You Do Hoodoo

Strunk and White on Steroids

Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable, —mon frère!

Baudelaire, “Les Fleurs du mal” 

Last night I did something mildly perverse: I fed a commercial Facebook post into my ChatGPT—the same one I use for research, copy editing, and tech triage—and asked it if the copy had been generated by AI.

BTW, I refer to my ChatGPT as “Chad,” not because I think it’s human, but because it’s easier to say (and type) than ChatGPT.

Anyway, Chad conjectured that the Facebook post had been produced by AI and then provided these telltale signs of AI authorship (as if Chad were human, and didn’t engage in the same techniques itself).

            The first indicator is that AI produces balanced sentences. [1]

Three-part structures. Nicely paced. Very composed. Humans do this too, of course—but we’re sloppier about it. We interrupt ourselves. We go long when we shouldn’t, or bail out early.[2]

e.g., “Stay alert, stay ready, and don’t talk your way out of the moment.”

The second sign of AI-generated prose Chad calls “hinge sentence moves”—phrases like

“Because it does happen” 

“And here’s the part that matters”

Those little turns feel less like thoughts arriving and more like pre-installed signposts.

The third characteristic of AI writing Chad cites is its tendency to engage in “emotional generalities instead of specifics.”

            “move your life in a direction that feels right”

That’s technically fine, but it floats. A human writer—especially you— tends to ground emotion in something tactile or slightly odd.[3]

Phrases like “move your life forward in a direction that feels right.”

No one ever missed a bus in these sentences. No one spills anything. No one says the wrong thing.

            Number four is “controlled charm.”

“Your dog, who is clearly the decision-maker.”

That line has been focus-grouped by the internet into harmlessness. It lands, but it doesn’t leave a mark.

And, finally, number five: evenness of tone.

No spikes. No awkward sentence that makes you pause and reread. No moment where the writer sounds just a little off—and therefore real.

Humans leave fingerprints. AI wipes the glass.

And here’s the twist: The more people read AI copy, the more they’ll start to distrust fluency.

So, there you have it. ladies and germs, the AI Style Sheet: Strunk and White on steroids. 

Stay tuned. My next project is plugging some Faulkner into AI to see how it would rephrase the opening paragraph of Absalom, Absalom.

[1] I’ve italicized Chad’s direct quotes.

[2] Note the self-referential pronoun “we.”

[3] Chad doesn’t mention this, but AI-prose loves them em-dashes. I’m assuming the “you” in the sentence refers to Wesley Moore III.

Yesterday’s being 4/20 and all, I committed a cliche— got confunctificated on cannabis.[1]  

As I made my way home on foot from Chico Feo, East Erie Avenue was blessedly empty, which meant I could recite out loud the lyrics looping in what I’ve come to call my mental jukebox. Saying the words—or singing them—is therapeutic, much preferable to merely letting them swirl unvoiced like dust devils in the attic of your frontal lobe.

No doubt I’m not the only one who suffers from this niche obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I suspect it’s extremely rare. I can’t find anything about it on the internet, so I’ve had to name it myself—Mental Jukebox Tourette’s Syndrome, or MJTS.

Playing in my head on the walk home was a Beach Boys cover of the Hollywood Argyles’ song “Alley-Oop,” a silly novelty tune inspired by a comic-strip caveman.

There’s a man in the funny papers we all know
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
He lives way back a long time ago
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
He don’t eat nothin’ but a bearcat stew
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
Well, this cat’s name is-a Alley-Oop

Here’s what got stuck in my head and what I voiced aloud as I walked along:

There he goes.
Look at that caveman go.
Ride, Daddy, ride.
Switch them blades.

The only way to exorcise these jukebox demons—at least for me—is to listen to a recording of the song. So when I got home, I cued the Beach Boys’ version, and lo and behold, I’d gotten the lyrics wrong. After “Ride, Daddy ride” comes “Heigh-ho, dinosaur,” not “switch them blades.”

