Knowledge Won't Begin

There’s a male piedmont archetype in North Carolina that’s cooler than Gomer Pyle and more corrupt than Andy Griffith. Still with that sing-song voice, tall and fit with ruddy skin, and carrying a crooked grin that’s highlighted by the hope in his eyes. In essence, this perfectly describes Darryl Jenkins. 

I met Darryl at church, of all places, just after I’d turned 17. My closest friends were months older than me, and much less awkward. After we all got cars and drivers licenses, they began to peel away. I’d find myself after youth group looking for my two best friends, only to learn they’d snuck off with an older teen and two girls to smoke Camels in the car.

I guess that’s how I met Darryl. He was crossing the parking lot and asked me did I want to sit in his truck and listen to this new hip hop tape he’d come across. Paid in Full by Eric B and Rakim. That’s how these things start. Before long, I was skipping church all together. I had to go to church, mind you, because I was on restriction for some devious things I did. I could only drive to school and work and to church on Sunday and Wednesday. Youth group became the biggest social event of the week during my senior year in high school. 

You could do whatever you wanted to back then, and Darryl and I certainly did. Winston-Salem had yet to annex three-fourths of Forsyth County, and once you left the city limits there wasn’t a cop in sight. Especially for two white boys in a Chevrolet pick up. Darryl would light a joint as we left the parking lot of First Assembly of God church across from Wake Forest University. We’d drive up University Parkway and cut behind the old K-Mart plaza on Bethabara Road to Old Town Drive and before the buzz kicked in we’d be in Pfafftown.

We left church one Sunday and Darryl had just gotten a new quarter bag and had yet to roll any joints. He had this homemade device you could make from a toilet paper roll and a small piece of aluminum foil. Imagine being stupid enough in 1988 to smoke weed out of aluminum foil, but that was us, two spoiled white boys from the suburbs who thought we owned the world. 

Since we couldn’t pass a joint, we had to wait to pull off somewhere to hit the bud in the toilet roll thing. Darryl drove toward his parent’s house out of habit and decided to pull around the back of this small white church off Transou Road. 

“Son, did you see Shelly Eller’s titties?” he asked me as he put a pinch in the bowl. “If that knit sweater was any tighter..mmm, mmm.”

He pulled on the roll’s end, smoke filtering into the January air from the half-cracked window on his side. He handed it to me.

“I seen you looking at her. When you gonna make a move big boy?”

I exhaled and looked out the window on my side, through the naked trees around the playground and into the Food Lion parking lot. I guess he didn’t remember that I’d spent the entire fall, and the summer before that, calling her on the phone, writing her poems and driving them out to her nouveau riche mansion in Lewisville. I’d  put them in the mailbox at the end of her half-mile driveway that ran through horsepasture and drive off.

“That ain’t gonna happen,” I said and handed the roll back to him. “I been talking to that younger girl, Crystal. I think I’ma ask her to the prom.” 

“Oh yeah, she’s a pretty thing, too,” he said. “Too young for me, though. But Shelly, now there’s a fair piece.”

I had just put the lighter to the weed when this white Ford Bronco came around the front of the church.

“Put that shit down,” Darryl said, and started the truck. 

He pulled off slow like, the Bronco heading straight for us across the blacktop. Darryl pointed the truck in its direction and pulled alongside. An older man in a RJR Tobacco Co. ball cap eyed us with concern.

Darryl was unfazed. He stuck his head out the window.

“Hey fella,” he said. “You know what time services start around here?”

The man looked from me to Darryl and back at me. I tried to play it off.

“Well, morning service is over,” he said. “Evening service starts at 6.”

“All right. Thank you now,” Darryl said and waved at the man as we pulled away.

We weren’t to the parking lot’s edge before I was laughing tears.

Theoretically speaking, I was supposed to be a scholar fixing to go off to college. I knew I was going to college, but as January rolled into February, I had lost all focus on school. That explains why I was about to fail calculus. Mrs. Outen had told us all to open the text on the first day of class and put the book on top of our heads.

“Osmosis,” she said. “Hopefully it will work for some of you.”

I did okay in her class, and in school overall, until just before Christmas when I realized Shelly Eller wasn’t going to go out with me. I sank into a deep depression, the second of my life, and began smoking a quarter bag of weed a week. When I failed the midterm at the end of January, Mrs. Outen took me aside and explained what it would be like to repeat the 12th grade while all my friends were off at college. 

