Less Than
Niles Reddick
My network of small town friends from school had bikes (mine was bought with S&H green stamps), and we rode them all over town, sometimes without hands, sometimes fast to outrun a barking dog chasing us (we wouldn’t go down that road again), sometimes dropping them on a sidewalk or somebody’s yard to see a friend’s new tv or downtown to get a cherry Coke or a Coke with a pack of peanuts to pour in the bottle.
Once, we were headed to Hodges’ Pond, a swamp of black water with gators, snakes, and Cypress trees with Spanish moss, located on the edge of town. We wanted to see the new brick homes built on the edge of the pond. Those homes were anomalies to us, poor people whose parents rented clapboard houses with no HVAC systems, just gas space heaters and an attic fan, one bathroom to share among six people in our family, walls that sweated mildew as if alive. It didn’t occur to me at the time we were poor, though we ate bologna, mayonnaise, and ketchup, or potted meat sandwiches and Vienna sausages and Spam. We believed these were luxury meals just like we believed in Santa Claus. I think our parents lived paycheck to paycheck and couldn’t afford the best nutrients, so we supplemented that with Flintstones’ vitamins.
Our bike gang came upon a boy from our grade we really hadn’t gotten to know yet: Buddy. That wasn’t his real name, of course, but I didn’t know that until years later. I have tried to recall what made us do this, but I had a couple of dollars and dared him to pick up a crusty white dog turd in the grass on the side of the road and take a bite. He did and got my money. We all laughed, and I wonder now if he spit it out or swallowed it. It probably wasn’t very different than some of the meals we thought were good.
Buddy was the youngest of three. He had two older sisters, but he was the only boy and the youngest. Buddy’s parents were Pentecostal. They listened to albums on a record player sung by The Florida Boys, the Happy Goodman’s, The Chuck Wagon Gang, The Dixie Echo’s, and more. I remember commenting (I have always been good about this—connecting and relating) that I had heard those singers on the television show The Gospel Singing Jubilee, which we watched on Sunday morning before Sunday School and church. I think that comment in their perception pulled me into their world, made them think that I was somehow a good boy (they didn’t obviously know about the dog turd and money). Buddy went to 4-H camp at Rock Eagle in Georgia one summer with the rest of us. We rode on the school bus with no air conditioning, and we didn’t care. The hot air blowing in the open windows on the interstate and back roads kept us cool, and we were going away from home, where no parents would tell us what we couldn’t do and no preacher to tell us we were all going to hell.
One afternoon at camp, while the girls were busy with their leader at a different part of the camp, the boys invaded their cabin, stole their underwear, and ran to the lake, where they threw them in. Looking back, I wonder if they had enough extras or if their counselor, Kim Carter, had to go to town and buy more. We were in love with Kim Carter. Not only was her uncle Jimmy the President of the United States, but her Daddy was also Billy of Billy Beer fame, something all of us wanted to try, and in just a few years, we would try beer and much more. I’m sure we asked Kim Carter about it. We might have been in love with Farrah Fawcett Majors on posters tacked to our walls at home, but Kim Carter was front and center in shorts and a t-shirt, wearing a boot for a broken toe or ankle, and she had blonde hair and a dentist’s dream smile. We felt like we were one step from the White House, and it gave us hope that one of us poor kids might one day be famous.
I thought of Kim Carter when I watched the state funeral for President Carter on television. I didn’t see her among the family, but I’m not sure she’d look the same as I remember fifty years later. I did see President Carter’s grandson, Jason, whom I’d met when I was working at a college, and he’d come to speak to faculty and students. I also recalled other times I’d been in the company of President Carter—when he was governor and I met him in a parade, when he’d spoken at the college, when I attended a big dinner as part of our college, and the Carters sat two tables over from us, and finally, when I attended his Sunday School class—the only Sunday School class in my life where I had arrived an hour early, been searched, where the car had been sniffed by bomb dogs, and where we were crammed into this small, country, Jello-colored church that seemed stuck in a different time. I was two rows behind Mrs. Carter and some of their family when the former President came out, smiling and waving at everyone and asking where people had come from.
He launched right into the Baptist Sunday School lesson, which was about Abraham and Sarah, the handmaiden Miriam, and her son Ishmael, and Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice Isaac. Carter didn’t even read it; he told it, and then he stopped and said that this had been one of the most important stories to him as President because when he was at Camp David during the 1978 Peace Accords, they could not get Prime Minister Begin of Israel and President Sadat of Egypt to settle.
