September 25, 2004
Down the Memory Hole
When I was a kid I used to love to go riding around the countryside with my father. Mostly because it was a somewhat rare occurrence. If he said he was going "boodling down Tar Road" you knew that meant mischief of some sort, and you wouldn't be allowed to go.
I don't recall all the places we went that were the ostensible reason for the trip. Maybe to Roger B's to discuss Roger bringing over his bulldozer to fell some timber (I believe the old man was laying the pipe to Roger's enormously buttocked wife, Cuba, but I'm not sure. Cuba also had incredibly massive breasts, so in all fairness she was what is termed a "balanced package"). Maybe to Cordell Bazemore's to decide when Cordell would combine the corn crop. These were boring aspects of the journey, because the real reason for an outing, the mission, was to hit the closest liquor store, Effingham County being dry.
Sometimes we'd go to Pop Edwards' Lounge (the old Pop's on the west side of 21, formerly Cox's). It was barely in Chatham County. Sometimes we'd go to the liquor store in Blitchton, just over the county line in Bryan County. I used to like going because the old man would let you sit at the bar with him, and would buy you a six and a half ounce bottle of Coke and a bag of salted peanuts to put inside the Coke. Dad would usually try to get me or my brother to chat up some floozy in these places, telling us we would likely get a "date", whatever that was.
Then, of course, there was Ray's Playhouse, between Guyton and Tusculum. Ray's was a Colonial Oil gas station with a hoochie bar in back. Actually, it was a full-blown casino and juke joint, operating with absolute disregard for the law in a dry county. We didn't go there much, because I don't believe there was anything in the way of bonded liquor there, just moonshine, and dad was an aficionado of Canadian whiskey. And we were never allowed in the back of Ray's. We had to stay out front in the gas station office. Ray's was straight out of Walking Tall, although I don't recall ever seeing anyone carved up on a pool table there.
Speaking of knifings, though, in the old days before I-16 was finished you used to have to take the back roads to Atlanta. Somewhere around Metter, I think, in the middle of nowhere, was a dive called Junior's Supper Club. My father once represented two brothers who got in an argument with another fellow in Junior's, stuck knives in him, and "walked all the way around him". The guy didn't die, but the brothers were tried for it. The old man got them off on a self-defense plea. I'm not sure how justice was meted out in that corner of Hell's Half Acre, but I imagine graft was involved. Whores, too, most likely. It kept us fed, though.
When I think back, I truly had a blessed childhood. And I mean that.