Inheritance of Images

Keeping a journal during all those dark days gave me an outlet, a foundation, something to grab and weather the everyday changes that shaped everything. It was a time of life folding back in on itself, the view from the hospital window of the old neighborhood, the history there, where even Jennifer lived as a child, and the history of the hospital itself, where I was born, where family members had died. Life repeating familiar patterns and doing the best to make memory make some sense of it all—and both memory and events co-existing in the now, both alive and in a dance as one.

   Growing up in Mississippi, my father farms with his father and fights with his brothers, spends money his mother complains about building an automobile from the parts of many, maybe even spending money on film packs for a No. 2 Film Pack Hawk-Eye Camera. Bought for $25, it includes a shoulder strap and leather case and comes loaded with enough film for 100 exposures. When all the exposures are taken, someone, Grandparents or my father or his brothers, Duvaw, Dulith, Kellon, mails the entire camera to Rochester, New York, along with $10 to cover the cost of the new roll of film. Those huge negatives are still stored in the suitcase—some showing Great Grandfather Elijah Cothern, posing with his fiddle, another of the Brister boys, my Grandmother’s brothers, seated outside in a row of chairs, looking uncannily like the Dalton Gang, another one of Great Grandmother Sarah, one arm missing, sitting under a huge pecan tree—a stringy-haired dog blurring as he trots by behind her chair.

   An inheritance of images still piled haphazardly in the suitcase with worn corners. Surely one day the roaches will chew their way into the hoard of negatives and photographs and nest next to those images of grays and stark whites and blacks like smudges of charcoal. All those photographs whose tones have faded like a pile of slippery fish losing their color in an ice chest, still stored in that suitcase like random statements, no doubt curling from the heat, needing to be flattened and then straightened in order of exposure like facts in a story.

Pensacola Beach



   Each morning I put up a blue umbrella in the cool white sand before allowing myself a tomato beer. The dampness of my shirt and swimming suit dries as I watch the slow arrival of the people and the red and yellow and pink and green of t-shirts and bathing suits and towels dotting sand and the blue of the Gulf.

   I take photographs as I drink a second tomato beer and continue watching the growing activity on the beach. The old couple from Omaha. The family of rednecks—men who take off shoes and shirts to reveal muscular beer bellies like barrels—their women in one-piece suits with ruffled material from waist to thighs, like fat legs behind a table cloth. They have umbrellas but no chairs, preferring to sit close mornings and evenings on one quilt like massive seals on a rock. Occasionally one or two of the men walk to the edge of the surf like sentries guarding the women. A couple from Louisiana with their young daughter plant their patio umbrella, the white fringe waving in the constant breeze like plastic flags at a car dealership. I drink beer and watch them, the pink of their umbrella joining my own blue one and the gold of the ones from the Hotel Point Breeze. Brightly colored sea mushrooms against blue sky and deeper blue and green of the Gulf.

   The girls on the beach are incredible.

   Long, tall, tanned, hair sun-bleached, most unaware of being photographed.  While thinking about the girls/women I have known, the distinct pictures of each one, moments stilled like photographs caught forever in my mind, the 300mm lens is capturing only framed portions: beads of sweat on upper lips and white grains of sand sticking to long painted fingernails or the brim of a hat shielding a face or the slope of a dark shoulder.

Kadair's

  Below the hospital window, a short block away on the west side of Bernardo Street, on the corner of Park Hills Drive and Florida Boulevard sits the old Kadair's Camera & Records building where many of the photographs in the suitcase were developed. Forty years ago, it is the place to flip through albums of Broadway shows, Slaughter on 10th Avenue with a man posed, knees bent, one arm above his head, the other out to a dark-haired woman doing a dance split on the floor, her short black skirt bunched up around her legs. Stand and peer into glass cases at 35mm cameras with lenses pointing back at you, 8mm movie cameras with windup cranks on the side, the mysterious early Polaroid Land Camera ready to pop up and spit out instant images.

  Kadair's is part of a string of businesses along Florida Boulevard, a few blocks from the sign at South Acadian and Florida that reads:

You Are Now

Entering

Florida Boulevard's

Vibrant & Dynamic

Business District!

  Big deal. Ten blocks of squatty buildings stretching to North Foster. Beyond that there are few businesses until later, in the late 1950's, early 60's. Sears Roebuck moves from downtown to further out Florida, then the Bon Marche Shopping Center is built, considered classy but is nothing more than a large strip shopping center. Much later, further out Florida, another shopping center is constructed, this time an honest-to-goodness mall. Kadair's opens a branch store there, at Cortana Mall, and it is there in the 1970's, when the girls are young, the marriage between Dee and myself still fresh, that I go to work selling cameras for the Kadair family, for Howard Kadair, the kid working behind the counter at the original store while I pursue albums and drool over the glass camera cases.

  Looking back, our work ethic reflects the times, when so much of the 1960's still bleeds over into a laissez-faire attitude of the early 70's, a let's-party-because-the-bomb's-still-out-there syndrome. All of us at Kadair's in Cortana are young, some married, most finishing up at LSU, and we don't take shit off of anybody--especially customers who want a 35mm camera but don't know from Instamatic crap. If they are rude, we are also. If nice, hey, we wait on them. When the weather is bad--tornados buzzing about, hurricanes on the coast--the mall is home to real trailer types (as Sarah Reed calls them), folks who know the value of getting out of their tin foil homes, strolling around with fried chicken legs while the storm rages overhead. We have a Cretin-of-the-Week contest and judge the results from Polaroid pictures. Anytime one of us gets a candidate--say, a fat lady with underarm stains and torn stockings or someone with shit on his boots, feathers in his cowboy hat, and rotten teeth, or a kid with a rolled-up t-shirt and lurid tattoos or even a Japanese buying a camera from us--one of the other salesmen without a customer gets out a Polaroid and saunters over on the pretense of testing the camera. Snap. Zip. Watch it develop.

  There are boxes of Polaroids taken of each other posing and goofing off in the storeroom or drinking wine or beer we keep stashed in the refrigerator next to the VPS film. We drive customers crazy by turning the sound up and down on the bank of remote control televisions while they are watching them. The frustrated customers turn and look around, see us engaged in quiet banter, totally unaware of them. The customers turn back to the televisions, the sound magically restored just as their fingers almost touch the volume control. And of course we look at every roll of processed film that comes back from the lab.

  We have regular customers who call themselves professional photographers who shoot housewives in messy bedrooms, posing on the bed in lingerie, their fleshy legs dimpled with fat; giggling teenagers who give themselves away when they drop the film off and whose pictures show Bobby or Jimmy or Eddie driving a convertable with his dick sticking up like a floor-shift; and even one nun who takes pictures of herself in the mirror with her black dress hiked up to reveal a shaved vagina being saved for Jesus. Kadair's lab doesn't discriminate, as Sarah is fond of saying. A shaved vagina is the same as a shot of Ralph and Lulu on vacation at the Grand Canyon.

  When I quit Kadair's, I take some of the best Polaroid shots of the crew there, some of Sarah--standing at the register, ringing out the receipts at closing, one barefoot resting on top of the other, working, smiling, laughter forever caught in her eyes.