Souls Along the Road

John Drake Robinson

Description

John Robinson's "Road Trip" series is long overdue for a new release. Finally, here it is. Filled with political satire, signs of our times, good country food, and extraneous humor, John has exceeded his previous work with fresh stories of oddities and history, human failings and triumph. Who would ever guess that "the flyover state" had this much to offer?

Sujets

• Humor
• Politics

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 04 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781942168928
• Langue: English

Extrait

Souls Along the Road
Villains, Saints and Killer Cuisine
 
 
John Drake Robinson
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Copyright 2018 John Drake Robinson,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by Compass Flower Press
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-9421-6892-8
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 
 
 
 
 
Knowledge is love and light and vision.
– Helen Keller
Contents
Prologue: Velvet Elvis to East Jesus
I: Through a Tow Truck’s Looking Glass
People in Icewater Want Hell
Fuzzy Fables
The Good Badass Samaritan
Two Tom Cats, the Westminster Poets
Fast Food First
Erifnus Never Met Lenny Bruce
The Last Man to Beat Bill Hickok
The Edge of Wild
Back Door Branson
McMoonshine Junction
The Tenderloin Hunter
Wide Spot in the Road
Home
Intermission: Yard Bargains
II: Gourmet Elvis to the Promised Land
Oh, the Trumanity!
The Candy Bomber, Calvin Trillin and Sanctuary
Pretzel Streets and the Elements of Sin
Pioneers Need Pants
Deep Country Cuisine
Dark and Stormy Night
The Dean of Tunes
Murderous Row
East of Eden
The Devil’s Dirty Work
Murder and Rebirth on the Prairie
The World’s Greatest Taco Stand
Harvard, Hunger and Howard Hughes
There’s Silver in Those Rails
Chemicals, Court and Calder
Chance Encounters
Boonslick
The Graveyard Waltz
Party Time
Name Calling in Jug Town
Intermission: Stubby
III: Drive-By Elvis
Rising Above It All
Birthright
Buster Brown
Twist and Shout
Andrew Jackson’s Chief Justice
Running the Table
Long Metal Chicken Burritos
Jollification to Joplin
Ballhagen’s, Barrels & Boats
A View from Under the Bridge
Soldiers, Sybill’s and Saint Lucy
Boeuf Berger on a Clothesline
The Cow with Five Legs and Six Feet
The Gas Chamber
The Details in the Devils
Epilogue: 300,001: A Road Odyssey
Acknowledgments
 
