Catch Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary podcast: https://youtu.be/RVzcElHfeeA

or read the transcript below:

BEYOND THE GROVE OF THE DOLLS

 Within the dusty attic of my mind reside Deep South Gothic memories that occasionally arise and remind me that regardless of how many times The Stories tell themselves to you, they are never quite finished. For every story told, there is always The Next Day, and what happened The Next Day.

Here’s a true story that will never be completed. Fortunately, the human imagination, each human imagination touched by this story, will unwillingly carry forth the tale and conjure up possible Next Day scenarios. That’s part of the fun of storytelling.

Here’s a true and actual tale hidden in my Red Clay Diary many years ago. It reappears in my dusty mind every decade or so.

ONCE UPON A TIME OR TWO… 

 Downtown Birmingham is the Tether.

You can enjoy being Downtown or you can enjoy returning to Downtown. Just take a trip 50 miles thataway or 50 miles the other way, then return to the City. This is about the time I went thataway…and was so glad to return safely—though altered.

The life-size mannequins inside the old tin shed are all tangled together in a silent and stifled orgy of lacquered intimacy.

There are mannequins fully dressed and carefully made up and there are mannequins old and weathered and strangely still youthful.

There are glowy-eyed mannequins staring into whatever comes before them but never changing the direction of the stare, prisoners frozen and sentenced to observe only that which presents itself to their direct gazes and steely peripheral visions.

There are male mannequins with sculpted hair and female mannequins with flared nostrils and delicate hands, there are mannequin heads and arms and legs and feet and torsos both dancing and as still as stones at rest in the countryside heat. And there are mannequins swinging from rafters and peeking from large pails, and next door there is another metal-roofed building with yet more mannequins and their neighbors.

The little town of Shady Grove, Alabama has no idea that these mannequins and body parts are living, never alive, in its midst. And no-one knows, either, that surrounding these mannequins are big reels of full-length movies and newsreels and ”shorts” and previews (trailers) and documentaries and cartoons, all in their original canisters, all in their original formats, 35-millimeter, 16-millimeter, 8-millimeter, and photographic slides and transparencies, and, should you yearn to see one of these features, there are dozens and dozens of movie projectors and screens from every era—silent-movie hand-cranked projectors before the time of universal electricity, wide-screen movies before the time of TV-eating-up-the-world, military projectors designed to withstand V-2 or Scud Missile attacks, and projectors that were once handled by teenagers in high school science classes, and projectors that once had been operated in real movie theatres by real union-member projectionists.

The man who has coveted, stored, squirreled away and gathered all this mass of inert motion picture paraphernalia and this city of mannequins has also taken care to hoard hundreds of belts, projector bulbs, gears and sprocket-repairers, film editors and cutters and splicers and tapers, just in case the end of all other repair sources occurs during his lifetime.

And now, he is showing me his lifetime stash—which also includes a live nightmarish dog who barks perpetually day and night, never stopping, each bark accompanied by a three-foot leap into the air in a vain attempt to escape his fenced confines and energize all those mannequins—a truly possessed dog whose owners haven’t a clue.

Next to the sheds and shacks in the buggy country air are ten-foot-high stacks of very old grey and weathered mahogany boards that their owner has gathered from companies no longer needing them, and there is an old automobile splayed open to the world with wires running from under its hood into goodness knows what.

Inside his home, the man complains about the paper-thin ceilings that someone has spray-covered and which are now falling in from boredom and weariness, and his wife hides somewhere behind all his collectible mania, never presenting herself—a Gothic world that really exists if you go a few miles outside where you live now. A world not to be made fun of, since our world is just as offbeat and inaccessible to them as theirs is to us.

Maybe I’ll go back and visit this village of non-living comrades who in a way seem more alive than you and I and who certainly get along with each other better than you and I and who unlike you and I are totally accepting of their keepers—the insane leaping dog and the movie-mahogany-mannequin collector who is beginning to worry about what will happen to all his adoptees when he has become as lifeless-yet-attentive as they

Catch Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary podcast: https://youtu.be/ZjdTaesAaeI

or read his transcript:

THE RISE OF THE DRINK MACHINES AND OTHER DISREGARDABLES

Regarding the disregarded is my job as a writer, my task as a teller of stories.

It’s easy to notice the obvious. There are plenty of other folks whose job that is.

But paying attention to the invisible, looking between the cracks, examining the interstices, walking backward in a forward-motion crowd, even describing things so obvious that they’ve become obscure…that’s my job.

