Einstein's Tongue
"Hacksaw: The Musical "
by
Jon Dermott
About The Author
Jon Dermott (Jon is his real name, Dermott is not, but would have been had there not been a dispute about when a term of indenture ended back in the 17th century) is a librarian, omnivore, Sagittarius, narcoleptic, former non-denominational minister, Southern Gothic childhood survivor, and elementary school graduate in some order. He was born in Montgomery, Alabama on the first 11th anniversary of Rosa Parks famous sit-in and grew up in Weokahatchee, Alabama (which is a real place though not one you’ll find on most maps) which when he was a child had a population of a dozen people, all but one of whom had his surname before and or after marriage. He is less an atheist than a person who hasn’t found the right god yet. After traveling extensively in Weokahatchee and small town Georgia he returned to Montgomery where he currently lives in a cluttered townhouse he shares with his dogs Mardi and Ollie (which are their real names, though neither can spell it) and with the personal effects of a dead woman. (The dead woman herself has been removed.) He hopes to one day dance under the dome of the Hagia Sophia and to own a hybrid car, though neither is likely this month.
"Still Life of Narcoleptic, Terriers, and Dead Woman’s DayBed- 2007"
Hacksaw: The Musical
Myrtlesville is divided into three parts. There is the town of Myrtlesville, a blathering senile unwashed amputee of a place with a thrift store, a pool parlor, lots of boarded shops, a falling down but occupied house that has Christmas tree lights garlanding its collapsing porches year round, a Dollar General that is the town’s most thriving business (for Dollar Generals are much like Jesus- where three or more gather one will appear), then down the street the folk Gothic frame house where the glow of crackpipes twinkles like stars through the bulletholes in the plywood sign that once read Keep Out, and the whole of this lying in the shadow of the strangely enormous Baptist church that dominates the town like a citadel and makes you wonder how the residents of Myrtlesville, a town where time seems to sit still much like blathering senile soiled and unwashed amputees sit still, could afford to erect such an imposing edifice. Next, there is the pine forest, thousands of acres of pine trees owned and planted and harvested by local timber companies. Then, there is the Rest Area part of Myrtlesville, a ten mile desolate stretch of Highway 82 separated from the town of Myrtlesville by two miles of winding backroads but still counted as Myrtlesville. It is with this third part of Myrtlesville, the highway hinterlands, that our tale is most concerned.
It had been a great summer. I was driving the first new vehicle I had ever owned- "you can still smell the new" as everybody said; a beautiful midnight blue Chevy pickup. I had spent that morning loading furniture into my pickup, strapping down a tarp onto said pickup (having to leave a drop leaf table I’d bought at a yard sale the week before, which I realized I was going to have to come back for the following weekend) and headed off down country roads to a college town, where I was looking forward to life as an on-his-own college student. When 5:00 p.m. came I knew that my soon-be ex-co-workers were dressed in business casual with dead eyes watching the clocks in their cubicles, I was a hundred miles away on a college quad, dressed in my college t-shirt and cut-off shorts surrounded by others in their t-shirts and shorts, all of this on a weekday! Yep, my 33rd birthday was gonna be spent as a college student.
Little did I know the BLAIR WITCH meets DUKES OF HAZZARD horrors that lay ahead.
I left Tuscaloosa just before sundown going south down U.S. 82. Thirty minutes later I was at the McDonald's in Centreville. Centreville is bigger than Myrtlesville, the tiny, dying Mos Eisley that's the gateway to seventy miles of places that have names for one reason only, that being so there will be something to write on the “Place of Death” line of the death certificate other than “Up past where Old Mister Higginbotham’s store used to be but not quite to the house where the dog’s always looking out the screen door and maybe thirty minutes or so from the McDonald's in Centreville if you’re driving fast.”
