Drowning in Gruel Read online

  "Squirrels and birds, too," Ted says. "Don't forget about the time we spent the night at that rest area not knowing squirrels lived all over the place."

  Jessica passes the pipe back to Amanda. She says, "I know it can be scary starting right off. There are a few people who take this whole art car lifestyle a little too seriously. I mean, there've been accusations of bribery and payoffs, you know. We've been to about forty of these congregations over the last eight or nine years. My advice to you is to do the best you can do, try to think up something that no one else has done— everybody thinks that covering their cars in pennies is going to be some kind of statement—and have fun. Share any food that you might have with people who look starved. Ted and I've been lucky to win first- or second-prize money for a while now, so we're not hurting."

  Amanda says, "I brought some moonshine along that I got in Virginia yesterday."

  "We had a big nest egg, too," Ted says. Then he and Jessica start laughing and nudging one another the way only bank robbers act.

  "So. You can ask me anything about anything. Do you have any questions?" Jessica says.

  Amanda exhales. She actually feels her head lift from her body and hover above the campground. "Yes. The man at the army-navy store in town tried to sell me a gas mask. Should I have bought it? Also, why is it every fucking Republican president thinks that not funding our schools will somehow improve America?"

  "There are no Republicans in Gruel this weekend," Ted says. "Well, maybe one. We ran across a boy who wants to glue shoe polish canisters all over his Volvo. He'll be in competition with you tomorrow. You'll see him—he's wearing a Nazi uniform."

  "I told Ted that it could be he had some kind of knee replacement surgery, but he says doctors have that operation down to a science. Ted says the guy's goose-stepping."

  Amanda doesn't give up the pipe. She points that she needs more. Ted fills it, lights it, and Amanda tokes. "I have another question: Do you think I'm unattractive? Should I dye my hair a different color? Am I getting fat in the hips? Why is it that stupid people get glamorous jobs in the United States? My friend Ampersand Number is apartment-sitting for me—well, I mean, she's subletting—and she can't get anyone to take her artwork seriously because she's beautiful. Hey, do people ever dance at these parties?"

  Someone walks by offering nitrous oxide balloons. Ted and Jessica distract Amanda. "Moonshine," Ted says.

  Amanda wakes up thinking about how she's betrayed her roots. She was born and raised in Myrtle Beach. Her parents owned a gift shop that specialized in puka shell necklaces, an L-shaped motel two streets off the beach that fraternity boys from state colleges inhabited between March and August, a bar called Whitey's Crab Shack that held the largest aquarium wall in South Carolina. She graduated from high school with a near perfect SAT, went north on a full ride, and never returned. When Amanda delved into vegetarianism her sophomore year in college she started off by not eating shellfish as a statement against her father, then eventually eased out of fish, chicken, beef, and pork.

  Her head hurts at dawn, but she knows that she must get started on her work, that she'll try to get the VW half done before driving it onto the square and finishing the project in front of paying spectators. Maybe it's the marijuana still coursing through her veins, but she can only think about nine interlocking triangles, of a yantra. She emerges from beneath her tarp and sets to work on the hood of her VW without the aid of a straight edge, yardstick, or protractor. By the time her campground neighbors emerge from their backseats, tents, or pop-ups, Amanda has counted off and carefully placed one thousand shed claws from her dead cats.

  "Let me guess: It's a crop circle," says Russell Threatt, the Chocolate Soldier guy. "That's good. That's a statement. Are you from Kansas?"

  His wife pours coffee into a speckled ironware cup. "Idiot. It's a spiderweb on the hood. The car's a Bug. The spider's caught the Bug, you know."

  Amanda smiles. She nods and shrugs, says, "It's kind of both, I guess." She tries to eradicate one thought from her head: This must be like receiving applause after an off-Broadway production. This is the kind of recognition that I never got while waiting tables, no matter how good the food and service. Amanda says, "Have y'all won awards for your Chocolate Soldier? I like it a lot. I kind of like to think that y'all are making a statement—that you come from a long line of people who were mistreated and held down, that you were forced to serve your country in one way or another, and that no one appreciated your contributions to keeping the United States of America free."

