Songs from Massilia: Vol. 1

Written By Evan Hammonds

Creases and All

Massilia is an unincorporated town located in the northeast corner of Mississippi, just south of Memphis, with no mayor and no city council—half black and half white. The main industry, if you could call it that, is poultry and soybeans. It had been this way for as far back as anyone could remember, and then some.

It was January, and I had just moved back into my childhood home with my mother in Massilia from Starkville after dropping out after a lone semester at Mississippi State. I was nineteen at the time, somewhere between a woman and a girl. When asked why I dropped out of college, leaving a partial art scholarship on the table, I responded the same vague way then that I do now: “I guess I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

I didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. Certainly not Massilia, but not in a collegiate setting either. The death knell was when I received a C- from my art professor for a piece I’d drawn. I had spent months working on it. I went through draft after draft, crafting it at the library, my dorm room, during and in between classes, and at a little coffee shop I’d trek to on Sunday mornings. By the time I’d turned it in, I had never been more proud of anything I had done in my entire life.

“Composition unclear. Execution lacking. Concept derivative,” the note from the professor had read. I didn’t argue or protest. I simply folded my submission into a compact square and toted it around with me from that point forward.

I had only been back in Massilia a week or two when I set out to get the tattoo—my first—and I had my drawing slipped in the back pocket of my jeans like usual. My mother had just finished another phone call with an old coworker friend of hers, and I could hear her reiterating that she “wasn’t fired, but had resigned” from her job of answering phones at the local food processing plant—a role she had held for seventeen years.

“God closed that door for a reason,” she said, sipping her coffee from a mug with a chipped handle that read, “Too Blessed to Be Stressed.”

I slipped out the front door without her noticing, but I knew that what I was setting out to do had a good chance of being a point of contention until one of us died.

I didn’t have a car, so I had to make the roughly three-mile journey to the tattoo parlor on foot, past the Dollar General, past the faded Massilia Pentecostal billboard where the “O” in ‘God’ had been tagged with buckshot.

As I walked, I thought about my father. He had a Roman nose and a shock of white hair and looked more or less the same as the day I was born. He was never so much in my life as around it, either separated from my mother, or in jail, or both. He was a chronic story repeater, commonly leading into a, “Did I ever tell you about the time...” to which a response of “yes” or “no” was irrelevant to whether you were about to hear it or not.

One of his favorites was describing how he had once made a special teams tackle on a kickoff during the Gator Bowl. He had walked on at Mississippi State—the same place I had just left. He didn’t finish either, citing his grades and firm opinion that college was a waste of time and didn’t have a thing to do with real life anyway. My mother’s recollection differed, and she once disclosed to me that he had, in fact, been caught selling marijuana on campus and had been kicked off the football team and expelled from the university in the very same afternoon.

He always had a scheme to make money, so long as it involved something other than working a steady and legitimate job. Once, he had put some hair (likely his own, but that’s purely my supposition) onto his McDonald’s hamburger, took a few Polaroids, and mailed them along with a handwritten letter to the restaurant’s corporate office both threatening to sue and implying that if they didn’t play ball, he’d go both to the Clarion-Ledger and the New York Times. After several months of back and forth via letter, he settled for a stack of coupons, which he spent liberally to throw a party at McDonald's for my friends and me for my ninth birthday. My favorite one.

At the time I got my tattoo, he was serving a long prison sentence for counterfeiting one-dollar bills. He had mentioned the idea once to my mother and me, and we foolishly believed it was just one of his rambling hypotheticals rather than an honest-to-God plan. He reasoned that the Feds only investigated the counterfeiting of big bills—your 20s, 50s, and 100s. They didn’t have the time or manpower to work cases on the “one-dollar bandits,” as he called them. He explained, “Sure, the cops will pull you over if you’re speeding twenty miles over the limit, but just one? Ain’t no way.”

My mother and I said we didn’t think that was the same thing, but he waved his hand and told us we lacked “vision” and the “entrepreneurial spirit” in a gentle and patronizing manner. We thought the matter was dropped, but he pursued it on his own time and eventually sourced a beat-up old printing press from somewhere outside of Jackson.

Well, he tried to spend his first batch of bills at the very same Dollar General that I had passed. Whether he chose that location because it was the closest retail business to our home or if he just enjoyed the symmetry of trying to pass off his phony ones at a place with “dollar” in the name, I do not know. Either way, he had left the house on a Saturday around a quarter to eleven and was in handcuffs before lunch. He had been attempting to purchase a small box of Crayons and a cheap watercolor set for me - a fact I didn’t learn until the trial.

***

I had finally arrived at the tattoo parlor, which sat next to a Domino’s Pizza and a thrift store in a squat beige plaza. The sky had grown overcast. The store had a neon “OPEN” sign that buzzed but didn’t light. I pushed the door open, and the bell above the frame clinked and announced my presence. Inside smelled like antiseptic and burned hair, and I instinctively held my breath.

The man behind the counter was stout, late thirties or older, wore a beard, and had faded tattoos creeping up his neck.

He looked up from his phone, and his eyes ran all over me before he spoke. “You eighteen?”

“Nineteen,” I replied. I can’t say if he just took my word for it or didn’t care, but either way, he didn’t bother asking to see my ID.

“You live around here?” he asked.

“I’m not living here,” I replied. “I’m staying here.”

He nodded once and continued, “You got something in mind?”

I unfolded the drawing—my old college submission—creases and all, and handed it to him.

He took it and studied it for a moment. He then turned and grabbed a laminated flash sheet about the shape and size of a Waffle House menu and said, “How about one of these instead? They’re easier. Cleaner.”

I shook my head and said, “I want what I gave you.”

He stared at me to see if I’d cave, but I didn’t.

“All right,” he said, but in a way that sounded like it wasn’t. “That kind of custom work is going to cost extra. A lot extra. Unless you’re open to… negotiation.”

He didn’t say it with a grin, which made it worse.

“I have money,” I replied flatly and stared at him until he looked away, cleared his throat, and motioned to the chair.

The buzzing of the machine started low and then climbed like a disturbed hornet. When the needle hit my thigh, pain vibrated through my body like a tuning fork. I clenched my fist and stared at the stained wall, where I noticed an old clock that had stopped working.

He didn’t say anything. Just wiped and buzzed, wiped and buzzed. When he finally finished, he said, “Well, take a look and let me know what you think.”

“No,” I said. “Just wrap it.” It didn’t matter what it looked like. It just mattered that it was mine.

Outside, the sky had grown dark, the temperature had dropped dramatically, and it had begun to rain. I zipped up my light jacket tightly, which did little to ward off the cold. It didn’t take me long to conclude that I wouldn’t be able to make the long walk home in that weather with a fresh thigh wound.

With no better options, I texted my mom and asked if she could pick me up at the Domino's parking lot.

She replied instantly, “omw,” and pulled up ten minutes later in her rusted PT Cruiser.

When I climbed in, she caught sight of the bandage, and her eyes jumped to the tattoo parlor whose neon sign had stopped buzzing.

“God, what have you done?”

I smiled for the first time I could remember and answered, “Oh Mama, I’m just having fun.”

Evan Hammonds
Previous

Songs from Massilia: Vol. 2
Next

Unearthed Vol. 18