when he became sloppy and rude, the boyish politician’s curl in his brown hair unable to cover up his fundamental contempt for the world.
He pulled a bag from his pocket and pinched out a little bit of shake and put it in the bowl.
“Did you get a hit?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“Bullshit,” said Nash from the other side of the circle. I’d met him at the skate shop years earlier, when we were just visiting my grandparents, before we even moved to town, and now our parents went to church together and he’d introduced me to the whole crew.
“Me either,” Glenn said, and laughed.
Hector handed me the bowl, and Glenn punched me in the arm.
These guys understood my contempt for my parents’ world. We called ourselves the Grubs, short for “grubby campers,” an accurate description of our state after a drug-fueled camping trip in the mountains outside of Greenville. But it wasn’t just that; we were all misfits in some form or another, grubby not just on the surface but somewhere deep down in our souls. We didn’t fit into Greenville because we didn’t want to. If, as the Bob Jonesers told us, we were going to hell, we were going because we wanted no part of their heaven. We were heathens—the world was safest when we were up in the mountains camping and not on the roads. At least then we were a danger only to ourselves…most of the time. Unless we took hallucinogenic mushrooms and ran out of beer, as we had once at a place we called Hector’s Pixie Pussy Lake.
It was a new campsite for us, one that Hector had told us had a lake with a rope swing. But it was also an old Boy Scout camp, and we were camping right by our cars instead of hiking in as we normally did and it was pretty disappointing. So when we got down to the last six-pack just as the mushrooms were peaking, we couldn’t resist.
“Beer run,” Nash yelled.
“Race!” Harry said as we all leaped to our feet.
We left the empty cans scattered around the smoldering campfire and ran toward the cars. Nash and Harry jumped into his Jeep, and Glenn and Hector and I got into my Volkswagen.
I cranked the engine and pushed my car as fast as it would go toward their taillights as we raced down the mountain toward town, now just a dull orange glow in the distance.
The roads were steep, full of turns and cutbacks. I raced up beside our friends in the opposite lane, not caring that there could be another car coming up the road, as the Misfits blared out over the stereo. My car’s weak engine clanged behind the music, and the wind whipped in, blowing my hair in my face. Glenn threw his beer can out the window at Nash, and we howled with laughter when it hit the side of his Jeep with a thump.
“Direct hit,” Hector shouted.
In retaliation, Harry turned on his flashlight and flashed the beam toward my eyes, trying to blind me as we squealed around the switchback turns.
We somehow made it home that night, but it was obvious that our good luck would not last forever. We were too reckless to remain wreck-less.
One day that summer, a bunch of us were hanging around my house, drinking beer and playing video games while my parents were at work. It was raining, and there wasn’t nothing else to do. We started early, about 10:00 a.m., and by three it was just me and the two brothers, Glenn and Hector. I’d probably already had ten beers when the cordless phone rang that afternoon.
“Toss me that,” I said. Glenn threw me the heavy white cordless phone.
“We had a wreck,” Nash said when I answered, his words crumpled together like crashed cars as he gasped into the other end of the line. “We were driving down Paris Mountain and I lost control and we flipped off the side. I got thrown out. My ankle is broken. But Harry got pinned between the Jeep and a tree on the side of the mountain. It took forever for them to lift him out, and he’s in ICU.”
“We’ll be right there,” I said.
The brothers were already gathering up the clutter of empty beer cans sitting on the wicker chest that served as our coffee table when I hung up the phone.
“What happened?” Hector asked.
“Nash and Harry are in the hospital,” I said. “We gotta go.”
Glenn gulped the rest of his beer and handed me mine. I slammed it down. I stopped in the kitchen and scooped a spoonful of peanut butter into my mouth to obscure the smell of beer on my breath. We put all the cans in a plastic bag and ran out the door, then clambered into my rusted and leaking 1968 semiautomatic Volkswagen Bug with bad brakes and worn-down windshield wipers, and set out for the hospital through the downpour.
Our friends were in trouble, and we weren’t going to let a little drunkenness stop us from seeing them. Hector handed the plastic bag of empty cans to Glenn from the back seat, and Glenn tossed them out the window. The cans clanged down the road as rain sprayed into the open window.
