SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 72

1,348 miles on I-65.

I saw the “HELL IS REAL” sign along I-65 S, somewhere between Gary, Indiana and Lafayette; the sky was gray just after sunrise, with a little strip of neon red banded to the horizon. This is a billboard about which I am fanatical, though I’d never been so lucky as to see it in real life. But it has had a lot to do with how I conceive the world, along with a YouTube comment I found years ago under a video for a song I no longer recall. (I consider it as arcane wisdom passed down to me like an heirloom, which I keep in the screenshots folder on my desktop.) “So heaven does exist!” comments one user on the song, whatever it was. Months later, they receive a matter-of-fact reply: “Yes, on Earth. But the problem is that hell is also on Earth.” In those days I was less spiritually attuned than I am now, but the sentiment struck me as self-evidently true. And I began to see evangelist billboards as hysterically redundant, screaming “HELL IS REAL” along the Midwestern interstate, studded between casinos and sex shops and prisons. “Well, yes,” I think. “It’s right here.”

I share something in common with Jimmy Harston, the semi-retired real estate developer behind Columbus, Ohio’s famous “HELL IS REAL” sign: we both like to go on Google Maps and see what we can see. “Every once in a while, I’ll pull up Google Earth and take a look at that sign,” Harston said in an interview in 2023. As for what inspired him to erect religious billboards throughout Ohio, Indiana, Arkansas, Kentucky: “I’ve done what I was supposed to do, and I know the Lord had a reason. He had a purpose for it,” he concluded. “Hell is real, that’s all I know to tell you.”

It was an inspired choice to declare the message so near to Gary, Indiana, which looks just like hell on Earth should you drive past it after dark. Further down I-65, just north of Indianapolis, a newer billboard shouted a warning, or perhaps an advertisement: “NO FENCE NO JOBS,” it read, “JUST CRIME AND DRUGS.”

The drive down from Chicago to Birmingham, Alabama is more or less a straight shot south on 65; at 674 miles, it was the longest drive I’d undertaken since I bought my car last year. A little over halfway through is Mammoth Cave National Park — the world’s longest cave system, currently mapped at 426 winding miles underneath south-central Kentucky. I crossed the river by ferry in the old Cadillac, whose “SERVICE SSS” light had started flashing hours ago, whatever that could mean. A weathered man in a felt Ranger hat led us aboard a bus which rattled through the woods, stopping at what you might call a “liminal” stainless steel door. The man unlocked it and we climbed into the Earth, descending a wet staircase as it spiraled through limestone passages so snug you had to duck. The caves were lit up here and there by green and yellow lights, casting shadows that seemed to illustrate ancient allegories: the profile of a bear from behind a fallen rock, or the figure of a woman bending to pick up her child. (Can you see her in the first photo below?) The ranger told us that the park got rid of the old orange lights, which made the caverns look unmistakably like hell.

Seated in a passage where a river used to be, the ranger fielded questions. “Was this cave ever used as a fallout shelter?” asked a man whose left arm was in a sling. In fact, the ranger said, from the ‘60s until the ‘80s, the cave was stocked with enough food for 8,000 people in case of nuclear attack. “I can feel it,” the man quietly replied. “There is an energy that tells me people sheltered in this place.” The room fell silent but for the drip of groundwater looking for the river. “What about the next one?” he continued. The ranger understood the question but didn’t have an answer, and we descended on.

Almost every dining establishment without a drive-thru in Cave City, Kentucky was closed on Sundays, but Cherie, the owner/operator of Main St. Bed & Breakfast, told me Yancey’s would be open specially for the Super Bowl. I was halfway through my Coors Light and beginning my club sandwich before I noticed that the broadcast we were watching was in Spanish, and most of the commercials were en español, too. The owner cycled through the bar’s several hundred channels, but only Telemundo offered the big game. “You might get it on Netflix…” one patron offered to the owner, who had become irate. “That’s not the point!” the owner snapped. “I pay $1,700 a month for DirecTV. If I wanted to hear Spanish, I’d go hang out with those shitheads over at Los Mariachis!” He spent most of the next quarter yelling into the phone, but the game was still in Spanish when I left after the half for 10 hours of dreamless sleep in the “America Room.”

“I know 99% of the people who walk into this bar,” said Taffy, the Monday night bartender at the Red Lion Lounge, wondering how I (the 1%) had wound up at this 63-year-old basement hideaway in the Birmingham suburbs. I’d found the place, I told her, the same way I always did: searching “oldest bar in Birmingham,” which had led me to an article from 2013 suggesting business had been slow because the regulars had died. At a youthful 60-something, Taffy’s coral-pink hair was the same hue it had been when she began working here in 1991; I knew this because her portrait was the first of 100 caricatures covering the walls, the work of an old regular named Dennis (now deceased). Where there were no portraits, there was Elvis paraphernalia and the kind of vintage jukebox that still spun CDs — Kenny Chesney, Conway Twitty, The Drifters’ Greatest Hits. Come to think of it, the place was kind of like a cave: damp and drafty, with low stone arches and medieval-looking sconces. I ordered the house specialty, a Long Island iced tea served in a 24-ounce jar.

