From a Friend
Driving to the airport, and one writes a dozen pearls in one’s mind. Let me see if I can get this one finished. LOL
In less than 24 hours since driving home from Memphis airport, I was “making like Willy Nelson” (back on the road again) to Memphis. Mom and I had carefully concocted this scheme whereby she would arrive in Memphis the day after I got back from the Bahamas, and I would stay in Memphis overnight and pick her up and bring her home. Guy, who had been looking after the house and the dogs while I was away, even said he would mop the kitchen floor and “office” floors so that it would be nice and tidy for when I brought Mom in.
Hurricane Rita had other ideas though and when I waited too long to make my reservations for a hotel room in Memphis, I found to my great surprise that not only was the airport Radisson booked up, so was every other hotel in reasonable proximity to the airport. I know rooms are very hard to find during the “Memphis in May” events on weekends in May and of course, those two revered days of Elvis’s birth (January 8th) and his death (sometime in August), but it never occurred to me that so many people would have migrated to Memphis trying to escape Rita. Oh well. So I drove home and the doggies were sure glad to see me, I was pleased to see that Guy had done everything as promised. I got some sleep, answered some emails, and got on the road again.
Though a chain of thought process that is too complicated to explain, of course getting gas was a consideration, and usually the cheapest place in town is the Raceway station just off Interstate 40 at Exit 82. I didn’t really need gas, it turned out, for another round trip to Memphis, but I remembered a day in 1997 where I would never think of that Raceway station in quite the same way again.
Ray and I met this guy named Mark in early 1997. He had come to this area of Tennessee from Washington state because he was intensely interested in the Civil War and participated in Civil War re-enactments. He was brilliant, although not as brilliant as Ray, and they shared an interest in the Civil War. Ray insisted that I learn something about the Civil War several years before this, making me watch the Ken Burns 13 part PBS Civil War series several times. He had it on laser disk and even when I left the room to get something to drink or go to the bathroom, he would put it on pause and make sure I watched every last second of it. His rationalization was, if I was going to live in the South I had better understand something about it. I was, to that point, fairly blissly ignorant about the “late unpleasantness between the States,” despite the fact that I had worn out two copies of Gone With the Wind and as a teenager, even wrote a sequel to it! (happy ending where Rhett and Scarlett get back together).
Mark looked like an anorexic version of Anthony Geary (“Luke” from General Hospital) and when he did re-enactments, he was a Confederate. It was not a big leap even for those who don’t believe in reincarnation, to think that Mark was a reincarnation of a dead Confederate soldier.
Mark was addicted to prescription painkillers (Oxycontin, when he could get it, but usually Vicodin) because of a degenerative hip problem on both sides. He was in constant pain, and as so frequently happens, a “normal” dose didn’t do it for him and he usually ran out of medication before he could get a refill. There was supposed to be a re-enactment in Shiloh (about 45 minutes south of here). We had promised him we’d go down to the re-enactment. I had never seen one before but wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the idea and I was somewhat relieved when there was heavy rains that washed out the event. Mark drove down there but found the whole “staging area” (I guess you might call it that) washed out, and drove back to Jackson somewhat despondent and not in a little bit of physical pain. He stopped at the Raceway station to call the people at the hospital and tell him he was desperate to get pain medication and would they please do something to help him.
Apparently in his pain, he started to get verbally abusive to the people on the help hotline (pain will make a person do this!), and as he was standing at the pay phone, several of Jackson’s Finest pulled into the station. The people at the helpline had called the police. Mark got back into his car and for reasons unknown to me because I wasn’t there, he picked up his Civil War musket. That’s when the police opened fire on his car.
Take him downtown and book ’em, Danno.
The story made the wire services at the time, I think, because here is this guy dressed up in full Civil War confederate regalia and the police were claiming that he pointed it at them. The charges were eventually dropped, but Mark spent the next six months in jail, until his parents put up their house for the bail. I was there at the bail hearing. The courtroom was full of television cameras and reporters for the print media. I stage whispered to him, “Mark…you’re a star!” Mark was just confused and bewildered, but he was glad I was there for support for him. This town can be a very cold place to “outsiders” and we both fell into that category. The city court judge had set the bail for $250,000. He was assigned a public defender, before we found him a private criminal defense lawyer that his parents likewise paid for. Several years later, when I found employment as a legal secretary, I found out his lawyer had to go into drug rehab himself. And so it goes…
There was never any trial, but all sorts of time consuming processes had to be gone through and Mark stayed in town for the next two years until it was all sorted out. The charges were dropped, the police officers in question got a slap on the hand, and Mark never got any compensation for the numerous bullet holes they put in his car or his unjust incarceration. We tried many times to visit Mark in jail, which at the time was in the basement of the courthouse, and they would never let us see him. We bought him books that he could read in jail, and the jailors would never accept them to give to him. They said that the prisoners would set fire to books. Most of the time he was in jail, he was not getting medical attention, nor was he getting his painkillers. And this is how they treat a white guy….
Mark has been back in Washington state for some years now, but he still calls here every month or so, sometimes more. Despite what should be a slew of unhappy memories for him here, he still feels a strong attachment to this place. It could be that under the hallowed ground of the battlefields of lesser known battles of the Civil War that occurred in this county, his heart is buried somewhere here.