On the first Friday of February, I was sitting at my desk in the basement of my parent’s house. The same desk where I’d written Shelly Eller about 30 lovesick poems over the previous 12-month period. The calculus textbook was open and a bunch of letters and numbers in confusing proximity to one another scribbled across a sheet of notebook paper were no closer to resolving the equation. I took my thick plastic glasses off my face and rubbed the heel of my palm into my eyes. Then the phone rang. I had to get up and cross the basement to the wall phone because I had smashed the cordless on the brick wall outside in October when Shelly Eller told me she couldn’t go to the homecoming dance with me.

“School boy, what are you doing?” Darryl asked me. 

“Homework,” I said.

“On a Friday at fucking four o’clock,” Darryl said. “Son, what is wrong with you? You ain’t ever gonna get laid doing homework on a Friday.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I shot back.

“Look man, can you be over to the warehouse at 5? I want you to ride with me and my buddy Bowman to get a car,” Darryl said. 

“Where to?”

“Well, it’s in West Virginia, but if we leave at 5, we’ll be there by 8 and back here by 1 or so,” Darryl said. 

“West Virginia?” I said. “What the fuck do I wanna go to West Virginia for, especially in the dark.” 

“C’mon man,” he said. “Look,  I got some killer weed and you will love the car. It has a bumping speaker system and we can get high and listen to that Eric B and Rakim tape on the way back. Anyway, I sort of need your help to make the pieces fall into place, and besides, I don’t wanna go there by myself, either.”

I hesitated and thought about another Friday night at home. I thought about Shelly Eller doing whatever she was doing with her prep du jour. I thought about how my parents let me off restriction at the first of the year and how they didn’t know I was about to fail calculus, how I’d already given up on calculus, and how the calculus of the next five months was as jumbled as the formula on my desk.

“Sure, man, I’ll be there,” I said. 

Darryl was 19 and he wasn’t going to college. He worked at a plumbing distribution warehouse over on Indiana Avenue, near that triangle intersection it makes with Patterson. I drove down Old Town Drive, across Bethabara Road to University and cut over to Indiana on Akron Drive. I passed the RJR Tobacco Co. world headquarters where my dad worked, a glass menagerie that looked like all black Rubiks Cubes lined up three in a row. I passed the city cemetery where eight generations of my ancestors were buried. Inside, I really didn’t want to end up like them, dead and gone after working on a farm or in a tobacco plant and dying early because they ate pork three meals a day for 56 years. I should have turned around and gone back home and studied calculus for Mrs. Outen so I could graduate and go to college in the fall. But that seemed a lifetime away.

I pulled up to the gated parking lot and saw Darryl and a hunched over skinny dude leaning on a Cutlass Supreme. 

“School boy on the loose!” Darryl said as I pulled up. “You got a full tank?”

“”Yeah, why?”

“Part of the pieces that need to fall into place is I need you to follow us to King. We’ll park your car there and pick it up on the way back.”

It was a warm afternoon, even now as the February sun sank low over the trees to the west. I hadn’t thought much before leaving the house and only grabbed a thin jacket to put over the t-shirt I was wearing. Knots formed in my stomach.

“Alright, whatever,” I said. 

I followed Bowman’s Cutlass as we headed north on Patterson Avenue to US 52. We drove north to King and he pulled off the highway and into a Food Lion parking lot. Bowman stopped on the far side near a stand of trees and Darryl got out. 

“Pull to the other side of the parking lot,” he said. 

I parked and we got out of the car. I was curious, but Darryl’s master plan seemed more simple than the calculus equations on my desk at home. I didn’t ask questions. 

It was solid dark by the time Pilot Mountain faded in the rear view and we crossed into Surry County. Bowman didn’t talk much and listened to that horrible country music station you can get all across the rolling hills of North Carolina and Virginia. I dozed off in the back of the Cutlass listening to Darryl talk to Bowman about work and the clerk in the tight jeans that came from the big office with a clipboard to count stock every few hours. They surmised who she was fucking and I really didn’t care. 

