The Ghost of Gene Kirby
Part One
A Hootin' and a Hollerin' He Come Upon Us
We were seventeen years old. We hung out at the Waffle House on exit 14. The Applebee’s next to the new K-Mart was as metropolitan as Cumming got in those days. We’d go to the Wa-Ho on weekends, stay up real late drinking vanilla cokes, and trucker coffee. We ate raisin toast, we ate cheese grits. We smoked Camel Lights. We talked movies and books, and indie rock. We reconciled fundamentalist Christendom with our mature, intellectual and liberal minds. We talked about girls. We wrote bad poetry, came up with ridiculous ideas for movies of our own. I used to wear a cat collar. Despite all the cussing, all the discussion of sex and violence, it was wholesome, I suppose. That is until one night he came busting through the doors, Ol’ Gene Kirby, the self proclaimed meanest som’bitch you ever did meet.
Gene was a short, squat man in a trucker hat. He kept a dirty blond-turning grey beard that could not diminish his big bulbous W.C. Fields nose. He wore a dirty denim jacket over a ratty t-shirt, and matching in filth and fabric were some worn out jeans. Sometimes he wore sneakers, sometimes he wore work boots. His fingers gnarled themselves inward, like an infant trying to make a claw. He hid this physical embarrassment by keeping a lighter in one hand and the cigarette to light in the other.
Gene had this gravelly voice that sounded painful to speak. If this were so, he didn’t show it for he rambled and hollered unceasingly. Gene came up to us kids talking all his shit about owning two of the Waffle House’s windows. He said, and this was backed up by the staff, that he had tossed a patron through one, and on another occasion threw a separate customer through the other. In both incidents Gene claimed to be defending the honor of a Wa-Ho waitress.
It was for two reasons he joined my friends and I. One reason was whatever little girls we had with us. He liked to flirt, and then comment on their breasts and asses. He’d tell them what he would do for them were he a younger man again. Then Gene would grab us boy folk and shake us, letting us know he was just shittin’. He’d tell the girls that we had better treat them good and to give him a call if anything needed correcting. Gene would elbow the hell out of our ribs; he’d give the girls a pinch on the arm.
The second reason he came around us, and this was his primary reason, I’m sure, was the fact that we had cars. Suwannee, a town next door, sold liquor later than Cumming, so ‘round about midnight that’s where Gene hankered to go. I don’t know anyone who was fool enough to give him transport, but he must have been met with some success or he wouldn’t have bothered. He was, however, never too disappointed by our respectful refusals, and this was due to a bottle of MD 20/20 he kept out by the dumpsters.
Mostly I think he just wanted something to do, and someone to do it with. And this was the greatest bond between he and us, between he and everyone else in a smoky Waffle House at three o’clock on Saturday morning.
Gene didn’t always remember what had transpired in previous meetings, but he could call all us boys by our names. The girls were all darlin’.
One night after a bit of storyin’ I told Gene I would write a book about him one day. He went teary eyed, put me in a headlock and introduced me to every redneck he knew in the diner, even those he didn’t know were forced to shake my hand and tell him congratulations.
I had no real intention of writing a book about Gene Kirby. I doubt he ever made it into one of the horrid poems I was cranking out at the time. I had simply meant it as a polite compliment, that his stories were entertaining, that he was a true character worthy of being remembered. But after being danced around by my neck glad handing every stranger occupant I let his notion stand.
As a teenager I longed for a surrogate father. Of course, I would not on my blackest day wish to be Gene’s son, but still, he had qualities that could be honed as my own. He was a man’s man. He was burly and cared not for what opinion others might have of him, and there were some who openly expressed their ill view of Gene. Fuck them by god sonsabitches, he’d say. He stood up to anyone fool enough to trespass against him, and a few who didn’t just to keep in shape. Gene loved to laugh, and loved to get folks laughing with him. At the end of the day, at the end of those long nights, Gene meant no one any harm; he could just get carried away is all.
Over a decade later memories of the old man have dissipated or run together as his own did from one night to the next, but two instances remain vivid to me. The first is of an especially distraught Gene who came in after a long bender with no trademark glee in his leathery, bewhiskered face. He came in hollering that, by god, if it’s over for him, it’s over for every fucking body else. He slumped in beside us, banged on the table removing whatever joy to see him we held, his fists balled tight, forming jagged stumps. Gene did not speak except to say that if they found out it turns out to be cancer then, by god, he’s gonna take everybody else with him. Gene looked around the restaurant like he was about to bulldoze the whole thing, and we kids were just part of it. We were just more tacky wall art, extra waffle irons. We had our coffee and cheese grits in fear and silence, save for Gene’s rumblings.
After that night he came back same as he always had before: stomping and laughing away. We didn’t ask him anything.
More vivid to me is the last time I saw Gene Kirby. I was having breakfast on a Sunday morning with a friend. It was just her and me, and the church crowd until I spied a very different Gene come through the doors. It was remarkable to see him in daylight. His hair was slicked back and real nice, for Gene. He wore a polo shirt, and some khaki pants. His clothes were cheap, but clean; shirt tales tucked in and everything. I got up to say hi. I said, “Hello, Gene.” And extended my hand. He gave me a peculiar look and put his own hand out. Gene’s hand was straight and steady, no gnarly fingers clutching to vice. I asked how he was doing. “Um, fine, I reckon.” His voice not a hint boisterous, but still as gravelly. It then occurred to me that he had no idea who I was. I told him I was glad to see him anyway. I rejoined my friend at the booth, and Gene took a stool at the counter. That was it.
Come on back next time for part 2 where i come upon a book of the dead in: Frosty Mugs and Icy Hearts!
posted by pacoblue at 9:53 PM
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