You know you're entering the highway portion of Myrtlesville when five miles after you’ve passed the Rest Area that is Myrtlesville’s sole 24/7 employer and see the sign for the Holy Bible Methodist Church, a sign that simply reads, without punctuation or anything else,
I was about halfway between the rest area and the holy amphetamine lab when, there being just a tiny amount of twilight in my rearview mirror mirror and starless black night ahead, I failed to see the piece of black tire on the black asphalt in the black shadows of the black trees until I was right up on it. Simon and Garfunkel were singing And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls… and tenement halls" courtesy of a Birmingham oldies station, when I heard the thud as it attacked the undercarriage. The next thing I know my S-10 and I are dancing the James Dean Polka 'over the river and through the woods into somebody's grandmother's yard we go' as my mind calmly and rationally entertains two thoughts, those being:
1- I'm going to crash and there is not shit I can do about it (this rational acceptance of impotence is by far my least favorite part of a car crash, always reminding me somehow of how some believe a person knows for a few seconds they've been guillotined [although the analogy falls apart when you remember that nobody is expecting to have a car accident, while if you're bound and shaved and carted through a howling mob pelting garbage at you and forced to lie face down under a guillotine blade you've gotta suspect that something is up]
2- How in the hell am I going to get that drop leaf table to Tuscaloosa this weekend without this truck (assuming I'm alive)?
As the truck is going off the road and rolls onto its side, I’m thinking "Well this is new… I haven't had an accident like this before…" It flips twice and would have flipped a third time but it was stopped by a pliant but sturdy Crepe Myrtle tree that's as tall as three Tom Bosleys. The Crepe Myrtle breaks the truck’s advance, reverses its direction and the truck lands on the driver side, there now being grass and solid earth and shattered shards of shatter proof glass where my driver side window had been a second before. The excellent stereo system of the truck (best sound system I ever had) sang And whispered in the sounds of silence.
The thought now in my mind (other than bodily function related expletives) is "I haven't got a clue how to get out of here." I was afraid of climbing through the passenger door, because I can tell the truck is on a slope of some sort and while I can't see any real damage in staying in the truck, I could definitely see being slightly killed if the truck rolled back over or catapulted me while I was climbing out the passenger side window (or, as it's now known, the skylight).
The problem was solved by two locals in whose debts I will legitimately and eternally remain. They had seen the accident from a tiny storage-shed sized gas station diagonally across the road and ran over, calling "YOU 'KAY IN THERE? YA A'RIGHT? YOU LIVIN'?" They helped pull me through the passenger door/skylight/escape hatch, and the first thought that hit me as the older of the two, whose name I at some point learned was Gary, helped pull me through with his hand was "He could be Colm Wilkinson's twin". (For straight males, Colm Wilkinson is the Irish singer/actor best known for originating Jean Valjean in the English language version of Les Miserables.) It's always strange the stuff that goes through your head when you're crawling out a myrtle-covered demolished truck in Myrtlesville. I have a cut on my chin that's smaller and less bloody than a minor shaving cut and that's the extent of my observable injuries. I'm pretty damned lucky I suppose, but at the moment rejoicing is not on the menu. (Always wear your seatbelts.)
Gary Valjean asks "You want us to call 911 for ya? You need an ambulance?" His buddy quickly adds "Have you been drankin'? If you have we'll wait a while 'fore we call the sher'ff". (Southern hospitality is dying, but it is quite real and thorough.) I tell them I'm sober and to go ahead and call. I want to walk around for a second to calm down. About this time the old lady in whose yard I've landed, who has watched the entire accident, who has seen me climb out of the passenger window and walk around a few steps, asks the logical question:
"Is he day-id*?" (*dead)
She's completely serious.
Thought: Yas'm, I'm day-id… but 33 year old library school students in trucks are kinda like those chickens get they hay-ids cut off. The nerve endin's last just long enough to get us out the truck but I'm a goner now and oughta be droppin' on your lawn any second. Either that or the Rapture has started. Why don'tcha go down ter the cemetery see if your dearly departed have got up or if those Freedom Riders who disappeared in the 60s are wandering around the landfill…
Said: “No ma'am, I think I'm okay.”