I woke up to the blinding lights of the toll booth where US 52 and I-77 come together like snakes in a field. Bowman threw the quarters in the tube and we turned onto the concrete highway and headed northwest. It felt suddenly cold in the back of the Cutlass. I sat up and rubbed my eyes and could make out white particles in the air, the moisture melting on the windshield. Soon the flurries turned thick and Bowman flipped the wipers on. 

“I didn’t know it was supposed to snow,” I said. “It was sixty fucking degrees in Winston.”

“It’s February,” Bowman said.

He didn’t seem concerned about it and so I wasn’t either. Bowman took a backroad off the highway because he said it would save us half an hour. We lost that when he blew a tire on a rut near the crest of a mountain. It was snowing harder now and it was pitch black dark. I could see fresh bear tracks across the road in front of the Cutlass and Bowman worked fast to change the tire. 

Twenty minutes later we hit a paved road and in no time we dipped down on a gravel cut to his family home. The white house was set back in a cove and I could see a car at the property’s edge covered by a tarp.

Bowman tensed up. 

“There she is just like I promised, Darryl, now give me the money and scoot before anybody asks questions,” he said. “Just throw the tarp off and I’ll get it in the morning.”

Darryl’s face lit up as we pulled the tarp back to reveal a pristine 1987 Camry. 

“Sweet ride,” I said.

“Ah, yeah, big boy,” he sang out. “Wait till you hear them speakers.”

Darryl started the car and we pulled off. He got the heater going and the orange glow of the dashboard added to the warmth. I felt a bit easier, especially since the snow let up as we pulled onto the paved road. After a few minutes, Darryl realized we needed gas.

“Damn it, I asked him to fill the tank up,” he said. “I have no idea where we are.” 

Darryl had directions back to the highway scribbled on a paper scrap.

“Maybe we’ll pass a town,” he said. I was not comforted.

But we came up on some signs and Darryl pulled off the highway toward a crossroads town, square, flat roofed buildings clustered around an intersection. It was about nine at night and lights were sparse. We drove around the few blocks that were there until Darryl spotted some glow in a window at the corner. He pulled the Camry up and rolled down my window. Honky tonk music seemed to come from behind a warehouse-type door that was cracked open.

“Go see if anyone’s in there that knows where a gas station is,” he said. 

I’d come this far and wasn’t about to act afraid now. I went up to the door and heard loud voices and pulled it back. Inside was a pool table and a small beer bar. Several young men and a few women clustered around the pool table and along the wall. They all looked at me funny.

I was 17-years old and wearing black Adidas high tops, green warmup pants and a light jacket. My floppy brown hair framed around my thick brown glasses.

A man cut the music. 

“Hey, uh, so we’re trying to get back to North Carolina and we’re out of gas,” I said. “Is there a gas station around?”

A man wearing a jean jacket covered in patches stepped to me holding a bottle in one hand and a pool stick in the other. A half-smoked cigarette hanging from his thin lips. His hair pulled back tight with a ponytail halfway down his back. He looked me up and down. 

“How’d you get here?” he asked me. 

Always quick on my feet, I told him we’d brought my friend’s co-worker back to his home nearby.

“I just came for the ride,” I said. “I got no idea where I am. We just pulled off the road and saw the lights.”

The man drew on his beer and looked past me to Darryl’s car. 

“Nice car,” he said. “Don’t see many of them around here.”

He set the stick down and walked outside.

“You just go back onto the main road, south I take it, and in about five miles there’s a crossroads,” he said. “There’s a travel center there, just off the interstate.”

He pulled on his beer and I started toward the car.

“You got any money?” he asked.

I turned and noticed four of his friends lined up behind him on the platform.

“Everything has a price, friend. Ain’t nothing in this world free,” he said. “Consider it a donation to the beer fund.”

I pulled out my wallet and had a ten and a twenty. In the darkness, I hid the twenty with my thumb. 

“Alls I to gots a ten,” I said.

“That’ll do just fine,” he said and put the bill in a pocket on his jacket. “Now y’all be careful. Enjoy your time in West, by God, Virginia.”

In the side mirror reflection I could see them going back in the beer bar, the man following up the steps from the street. I told Darryl what the man said and thanked God on the inside for making me six-foot-five with an air of amiability. 

We got the gas and it was about this point I was ready for the fun to begin.