1. The looming electronic soft-drink machine flashes its message: EXACT CHANGE ONLY. Only, what the exact change should be is not posted, leaving the caffeine addict no choice but to pour money in until something—or nothing—happens.

2.  The parking meter asks for quarters, but nothing happens when a quarter is inserted, leaving the visitor no choice but to pour more quarters in, just in case this magically fixes the problem.

3.  The flashing yellow light at a busy intersection totally confounds most motorists. Does yellow mean stop, does it mean speed up, does it act as a four-way stop, does the other driver know the same set of rules that you know? Most of us simply look both ways, make a wish and take the Acceleration of Faith, hoping that irresistible objects don’t suddenly meet and mess with the laws of physics. Either way, the light never stops communicating its uncommunicative message: YELLOWFLASH YELLOWFLASH YELLOWFLASH

4.  The elevator light doesn’t come on when you punch it, leaving you no choice but to punch it again and again, just in case it didn’t get the message the first time. Then, another pedestrian arrives and starts punching, too. The elevator disregards us all and operates exactly as it is designed to. It’s the elevator’s world. We just live in it. And obey.

5.  The fast-food clerk has done her job so many times, she no longer feels the need to speak. Her economy of movement dictates that she simply sit there staring at me, slightly raising an eyebrow as if to say, “Come on, speak up. I don’t have all day.” I am amused and decide to play the game. I stare silently at her and raise an eyebrow, too. She doesn’t respond. Finally, I say, “Welcome to FastFoodHeaven, may I take your order, please?” She snaps out of her contempt, acts confused, then decides to take my order. Afterward she returns to her stupor. She never knows what just happened.

6.  The city employees I most admire are the trash and garbage collectors. They do their jobs like clockwork, exposing themselves to every manner of germ and fragrance and dangerous object, come rain, drought, storm or darkness. They cannot possibly be paid enough, and certainly should receive higher salaries than city leaders…maybe about as much as surgeons. The only thing I have to do as a citizen is mind their rules, which are sometimes obscure. I obey because I don’t want them to fail to pick up my detritus.

Regarding the disregardable is a gift and a curse. Disregarding the all-too-obvious is next best. Forgetting the unforgettable, always remembering the forgettable…that’s what we storytellers do. I hope we have your sympathy…even if we don’t, we still have one shared secret that keeps us going:

This kind of life is sooo entertaining.

Get yourself a pencil and you can live it, too

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE

Hear Jim’s Red Clay diary podcast: https://youtu.be/eYJLRoTvV5c

or read the transcript below:

THUD MACTHUD AND THE SEAT-YOURSELF BARROOM 

Thud mac thud thud boom…thud mac thud thud boom…thud mac thud thud boom…

The foyer of the downtown barroom enfolds me with deep, resounding, rhythmic percussion. As I enter the darkened neon-lit drinkery-eatery, I embrace an atmosphere totally different from the hustled street outside.

I await folks who plan to have dinner with me, so it seems only right to purchase a Diet Coke at the bar and take a seat near the front. The music is contagious.

Thud mac thud thud boom…thud mac thud thud boom…thud mac thud thud boom…

I focus my people-watching senses and enjoy the spectacle.

Newcomers enter and look around, disoriented and ready for a new adventure. Regulars enter and grab a menu from the metal stand inside the doorway and head to the back to find booth or table. Couples appear, smiling and hopeful of romance and chat.

The bartender greets customers, takes orders with his finger-activated screen, and transmits data to cooks and servers.

Thud mac thud thud boom…thud mac thud thud boom…thud mac thud thud boom…

I am still waiting for my companions, so my time is spent sipping beverage and taking notes on a Mister Rogers Neighborhood sticky-note pad. Mister Rogers grins his approval.

Diners and imbibers are relaxed and ready to loosen up in this Friday night after-work venue, their youth and vitality all aglow, their momentary assurance of pleasure and immortality thus far unbroken.

Thud mac thud thud boom…thud mac thud thud boom…thud mac thud thud boom…

If I were an habitue of this sort of establishment, if I were fifty years younger and filled with ignorance of consequences, I might meet someone here and spend an hour philosophizing and flirting. I might change my name to Thud MacThud…doesn’t that sound cool? “Hi, my name is MacThud…Thud MacThud,” in my best Sean Connery voice.

Just a moment of lapse. Back to the present.

