Central Alabama

Five lifetimes ago

I want to remember the Bill I knew when we were in our twenties, in another lifetime, or more like five lifetimes ago.

He was enrolled as a music major at FSU in Tallahassee, and while he excelled in his vocal recitals, he floundered in academic subjects. Bill was already smoking a lot of the mary jane by then, and had trouble making it to class on time. He worked the night shift at Kinko’s Copies above a thumping dance club, and lived with his girlfriend in a run down university apartment nearby. As many of us do, he felt the need to go somewhere that wasn’t where he grew up.

The first time I reached out to Bill for an escape from Florida, I was in school in Central Alabama, and I invited him to transfer and join me there. Alabama was at least a change of pace. 

We shared an apartment in a farmland suburb where we hid in the bathtub during tornado watches. We had no real furniture, just mattress pads on the floor, and bookshelves made out of cardboard boxes. My mother is currently horrified to read this. Why didn’t we have real furniture? I have no idea, except that we were content sitting on the floor and life felt so transient, it didn’t make sense to have a sofa we would only get rid of when we moved. 

Bill invented a literary meter called “Bubbatameter,” which was a refinement of our lilt-like North Florida accent. Bubbatameter simply required that any phrase you said had to involve a particular cadence. Your voice started low, then rose to a high point midway through, and then fell again. Bubbatameter turned everyday things into poetry, because that’s the kind of artist Bill was.

I can still hear him saying, “That’s like a stop sign on a wet street,” in Bubbatameter, and it sounded like he was imparting wisdom of the ages. 

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On Halloween, we went trick-or-treating in our little Alabama suburb. I wore one of my grandfather’s old suits and a hat, and Bill was wearing a hippie-ish dress he’d bought at The Alabama Thrift Store where I worked part-time during the days. 

Bill and I loved to dress up together, a practice we carried from our childhood play productions of The Selfish Giant and our Captain Kangaroo records. As kids, we had a laundry bin we called “the dress-up box” where all costumes were stored. Now our costumes came from second hand stores and garage sales, and we loved them just as much.

Our friend Denice worked at the Glamour Shots in the Birmingham Mall, and offered to give us matching makeovers. If you never went to a Glamour Shots, it’s not too late, because I just learned they still exist.

Denice gave us the makeovers in the beauty chairs, but the actual photos were taken in the publicly staged window. The setup was meant to mirror an old time studio, where the experience of having your photo taken required an audience beyond the camera. After Denice did our hair and make-up, she took our picture in the window while surprised and intrigued passers-by gawked at us through the glass. We did not care, we were young and foolish and fancied ourselves radical. Bill had the photo framed, and it’s sitting on the shelf above the fireplace in his house here in Portland. In an imagined imitation of film stars from the 1920s, we’re wearing feather boas and bright red lipstick. 

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One of our favorite albums at that time was Digable Planets’ Reachin’: A New Refutation of Time and Space, where they sang, in “Nickel Bag of Funk”:

Long haired hippies
Afro Blacks
All get together
Across the tracks

Add fundamentalist Christians and a small assortment of global immigrants to the mix and you pretty much summed up our part of central Alabama in the early 1990s.

We listened to Reachin’ over and over on the boombox in the living room. Yes, we were two dumbass white kids reciting hip hop lyrics to each other, dreaming of how cool it would be to live in New York City. Instead, we made thirty minute trips to Birmingham to visit our favorite restaurant, George’s Lebanese. I just looked it up on Yelp and while it has sadly closed, I can summon the taste of their homemade pita chips and baba ganoush in my mind through the pictures still posted. It was our introduction to a lifetime love affair with Lebanese food, run by George and his wife, while George’s mother sat in the back and watched Lebanese television with subtitles. We got high on their mezze platter and coffee, and then drove back to our shitty, furniture-less apartment complex and loved being alive.

I was never too big a fan of smoking weed, but Bill always was, and it permeated much of our relationship, including our time in Alabama. Once I was with him when he surreptitiously purchased some from a friend who owned a coffee shop, and I completely embarrassed him by exclaiming, “Fifty-five dollars for incense?!” 

Bill was a huge Grateful Dead fan, and I loved to rile him by doing a protracted analysis of the lyrics to Sugar Magnolia. I would stretch out my language like I was reaaaaallly high, maaaaaan, and the true spirit of Jerry was like the sweetness of a kiiiiind magnolia flower.

I’m wondering now if where Meow Meow language really started was the time I actually was high and decided that I was possessed by the spirit of my cat Melismo, and ran around the apartment proclaiming it in a cat voice, which I also recorded as our voice mail message. This is why I don’t do drugs.

I do not know how we survived Alabama, or any of our twenties, except that we were very lucky and perhaps we were so anachronistic that we were invisible. Or maybe we weren’t that out of place after all, like the Digable Planets song. Or maybe we were just young and fearless and it was actually our recklessness that saved us in the end.