Late one night, Carter said that they were literally in the eleventh hour and had made no real progress, and he walked into the room, sat down, picked up a Bible from the table, and prayed for God to help him. He opened the Bible to the story of Abraham and Sarah, and it occurred to him that all three great religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—had their beginnings in this story, that they were historically connected and had more similarities than differences. He shared with the Sunday School class that he’d shared this with Begin and Sadat, and this is what got them to ultimately agree and sign the Peace Accords. It was a wonderful lesson, and the hair on my arms stood up. I felt like I’d just witnessed a replay of history and an influential story sadly left out from all the commentary of Carter’s accomplishments during his state funeral, and not one I recall being mentioned as having influenced the peace process.
When I turned fifteen, I got a job as a dishwasher at the restaurant, Tasty World, that Buddy’s dad managed. I knew I had gotten the job because Buddy was a friend, and his parents knew me as a good boy because I knew who the gospel singers were. His mother was the manager of the Days Inn, connected to the restaurant with gas pumps and a gift shop. The place was packed daily with travelers going to or coming from Disney World.
I’m sure someone trained me on how to work the dishwasher, probably Buddy, because he worked there, too, and he was what we called a cut-up. He was a hard worker, but he liked to have fun, too. I remember him putting a rubber snake from the gift shop by the loaf of Texas toast under the grill. The butter-slathered toast went with steaks or fried shrimp dinners, and Maxine, the cook, reached down and saw that rubber snake jiggle and flop out when she went for someone’s Texas toast, and she ran into the crowd waving her spatula and screaming, “Snake, snake,” through the dining hall, and out the front door into the parking lot. Buddy and I were laughing like fools by the swinging door to the kitchen until someone calmed Maxine down, and she came back inside and wouldn’t speak to either of us, even though I was only guilty by association.
Later in high school, Buddy got a black Trans Am with T-tops, just like in Smokey and the Bandit. Buddy and I took a trip in it to Panama City Beach, Florida, and he barked the tires up and down the strip, people gawking at us two teenagers with long brown hair. We thought we were the coolest people in the whole world. I remember driving there or back to our small Georgia town, and Buddy pushing the Trans Am to one hundred miles per hou,r and me pleading with him to slow down. He loved pushing the limits, and I was more cautious.
When we finished high school, I found a job in the city, quit my job at the restaurant/hotel after working there for three years, and moved to begin college. Had I stayed, I thought I wouldn’t learn anything new and probably wouldn’t have gone to college. I didn’t even know if I wanted to go to college and had asked my high school counselor.
She threw up her hand and said, “Go to college.”
“What would I major in?” I asked her.
“It doesn’t matter,” she’d said.
Later, I figured she was just trying to get me out of her office, but at the time, I thought she must be right, that she must know. I changed my major five times, and it took me six years to get a four-year degree because I worked full-time and borrowed money to pay for it. The lessons I learned in high school at that restaurant and motel, however, taught me about people, about customer service, and about the need to do and know as much as possible. I had been a dishwasher, cook, busboy, desk clerk, and cashier by the time I left for college.
Over thirty years later, and after working at three colleges or universities as a faculty member and administrator, I retired and moved to the Appalachian Mountains. Buddy and I reconnected on social media, messaging each other about getting together and having lunch. We’d only lived about an hour apart, me in East Tennessee and him in Western North Carolina. I didn’t know much about what he’d done in all those years. His social media page seemed sparse. We simply didn’t plan anything.
I was sad when President Carter died because I loved his service to humanity and the work he did, driven by his incredible faith, and the world seemed less than. I loved that I got to meet and hear him teach Sunday School. The next week, I learned on social media that Buddy had died, too, and we wouldn’t get to connect again. Again, the world seemed less than. I loved his friendship, and I wrote to his sisters and sent his mother a card and flowers in the nursing home. Even though President Carter and my friend Buddy had brushed my life briefly, their impacts meant more than those who were in my life much longer. It seemed a strange thing to consider, but the memories made me long for simpler times and a nicer world in which to live.
Niles Reddick writes from the Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee and is the author of a novel, four short fiction collections, and two novellas. His work has appeared in over five hundred publications, including The Saturday Evening Post, Cheap Pop, Flash Fiction Magazine, Citron Review, Midway Journal, Hong Kong Review, and Vestal Review. He is an eight-time Pushcart nominee, a three-time Best of the Net nominee, and a three-time Best Micro nominee. Facebook Instagram LinkedIn
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Wonderful essay, Niles!
Enjoyed this a lot!