Thud mac thud thud boom…thud mac thud thud boom…thud mac thud thud boom…

As usual, my brief time at an isolated table atop a backless stool in a neon-world barroom is the funnest part of the evening. I don’t even need to meet and eat. What I take away is a fine memory of a fine few minutes at a sociable hot spot within a percussive dream in a lively nighttime town near the center of the universe.

I tip the bartender and stroll back to the shop, the shop that is indeed the center of my workday universe. I drive home to the second center (yes, the universe has many centers, and you are one of them) and have a pleasant time conversing with my wonderful soul mate.

Just another Friday night in a Friday night town in Deep South Alabama

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE

Hear Jim’s Red Clay diary: https://youtu.be/jLT44ssjn0Y

or read his transcript below:

DIGGING DEEP FOR THE PRIZE OF PRIZES

I’m five years old when I become aware that my right hand has become invisible.

Here I am, back in childhood’s Tuscaloosa, living high, enjoying playtime and neighborhood play pals and imaginary adventures. Unaware that someday all this playground fun will be camouflaged by the duties and expectations of adult life.

Right now, I am small and full of curiosity and energy. No responsibilities beyond household chores. No worries, because parents will take care of me, parents will shoulder all the pain and duty.

My right hand is stuck deep inside a box of Cracker Jacks, my fingers wiggling about. Impatient, I want to dig down for the prize that I know is hiding beneath all those caramelized popped kernels. The prize comes first. Then the appreciation and examination of the prize.

My right hand appears again when I pull it out of the box, prizeless and covered with sticky. Dang! I rotate the box and dig in again, stopping first to eat the best part of a Cracker Jack box, the crunchy peanut that occasionally makes an appearance.

My finger touches something hard and metallic. Prize found! Treasure discovered! What will it be?

I slowly pull forth the unknown object of my obsession, popcorn scattering about me.

It is a small metal airplane, complete with propellers you can spin, complete with the permanence that only cast iron can provide. This aircraft will last a lifetime or two!

I sit on the bottom step of the front porch gazing at the day’s Cracker Jack prize that is now perched on my bare knee. I clutch the box to my tiny chest and slowly savor the crunchy goodies within. I look for a second peanut. This is a good day.

Will there ever again be such a wonderful day?

My imagination extends as far as my right hand. This is the best day of my life so far

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE

Here Jim’s Red Clay Diary podcast: https://youtu.be/SDSC5j7glWI

or read the transcript below:

FROM GRUNTY TO NERDY AND BACK AGAIN

Sweeping up and straightening and cleaning.

Those are my summer tasks here at the Tuscaloosa YMCA in the late 1950s.

For this dusty work I receive a few dollars from the Y executive director.

With those few dollars I head for Lustig’s bookstore nearby and spend an hour roaming the aisles and inhaling the knowledge and humor and danger and romance dormant within multi-colored multi-shaped volumes.

These few days in the old Victorian house that shelters the Y provide my first experience in earning non-allowance non-school-lunch-money income. It is also a way to pay my way for an upcoming Hi-Y field trip.

As I walk home, saving bus money for more book purchases, pockets jingle with fresh income I can call my own. Previous entrepreneurial efforts have been terrifying and discouraging. Trying to sell greeting cards door to door is not for me. Who or what hides behind those doors I’m supposed to knock on? Cold calling , I learn, is way too scary to ever attempt again.

Next day after school, I cross fifteenth street and head for Parkview Drugs, where unspent lunch money and bus fare allow me to buy books from rotating squeaky metal racks. I will forever associate that sound with exciting literature and forbidden titles.

After the Y job, my working career lies fallow until the next summer, when I am employed as a day-laborer at a government housing construction project in Warrior, Alabama. Six weeks of sunburn and heat rash and heavy lifting bring me even more income. But those six weeks teach me that, like cold calling, grunt labor is not something that will ever satisfy me. I gain a new and unexpected education from co-workers. I learn a lot of cuss words and folklore, too. It is a vivid experience that still influences my writing and my journey through life.

The following summer brings me my bliss and sets my course.

At the age of seventeen I become an on-air personality at the public radio station in Tuscaloosa. More money, more jingle in my pockets, more books. Mainly, more experience that I, as a nerdy youngster, can appreciate and feel at home with. This later turns into a career in television.

There are other careers later on, but they turn out to be mistaken choices…until, one day, I begin to buy and sell old books for a living, writing a few books along the way. And, forty years later, I am still at it.

Many decades later, looking back with joy and horror at those and many other jobs, I can pick and choose…pick and choose which careers were ripe for me, right for me…which careers I should have avoided.