“I can’t believe they flipped off the fucking mountain,” I said.
“Maybe they didn’t really,” Hector said. “Maybe they’re just fucking with us.”
“Shut the fuck up, will you,” Glenn snarled, turning back in his seat and swiping at Hector.
The brothers were two years apart and shared many of the same friends. But they also shared a bedroom in their mom’s small apartment, so they fought a lot.
“I can’t believe they fucking flipped off the mountain,” I said again.
At the intersection in front of the bowling alley, the car in front of me stopped at a yellow light. I hit the brakes and my car careened, weightless, almost floating as it slid into the other car’s rear end with a horrific crunch.
I looked up and the world was blurry. My prescription sunglasses had broken along with my nose on the windshield shattered in a spiderweb pattern in front of me.
My Bug was curled over on the bumper of the sedan. An elderly Black man with gray hair and a cane held on to his back as he got out of the car and then hobbled toward my door, flinching at the patter of raindrops landing on his skin. I was still in shock, trying to figure out what had happened.
I did a quick check to make sure Glenn and Hector weren’t hurt before getting out. I used my shoulder to force open the door, which had crunched in and bent over as the hood curled, with a heavy heave against it. The metal squealed as it lurched open, and I staggered out into the rain, my Birkenstock sandals flooding with cold water.
“Are you all right?” the man asked, gesturing between my smashed nose and the shattered glass.
“Yeah,” I said. “You?”
He didn’t answer. A glop of blood fell from my nose into a puddle of water at my feet and floated there on top of it.
“What happened?” he asked instead.
I looked back at my crumpled car, where Glenn and Hector sat, looking stunned. I’d crashed my car on the way to see our friends who had crashed their car. It was almost funny.
“I just didn’t expect—”
The whoop of a siren cut me off. The flashing blue light heralded the deputy sheriff, driving up through the median in one of the silver-and-black cars that we called storm troopers. The car stopped. The older Black man looked at me and I looked at him. We were both soaked, water running down our faces.
The deputy’s door opened. He got out, squinting into the opposing headlights. He walked up, white, stiff, and stern, moving as if his knees couldn’t bend. The rain bounced off his plastic-wrapped Smokey Bear hat.
“What happened?” he asked.
“The light changed, and I stopped. And he just clobbered me,” the old man said.
“I didn’t expect him to stop on yellow,” I shot back.
“Have you been drinking?” the deputy asked me.
With my long hair wild and plastered to my head, my nose smashed, and my white T-shirt soaked through with blood, I looked either out of my mind or drunk.
“No, sir,” I said. There was a weed drought that summer, so I was momentarily relieved to realize that he wouldn’t find drugs if he decided to search me.
“Why don’t you come this way with me,” he said, walking me to the storm trooper car. He opened the back door and gestured with his chin and I crouched in, shivering in the air-conditioning as the backs of my bare legs stuck to the vinyl seat. I pinched my bleeding nose. My hands were not cuffed. There was still hope.
“You can wait in your car and I’ll be right with you, sir,” I heard the deputy shout to the old man as he opened his door and ducked into the seat.
And now I was just sitting there, waiting, as the cop busied himself with paperwork on a hard aluminum folder, occasionally reading a numeric code into the radio. I strained my sight to see what he was writing. But my eyes were watering, and the back of my throat was filling up with blood. I gave up, leaned back, and pinched my nose shut again, hoping the coppery taste of blood would cover up the fetid booze on my breath. The adrenaline of the crash had surged through me, but it did not sober me up. Instead of being scared, I was restless and angry.
The police radio squawked. In my peripheral vision, I saw the dark mass of a person blocking the light through the steamy gray window. Knuckles rapped the glass.
The deputy rolled down his window—the rush of rubber tires on wet asphalt as the traffic struggled by and the claustrophobic smell of the summer storm shot into the car. Then a New York Yankees baseball cap moved toward me through the rain. Beneath it, my grandfather Summey’s wrinkled, sunspotted face came into focus. He nodded toward me, his pale-gray mustache and rain-streaked glasses framing his long nose.
