Poverty Porn - Alabama
I hugged Sunny goodbye at 6am, invigorated and full to bursting with happy memories. I wanted to get to New Orleans for mid-afternoon and hoped to beat the infamous Atlanta rush hour traffic.
The journey would take me through the great states of Alabama and Mississippi and I couldn't help but make a few stops as I don't exactly get to visit such esteemed places very often. In Georgia Ben had summed Alabama up as "a beautiful state filled with the worst fucking people in the world." I can happily (or perhaps sadly) attest that Alabama conforms to just about every stereotype I'd heard of, and even a few new ones.
First off, Alabama, I'm delighted to report, is the only place I know of that still sells cassette tapes(without so much as a whisper of irony). To put this in context, the last place I managed to procure a cassette tape was seven years ago in Marrakech - and even that was quite an effort to find. No such trouble in the great state of Alabama. I had my pick of Hank Williams, Dollie Parton, Willie Nelson and a few other, less dazzling stars of the country scene.
Alabama gas station
Everyone in Alabama seemed to bear the wrong end of some physical or mental affliction. In the gas station shop I stood completely transfixed watching a toothless, malting weed of a man in a greased vest, listlessly floating around. He hummed atonally, as only the purest lunatics can do, and was affectionately stroking Twinkies and other soft confectionery that happened to drift within reach.
"You aawn that shit agayn Jim?" Boomed the gas station proprietor, replete with a wolverine haircut and handlebar moustache.
"Nah maaan, I cleayne now." Another slight shuffle. "I cleayne." Now in a slightly wounded tone, accompanied by a good deal of feverish scratching.
He paused for a moment, then glided over to the counter and simpered. "Y'all can spot me a pack a Kools on creydit?"
Needless to say, Jim made his way from the gas station empty handed.
I was feeling a little guilty about taking so much interested in what was, essentially, poverty porn. Not entirely satisfied, I decided to lunch in a town with the 'fasten your seatbelts' monicker of Atmore, Alabama for an even bigger hit.
It would be kind to Atmore to say that the town had probably seen better days. Whilst desperately scanning the place for somewhere that served food it quickly became apparent that I was barking up the wrong tree. A walk down Main St revealed a worn out succession of pawn brokers, loan sharks, thrift stores (one enticingly named New York Fashions) and a jewellery store. On closer inspection the latter just turned out to be another, more upmarket, pawnbroker.
Atmore, AL
I did find a cafe but I had sadly missed the two hour daily slot when it was open (10am-12pm every day except Sunday, in case you were wondering). I made my way back to the interstate and stumbled across a place called The Anchor on one of Atmore's charming little side streets. A massive fleet of pickups were parked outide so I divined that it must at least be serving something.
It didn't fail to disappoint. The Anchor was a serious hillbilly hangout. Although quite a classy one it seemed. A hand written sign on the door forbade 'string vests OR baggy shorts'. Every one of its patrons was as white as driven snow, sunburnt, wearing a camouflaged baseball cap and spoke in an unmistakable, barely intelligible Alabama drawl.
The Alabama Range Rover
Strangely, this was the only restaurant on my entire trip where the waitress didn't ask where I was from. The fact that I was from England was probably a little beyond her understanding. In fact I was quite sure that I was the first person who wasn't from Alabama that had ever darkened The Anchor's doorstep. They probably just assumed I was one of America's squadron of wandering serial killers and just didn't want to probe too much.
I had the lunchtime special. A BBQ pork sandwich with slaw and potato salad, followed by pineapple upside down cake. It was actually rather tasty, although it was clear that the 70 plus section of the town were having their way with the menu. The slaw and potato salad looked like they had been passed through an industrial mincer and were served using what I can only imagine was an ice cream scoop.
The plates also looked like they had been donated by the local retirement home. Given that so many of its inhabitants regularly ate here, they had probably just brought their own and The Anchor had quietly amassed a collection. They were made of reassuringly thick, drop-proof plastic and adorned with three shallow troughs aimed at prevening any accidental food cross contamination. It was all so jauntily institutional.
The lunchtime special at The Anchor
Over lunch I decided to see whether the state laws in Alabama were as dumb as most its inhabitants seemed to be. In Alabama, I'm delighted to report that it is illegal to wrestle a bear, have an ice cream cone in your back pocket, play dominoes on Sunday, wear a fake moustache in church, salt a railroad or (my personal favourite) 'flick boogers into the wind'. Together they painted a very illuminating portrait of the everyday behaviours of the average Alabaman.
In the face of such a paucity of diversions, I would have assumed (as is the way down here) that one would be allowed to allot a fair chunk of leisure time to your nearest and dearest. However Alabama has recently acquired some of the most stringent laws concerning incest in America. Presumably this was because it used to be so endemic that everyone in Alabama would have developed a forehead the size of a drive in movie theatre were it to continue for another generation or so.
The best thing in Atmore
I left Atmore happy in the knowledge that we were unlikely to cross paths again. Unsurprisingly, I now felt even more guilty about having such a morbid fascination for a place that really was just a meat grinder for poor, malnourished, dumb and uneducated hicks. I promised myself that one day I would come back to the state and see if there was more to this place. I have no doubt there would be. There always is.