Actually, the line “switch them blades” comes from another cover on that Beach Boys album, “Hully Gully.”[2]

‘Hully Gully” is a 1959 tune recorded by the Olympians, one of those songs that celebrates a dance. It was covered by, not only the Beach Boys, but also Buddy Guy, Chubby Checker, the Grateful Dead, and the J. Geils band—among others.

Here’s how it starts:

Well, there’s a dance spreading round like an awful disease
Hully, hully gully
You just shake your shoulders and you wiggle your knees
(Play it like it is!)
Hully, hully gully
Well, there’s a dance spreading round from coast to coast
Hully, hully gully
Well, when me and my baby do it, that’s how we do it the most
Hully, hully gully.

And here’s the bridge:

Hully, hully gully
Do it with your left shoulder
Hully, hully gully
Do it with your other shoulder, now
Hully, hully gully
Switch your blades
Hully, hully gully,

Not “switch them blades,” but “switch your blades.”

Even though I was wrong, you have to admit: “switch them blades” sounds much better.

Anyway, like its ugly distant cousin tinnitus, I’ve learned how to live with MJTS. So don’t worry—I’m not going to hit you up with a GoFundMe request.

[1]I first heard “conjunctificated” from a Black co- worker in 1977 at Whit-Ash, a furniture store in Columbia. This cat rarely said a word ever, but one day—out of nowhere— he proclaimed, “This place is conjunctificated,” and I knew exactly what he meant.

The Old Testament Ain’t the New Testament But It’s Pete Hegseth’s Testamentthe

air without refuge of silence,

    the drift of lice, teething,

and above it the mouthing of orators,

    the arse-belching of preachers.

Ezra Pound, “Canto XIV”

One of the most puzzling paradoxes of the Trump era is the veneration he receives from evangelical Christians—those Bible-thumping Pharisees who once considered Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky the Marianas Trench of moral decrepitude.

Here’s Franklin Graham in 1998: “The Bible says we’re to pray for our leaders—but it also says we’re to hold them accountable. When a leader lies and deceives, that’s a serious moral failure.”

And here he is twenty years later: “We’re not electing a pastor. We’re electing a president.”

I mean, hypocrisy of this magnitude makes Tartuffe look like Atticus Finch.

Of course, unless you’ve just emerged from a two-week coma, you’ve seen the above illustration posted on Truth Social by none other than Donald Trump—the same “gentleman” who famously suggested that “pussies” are there for the grabbing.

Trump, of course, claims he didn’t interpret the image of himself miraculously healing one of the eight white figures as Jesus, but simply as a physician.

Graham concurs: “There were no spiritual references—no halo, no crosses, no angels. It was a flag, soldiers, a nurse, fighter planes, eagles. … I think this is a lot to do about nothing.”

Hey, somebody remove the scales from Frankie’s eyes. There might not be a halo, but either the recumbent man (Jon Stewart? Jeffrey Epstein?) has a king-hell high fever, or the divine touch of Trump has transferred the light he’s holding to the man’s body. When’s the last time your physician made a house call in flowing first-century robes?

However, my favorite Trump-administration foot shot belongs to Pete Hegseth, who paraphrased Jules Winnfield’s monologue from Pulp Fiction at a monthly prayer service.

Here’s Jules from the movie:

Ezekiel 25:17. “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the
Inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in
The name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of
Darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost
Children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious
Anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know
My name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Here’s Hegseth’s rendition:

So the prayer is CSAR 25:17, and it reads—and pray with me, please— “The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.”

“And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.’”

Okay, I’m willing to give Hegseth the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t say he was quoting the Book of Ezekiel, only that the prayer reflected it. Nevertheless, this is O.T. war-god Yahweh bellowing, not the Jesus they claim to worship—the Prince of Peace, admonishing us to love our enemies.

By the way, the aircraft that was shot down wasn’t dropping flowers on southwestern Iran.

Lord, help us.

