The Good Times Are Killing Me

I’m in Columbia, South Carolina. This is the farthest south I have ever been. Well, it’s the farthest south I’ve ever been if you don’t count Disney World—and you really shouldn’t count Disney World.

On Saturday morning, I woke up very early (especially considering how late we stayed out in Baltimore on Friday night going to plays and experimental films) and drove to Raleigh, North Carolina for my reading at the Cameron Village Regional Library.

A good size crowd showed up to the reading and it went very well. The librarian seemed pleasantly surprised that anyone showed up. It was Memorial Day weekend after all.

After the reading I drove to Charlotte. So it was a lot of driving on very little sleep in the previous two days. I arrived at my friend Heide’s house at about 7:30 p.m. After five minutes of hellos and things (Heide and I hadn’t seen each other in over a year) we left for a party her husband’s coworkers were having. We brought her Great Dane and Bassett Hound with us. The Great Dane wasn’t happy about my presence in the car. He kept staring at me and growling in my ear from where he sat in the backseat.

On the way we stopped at a grocery store to get a case of beer. While waiting in line to pay, I told the old man in front of us that he’d forgotten to take the sticker off the back of his pants. He wore 34x34 pants.

He bent down to check and was pretty pissed when he saw that I was correct, he did indeed have a sticker on his pants.

“Damn!” he said. “I’ve been walking around with this sticker on my pants for two weeks and no one told me?”

After peeling it off and looking at the sticker more closely, he kind of half-yelled, “Maybe my goddamn daughters will buy me the right size pants for Christmas this year. Every year I have to return the pants they buy for me. They ought to know my size now—I’m sure they’ve all been laughing about this sticker for the last two weeks.”

At the party, Heide suggested we play beer pong. I hadn’t played since college, but thought it might be a good way to get to know people. We set up the table and divided into teams. Heide and I were on the same team. We won the first few games and people began referring to us as the Yankees (Heide is also from Massachusetts). I wasn’t really happy about being placed in this group, but went along with it.

Before long, jokes that I don’t feel comfortable repeating were being slung back and forth between various northerners and southerners at the party. Among the more mild jokes, there were threats to draw a Mason-Dixon line across the center of the table and I was accused of voting for Barack Obama.

After a while of this, people got tired of the kind of jokes that I consider dangerous and moved into the territory of good-natured stereotyping. This was an area in which I felt comfortable slinging a few barbs.

As the girl across the table cocked her arm to throw, I asked if I could pinch a pinch of her Skoal when she was done missing. This joke was poor judgment on my part.

Suddenly there was a bottle cocked in her arm instead of a ping pong ball. And I found myself wondering, if she did throw it, whether I should duck or try and catch it to save the sliding glass door behind me. I decided I’d duck. It was getting pretty dark.

She never did throw the bottle, and she finally did accept my apology, but that was the first and last joke I made that night.

On Sunday, after saying my goodbyes to Heide, I set up camp at Sesquicentennial State park in South Carolina. I went to sleep at 5:30 in the afternoon. I was tired and my throat was pretty sore. Heide and I hadn’t had much to drink the night before, but we’d stayed up ‘til 4:00 a.m., talking and watching Roseanne.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a very bad sore throat and decided to see a doctor in the morning as soon as the park gates opened at 7:00. I drank some NyQuil and went back to bed.

At 7:10 I left the park and headed to the doctor. I was erring on the side of caution. I haven’t seen a doctor since college for my annual track physicals, and I haven’t been sick in even more years. If I was at home, I would’ve waited to see how the sore throat developed, but being on the road, I didn’t want to get stuck in some campground with strep throat.

The doctor gave me a prescription for an antibiotic and told me I should’ve brought an antibiotic with me on such a crazy trip. I told him I didn’t know that a person who’s not a doctor could easily obtain a pre-illness antibiotic. He just nodded, signed the form, and left.

That afternoon, I met up with some family I have in Columbia, a married couple. We toured the downtown area and the state house and many monuments, most of which are related to the Civil War. The woman, originally from South Carolina, explained all these things with what I thought was a good mix of humor, skepticism, and thoughtfulness. We saw where Sherman’s cannon balls hit the state house, leaving cracks and broken chunks of granite. Each place that was struck is designated with a star.

That night we went to Maurice’s BBQ, where racially charged literature is sold alongside mustard based sauce. I was surprised to see black people working there. The husband, a teacher, explained that his students think Maurice is an asshole, but they also recognize that Maurice’s pays some of the best wages around.

I ended up staying over at their house for two nights and had a great time discussing South Carolina and Georgia issues (including local politicians, race issues, Gullah Gullah Island, and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) while watching their dog catch Cheerios.

On my second day there, I did all the laundry I had and mailed a bunch of packages I’d been meaning to take care of for a long time.

That night at dinner, we discussed Stephen King’s writing and a number of random films, from The World According to Garp (I just saw John Irving speak a couple months ago) to John Cassavetes and A Child is Waiting. We also talked about school children and standardized testing, something I’ve become much more interested in lately.

Of particular interest to me, was the issue of whether children tend to stay in the academic groups they are placed in during first grade because the teachers are so good at putting kids into groups or because people have a tendency not to break out of the group into which they’ve been placed. We came to no definitive conclusion.

I was sad to leave, but it was time to get back on the road.