Taffy told me about the old days at the Red Lion, while the only other patron showed me pictures of his purebred Papillons, all six of them. The man, Gary, was a lawyer in his 60s who, having pried from me the basics of my occupation, confessed his passion for Save Me the Waltz, the only novel by Alabama’s own Zelda Fitzgerald. He admired Kerouac, too, having fantasized in younger years of saying goodbye to law school and taking to the road, though I never would’ve guessed it from his freshly-pressed dress shirt and air of Southern refinement. Taped to the pink tiled wall inside the women’s bathroom was a handwritten message: “Once Upon A Time, there was a cute mermaid painting here,” it read in curlicue Sharpie. “But, somebody stole it. So, now we have this note.”

“Which do you want first: the good news or the bad news?” asked the mechanic at the Express Oil Change where I’d finally brought the Caddy, whose service light had been flashing now four days. I set down the gospel tract I’d picked up in the waiting room (“RECOGNIZING SATAN’S TACTICS IN THE LIGHT OF GOD’S WORLD”) and requested bad news first. “The bad news is to fix it, you need to replace the struts, then cut the wire from the suspension module,” the man drawled somberly, but all I processed was the price tag — an unthinkable $5,800. “The good news is, you’re beautiful,” he doggedly went on. A win, after all, was a win.

“Let’s say I don’t fix it, and instead, drive 10 hours first thing tomorrow morning,” I asked. “What are my chances of blowing up on the highway?” “You want my advice?” the mechanic whispered. “Stick some tape over the service light and don’t think of it again.”

It rained all day on my last day in Birmingham, and the cement bar inside The Garage was frigid to the touch. A private parking garage for wealthy residents in the 1930s, the place had been a neighborhood dive since 1994, with a wisteria-draped courtyard piled with rusty antiques. (GQ named it among the “world’s 10 coolest bars” in 2003.) I ordered a High Life and a reuben sandwich as the white-haired man beside me told stories of Alabama’s illegal bar scene of yore. “You weren’t even born yet,” the fellow rambled. “This was the ‘70s and ‘80s; in the ‘90s, they started cracking down on people selling alcohol out of their house.” He described the late night parties he would drive to out in the boonies, where older black guys got together after work. “They didn’t have the money, or the transportation, to go to bars that didn’t even really exist,” the man went on. “So, they’d buy a case of wine and tell limericks all night.”

“Excuse me,” I interjected. “Did you say limericks?” Limericks, he repeated — the favored pastime of Birmingham’s illegal bar scene. The regulars knew limericks, and would recite them in a circle until someone fumbled the words. Then they’d drink some more and start a new one, a few of which the man could still recall by heart. (“He said to the butcher, I don’t give a damn / And he wiped his ass with a bone of ham,” went the last stanza of a particularly gross one he recited from memory.) After 2 a.m., he told me, he’d drive over to a guy called Ratkiller’s house in the West End, where you could buy beer and steak sandwiches, a baked potato and some salad. “Cops would come get something to eat at 3 or 4 a.m.,” he said. “They knew everybody was drinkin,’ but nobody was causing no trouble.”

He and his buddies would be the only white folks at these gatherings. “We’d go to a joint like this, pick up a girl or two, and say: ‘You want to smoke something? I’ll take you for a trip.’ We’d go over there, light one up, and I knew the limericks.” At one such joint, the matron of the house was what he called a disciplinarian. “This one dude, this really old fucker, 65 or 70 — he would get drunk and pass out,” he went on. “Well, she got tired of it, so she sat on his lap and started slapping him: ‘Get up! Get up, you mothafucker!’ And he goes, ‘I can’t get up, ‘cause you sattin’ on me!’ I can’t make this shit up,” he added. “I ain’t that creative.” Once, he said, a chicken truck had crashed off the expressway, and several birds were running loose in the neighborhood. “You don’t know how a bird could get that big that fast — but anyway, they got one. It happened to be a rooster, and they called him Foot. And this sonofabitch went from being this big, to THIS big, til he was about THAT fuckin’ big,” he said, holding his hand about three feet off the ground. “They called his ass Foot, and he was like a watchdog. He’d see me coming and be like, ‘Bawk bawk, bawk bawk.’ But this other dude, he wouldn’t let him in the fuckin’ house. He’d say, ‘Get this bird off of me!’ And they’d say, ‘If Foot say you can’t come in, you can’t come in!’”

Indianapolis in February is not what I would describe as a sight for sore eyes, but I’d driven seven hours straight on I-65 N and had so far avoided death by Cadillac, and that was grounds for celebration. I pulled into the parking lot outside John’s Famous Stew, an Indy institution since 1911, whose menu had on offer John’s Famous Stew, a breaded pork loin sandwich smothered in John’s Famous Stew, and a twist on an old classic which smothered the classic stew in butter beans and hot peppers. I decided on the latter, soaking up the broth with slices of white bread to the howl of ambulance sirens and an Aaron Lewis song braying on the tinny speakers:

Two flags fly above my land that really sum up how I feel
One is the colors that fly high and proud: the red, the white, the blue
The other one’s got a rattlesnake with a simple statement made
“Don't Tread On Me” is what is says, and I’ll take that to my grave

Because this is me
I’m proud to be American and strong in my beliefs
And I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again
‘Cause I’ve never needed government to hold my hand
And I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again
‘Cause my family’s always fought and died to save this land
And a country boy is all I’ll ever be.