When I was five years old living in Biloxi, Mississippi, I was fortunate enough to contract rheumatic fever, an autoimmune reaction to untreated strep throat that triggers the immune system to rev into overdrive, attacking healthy tissue along with invasive streptococcus bacteria. I say “fortunate” because the disease left no permanent heart valve or joint damage and no doubt changed the course of my life because, to echo Jagger and Richards’ “Street Fighting Man,” what’s a poor bedridden boy to do but play with puppets, put together picture puzzles, and be read to?  

Whether for good or ill, these lifelong habits have formed my character.

Spending a week in a hospital ward and another month in bed on Laurel Street in Summerville contributed to my becoming an avid indoorsman. Even in my young adulthood, I preferred the vicarious adventures reading provides —hunting down that great white whale with Ahab and the boys—to actual deep sea fishing, which I’ve done once but never will again. Not that it wasn’t interesting seeing flying fish skim across the surface of the ocean and that waterspout lazily twisting in the grey distance, but when all is said and done, Wordsworth’s nature just ain’t my thing.

Of course, I’ve moved on from picture puzzles of my pre-kindergarten hospital bed to more sophisticated pastimes like crosswords, sudoku, Wordle, Connections, and Spelling Bee.  Solving a set series of on-line puzzles has become an unalterable beloved morning ritual during my retirement. 

As far as puppetry goes, you can catch a video of a late life puppet show by hitting this LINK.

But more importantly, back in the day — the summer of 1957 to be precise— by mother read to me. I especially liked the Uncle Wiggily books, featuring a set cast of characters like Peetie Bow-Wow and Neddie Stub tail, the bear chap, and I also enjoyed Mother Goose and the brothers Grimm’s fairy tales.

Newtonian physics de damned!

Hey, diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed

To see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

After I learned to read myself, I started collecting Classic Illustrated comic books in which the authors and artists attempted to jazz up novels like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment with action packed illustrations that actually belie the dark claustrophobic interiority of the novel’s 720 some odd pages. 

Anyway, in retrospect, I’m okay with swapping two months of playing tag out-of-doors to the subsequent decades of living a life of imagination, and, of course, I know Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and my pal Jason Chambers have proven one can both love literature and the wonders of nature. Indeed, that love no doubt has deepened their understanding of how it all works.

C’est la vie.

I’ve come up with the male equivalent of “resting bitch face,” that sexist slight used to describe women who don’t dutifully beam sun-splashed smiles as they slog through yet another day of taxing responsibilities. Unfortunately, my term for the male equivalent—resting ogre face—aptly describes—to echo Eliot’s “Prufrock”—the face I prepare to face the faces that I meet. In other words, I shuffle through my world looking like an angry old man, projecting an aura that conveys get out of my way, don’t mess with me, whoever you are.

Even when I should be attempting to look somewhat pleasant—for example, in a public interview at a book festival—I come across like a put-upon asshole. Take a look. Notice the interviewer’s cheerful demeanor. Now notice the expression of the man sitting next to him.

I don’t even know, at this late stage of my existence, if it’s worth the effort to emend this unfortunate aspect of my demeanor. After all, a genuine scowl, as opposed to an ersatz smile, might be preferable in today’s timeline, when our country is led by an amoral, narcissistic vulgarian who sports a white baseball cap at a solemn ceremony where he meets the families of slain soldiers in a war he started under false pretenses—apparently to distract the public from the almost assured likelihood that he’s a pedophile.

In any case, until circumstances improve, resting ogre face may simply be the most honest expression available.

This is an excerpt from Too Much Trouble, a stand alone sequel to my novel Today, Oh Boy. In this scene, high school sweethearts Ollie Wyborn and Jill Birdsong, college freshmen home for Christmas after their first semester, meet for pool hall hotdogs in Hutchinson Square in downtown Summerville, SC. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since their breakup in June before Ollie reported to the Air Force Academy.

Jill’s relieved that so far her “date” with Ollie has been low-key, like two old friends catching up. He looks great. His boyish features have become more angular, his posture a bit more rigid. It’s breezy out on the square, the shadows of the trees swaying on the ground in front of their bench.