  Amanda knows that if it's not the marijuana still bubbling in her system, it's the moonshine she drank with Ted and Jessica while walking around the KOA campground looking at everyone else. She thinks about when she sat in the front row of a Helen Gurley Brown speech back in college. "What are you talking about?" Konetta Threatt says. "Hey, you want some coffee?"

  Amanda starts to say, "Workers of the world unite," but doesn't. She says, "Where are y'all going next, after this one?"

  The campground comes alive like so many earthworms after a good steady rain. Russell Threatt says, "It doesn't sound right when you say 'y'all' whatsoever. Don't come down here and pretend, girl. You won't get nothing but killed if you try to be one of us, no offense. You and your crop circles."

  "It's a spiderweb," Konetta says. "It's a spiderweb, catching the Bug. And I'll make a prediction that if she don't win, it'll be the boy with all the wine corks on his Chrysler. That thing looks cool, but it doesn't have the same philosophical implications."

  Cars start up. People drive to town. Amanda calls up &# to check on things, but only gets this new message, in &#'s voice: "What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, three legs in the evening, and four wheels later on in life? Yes, it's not a pretty sight. Leave a message if you know the answer."

  Amanda can't remember if she called her subletter the night before. She can't remember if she paid all the bills, or if she made decisions as to what might be her first big decision since leaving South Carolina fifteen years earlier. She says to the machine, "There are conceptual artists outside of New York City, Ampersand Number. They don't even hide behind fake names, either. You need to get yourself back to being Rachel and take the first flight down this way, believe me."

  She mashes the end call button. To Russell Threatt she says, "I used to say 'y'all' all the time. I guess I've gotten out of practice. I'll get better. I promise that I'll get better."

  So the hood ends up a nice nine-interlocking-triangle yantra design, the roof a double helix, and both car doors resemble, somehow, Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. Spectators have their own theories, though: One man thinks the doors look like the Milky Way jammed together. The man with the DUI-ticket moped thinks they either mimic a bag of spilled rice or a large city's streetlights viewed from above. "I've been in an airplane before," he tells Amanda. "I believe it was Birmingham, Alabama, that looks like your doors from the night sky." A husband-and-wife freelance writing team hoping to sell an article to Art in America comes by and tut-tuts that the doors are nothing more than a Jackson Pollock rip-off. Then two women stand stunned and begin convulsing orgasmically. One woman says, "Please, please let us ride with you to the next convention." Her partner says, "I've not been affected like this since listening to Wagner over and over an entire month."

  Amanda glues every available cat claw and tries not to subconsciously count how many visitors she's entertained, calculate the entrance fees, divide by the other dozen art-car-in-progress participants, and divide again by two. She wishes she'd've taken care of a dozen cats in New York, or at least paid more attention to the rugs, carpets, scratching posts, and furniture of her cat-owning friends over the years.

  She does not say, "Voilà!" She wipes her brow, looks over at the competition, and waits for someone to tell her when it's time to join the parade of cars around Gruel's square, circling the statue of one hometown Civil War hero named Colonel Dill.

  Eugene Par
ker walks up wearing a shirt adorned with pictures of vintage car lighters. He says, "I bet you're glad you came down, girlie. You the talk of the fair."

  Amanda doesn't spit on him as she might if he were a diner at one of her old restaurants. She knows that it's not her expertise in art car decoration, either. Trying to be totally objective, Amanda notices that she might be—physically—the prettiest woman in attendance. She says, "This is kind of like a society within a society. Someone should write a scholarly paper about these people."

  "Well maybe you should do that," Eugene says. He sucks on his teeth and scans the other cars. "Maybe you the person who should write about you people."

  For a second, still holding her tube of Superglue, Amanda thinks, I'm not one of these people. She feels sick to her stomach, and says, "Excuse me for a second, Mr. Parker."

