I am in a motel. Running the basic cable. This video comes on. "Home," by Sheryl Crow. Everything is shot in black and white, that lustrous black and white with the silvery spray-paint sheen. Sheryl is singing at a demolition derby. The possibilities of heaven expand. The derby cars are jouncy and spring, tagged with ads for pressure washers and muffler shops. The drivers careen with earnest idiocy. Heads bobbling, radiators fuming, they smack each other tremendously, in stark contrast to the wistful adagio of the music. The camera cuts from the cars to the grandstand, dwelling on faces. Every face is different, but they share the patina of hard living. Wrinkles and wind scour. Pale brows and burnt napes. A women's skin, jerked and cured by a lifetime of cigarettes. A thin nosed child with bad teeth. A stiff-backed man with guarded eyes. A girl, maybe out of high school, pregnant and beaming, the old lady she will become already evident in her uncomplicated face. The boyfriend's hand, meaty and tan, cupping her belly. This is a powerful human study. Every countenance is proof of common verity. Proof of how station, time, and circumstance shape our visage. Every day I see these faces.
Sheryl, of course, is beautiful. She is exempt from our verity. She is standing amid the sheet metal and the dust and the hardscrabble rednecks and she is singing her soft, sad song, and - in a juxtaposition perhaps confirming the existence of God - she is wearing leather knee-boots and an abbreviated nightie. Between her hemline and her boot tops there is an equine stretch of thigh as to imply a lifetime of mystery and wonder. The song is ending. Cut to Sheryl standing atop a hay bale - O ineffable image! - at the lip of the mud boggers' racing pit. A beastly four-wheel-drive slams into the slurry. It screams through the frame, lifting a vast, chocolaty curtain of ooze, which obscures, then breaks (in delicious slow motion) over Sheryl, legs tad astraddle, head tipped back, arms held wide.
Awards should be arranged.
Behind her, my people rise to their feet and cheer.
Gawping at the TV, I make a noise. Sounds a little like a walrus.
- From Population 485 by Michael Perry
1 comment:
Good stuff. I like that "the drivers careen with earnest idiocy." Don't we all.
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