Unlike most males Jill has known, Ollie seems to genuinely care about what’s going on in her life and listens attentively. Before he left to fetch the chili dogs, he asked very thoughtful questions about life at Davidson, and his follow-up questions demonstrated sincere interest.

Now, in his absence, Jill’s mind drifts to Rusty. She wonders what he does during the day, an exile from his home.

Duh, he reads.

He’s been a booklover since she first met him in the 7th grade. In the fast-track history and English classes they shared, he was engaged, a lot more engaged than most students, and sometimes offered controversial takes on what they were reading, like calling Nick Carraway a smug, arrogant know-it-all, the worst of the slew of unlikable characters in The Great Gatsby. Then again, he didn’t seem to care all that much about his grades.

When Principal Pushcart read the daily announcements each morning over the intercom, Rusty was frequently one of the troublemakers summoned to the office. One time in the hall, Jill overheard Rusty tell Sandy Welch that he was, quote, “nothing but a crazy mixed up kid.” Jill wonders whatever became of Sandy, Tripp’s girlfriend, a wild child. Her family moved back to New Jersey not long after Tripp died, not long after the car chase she never wants to hear about again.

Here comes Ollie, smiling, walking up the paved pathway with a bag of chili dogs, fries, and a couple of Cokes.

“Is this wind bothering you?” he asks once he’s standing in front of her bench. “We could eat these somewhere else.”

“No, I like it here,” Jill says. “I like the sound the wind makes in the trees.”

He glances up at the limbs of the oak overhead, its branches swaying, its Spanish moss holding on for dear life.

“You’ll never guess who I just saw in the pool hall.”

“Who?”

“Rusty Boykin and Alex Jensen.”

“Really! Just now?”

Ollie nods. “Yep, they’re there right now.”

“Did you tell them you were with me?”

“Yeah, since girls don’t go into the poolroom, I was going to invite them over here to say hi, but they seemed to be in a very serious conversation. AJ has really put on a lot of weight, and Rusty’s hair’s down past his shoulders.”

“I know,” Jill says.

“So you’ve seen them over the holidays? Of course, Rusty works at Katz’s.”

“I saw Rusty last night.”

“Last night?”

“Yeah, we went on a date.”

“You and Rusty?”

“Yes.”

Ollie, who has been straining to be upbeat so far, frowns for the first time, then quickly recovers.

He carefully removes the white paper sleeve that holds Jill’s chili dog and hands it to her and then a small bag of rather greasy fries. She reaches down herself to grab a Coke. Ollie hands her a napkin, then retrieves his dog and fries and Coke.

“God,” Jill says, “I’d forgotten how good these are.”

God as an expletive, not gah, per usual.

“Indeed delicious. Did you have fun on your date?”

“Yes, I did. We both did.”

Ollie averts his eyes, takes a bite.

They eat in silence, the wind in the trees indeed highly audible. Ollie hadn’t noticed until Jill mentioned it. It bothers him somewhat that he doesn’t pay more attention to sounds.

Jill takes the last bite of her chili dog.

“Look, Ollie, the last thing I want to do is hurt you, but I haven’t forgotten the last words you said right before you hung up the other day. I’m sorry you think you love me, but I’ve changed a lot since June. I’m not the same Jill you knew. I’ve started drinking wine. I’ve quit believing in God. What you love is the idea you had of me back in high school.”

Ollie, ever quick on the take, instantaneously sees that it’s true. This Jill sitting next to him on the park bench isn’t the same Jill he took to the prom last May. Yet he’s more or less the same Ollie he was in high school. Oh, he’s better educated, in better physical shape, but his philosophical bearings haven’t wavered.

“I can see that,” he says, “but the funny thing is that I don’t think I’ve changed at all.”

“That’s because you’ve always been so mature, Ollie, and so good. I’d hate to see you change. I really would.”

Ollie doesn’t know what to say to this, so he says nothing.

She glances at her watch.

While Ollie pursues an errant napkin, she drops hers in the empty bag, crumples the bag, and deposits it in the trash can.

