So I ended up with SB on a technicality. The thought of physically handling his ashes in order to transfer them from the box they came in to a nicer container horrified me, plus I ain’t got no fireplace. Where the fuck was he supposed to go? Should I have, like, displayed him? Not doing that ever. But isn’t it wildly disrespectful to just, um, throw him away? Is there no discreet disposal service I could use? WHY DID THEY MAKE ME HIS GUARDIAN? I HATE BEING IN CHARGE OF THINGS. It would’ve been an easier decision if I had a house. Because then I could just dump him in a hole and plant a rose bush in it or something, and when houseguests admired my garden I could explain to them how I’d ingeniously repurposed my father’s cremains and look like a thoughtful and sentimental person. But I’m broke and can barely keep the tiny succulents in my studio alive, so instead of doing anything with him, I hid the giant can of rocks and dust that used to be Samuel Irby in that Gap bag on the top shelf of my hall closet and decided to ignore him. It would be a fitting metaphor for the bulk of my childhood. Plus I didn’t think my dad would give a shit, really; I was more haunted by the ghost of the old boyfriend I’d purchased those fucking Gap sweaters for.
I’m not sentimental; I don’t save birthday cards or baby pictures or newspaper clippings, I have no real traditions, and I throw everything away the minute it stops being shiny and new. Still, one day I realized that dusty box full of my dad’s ground-up bones and brains had been sitting between the cat carrier and a bag of mittens for seven years, and I was determined not to move it to another apartment ever again. My dad died eighteen years ago: it was time for my dude to get free and stop grossing me the fuck out every time I needed a goddamn jacket.
I decided to take him to Nashville, to dump the ashes of my dead father in one of Tennessee’s thirty-plus rivers or tributaries so he could float on and become one again with the earth or whatever, but also to kind of try to have a vacation. Like I said, he was technically from Memphis, but I’ve been there. A lot. There are only so many times you can trudge through the excruciatingly depressing mausoleum that is Graceland without wanting to scoop your fucking eyes out with a grapefruit spoon, so I wasn’t doing that again. I needed to get rid of him, and it needed to be in a place that felt like it had at least a little bit of sentimental value in case any of my future children (read: cats) ever ask about their grandfather. It also needed to be someplace close enough that I could drive there without dislocating my fucking knee, yet far enough that my boss couldn’t get cute and try to call me in to work. My hipster friends with good taste like Nashville, there are a lot of Kinfolk-looking blogs espousing Nashville’s many hidden gems, and Nashville has a shitload of good restaurants. If my daddy had really wanted to split hairs about his final resting place, he should’ve left a goddamned will instead of overdrawn checking accounts and a bunch of gambling debts and worthless old scratch-off tickets. That motherfucker was getting scattered in Nashville.
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I am for sure about to be called a nigger with the hard R. That is what I was thinking while Mavis and I sat in my rented Toyota Camry outside a Hucks gas station in Madisonville, Kentucky. According to the faded signs in the window, you could get a pack of cigarettes here for less than three dollars. You can’t even get a newspaper in Chicago for three motherfucking dollars. Should I move? I mean, I don’t smoke and the South is terrifying to me, but last week I spent thirteen dollars on some trash called “young raw coconut juice” and that is really not the kind of life I want to be living anymore.
Anyway, we had been in the car for seven hours, me behind the wheel as we darted between terrifying big rigs and 1976 Toyota pickup trucks driven by mulleted, shirtless teenagers. Mavis thought it would be more romantic to take the small and beautiful back roads due south rather than the ugly congested highway with its bright lights, densely populated McDonald’s, and the kinds of white people who care about driving fuel-efficient hybrid cars, so we had been singing along with a two-hundred-song Spotify playlist I packed with BONA FIDE JAMS like “Return of the Mack” and the Human Nature remix of SWV’s “Right Here” (if you weren’t a teenager in the early nineties then I am terribly sorry for you) to keep me awake on the road while driving through hundreds of miles of desolate farmland.
A man wearing thick white athletic socks shoved into Adidas shower shoes shuffled past the car, studying my stylish urban Mohawk with an intense curiosity. “My barber fades it by hand,” I almost called out, my polite northern way of asking exactly what the fuck he was motherfucking staring at, but decided against it. Mavis is a healthy person, reason number 137 why I am convinced she will quickly grow tired of me and my bullshit, right after “votes in local elections” and “has never eaten a Hot Pocket purely for enjoyment of the taste.” Healthy people keep themselves properly hydrated, and this was the third time we’d had to stop and find her a bathroom in the kinds of towns where Confederate money is still accepted as legal tender. I’m the opposite of whatever she is, the kind of person whose extra-large drive-thru Diet Coke had lasted from Broadway and Thorndale to the middle of Kentucky, and I hadn’t once had the urge to pee. Or shit, for that matter, since I had eaten only a handful of saltines and Imodium for breakfast. I don’t need that kind of stress, man. I would rather fight Moby Dick on a raft with a hole in it than be stuck in a car in the middle of nowhere groundhogging a giant poop. Or squatting on the side of the interstate with nothing but Mavis’s skinny legs for cover.
Mavis emerged from the sliding glass doors, loaded down with water bottles and whatever healthy snacks are to be found in a country-ass gas station. A blazing neon sign in the window blinked an advertisement for hot fried chicken and gizzards and, maybe I’m disgusting, but there really was an internal struggle between the part of my brain that is averse to eating food left out in the open under a heat lamp and the part that knows that chicken was probably delicious. I spent the entire rest of the drive dreaming about those room-temperature gizzards as my stomach growled loudly in protest.