a vestavia hills gal

“You think you’re better than me don’t you?”

At first, one might be prone to think that’s a loaded question. But it’s not. If someone indeed every asks you that question, the answer is already known. What is also known is the truth of it. If someone thinks that you think you are better than them, it is indeed a fact.

However, this would not be the correct answer to give at this very moment.

“Hell no, brah,” I said with a smile and a quick man hug. “I’d never even think such a silly thing about my dawg.”

Yeah, my dawg. His name is Steven. Steve is what he goes by. Steven Wilson. We’ve been drinking at this same bar for 28 years now. Of course, for me, it’s just a once or twice event now. For him, it’s five times a week.

I used to be in the same boat. When I lived in this dump of a town. Maury, Alabama. I visited once, for a story on a great football player. A blue-chip high school player. He was being recruited by Alabama, Auburn, even USC. Football season was perfect for him. Right before the playoffs, I came down, did an interview with the kid. He had all the elements of a perfect “human interest” piece. Great athlete living with his grandma. Both parents dead. Working at Wal-Mart to help with the bills. Still rushing for 2,000 yards. He was a good kid. A bit standoffish at first, but I completely understood. Here I was, some white guy with long blonde hair, looking like Gunnar Nelson showing up at his high school in the middle of nowhere Alabama.

I wrote the story. It won some awards. Got picked up by some bigger places and his story was everywhere. Then, in a harmless basketball game, he injured his knee. All the offers from the big schools all vanished. I felt bad. I sent him a note and all. But never visited him. Shitty thing. But, that’s what writers do. They do the story, then they move on to the next one.

He ended up at a smaller school. Became all-conference. Drafted into the NFL. Even stuck around a few years. Cool for him I thought one day while I was in the only bar in his old hometown. His family were all gone now. Either dead or moved away. There was nothing left to remind folks of his exploits, except for the article I wrote, still pinned to the head coach’s wall at the school.

I lived there for three years. In a double wide. Trying to avoid creditors and a woman I’d knocked up in a Birmingham bar. Yes, in the bar itself. Bad scene all together.

In this place, I met Steve. He made me call him “my dawg.” Never understood why. Guess he just liked it that way. He was a stock boy at a local grocery store. His dad owned the store, so one day, Steve would own the store. But for now, at 32 years old, he was still just a stock boy. Which is why he drank. And why we met.

I had just moved in to my beautiful trailer home, tucked behind some trees in the way back of the lot. I’d asked the manager if he had one “away from everyone else” and he looked at me for a moment, then said “you look like you’re just hiding from something simple, not the law, so I’ll show you Marge’s old place.”

Apparently, Marge had died a death very much like the Gluttony guy in the movie “Seven.” She’d been obsessed with winning a sweepstakes that the Hungry Man meals were putting on. Inside of each package contained a scratch off ticket. So, she spent weeks just binging on salisbury steaks and fried chicken plates from your friends at Swanson. The cops said it was the XXL meals that seemed to finally tip the old lady into some kind of frenzy. Every store within a 50-mile radius reported Marge buying all their stock every Thursday. Which happened to be the day she got her check from the state.

On the last day of her weeks-long binge she actually won the damn sweepstakes too. The $150,000 winning ticket is exactly what brought me to Alabama again in the first place. A friend of mine in the police department from my first journalistic stint in the state called me up one night, drunk as all get out, and told me everything. I was there 8 hours later. Writing the first story on the event. To the local scribes, it was just a fat lady who had a heart attack. To me, it was a goldmine. I saw a book in there. And I chased it hard and fast.

Which is why, one night I was in a bar in downtown Birmingham, celebrating my good fortune. I stumbled out into the street and bumped into Michelle, a 27 year old grad student. I was wearing my old Ralph Sampson UVA vintage t-shirt and she happened to be related to the Doug Newburg, a backup guard from the 1980 squad. We hit it off immediately. Too well.

(Five) weeks later, while I was chasing a higher up in the Swanson company, I got a call from Michelle. She said she was pregnant. I was kind of shocked. In fact, until that call, I hadn’t given her a thought since I said goodbye the morning after over waffles and toast at Waffle House in Vestavia Hills.

I told her I’d meet her for dinner. We met, she said she was “keeping the baby” and all I could think about was Madonna’s “Poppa Don’t Preach” video. She had such a nice ass in that one. This did not bode well for a long-term commitment from me, the father. I told her to call my agent, Sidney Sweaton, and I gave her his number. We’d set up some kind of payment plan. I just wasn’t in the right place, right time to talk about it. She threw her coffee in my face. Luckily, it was cold. And she left.

This story made Steve laugh the first night we met at Meg’s Bar in Maury. He said all those “Vestavia Hills bitches are just looking for some easy money. A ticket out of being daddy’s little girl.” I asked him why he felt that way. He said he dated one while he was a linebacker at Troy. She got pregnant too. “The bitch who ruined my life,” he would refer to her every time she came up. And still does.

I liked talking to Steve. He gave me an extra character to draw upon for first my series of articles on “the Swanson affair” as it became known. I never knew if people understood I was actually trying to do the old lady right with my attempts at writing about her. She seemed like a nice lady. At least from all the stuff I went through when I just happened to get to move into her old double wide.

Eventually, I wrote a book. It was made into a movie and I made a shit load of money. Enough to leave Maury, Alabama, and not be worried about payments for my kid, who the mom named Randy Jr. Never understood that either, since technically, he’d be Randy IV. In fact, every penny I made from Marge when into the “Junior fund” as Sidney Sweaton called it. It ended up being $14.3 million. Not too shabby. I wonder if he’ll marry a Vestavia Hills gal one day?

Anyway, I still come back to Maury two times a year. Once for Steve’s birthday, once for Junior’s. Steve and I meet up at the bar, we get drunk and he talks about his shitty father, now 78 years old, not letting him run the place still. I laugh too much at his plight, and he gets angry. I hug him and say I’m sorry and he calms down.

One day, I figure, he’ll be dead and I won’t have to come back but once a year.