When Ollie returns home to his house in the Twin Oaks subdivision, he’s understandably downcast. Although he likes Rusty Boykin as a person and was even going to seek him out for companionship this week, he thinks Rusty’s all wrong for Jill—he’s wild, reckless, disorganized, and countercultural, which means he undoubtedly smokes cannabis and therefore breaks the law. That is, unless Rusty, too, has changed, but it certainly doesn’t look like it with his wild hair and raggedy outfit.

Ollie’s feeling the inherent sadness of the end of a relationship. He realizes that he and Jill will never be friends again in any meaningful sense. However, he also realizes—after all, some of the kids in Summerville call him Spock—that change is the one constant in life. While he’s sitting right now in the model airplane museum of his bedroom, his cells are multiplying and dividing, water is evaporating over the ocean, clouds are shifting shapes, the moon is waning. Virtually every high school romance ends like this. It’s, as his grandma would say, just part of life.

He’s chomping to get back to Colorado Springs. Summerville isn’t really his home. Here he’s a Yankee, and if he lived here for another 50 years, he’d still be a Yankee. He’s never completely understood the fixation they have with the Civil War.

A knock on the door interrupts his musings.

“Come in. Hi, Mom, what’s up?”

“You have a phone call. Cindy Cauthen would like to speak to you.”

“Cindy Cauthen. Okay, I’m coming.”

I’ve submitted this one minute video entitled Edge Connections for an art show in Charleston. If accepted it would play in a loop projected on one of the walls of the gallery. The audio would be provided by the curator. The theme is Folly Beach Noir, the Edge of America. Click on the box below to engage, even if it’s black.

Well, here I go again—only three months after lamenting the death of my high school buddy Adam Jacobs, now mourning the death of another of our crew, Jack McDonough, who died unexpectedly last week in Asheville. 

Unlike, Adam, whom I hadn’t had seen in this century, I was lucky enough to hang with Jack each fall when he would visit Folly for three or four days. Here we are with brother Barry at Chico in late October, about three weeks after Adam’s death.

Jack, Adam, and I were among the handful of Summerville kids who surfed. In fact, it was Jack who sold me my first board, a five-foot needle-nosed, home-shaped piece-of-shit that barely floated me, a 135-pound skeleton wrapped in untannable, freckle-mottled skin. In fact, on his last trip, we reminisced about that board, which indeed was fast if unstable.

In addition to his kindness, which you could see embedded in his facial expressions, Jack possessed an enormous amount of stoicism. He suffered from childhood diabetes, which did a number on his feet, and had a stroke some years ago that left him hobbled but unbowed.  With a hiking cane and later a walker, he unselfconsciously inched his way without a scintilla of self-pity. There’s no substitute for self-confidence.

Jack was descendent of the Irish patriot and martyr Thomas McDonough.

Thomas McDonough

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride   

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

                                                William Butler Yeats, “Easter 1916”

Jack loved the land of his ancestors and studied Irish literature at Trinity College in Dublin and developed lifelong relationships with his Irish cousins. Family was so important to him, his brothers who predeceased him—Patrick and Matthew—and his surviving brother Barry and sister Casey and mother Edith who’s still somehow going strong in her Nineties.

Perhaps he was happiest hanging with his daughter Kate and her two children, whom he adored. 

I’m also very appreciative to Jack for his support in my writing, not only purchasing and reading the books (the latter a rarity with my Summerville brethren) but by offering specific praise that demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the texts. I can’t tell you how much we non-best-selling authors appreciate that.

I’ll end by saying that despite his physical challenges and the tragedies his family suffered throughout the seven decades of his life, Jack was a fortunate man because he was a man of love. He was a devout Catholic who attended Mass daily, so he probably wouldn’t approve of this sentence, but goddamn it, I’m going to miss him.

I’ll end with a bit more of Willy B:

Now shall I make my soul,

Compelling it to study

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body,

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come –

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath – 

Seem but the clouds of the sky 

When the horizon fades;

Or a bird’s sleepy cry 

Among the deepening shades.

