On Filling in the Blanks

Last weekend Kate and I went on a short road trip that we'd been planning for a while: Nashville to Northern Mississippi to Memphis. I forgot to pack the Snoopy doll that we've been bringing along on such trips lately (the one I received several years ago for Christmas and lent/gave to Joey to keep him safe on his drive back to Virginia that year), but that didn't matter too much, because the whole trip was full of Joey things.

Road trips are, and always will be, Joey things, but this one was especially so. To wit:

a) One of our early stops was Florence, AL, where we had dinner at a mediocre but high-priced restaurant in what looked like the newly trendy part of town. Afterwards we drove through Muscle Shoals, which has a famous recording studio where legendary albums like the Stones' "Sticky Fingers" and Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" (his Christian album) were recorded. We'd done a bit of research beforehand and determined that the studio is still standing, and so as we drove into town we played Paul Simon's "There Goes Rhymin' Simon" (the only album on our iPods that was recorded there) and did a late-night drive-by. Or two. This was a very Joey thing to have done.

b) We stayed the first night in Tupelo, MS, a town I first visited with Joey several years ago (when we saw, but did not tour, Elvis's birthplace), and it is also a town Kate and I visited last July on our trip down to New Orleans the weekend of Joey's accident. We didn't linger in Tupelo this time.

c) Then we went to Oxford, MS, a town that I also first visited with Joey, possibly on the same trip that brought us to Tupelo. It must have been a Sunday when Joey and I were there, because I remember walking around a deserted town square, posing for a picture with the Faulkner statue seated on a bench, and having an unremarkable meal at a dark restaurant just off the square. Somehow we missed the enormous bookstore on the square (maybe it was closed?), didn't bother to search out Faulkner's house, Rowan Oak, and didn't even take a spin around Ole Miss. This was most unlike us - we must have been in a hurry - but Kate and I made up for it this time by spending gobs of time in the bookstore (a perfect example of how a good bookstore can foster and sustain a literary community), touring Faulkner's house (which was pleasantly spartan and ramshackle, a nice contrast to the lurid excess that we'd see at Graceland a few days later), and having an excellent brunch/lunch/midafternoon repast at a place called Big Bad Breakfast, on the recommendation of Joey's friend Nick, who'd recently been to Oxford. Kate had an omelet, and, after much hemming and hawing, I ordered a sandwich called The Elvis, which was peanut butter, banana, bacon, and mayonnaise on wheat toast, served with a side of fruit (I chose the wheat and fruit over white and fries, figuring that this would help to forestall any permanent artery damage, whatever Elvis might think of it). I initially wasn't going to order the Elvis - I've become almost entirely vegetarian lately, and this means, among other things, that my tummy doesn't appreciate being forced to digest pork, whether it's surrounded by peanut butter and mayonnaise or not - but then I remembered my journey through the Upper Midwest with Joey a couple of summers ago, when the guiding principle was to seek out and consume the most ridiculous things we could find (pie shakes, butter burgers, fried cheese curds, etc.), and then I decided that The Elvis was not only firmly within that tradition but also had the potential to expand the parameters of that tradition considerably. So I went for it. And it was very good. It tasted overwhelmingly of bacon and peanut butter, which is not an unpleasant combination, and you could hardly taste the mayo, which, I suspect, was primarily there for texture.

It looked like this:

d) After Oxford we drove to Memphis, deliberately taking the long way, driving west to Highway 61 and then taking that north, through the delta flatlands, to Memphis. On that trip through the Upper Midwest, Joey and I had taken Highway 61 south through Minnesota for a while, choosing the obvious musical accompaniment, Bob Dylan's "Highway 61, Revisited." Highway 61 in the Mississippi Delta looks a lot different than it does in Minnesota - fewer dramatic, towering bluffs, more limitless horizons and dangerous-looking agrochemical plants - but Dylan is Dylan wherever you play his music, and so play it we did, as we zoomed down the road to Memphis.

e) I had also been to Memphis with Joey, of course, most recently in October 2009, when Kate, Joey, and I drove there from Nashville to pick up my father, who'd been stranded by a storm on his way to visit us. On that trip we'd visited Sun Studios (where Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and others recorded), walked around downtown, ate Thai food, and poked around outside the National Civil Rights Museum, on the site of the (partially preserved) Lorraine Motel, where MLK was assassinated. On this trip we toured the inside of the Civil Rights Museum, walked around downtown (eating lunch at a place called The Little Tea Shop, a place dating to 1918 that Joey would have enjoyed, if only because it's listed in the Roadfood guides and serves a ridiculous-sounding (but quite tasty) dessert called a Pecan Ball), and saw a lot more of Memphis than we'd done before, driving around some of the cool old neighborhoods (and many of the uncool old neighborhoods), popping into bookshops and record stores, and, yes, eating Thai food.

f) We also went to Graceland, fulfilling an intention that Joey and I had long had. We frequently passed through Memphis on our journeys to and from Oklahoma, and we frequently considered stopping to see Graceland, but always either the time was too short or the cost was too high, and we never did. But Kate and I did, and it was great. The cost, I think, has gone down - it's still not cheap, but we were able to get the "Platinum Tour" for about $35 apiece, which is about $20 less than what I remember it being when Joey and I looked into it - and it helped that we went in the morning, before the hordes of drooling tourists converged on the place. There are no tour guides at Graceland - just people standing around marshaling you from spot to spot and making sure you don't nick any silverware - and you're forced to acquire one of those headset audio guide things that Joey hated (he could never manage to go in time to where his headset was telling him to go), but that's okay, because the absence of a human guide means you can dilly-dally a bit, provided you can figure out how to pause your headset. And it is a place worth dilly-dallying, a fabulous example of what happens when someone who is not accustomed to having wealth suddenly comes upon more money, more quickly, than anyone since the days of the Robber Barons. The furnishings are by turns exuberant, vulgar, and downright suburban - Elvis's kitchen was especially remarkable for just how banal and comfortable it seemed - and to linger there is to get a much better sense of who this guy really was than almost anything else I can imagine. I think, apart from the audioguide, Joey would have enjoyed the place immensely. There was much that would have earned some of his whispering snickers, and I regret that I'll never get to hear the jokes - no doubt many of them excruciating, Elvis-themed puns - that he would have made about Elvis's cars and planes and gift shops.

After we visited Graceland, we drove around listening to another Paul Simon album. You'll never guess which one.

Doing all this made me feel better than I've felt for a long time - partly because it took me out of my usual environment, partly because trips like this are among my principal reasons for living, partly because it was a way to keep propelling my brother's spirit through the world, and partly because I was with my wife, with whom I would go anywhere and do anything and have 500x more fun than ought to be possible. Traveling with Kate is a way not just of remembering past adventures but of anticipating future ones, and that makes me excited and hopeful, and that is a good way to be.

There's one more story that I need to tell you about William Faulkner, Oxford, Joey, and me, but it'll have to wait a few days. Check back soon, though: it is very, very important.