Should groundhog day ever occur, should I ever be allowed to do it all over again, I know exactly what I will pick this time as the best career of all best careers.

But that’s another story for another time

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE

Listen to Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary on youtube: https://youtu.be/SvXqgomWH88

or read the correct transcript below:

THE RANTS OF THE LANKY DEEP FROWN MAN

The mouth of the lanky Deep Frown Man is barely moving as his words issue forth from between clinched teeth. He’s pecking around within my bookshop, looking for things to rant about, his rantings deeply concretized and often repeated, rants he is clinging to in order to make some sense of his minuscule world.

My mind deflects the Deep Frown Man’s utterances, since I really do not know how to treat his pain.

He sends out probes to my blissful bubble, hoping to get a predictable response, a response that will allow him entry to my political depths, my tribal beliefs. He wants so much to show me how right he is and how wrong I am and how much of an ally I could become if only I would subscribe to his tract.

I quietly and rather merrily go about the business of assisting customers and shelving books, confident that this man will eventually leave and that peace will salve the atmosphere, and that nearby browsers can breathe a sign of relief and continue their gentle cruise.

The Deep Frown Man and others like him add an edge to the shop, but the fights they attempt to initiate are simply not there. It is not within me to punch back. It is not within me to counter his rants with facts or counterintelligence. Would not have any effect anyhow, don’t you know?

In a world of my own making, people like the Deep Frown Man would have a way to congregate and hear each other out. They would not have to go forth into the random world and try to force-feed folks who have no inclination to be force-fed.

Yes, I know that the Internet is the enormous palette upon which ranters can meet and greet…but this in no way affects the generation of Deep Frowners who have not embraced the Internet age, who don’t own a computer, who are not willing to learn more than they already know. So they are left to wander the earth, bringing their angry sadnesses to the rest of us through their non-virtual presence.

The Deep Frown People are fascinating, worth writing about, worthy of our examination in writings such as the one you are now reading.

I just wish they could find some peace and hope in listening to the rants of people who feel and believe differently. Wish they could embrace us, hear us out, allow us to hear them out minus the proselytizing, minus the intolerance they carry against anything opposed to their views.

Oh, well, I was raised to really look at people and try to appreciate the eternal children they carry inside themselves.

After all, what good is a day in which I, too, turn into a Deep Frown Man?

What good is any day if it is not predominantly a period of time in which I can seek to love unconditionally someone who is not at all lovable

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE

Hear Jim’s Red Clay Diary podcast: https://youtu.be/mhE9ga0QCnA

or read his transcript:

FINE CHINA FACE

 Once upon a time or two, way back when, my happy day at the shop is interrupted by the entrance of a customer from some far-away harsh place. She seems so lonely and isolated. I have to take note. I have to record her presence in case I never see her again, in case you never have a chance to meet her…

Her face is like fine china, only it is more like old china, the pale white nearly transparent china that looks as if it would break into a million pieces should you drop it .

Her face looks like brittle pale white china that has indeed incurred stress fractures throughout its surface. Tiny dark lines run delicately about, some parallel, some crossing, some ending abruptly. Like those tiny thin lines that a fortune teller will pay close attention to in the palm of an old withered hand.

She walks steadfastly into the shop. Her gait is the gait of a young woman. Her body is the body of a young woman.

But her face. Oh, her face.

Her face, though obviously young, has been stress-fractured like fine old china, and she is holding that face stiff and straight as if she knows for certain that the act of smiling or even of frowning will cause a million-pieced shattering.

Her face seems frozen into this image that her mind extrudes through her pores, and now she might never smile again, lest she become tiny sparkling flak whirlpooling itself to the impersonal ground where it can never be assembled again in just the same way, the way it once started out.

And so she keeps the expression and holds together the fine piece of china that she is. She is intent upon making it through the day. Or making it through the events that have caused her to decide to stay in one expression, regardless, till something better or something worse comes along.

The fine china woman is just one beautiful solitude on one beautiful day at the shop. She will be followed by other beautiful solitudes as the day goes by. She deserves my attention and your attention. What kindnesses may come from us when we notice? What kindnesses do these beautiful solitudes deserve? What kindnesses will they never experience should you and I fail to heed their deserving presence?

It’s another beautiful day in Mr. Reed’s neighborhood

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE

Hear Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary podcast: https://youtu.be/2ZTeRjC3PU8

or read transcript below:

HOW TO THROW A PUNCH

I am lying flat on my back, staring up at off-stage theatrical trappings just out of sight of an audience. This is a theatre and I am an amateur actor, way back in the 1950s.