I’m rereading Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, a collection of semi-autobiographical, first-person narratives recalling his years in Nazi Germany before the war. The most famous of these pieces, “Sally Bowles,” later became the source for the musical Cabaret, dramatizing a reckless Englishwoman’s decadent sojourn in the German capital.

As Hitler gears up his war machine (at least he had the decency not to grovel for a Nobel Peace Prize during the buildup), Berliners hit the clubs in a final spasm of decadent hedonism—one last binge before the Jews disappear and the bombs begin to fall.

Many have drawn parallels between Hitler’s Germany and Trump’s America, and the similarities are unsettling: paramilitaries (Brownshirts/ICE), megalomania, bigotry, contempt for established law—not to mention basic human decency. The difference, however, is that we-the-people have access to real-time video documentation of atrocities.

Take the killing of Renee Nicole Good, whom the Trump administration claimed attempted to run down her killer. Video evidence clearly shows otherwise: she was trying to drive away. Her last words were, “Look, dude, I’m not mad at you.”

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It was their final, most essential command.”
—George Orwell, 1984

I keep hoping that such footage might turn the tide against Trump’s authoritarian overreach.

“And so yesterday, without any fanfare whatsoever, ICE distributed a ‘legal refresher’ to their thugs, reminding them that constitutionally protected freedom of speech is still a thing—and that, as much as they’d like to, they can’t execute anyone for calling them a ‘pussy-ass bitch.’”
—Jeff Tiedrich, “ICE Is Big Sad Because Everyone Hates Their Guts”

* * *

At any rate, last night I found myself at Folly Beach’s cozy Bounty Bar for an indoor version of 

Foxy G’s Soapbox. Sitting there, it occurred to me that the darkened room and tiny stage of the Center Street tavern bore a faint resemblance to the Kit Kat Club of Cabaret—especially when John David Kulpa took the stage to perform three songs from three of what he calls his “hard rock operas.”

So what’s a poor septuagenarian to do
But sit in the dark while the singers sing through?
In a red state fast asleep, way down in Dixieland,
There’s no just place for a street-fighting man—

Too Much Trouble

BOOK I

Chapter One: Goings and Comings

Thornwell Dormitory, the University of South Carolina, 22 December 1972 

Crisscrossing his dorm room, Rusty Boykin wads up clothes and shoves them into a sour-smelling duffel bag. He leans over and snatches his two-tone cowboy shirt from the floor, the one with fake pearl snaps, and shoves it in on top of two pairs of faded Levi’s. Turning around, he rifles through the built-in drawers in his closet and crams into the bag the four boxer shorts he owns. After yanking the drawstring tight, he slings the duffel over his shoulder hobo-style and steps out of the room into the suite he shares with three other students. Before leaving, he checks himself out in the mirror above the sink, admiring his Keith Richards–inspired shoulder-length shag that’s sure to give his ol’ man a hemorrhage-and-a-half.

Red on the head like a dick on a dog 

His suitemates, Jersey boys, have already departed for the frigid Northland. Despite going to the University of South Carolina, two-thirds of Rusty’s dormmates hail from the Northeast while the rest come from small in-state towns like Hampton, Seneca, and Sumter. Yesterday was the last day of exams, so most students have already cleared out for the holidays.

Rusty doesn’t own a car, so he’ll get back home the way he usually does—by hitchhiking. With luck, someone will take him straight to the Summerville exit so he won’t have to hitch on the interstate. It’s no fun shivering on the side of the highway, getting wind-whipped in December as 18-wheelers roar past on their way to some soulless Kmart loading dock. Not to mention that hitchhiking on the interstate is illegal.