Old Woman in Whose Yard I Had Landed (later identified as Miss Luverne): "I seen you run over that tahr" . (Tahr is Myrtlesvillian for tire, hereinafter spelled tire but pronounced “tahr”.) “I seen that tire come off a lawg truck earlier in the day. Said to myself then 'that's gonna cause somebody 'have a wreck. I sure said that."
"Did I run over a tire?" I ask aloud, because it's all happened so fast I don't really know what's happened.
"Yep," says Jean Valjean, "there was a lawg truck tire in the road over yonder and you run right over it."
"M-hmm. It's been out there in the road since about 4:30, 5:30 this atternoon," says the non Valjean. "I 'uz afraid somebody was gonna go run over it. Ain' you sure did…"
Sounds of an old giant pickup pulling into the lawn and stopping, its headlights visible from space and left on when its one-armed old owner, who still manages to smoke and chew tobacco at the same time, gets out. " Gary… hiya doin'… whoever drivin' that make it?"
"Yessir…" either I or somebody says (I get us confused).
"Good. Goood. Bet he run over that tire diddun' he?"
Me: Yessssss….
"Mmmmmm-hm. Me and Tyler Ann, we seen that thang in the road this atternoon. Said, somebody gone have a wreck if they hit that thang… mm.mm.mm…"
Tiny towns around the county are depopulated as their entire populations quickly begin to fill Miss Luverne's yard. "Luther Nell and Clovis told Sheila Ed and Bobby that Sonny saw a truck turned over up in here… and yep there it is.” The CBs and bongos ring out and the villagers get Big Mee-maw out of the attic and head on over. A couple of trucks stop by the yard just long enough to yell out "Anybody kilt?", then speeding off disappointed when answered with negative reinforcement, their hopes of videotaping the wreckage for inclusion in AMERICA'S FUNNIEST TRAFFIC FATALITIES once again dashed. Most, however, stop, park, get out of their car, and look at the truck, agreeing "you can still smail the new in this truck!" There haven't been this many people in one place on this highway since the Great Northern Civil Right's Worker Sighting of '62. Even the man from the Rest Area shows up. All of them forming an impromptu recital of the Myrtlesville Southern Baptist Greek Chorus and taking turns as choragus.
CHORAGOS: I seen the tire…layin' in the road…
CHORUS: Said, somebody's gonna have a wreck. Shore did… [strophe]
I'm stunned from the wreck and more stunned from the fact that more people saw this goddamned tire in the road than saw the Zapruder film and a question formed in my mind… let's see now, what was the question that formed… oh yeah, I remember…
WELL WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T YOU MOVE IT?!
I think, these are the ancestors of the Eloi! The people in THE TIME MACHINE who are so calm and serene and peaceful but watch with tame disinterest as one of their own falls into the river and starts to drown. What the hell is their justification for not moving something that anybody could see?
CHORUS: 'is gonna cause somebody 'have a wreck…[anti-strophe]
Reconstructed conversation based on purely speculative theory:
Gilroy: Well I ain't movin' it. The Lord obvious wanted it there. Jimmy Titus: That ain't my road, ain't my tire, don't sees how it's my bidness… Willie Hank: That road's state property, that tire's lumber comp'ny property… I ain't gonna be called a'thievin' it. I ain't goin' back to jail for nobody!
I don't say anything, of course, because… well, I'm standing in a yard surrounded by a dozen or three Eloi hillbillies without a way out of there. Pissing them off would not be a good idea. And then there are the less than dulcet Sounds of Silence, which can always be dangerous in large groups of people in rural Alabama. Then one of them has an idea.
"We can turn that truck back over for ya if you wan' us too…"
Massive agreement. “Oh yeah… “ “We could do that easy like…” “we could have it back upright in two pulls of a goat’s tit!” “…bet you could drive it on outta here for the sher’ff and wrecker even get here… save ya’sef some paperwork and money!” “Bob, don’tcha think me and you and Lemay could git that thang righted?”
I decline… very politely… because I don't know if the truck needs to be in its original position when the sheriff comes to make the accident report or if it could somehow void the insurance coverage or if it won't do more harm than good. I've hurt them, I know.
Then the sheriff arrives.