  The grand prize winner for something like six straight festivals was always Ruben Blank, a man who mixed moss and buttermilk in a blender, then slathered the concoction onto his Mercury Comet. He parked it in the woods behind his house near Rutherfordton, North Carolina, and waited for it to come out looking like a Chia Pet. Even the windshield was covered. When Ruben Blank slit out spots so he and any possible passenger could see where they drove, the Comet looked not unlike any green monster invented by Japanese cinematographers. No one involved in art cars—not the man who covered his DeSoto with ceramic Florida tourist knickknacks, not the woman who adorned her Buick in ignitable Joan of Arc bobble-head dolls—could hope for anything but second place when Ruben Blank showed up.

  That is, until an as-of-yet unidentified perpetrator snuck up one night with a gallon of Roundup—two art car festivals before Gruel—in Lily, Kentucky.

  "Gentlemen and lassies, start your engines!" Eugene Parker finally says, walking around the roped-off vacant acreage on Old Old Greenville Road. "It's time to strut your stuff."

  Amanda turns her ignition and gets out of the VW to say to Eugene how he needs to learn how to address women as women, how it shouldn't be "Gentlemen and lassies," "Boys and girls," "Ladies and gentlemen," or even "Gentlemen and gentlewomen." She wants to yell out something about how he should only yell out, "Human beings, start your engines," but her cell phone rings as she gets back in the car.

  It's &#. "I don't want to be one of those litigious creeps," &# says, "but I was walking across the den and I cut myself pretty badly, Amanda. I was barefoot—and I've checked into this already, how a person has the right to walk around barefoot in a landlord's property—and I cut my foot. Or at least I punctured my foot. I hopped down to the free clinic and the doctor there had to get some tweezers and pull out what ended up being one of your cats' claws from the sole of my right foot."

  Amanda says, "Ha-ha. Funny joke."

  "I'm serious," &# says. "I'm as serious as a splenectomy. It might've been a shard of glass, but the doctor said it looked like a cat's claw, I swear to God."

  The cars rev up in a way that might make a chicken row spectator at the Darlington racetrack feel slighted. DUI-ticket moped leads the way out. A man with Adlai Stevenson pictures all over his car comes in second. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," Amanda says. "Listen. Save your bill and I'll pay for it when I get back."

  "I'm supposed to premiere a work on the corner of Lexington and Twenty-sixth today, and I don't think I'll be able to do it. The original idea was for me to wear a flesh-tone bodysuit and dance in a giant bowl of pasta."

  Amanda pulls off in line. The motorcade proceeds at five miles an hour. "On the street corner? What're you doing, working for people to throw change in a pan?"

  "I'll have you know that I got an arts commission matching grant for this, Amanda. I have to keep careful documentation of what I spend, and where I do things, you know."

  Amanda honks her horn because everyone in front of her does. She says, "I'll buy you some fucking spaghetti when I get back. Plus your free-clinic doctor bill. Listen, I have to go. I was going to invite you down here, but I don't think you'd be able to handle it."

  &# hears all the horns. "What kind of traffic jam could take place in South Carolina? What's all that noise?"

  Amanda holds the cell phone out her driver's window. She screams, "It's more than you could handle, Rachel." People stand on the sidewalks as the cars come into town. They hoot and offer war cries and give thumbs-up. "How're y'all doing?" Amanda yells back from her glistening, glistening Volkswagen.

  &# says, "What did you say? What was that word you used? Goddamn, Amanda, I didn't know you had changed to one of them, girl."

  Amanda looks over at Colonel Dill's statue, then over at Victor Dees in front of his army-navy store, then back to the Gargoyle-mobile in front of her. She says, "Wait a minute. You got taxpayer money to dance in a bowl of pasta? How is that supposed to further the human condition?" She takes a left-hand turn, then pulls over into the line of parking spots, and awaits the three judges'—one from Mexico, one from New Jersey, and one from Nevada—decisions.

  The guy from Mexico kind of gets it, in his own way, in a manner that Amanda hadn't considered. He thinks that Amanda's VW Bug represents the pain and suffering endured by Frida Kahlo after her encounter with a bus, the persistent gnawing question as to whether she should be monogamous with a fat muralist or give herself up totally to a man with communist ideals. The judge from New Jersey thinks that Amanda tried to overlap constellations—Orion over Ursa Major over Little Dipper over Corona Borealis over Camelopardalis, and so on. Amanda nods, as if that's what she meant all along. But the other judge from Nevada thinks that her cats' shed claws look like mere bugs popped on a cross-country drive. He says to Amanda, there in the pulled-over, stalled traffic of Gruel, "You should've just driven your car down here from wherever you're from, and let the gnats and mosquitoes done the work for you, little lady."

