Thomasville, GA 2002

I was in college and was driving home for Christmas break. For the first year ever, I had shopped before Christmas Eve and had every one’s gifts wrapped and in the back of my CRX along with about a month’s worth of dirty laundry. Tallahassee was only about two and a half hours from Fitzgerald so I didn’t think much about driving at night after my shift at Blockbuster was over.

I was about thirty minutes from home when I got a flat tire. I was on Highway 319, just entering Omega, Georgia when I heard the pop and the car began to lurch the way it does when you have a flat.

“Shit.”

I pulled over to the shoulder and began unloading the trunk. Bags of laundry and piles of gifts soon surrounded me and the rear-end of the CRX and I was able to gain access to the spare tire compartment. That’s when I realized I didn’t have the tire iron. Apparently the last time I had been home, Mom had taken it out to kill a snake in the yard or something and had forgotten to replace it. I re-loaded the trunk, leaned the spare tire and the jack against the car and began walking. Cell phones existed in those days, but I didn’t have one. Luckily I was only a short distance from the Suwannee Swifty and their pay phone.

“Collect call from Susan. Will you accept the charges?”

Mom answered and after a brief freak out on my part … “Why, exactly, would you take my tire iron out and not put it back?” … she suggested that I ask the cashier at the Suwannee Swifty for some help. Certainly she had a tire iron. I hung up and asked.

“Sorry honey. My husband drives me to work. I don’t even have a car here.”

I started crying. “What am I supposed to do? My mom has my tire iron and she’s all the way in Fitzgerald and I’m just trying to go home for Christmas and now I’m stuck on 319 with a flat tire and no where to go and no money and it’s late and I don’t know what to do!”

“Ok, baby. Calm down. I’ll call someone. Just go wait by your car and I’ll have them there in just a minute.”

Sniffling, I thanked her and went back down the highway. After about fifteen minutes, a truck pulls up. It’s rusted and loud. There’s a gun-rack in the back window and a confederate flag pasted to the front. Suh-weet.

“Thank you so much for coming! Do you have a tire iron? I can totally change a flat, it’s just that my Mom has my tire iron and I’m stuck here and, well, can I use yours?”

A 50-something year old man with a couple of teeth missing and a full on hillbilly wardrobe complete with overalls, got out of the truck.

“Naw. I’ll do it. You got your spare?”

He grabbed the tire iron from the back of the truck and started on my flat. Turns out, trucks and CRX’s don’t have the same size lug nuts on their tires.

“This ain’t gonna work. Sorry.” And he made as if he was going to leave. I started crying again.

“Please! I’m from Fitzgerald, just trying to get home for Christmas. I can’t stay here all night. Can you please help me?”

“Don’t worry. I ain’t leavin’ you.” And he reaches through his driver’s side window and pulls out his CB receiver.

“Breaker, breaker 1-9. This here’s Bumblebee. Y’all got your ears on? 10-4.”

Silence.

“Breaker, breaker 1-9. This is Bumblebee. Is there anyone listenin’? 10-4.”

“Hey Bumblebee, it’s Red Dog. 10-4.”

“Red Dog, we got a flat out her on 319 and need us a lug wrench. Can you help me out? Copy?”

“Sure thing, good buddy.  10-4.”

Red Dog and two of his friends pull up a few minutes later in a truck that makes Bumblebee’s look like a luxury vehicle. In my head I begin planning my escape.

“Thank y’all so much for coming out here. I don’t know what I would have done.” I kept rambling on hoping that my chatter would make them like me or keep them distracted enough to not notice my collection of peace signs and liberal bumper stickers on the back of the car. They didn’t talk back to me. The four men had set to work on my car and had no need for any of my girly chatter.

I unloaded the gifts and laundry back onto the highway and waited for the men to finish with my tire so we could pack the flat and I could get the hell out of there. They worked quickly and before I fully decided which way I was going to run when they tried to attack me, they were done. Bumblebee thanked Red Dog & his friends and they left. He then stood and watched while I re-packed the hatchback for the third time that day.

“Bumblebee. Thank you so much! I don’t know what I would have done without you and Red Dog.”

“Mmm hmm.”

I had closed the trunk and planned to get in my car to finish the drive, but he just kept standing there.