I never caught his name, but in my mind he's Sheriff Fred Earl Cliché, for he is the incarnate cliché of every southern sheriff ever shown in a movie. In fact, if I'd seen him in a movie, in which he'd have been played by Gailard Sartain or John Goodman or Joe Don Baker, I'd have been furious that once again Hollywood was stooping to stereotypes of southerners, but sometimes you have to remember why stereotypes exist in the first place. Sheriff Cliché is middle aged, has a massive gut that pokes through his tan uniform, is wearing mirrored sunglasses… at night (his deputy is driving), and so help me God I am not embellishing when I mention that he was chewing a piece of straw. He assays the scene and says (I swear on my holiest oath, which is something close to 'May I live to be a very very old man and spend every minute of it in Myrtlesville' that he said this):
"Truck turn over?"
Sheriff think good. There comes a time in every man’s life when he simply must steal a line from Bill Engvall, and this was mine: HERE'S YOUR SIGN! No sheriff, the truck stayed still, but the world turned sideways.
Sheriff Cliché walks to the truck with a flashlight. "Damn… you can smell the new in this thang… lessee, you got wunnnnnnn….two… two flat tahrs… what blew 'em out, reckon?"
"I ran over a log truck tire in the road…"
CHORUS: "We saw the tire in the road…[strophe]…said that's gonna cause a wreck [antistrophe]
The sheriff’s light continues to scan the undercarriage as somebody calls out, “Sher’f, take that light back to the driveshaft…” and when he does there’s a collective “Ahhhh.” There’s a dodgeball-sized ball of steel wire from the nation’s most viewed blown tire wrapped around said driveshaft. "Looka there wouldja!" "Steel wahr from that tahr done locked up the shaft…"
"…that right there's what caused him ta turn over, betcha anythang…"
"That's what I call some bad ass damage"
The Sheriff is very obviously very self-satisfied at having solved the "crime" and is ready to share his wisdom. Stranger still, the throng is ready to listen.
"Y’all know, that there steel tahr wahr is bout the strongest stuff on Earth? You ain't gonna believe this, but you caint' cut through that shit with a hack-saw! And I ain't just sayin' that. I tried it once! Sure did. That wahr is stronger than a hack saw…"
[This was when the tuba started]
Tuba: Bom/bom/bom/bom/bom/
CHORUS (loud musical stage whisper): Hack-saw…
Tuba: BOM/ BOM/ BOM/ BOM…
CHORUS (loud musical stage whisper): Hack-saw…
Tuba: BOM BOM/ BOM/ BOM…
Tuba/Chorus together: Hack-Saw/bom bom bom/Hack-saw…stronger than a hack-saw!
Sheriff: Cain't cut it wid a
CHORUS: Hack Saw!
Sheriff: Wire's stronger than a
CHORUS: Hacksaw! Hacksaw!
SHERIFF: Now me an' my two boys we took an ol' tahr
Back into our barn and we pulled out the wahr
Aw, we was able to gut it
But then we couldn't cut it wid a…
CHORUS: Hacksaw! Hacksaw!
SHERIFF: We sawed and we sawed but I say by the Lawd
That stuff wouldn't budge, my hand raised to Gawd!
Now you can b'lieve me if you wanna
But tell you still I'm gonna… you cain't cut it with a
CHORUS: Hacksaw! Hacksaw!
SHERIFF: I tried it before, won't try it ag'in
Cause it's futile I tell ya, gimme a big Amen!
CHORUS: AMEN!
SHERIFF: That steel cable wahr
Just gonna stay thahr
Cause you cain't cut it with a
CHORUS: Hacksaw!
SHERIFF: Did someone say a…
CHORUS: Hacksaw !
SHERIFF: Sher'ff Fred Earl took a…
CHORUS: HACKSAW! HACKSAW! HACKSAW!
The Highway is closed as the vehicle lights turn on bright and the entire highway becomes a stage for the MYRTLESVILLE SOUTHERN BAPTIST GREEK CHORUS CLOGGERS and their rousing but too long and too choreographed salute. Fred Earl's kick turns and splits are amazing for his girth and who knew that a bagpipe could be that spirited and just when you can take no more of the musical orgy…
SHERIFF: Cain't cut it with a hacksaw!
