Low Country, J. Jones [top 10 best books of all time .TXT] 📗

Like a decent portion of the population, I owe my existence to a bar. My parents met at an upscale Calabash seafood joint off Restaurant Row on King’s Highway in that sticky, druggy summer of 1979, as it is recalled. Dad was the twenty-year-old bartender, born and raised in Myrtle Beach, the youngest son of a family of sons and brothers who owned a portion of the motels, pancake houses, golf courses, and other assorted tourist traps in Horry County. Mom was a waitress, the new girl in a small town who had both beauty-queen looks and novelty to her advantage. Debbie Allen had dropped out of her all-girls’ community college in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her roommate, a woman who would become known to us kids in cruel awe as the Black Widow, after the untimely, strange, and varied deaths of several young husbands. Debbie and her friend set up in an apartment whose bamboo furniture and seashell motifs were evidence to them, as to all inland emigrants, that the fantasy of the beach holiday exists as daily life for coastal residents. They waitressed together first at a diner in Cherry Grove, a strip of inlet beach south of a rusty swing bridge that crosses the same Intracoastal Waterway where farther down the county in Socastee Uncle Jack will kidnap my dad in a few years.

Mom knew Cherry Grove from childhood vacations with her father, when a post–Korean War boom in middle-class vacationing coincided with a post–Hurricane Hazel construction boom and all-around redrawing of the coastline in 1954. Maps you’ve used your whole life no longer work after big hurricanes. A rickety pier, bait shops, and ice-cream parlors popped up where only crab traps and widows’ walks had been before in the coastal village north of Myrtle Beach. Henry Allen named his three daughters after movie stars and his only son after himself, as blind to his own vanity as most men. Over six feet tall, blond and blue-eyed himself, he had the kind of good luck that makes you wonder if certain gods still play patron to their favorites, and lived at a time when his right to be the best at everything could never be questioned. He talked his way around a story as well as Odysseus, and Southern spirits rewarded his gifts with fortune more valuable than, but certainly including, gold. His wife, my mother’s mother, was no pining Penelope, though. She could not resist her suitors and had exiled herself to her own island far away by the time Henry was taking his four kids to Cherry Grove for summer weekends.

At the end of these holidays, Henry was perennially unable to wrestle his eldest daughter into the car. There was nothing to do but wait for her to finish splashing and swimming, and then return soaking, sunbaked, and happy in her own good time for a four-hour drive through pine forests, tobacco fields, and peach trees back to the red-clay dirt of Charlotte. Something called to her out beyond the surf. Again I imagine her a mermaid with a tail the same green as her eyes, as I recall the unquestionable existence of mermaids verified in a classroom text, but my schooling is not a part of the story just yet. Around this same time, right around the early 1960s, my dad and his tribe of brothers and cousins would have been diving for sand dollars and conch shells, which they sold for a dollar apiece to old Mrs. Plyler at the Gay Dolphin, for decades billed as the nation’s “largest gift shop” in slanted cursive over Ocean Boulevard. Were they ever in the water at the same moment as children, I wonder, and on the page, I’m inclined toward synchronicity over sense.

Things were going along according to plan, as they usually are before they aren’t. Mom was counting her tips and enjoying life in general as a full-time vacationer. The Chesapeake House used to offer a view of the ocean over the marsh. Now the restaurant’s windows are filled by high-rise time-shares and stucco-plastered hotels. The restaurant has never had a view of the Chesapeake, that famous bay several states to the north, though it has always been a house and remains done up like a farm, painted in red with white trim. Curtains of matronly lace shade the windows behind the fake Tiffany stained-glass lamps that hang over the bar. The night my parents met, the brackish water may have teased a syrupy shade of dark red wine underneath all that moonlight. It would have been particularly beautiful then, and even the alligators between the reeds would seem under the spell of backwater charm.

I’d like to pretend, though, that they met at a different bar. One that plays a more consistent role in my family’s history. With permission, we’ll relocate this scene to Drunken Jack’s. The view’s better and the drinks are stronger. Such a well-meaning and convenient move puts us closer to the Grand Strand tradition of laying claim to obscurities. At least I’m being upfront with you. How many of the juke joints along the boardwalk claiming to be the “birthplace of the shag” couldn’t tell you the steps to dance? Forward, to the side, and back till you’re spinning. We must place our feet in the right pattern, in the right time, so the memories can turn into history and the future might hurt a little less from its past.

Drunken Jack’s opened up in the late 1970s, when Mom moved to the beach, and both my parents wound up working there for longer, anyway. “I still have dreams of polishing the wood on the captain’s wheel,” Mom said the last time we were at Drunken Jack’s, as we walked past its glossy spokes and down the paisley-carpeted stairs into the dining room that looks over Murrells Inlet. As kids, my brothers and I dressed in our parents’ old uniform T-shirts