“Hey there, Tommy,” Summey said to the cop. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
I saw the deputy’s eyes in the rearview as he looked me over. Several car horns dueled in angry protest against the delay our crash was causing.
“My grandson,” Summey said, motioning toward me.
“Come on around and get in,” the deputy said to Summey.
Then he turned around in his seat and faced me.
“Go wait with your friends a minute,” he said. “Over at your car.”
I stepped out of the police car and into the rain, puddles reflecting the flashing blue light in a pulsing rhythm. I looked over at the silhouette of the old Black man, who was about the same age as my grandfather but did not know the deputy. I limped on an injured knee over to my friends where they waited inside my smashed car. Glenn lit a smoke and handed it to me as I climbed in the crumpled driver’s door that would no longer close. I took a big drag and then another. Hector handed me a piece of watermelon bubble gum for my breath and a handkerchief for my bleeding nose.
“What the fuck, dude?” Hector said, gesturing toward the police car. “What’s happening?”
I shrugged.
“That’s my grandfather,” I said.
The sheriff’s door opened. Summey climbed out of the car and strode toward us. He spit tobacco juice on the ground.
“I’m gonna tell your mother to pick you up,” he said when Glenn, Hector, and I met him halfway between the cars. “And call a tow truck.”
I nodded. We were less than a mile from his carpet store, where Mom was working.
“But the deputy’s got some more questions for you first,” he added, squirting a stream of brown tobacco juice into the rain. Then he turned to Glenn and Hector.
“I’ll give you boys a ride,” he said. “Get you out of this rain.”
“Yessir,” Hector said.
Summey waddled through the puddles in his Members Only jacket and baseball cap, followed by the drenched brothers. When he passed the deputy’s car, he gave a quick, casual wave, flashing the fake Rolex on his wrist. The deputy approached me.
“I’m going to write this up, as you’re at fault,” he said. “But it’s a minor infraction. You were driving too close for conditions.”
That was the official word on what had happened. I never heard anything else about the crash until one evening a couple of months later.
“That man whose car you crashed into is trying to sue you,” Mom said, going through mail on the counter, when I walked into the kitchen one day. I had pretty much forgotten the whole thing.
“Claims his back is hurt,” Dad added from the table, where he was paying bills.
“He was fine,” I said. “He’s just faking it to get money.”
I had no idea whether he was fine, and I didn’t even care—to me, the only players in this drama were me and the law. I was the victim and the hero, and I had escaped. The old Black man just wanted to get something from us, I thought, but we’d won.
“You are so lucky that Daddy was able to talk to that deputy,” Mom said, a sense of familiar relief in her voice. “That deputy wrote it up so that it was really the rain that caused the wreck.”
“Insurance will pay,” Dad said. “But that makes it real hard to sue you for being drunk.”
“I wasn’t drunk,” I said, insisting on my lie.
Things had not gotten better between me and Dad. Whenever he was in town, the atmosphere was always volatile. A small exchange like this could easily blow up into a screaming match, each of us building toward blows with the other to prove his manhood: he needed to prove that he still had it, and I was desperate to show I had come into it. But today, Dad settled for a sarcastic quip.
“Just like Gary Hart wasn’t on the Monkey Business,” he said.
“We are so lucky that Daddy drove by,” Mom said, directing us toward our common interest.
None of us questioned the source of my grandfather Summey’s power. We called it the “good ol’ boy system” when he used his connections to fix a ticket or otherwise help out someone who found himself in a bind. But even if such things were common, they were not exactly legit, and we knew it was best not to look too deeply into the source of his influence.
“Our lawyer made it pretty clear that it would be a lost cause,” Dad added.
No one ever followed up about a lawsuit. That wreck demonstrated that the white solidarity of the good ol’ boy system was at least as strong as the law, twisting the way the rules worked to provide me with privilege and protection. Good ol’ white folks with power look out for other good ol’ white folks with power. Whiteness is the belief that the freedom of white people is more important than the safety of people who are not white.
It is the freedom to deny race even as you use it.