I-95, Robeson County, North Carolina, 20 December 1972 

Rusty’s pal Alex Jensen, better known as “AJ,” has had a socially successful but academically disastrous first semester at Hampden-Sydney College—three Ds, an F, and a lone A in freshman English. “Frat life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life,” he sometimes jokes, echoing the Willie Nelson song. The good news—if you can call it that—is that AJ’s parents have become inured to being disappointed in their only offspring, a child conceived late in life when his mother Anne was 40 and her husband Thom was 52. So they won’t be shocked when they discover AJ’s abysmal grades and that he’s been lying, having assured them throughout the semester that classes were going great.

Four hours into his drive from Hampden-Sydney, AJ’s hangover has leveled off into a dull headache. He measures his progress to Summerville by the number of miles separating him from South of the Border, a Mexican-themed tourist attraction just below the state line. An absurd number of South of the Border billboards featuring their sombrero-sporting mascot Pedro appear with increasing frequency on the drive north or south on I-95 toward the North Carolina/South Carolina border. Up ahead, AJ spots yet another billboard, this one with a giant red hot dog standing upright above a sign that reads YOU NEVER SAUSAGE SUCH A PLACE!
(YOU’RE ALWAYS A WEINER AT PEDRO’S)
SOUTH OF THE BORDER 10 MI.

He thinks, Hell, why not? I’ll stop there, check it out, maybe get a bite to eat, and take a piss.

Fun ahoy!

506 Farrington Drive, Kings Grant subdivision, Summerville, South Carolina
21 December 1972 

Jill Birdsong, a tall, slender freshman at Davidson College, opens a Christmas card from her high-school boyfriend Ollie Wyborn. A fourth class cadet at the Air Force Academy, Ollie isn’t allowed to come home for Christmas. Jill hasn’t seen him since they broke up in June just before his departure for Colorado Springs. Although fond of Ollie—she admires his intelligence and integrity—Jill has never been “in love” with him, and their make-out sessions were relatively tame—especially for Summerville’s teenage culture, where, at least once every school year, some sophomore or junior or senior suddenly disappears “to stay with her aunt for a while.”

At Davidson, Jill has had a few dates, but nothing has clicked. Just recently, though, she has started drinking socially. In high school, Jill was religious—a member of the national Christian organization Young Life—and never indulged in alcohol; however, gradually, thanks largely to her biology courses, Jill has stopped believing in the Resurrection, a change of heart (and mind) she would never share with her parents, who are devout Episcopalians but not teetotalers.

Ollie, whose lack of playfulness had always been a bit of an impediment in their relationship, has never been a believer. In fact, in high school, when Rusty Boykin once asked Ollie if he believed in God, Ollie explained that the series of events Rusty had mistaken for divine intervention was merely coincidence. Although not friends, they had been thrown together the October of their junior year after some rednecks jumped Ollie outside the pool hall. Rusty and his would-be girlfriend Sandy Welch were slowing down, looking for a parking space when they saw Ollie karate-kick one of his three assailants.  They yelled for him to jump into Sandy’s Mustang to escape—only to have the rednecks tear after them in a high-speed chase through town. The rednecks’ pick-up ended up running off the road at Bacon’s Bridge and crashing into the Ashley River.

In Summerville, fistfights are common, especially among the undereducated white male population. Ollie, originally from Minnesota, was surprised at first by the belligerence and obsessions of small-town Summerville, especially people’s fixation on what they call “the War Between the States.” Ollie has contemplated the differences between the cultures of the Midwest and South with anthropological detachment. A talented academic with a scientific bent, he finds almost everything interesting.

Ollie cares deeply for Jill, but he’s a rationalist, not a romantic, so he understands it made sense for her to nix their high-school romance when college puts two time zones and military restrictions between a couple. Anyway, his boyhood dream of becoming an astronaut is paramount, so he intends to focus his attention on that goal. He could have asked for leave toward the end of the holidays but opted not to because he’s determined to demonstrate his devotion to his duties.

Jill slides the card from the envelope, glances at the glittering snow scene, then opens it and reads Ollie’s neat, efficient cursive:

Happy Holidays, Jill. As always, I wish you the best and hope that if our spring breaks coincide, we can perhaps go to a movie or have lunch and catch up. Your forever friend, Ollie.

Poor Ollie.