CHORUS: Sher'ff Fred Earl took a hacksaw!
SHERIFF//ALL (arms raised and on their knees):
HACKSAW!l
Miss Luverne: I said that's gonna cause a wreck!
HACKSAW!l HACKSAW!l
[End Number]
Oh alright, I made the tuba and the musical interlude up.
But not the part about the hacksaw. If that flatulent old cliché said "cain't cut it with a hacksaw" once, he said it eighteen times, not at all minding repeating himself when new arrivals came out. Then, he got out his binder and said "Guess I gotta make out a ree-port... goll-damn but I hate writin'..."
I'm terrified for a moment that he'll only have the forms for accidents involving fatalities and I'll end up with a .44 slug in my chest and 22 witnesses who swear I was driving the truck that way, but it goes smoothly. Of course the next thing out of the Sheriff's mouth is... "Aw hell, I'll just git the info and do this later. How bout we turn that truck over for ya?"
This is met with an enthusiastic CHORUS of
"Yeah!!...”
“We can shore nuff do it!”
“...bet you can drive it on outta heah!”
“Is he day-id?"
“Save you some money!”
So I decide, Fine, let them have their team-builder. Half of the county and myself bring the bed of my truck (like a barricade due to its angle... I half expected Gary to start singing "Bring him home..." or ideally hold it on his back like a runaway cart) whilst the sherifff attempts to choreograph. "Y'all push it over on my say, count o' three! ONE... two..."
"WAIT! WAIT!" cries out one of the women watching. "Carl's underneath the truck!"
Carl had gone to take a closer look at the Gordian Wah'r around the drive shaft. What series of synaptic ricochets had convinced him that the gathering of villagers to push the truck over would be a good time to look at the drive shaft I can't guess at, but I'm hoping that Carl isn't the night manager of the MYRTLESVILLE SUBATOMIC PARTICLE ACCELERATION PLANT (a subsidiary of 'FAT GIRL'S CHIKKEN AND BISKITS').
Carl removed, the truck is pushed back down, and they're right. The driver's side is smashed to hell and gone of course, two tires are blown out, the window's are broken, and there’s still a dodge ball size mass of wire wrapped around the driveshaft, but otherwise it's drivable. Their fun now had, the villagers depart. I'm still waiting for the wrecker as the sheriff sits in the passenger seat of his car, either working on his reports or perhaps trying to make a Power Point presentation on showing what that steel wahr did when he took the hack-saw to it. Gary and his buddy talked about how nice it was not to be standing waist high in the swamp or worrying about snakes, cause as truck crashes go this is one of their mild ones and they didn't have to go into the swamp that's just half a mile down one side of the road or the kudzu field half a mile down the other. "Fact, I reckon Miss Luverne's yard's bout the best place in Myrtlesville to turn your truck over." I'll contact AAA and have them recommend it, thanks.
A state trooper arrives, not so much because he's needed as because he just happens to see the sheriff's light going, but no sooner has he pulled his car into the yard than an 18-wheeler decides to pass three cars in a no-passing lane while the only light in the county is a blue sheriff's light. "HAW HAW! Somebody's gonna get theyselves a diss-tinguished drivin' award!" says Gary's bud while Fred Earl says "Shit! That shoulda been mine..." but otherwise all is well.
All in all, it could have been worse, but not to have happened at all would have been better yet. Of course there's also "The Wrecker's Tale" (he did have one, but that's another story) and the "Chevy Apocalypse Tale" that are tangential, but the moral is wear your seat belt. And take a carton of cigarettes next time you go up the road to any Colm Wilkinson lookalike who pulls you out your passenger window. And don't drink and drive, but if you do let them know to wait a few minutes before calling 911, but above all things to thine own self be true and you can't cut steel wire with a hacksaw.
Actually, yes you can.
I later tried it.
It was disappointingly easy.