  And that does it. "Listen, numbnuts," Amanda says. "I could stick a spit in you and turn you over and over, you little shit. You're going to have to learn not to call women 'little ladies' or whatever else you call them. I've about had it with men using these condescending names. Oh, it's not a southern thing, either—I've heard them all the time up in New York."

  This particular judge—though he placed Amanda second in the best compact art car category, which would've still given her first place overall—puts the blue ribbon back in his pocket. He says, "What?" as a man unsure of the price of a shot of whiskey might say to a bartender. He says, "I don't think I heard you right."

  "You heard me." Gargoyle-car driver and DUI-moped rider and flammable Joan of Arc driver stand nearby, awestruck. Russell Threatt and his wife stand across the way nodding, hoping this will push their car upward in the standings.

  DUI man says, "They's people call me Slopehead on a Moped, but I'm smart enough not to back-sass judges, baby."

  The judge from Nevada says, "I don't think you want to argue with me. You ever see basketball, girl? You ever watch a baseball game? There's something called a technical foul. There's something called getting thrown out of the game."

  When Amanda says, "Eat me right now," she realizes that she's never used those words before. She thinks, This feels good. This feels better than ever figuring out what Wittgenstein meant, or getting a fifty-dollar tip on a fifty-dollar meal.

  "I'm going to talk to my partners and find a way for you not to win," the judge says. "I can do that, you know."

  "Like that will change my life," Amanda says. "Like that's going to make me go back home and slit my wrists."

  The Nevada judge only stands five-six, and wears a combover. He doesn't weigh but 130 pounds, and has gotten to where he is by his reputation as an ex-boxer and philosophy major at UNLV He's worked as a soccer referee, and reaches in his pocket for a red card, out of habit. He reaches and reaches, and then yells out, "Get this woman out of here!"

  "That's right," Amanda says. "Woman." She feels her blood pressure rise. She thinks, I'm going to change everything wrong in America—that's my lot in life. She thinks, God, there has to be more in life than
wondering why people can't figure out ways to better the human condition. A man driving his art car covered in broken pieces of tile, so that mosaics of the Virgin Mary appear, burns rubber out of control, veering through the square. Amanda thinks, There has to be more in life than simply spinning wheels. She says, "Are you a judge at every competition? I hope you're not a judge at every competition we have in the future."

  And then she attacks him in a way that no one's seen in Gruel since old, retired, and decorated Colonel Dill took on a carpetbagger back in 1880 or thereabouts, thus gaining his reputation as statueworthy on a square. Later on, after Amanda gets escorted out of her KOA campground site, people say that they heard "We aren't stuck on this planet for no particular reason. And we aren't stuck here to put up with the likes of you" over and over from her mouth—the same thing Colonel Dill supposedly said.

  She yells out lines owned by Tennessee Williams's plays, too, though no one recognizes the allusions. Amanda Futch crumples down on the pavement, and shoos everyone away, and almost thinks about driving south to see where her parents are buried.

  In years to come the cats' claws will fly off in the wind. Amanda will drive west, then north to Seattle, then east to Michigan. She will drive back south to Gruel in a naked VW adorned only with the memories of what projects she had installed at various shows in small towns anxious for attention. She'll think about the slight money she took during her first competition, when onlookers examined her glued-on masterpiece. Back in Gruel, she will walk into Roughhouse Billiards and say, "I think I still have a dozen hot dogs coming my way for second-place finish in last year's art car competition. Hey, let me get a couple hot dogs all the way, while I go over to Gruel Pharmacy for my Goody's powders, Band-Aids, gauze, Neosporin, hydrogen peroxide, vitamins, Pepto-Bismol, Maalox, Geritol, eyedrops, and milk thistle." She'll say, "I have a great idea. It's about healing."