“Um. Really, thanks so much. I wish I had something to give you.” Bumblebee eyed the gifts in the back window. Going through the inventory … a sweater for my sister, makeup for my mom, a cake plate for Grandma … I considered just giving him a wrapped package and letting him work it out.

“Bumblebee. I don’t have any money on me. I’m really sorry. Thank you so much, though.”

He took one last look at the gifts, huffed in disbelief and left me right where he found me.

Pizza and a prayer.

Has this happened to you?

This is me. Ninth grade? I’m not sure. Tenth maybe. I got braces in 9th, and I know I was a dancer at the time because I remember wearing that shirt over my purple unitard. But, I danced for several years and I had braces for years, so who knows? What I do know is that if you search me on Facebook, you will eventually make your way to this photo and that is something I could have lived without.

Because of Facebook, I have reconnected with a lot of people from my past in Georgia. People who save photos. I now get status updates from old high school friends who I had forgotten even existed. People whose names seem vaguely familiar but, because people age so poorly in the South, whose faces are completely foreign. I struggle to remember why Britney was so important to me and why she seems to have recorded every detail of our youth in her memory (and saved every photo) when I have absolutely no recollection of any of it.

Yet, I add them. Because there is a part of me that wants to remain connected to that part of my history, hideous as it was. I’d like to try to remember those things and people I’ve forgotten. They’re part of who I am. And, to be honest, it wasn’t all hideous.

Up until Facebook, the only former classmates I could clearly remember were the dead. Between 1986 and 1990, fourteen of my friends died. Half of those were suicides. Now, I’ve talked about the dead a lot over the years. Maybe that’s why they’re still so vivid in my mind. I remember details like what outfits I wore to the funerals and specific conversations we had. But the survivors? Nothing. Or at least, very little. Of the nearly 80 friends I have on Facebook from Fitzgerald, I truly remember maybe 20. Even better than that, I’ve had email conversations with several of the 60 whom I don’t remember.

Them: Remember that time we blah, blah, blah?

Me: Sure do! That was fun!

Them: Where was that?

Me: Oh … I know it. It’s on the tip of my tongue … don’t tell me.

Them: (Finally coming up with the answer to their own question) I know! It was __________.

Me: YES! That’s it.

It’s exhausting. Yet. I add them. Why? Because I’m curious about who I was and why I am who I am. I think it’s important for people to stay grounded in their histories. Every experience I’ve had and every person I’ve come in contact with has impacted my life and it’s important for me to remember where I come from.

Also, I’m planning to promote the blog through Facebook so the more friends the better, right? Well. The thing is, I write about these people. And not always in the most flattering light. Not that I’m making stuff up about them — They really are aging horribly. It’s astonishing. — but I don’t know if I want to get into drama with people who knew me only when I had braces and a spiral perm.

Here’s another Facebook nugget:

My main problem is that I always thought that my classmates thought the way I did. That my classmates believed that the adults in our town, the ones who insisted on segregated proms and who allowed rampant bigotry and hatred, were as awful as I thought they were. I was sure we were all just waiting for escape from Fitzgerald because we all knew that there was something better, or more exciting, or at least different from what we had.

But, now that I have access to their lives via Facebook, I realize that I was wrong. Very few of them left. And if they did, it was only to go thirty miles up the highway because life is cheaper in Wilcox County. The most frequent reaction I get when I reconnect with someone is, “You mean you LIKE city life?”  I really always thought we, who were the Class of ‘88 (We’re great!), were in it together. And I write about them now because I’m just so flabbergasted. “You mean you LIKE living in the South?”

Maybe it won’t be drama. Maybe they won’t even read the blog. I already had a virtual throwdown on my Wall over that poor Miss California and gay marriage because I, through Facebook, have inadvertently connected my liberal, frequently gay friends with my Republican, rarely rational relatives. And honestly, it wasn’t so bad. It was kind of fun watching the fireworks and god knows I like to stick it to the conservatives.

I think that some of my garbage was used to create this installation. See the little organza bag and the clear bra straps holding the wood together? I threw out a little organza bag with clear bra straps in it about two years ago. They came with this stupid bra I ended up hating. (What’s Victoria’s secret? Her overpriced bras are garbage.) It also came with normal satin bra straps so I held on to those and dumped the crappy plasticky clear ones. Now, they’re street art.

Location: 15th Street between 6th & 7th Avenues