I lie on the hardwood floor because I am dead, killed by the pen of dramatist Maxwell Anderson.

I perform as well as I can, making sure that the rapt crowd really believes for a suspended moment that I am no longer alive. This means that breathing must be shallow and non-apparent. Eyelids must not flutter. Mouth must be slack. Giggling must not occur.

Being slain in a play is kind of fun. You get to pretend someone else’s life while hiding your actual life from view. And being dead is great. The audience cannot remove its attention from you, even though the living characters continue the scene. Not only do you get lots of attention, but there are no memorized lines to be remembered, to be spoken.

Once you as a character in a play have done your dramatic dying, it’s all over. You can rest backstage later while everybody else continues working. You stick around for curtain call because that’s when the applause will rise in concert with your bow. By the end of the play, audience members will have forgotten what your role is, but they will remember that you fought and died a violent death right in front of them.

But back to the scene. This is one of those performances without curtains. The audience gets to watch the actors leave the stage and the scene-changers re-arrange the props.

At this point in such a production, suspended disbelief breaks through the fourth wall and the audience gasps as the corpse—me—suddenly rises quickly and leaves the stage.

Later on, the play is successfully concluded and we actors get to mingle with instant fans.

One woman singles me out and gushes, “Oh, you were so graceful in that scene.” I just listen because graceful is not a word that has ever been applied to me.

“The way you fell to the floor, how did you manage not to get hurt.?” she does go on. “And suddenly you get up and become alive again!” She furrows her brow and asks intensely, “How do you do that?”

I am too young to come up with sage answers, so I just thank her, sign her program, and continue milling about until cast and crew are ready to pack up and travel to the next town, the next performance, the next dying scene.

When even younger, we playground kids call this play-acting. It is improvised but it is pretty much the same thing I am doing on stages. The difference is, the audience actually believes the story for bit.

In another play, I as a character get to punch another actor. This time, he is the body on the floor for a minute. Of course the punch is fake—you get to learn how to do this in rehearsals and acting classes—but some viewers actually believe it. After this performance, a fan asks me whether I am a trained athlete. I  haven’t the heart to tell her I am a practicing wimp and cannot, in real life, throw a punch or defend myself against one. I just play-act.

Decades later—right now, for instance—I am still haunted by people who believe I am someone I am not and can never be. But I also have these wonderful warm memories of being, just for an instant each time, a jock or an action hero or a resurrected body. And I can go back on my worst days and reminisce about all those people I could be.

And I am really grateful for the fact that no matter how wild and improbable those fictitious folks are, I can still bask in being me. The me who secretly re-visits the other me’s that no-one else can see

©  by Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

WEBSITE

Hear Jim’s Red Clay Diary podcast: http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/tombstonemist.mp3

or read his transcript below:

Way back in time, some several decades ago,

I am grabbing lunch at a nearby diner.

Suddenly I see a lone figure…and I realize that this person

is who I will someday become.

Today, it has all come true. I am now that man.

This is my entry into the Red Clay Diary from those many years ago…

TOMBSTONE MIST (A True Time Travel Tale)

An old, stooped man walks gingerly down the street holding his lunchtime book under his arm and heading for the sandwich place he’s been eating at lo these many years.

     His friends now long dead but not forgotten, he dines alone and peers deeply into his book for signs of life beyond his life, for indications of what will happen once he has become a mist over a tombstone.

     He eats quietly while noisy and harried fellow diners hassle over their individual lives and talk and signify among themselves.

     He turns another page in the musty volume and there lies, flatly pressed and nearly ossified, a long-stemmed green four-leaf clover. A symbol stuck there many decades back by someone who had feelings thoughts aspirations and longings, a person who believed if only for a moment that luck would somehow be mummified and preserved and passed on from reader to reader as long as the book lasted as long as the clover endured.

     He smiles to himself, for no one else is looking at him.

     He briefly picks up the botanical artifact and sniffs it, then carefully places it back onto the page and neatly turns the next page over it, being careful not to fold or harm it.

     He strolls back to his shop, a little less stooped so that nobody but he himself can tell, and he re-enters his quiet place of business and spends the afternoon dreaming of what never could have been and wondering what the young woman who had owned the book and the four-leaf clover had been like and whether she too was a mist over a tombstone awaiting contact with the mist he will become

© 2020 A.D. by Jim Reed