Prologue: Velvet Elvis to East Jesus
T he tow truck picked up momentum, speeding past a familiar silhouette along Interstate 70. From my shotgun seat, I tipped my cap to the giant plywood cutout of the King. The big wooden Elvis stood beside the Elvis Is Alive Museum, a small stone building Bill Beeny converted into a flea market collection of Elvis kitsch. An old Cadillac guarded the museum entrance. Inside the funeral room was an open casket bearing a gimcrack Elvis mannequin in a powder-blue leisure suit, surrounded by artificial wreaths and velvet Elvis paintings. The gift shop sold rolls of Elvis Presley Toilet Paper: “It’s rough. It’s tough. And it doesn’t take crap off anybody.”
Dead idols shape our lives. Sometimes they merit a museum. A gaudy garish tacky tawdry museum.
Bill Beeny is a diehard Elvis fan. A Baptist preacher and one-time segregationist candidate for Missouri lieutenant governor, Beeny believes the King is alive. He says DNA evidence proves that the body buried at Graceland is not Elvis.
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I never met Bill Beeny and neither did my dog, Queenie Beanie, no relation. Queenie Beanie wasn’t racist. She sniffed butts indiscriminately. Beyond that, I’m pretty sure she was a strict speciesist.
Towering over the Elvis Is Alive Museum, the sixteen-foot plywood Elvis cutout stood resplendent in his high collared jumpsuit and jet-black pompadour, bent toward his interstate fans, holding a microphone to his curled upper lip. As far as plywood Elvis cutouts go, this one rates a five. But a few years ago Elvis left the building. Beeny sold the King’s contents on eBay and turned his highly visible roadside venue into the Calvary Baptist Church and Food Pantry. It’s one giant leap for Bill Beeny, from crap-resistant toilet paper to feeding the hungry. The Brobdingnagian wooden Elvis got a makeover, and now the King carries an old rugged cross in his free hand, so if I squint and use my imagination, one King resembles the Other.
The tow truck passed Elvis in an instant, and I didn’t bring up the subject, since I had no idea how Jack the tow truck driver felt about Elvis or Jesus or segregation or toilet paper, and we had an eighty-mile drive ahead of us.
I remember the last time I saw Elvis. He was sitting behind me in the bleachers at old Busch Stadium on a sunny spring afternoon. The bleachers were packed for a Cardinals baseball game against the Chicago Cubs. Six young men sat shirtless in the front row, each chest painted with a giant red letter so that when the lads assembled in the correct order their bellies spelled WILLIE. For the first six innings of the game, they chanted “Willie! Willie!” Their arms bowed like palm fronds to their hero, Cardinals center fielder Willie McGee, who was shy as a doe. He never turned to thank his fans. By the seventh inning the young men, drunk and discouraged, turned their attention to the man behind me with the black pompadour. “Elvis! Elvis!” they bowed in tipsy reverence to the King. I think he might’ve been an Elvis impersonator.
In the tow truck’s shotgun seat, I rode alone with my thoughts: What’s the purpose of toilet paper that doesn’t take any crap? Seriously, Elvis would pick the Love Me Tender roll. But most folks use whatever is at hand. Deep in the Cascade Mountains, D.B. Cooper probably used a $20 bill, causing Andrew Jackson to choke back tears.
Earlier in the day, a morning radio call-in show was debating the fate of D.B. Cooper when my car died on a busy Saint Louis highway. D.B. Cooper became a legend the day before Thanksgiving 1971 when he stepped out the tail door of a hijacked Northwest Orient 727–with a parachute and $200,000–and vanished somewhere in the Cascade Mountains.
Some folks think D.B. Cooper is alive, and some folks think Elvis is alive, but my car was dead and we were riding a flatbed tow truck home.
We sped down I-70 in silence. Not driving, I had a rare chance to study the passing scenery and observe the wondrous monuments wrought by man, a rusty rainbow of roadside detritus in various stages of decay, jagged clusters of cholesterol along one of America’s major arteries, rundown motels way past their welcome mat, shuttered storefronts and roadside trash, cultivations of clutter and crap, junk that might be a flea market, or a proud display of redneck wealth. We passed flashing neon, tinted windows, ragged banners and way more than three billboards.
I: Through a Tow Truck’s Looking Glass
People in Icewater Want Hell
M aybe those movies were right, the trio of movies depicting Missouri as a haven for hillbilly hucksters and redneck killers. Winter’s Bone. Ozark. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. I wasn’t sure how Jack the tow truck driver would react, so I didn’t bring up the movies, not wanting to spend a long drive discussing burned bones and billboards and meth murders and a lake notorious for episodes of questionable sanitation and sanity.
Are we doomed?
There are signs. Signs encourage us not to swallow batteries and Tide pods. Signs warn tourists not to pet crocodiles. Signs beg employees to wash their hands. One sign captures the decline of modern civilization: “Not responsible if seagulls eat your funnel cake.”
Holy deep-fried shit!
America is morphing into a witness culture, watching life rather than wallowing in it. Too many folks only glance up from their smart phones to check a stoplight, or watch reality TV. People will watch anything: 16 and Pregnant . Trading Spouses . Hell Date . In Search of the Partridge Family.
“The elevator only goes up,” comedian Lenny Bruce said. Our culture has no reverse gear. Lenny tested boundaries of free speech in nightclubs during the ’60s, salting his act with carnal phrases and f-bombs. Authorities jailed him relentlessly. He died before blue comedy took off, before reality TV branched from its socially acceptable granddaddy, Candid Camera , into bawdy, ribald roasts. Lenny never saw HBO or Sensurround, personal computers or microwave ovens, floppy disks, ATMs or Archie Bunker, in-vitro fertilization, email, Richard Pryor, microchips, cell phones and smart phones, DVDs, GPS, DNA, Lisa Lipanelli, Bluetooth, camcorders, wi-fi, driverless cars, artificial hearts, Roseanne Barr, high definition, JPEGs, IMAX, Tupac, Instagram, bar codes, Andrew Dice Clay, iPads, apps, Facebook, Google, Napster, Pornhub, Netflix, Wikipedia, the Cloud, tweets, texts, selfies, Grand Theft Auto , road rage, sliced ketchup or Stormy Daniels.
But he opened the elevator door.
From my seat in this flatbed tow truck I watched the roadside fly past.
Strewn among the cultural carnage, glimmers of hope flame up like votives in a vestibule. For a solid week, before the tow truck ride, life was a carnival: A hundred stories unfolded and the road revealed its secrets, a wow around every turn.
My car showed no signs of dying.
 
 
A week ago, Grubville was good. Moving along the western perimeter of Jefferson County, my car zagged off Highway 30 down Route W, where we rubbed bumpers with the folks in Grubville at Joe Mama’s Hilltop Tavern. Cars parked bumper to bumper on both sides of this country road. We seized the only open parking spot beside the front porch where people sat around two tables framed by a pair of sleek Harley Davidsons. Near the group stood a deep fryer the size of an old tub washing machine. The cook and I greeted each other with mutual curiosity. He wondered who the hell I was. I wondered how I could politely partake in his Grubville cuisine.
“How much for some catfish?” I cut to the chase.
“No charge,” he startled me. “Buy a beer, get some food.” Fair enough. I tipped my cap and went inside.
This seemed to be a special occasion, but maybe the gathering was ritual in these remote hil