Darryl still seemed tense, checking his mirrors constantly, adjusting his seatbelt and his position in the driver’s seat. He hadn’t mentioned getting high yet. 

“You got that Eric B tape,” I asked. 

“You know it, son,” his eyes lit up. “We about to get paid in full.”

He reached with one arm to get his bag in the back seat. We were on a four-lane road now and he steered the Camry with his knee and rifled through the bag. Darryl handed me a film canister and some rolling papers. 

“Roll a nice one, school boy.”

He slid the tape in. Base pulses syncopated by trembly hand claps bounced until Rakim kicked it off.

I ain’t no joke

I use to let the mic smoke

Horns slid in with a step up groove and I licked the edge of the joint and handed it toward Darryl. His head was bouncing every which way and his shoulders followed suit. 

“Light it,” he said. 

I hold the microphone like a grudge

B’ll hold the record so the needle don’t budge

Darryl drove through the darkness as the tape played on. The weed was on point and Eric B cut the record on the next track and I felt like dancing myself. I put the roach in the ashtray as Rakim laid down ‘My Melody’.

Turn up the bass

Check out my melody hand out a cigar

I’m letting knowledge be born 

And my name’s the R

I’d never heard an emcee like this. Interior rhymes styling at an elite level. West Virginia turned to plain just Virginia and the snow on the roadside disappeared. 

“Where’d you get this car,” I asked. Darryl turned the music down. I looked at him and a huge grin spread on his face.

“You can’t tell a soul,” he said. 

“Ok.” 

“I stole this motherfucker.” 

I sobered up real fast. 

“Do what?”

“Well, just from my dad,” he said.

I didn’t feel any better. 

“He went on a business trip and left it at the airport,” Darryl said. “I found his spare key a few months ago in his closet and made a copy.”

“Are you crazy, man?”

“Naw, school boy, check it out,” he said. “He’s gone till next week. I took it on Tuesday and Bowman and me drove it up here. I got a place to park it for a few months and them I’ma paint it cherry red.”

I know you got soul! Yeah. 

Cause if you didn’t you wouldn’t be in, be in, be in here

Darryl’s plan was literally insane and I was beginning to question my life choices. It would be real hard to graduate in May if I was in jail for possession of a stolen vehicle. Darryl seemed unconcerned.

“I been saving for a car and my dad knows that,” he said. “He knows how much I like this car, so once I paint it, he won’t think twice when I show up with one.”

It wasn’t my problem, so long as I got back home in one piece. Darryl pulled out a brass proto-pipe and we got high again.

How could I move the crowd?

First of all, ain’t no mistakes allowed

Here’s the instructions, put it together 

It’s simple ain’t it, but quite clever

The bliss turned to paranoia and I saw a cop car behind every headlight. I couldn’t even enjoy the knowledge Rakim was dropping on ‘As the Rhyme Goes On’. ‘Chinese Arithmetic’ started and that eased my anxiety for a while. It’s hard not to get caught up in all that’s going down on that track. When it ended, Darryl went to flip the tape over to the beginning. 

We never saw the deer until it smashed into the car’s front. Darry dropped the tape and lost control of the Camry for a moment, caught it, but over-corrected and we skidded to a halt against the guardrail. We were pointed backward on the interstate, but with no cars around, Darryl got us righted and we pulled off. Rattling from the front and the scrape of the wipers on the bloody windshield as it cleared flesh from his view. He pulled off at the next exit.

The grille was smashed and the headlight on my side was cracked. Otherwise the car was ok, except for the blood streaks across the roof and the hairy bits sticking from the grille and hood. 

“God damn, son,” Darryl said. “I didn’t even see that fucker. You alright?”

“I’m good,” I said. 

“Shit,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

We got back on the highway and Darryl set the cruise control. I didn’t dare speak because I could tell his master plan had fallen apart. We crossed back into North Carolina in silence. Darryl seemed to be holding his breath and he let out a great sigh after we passed Mt. Airy.

“Stupid. This was all so fucking stupid,” he said. “What was I thinking?”

I kept my mouth shut, dry as it was, and wished I had a Coke or a beer. Pilot Mountain came into view and I began to wonder what the plan was now.

“What you gonna do, D?” I asked him. 

“I guess we’ll put it back,” he said. “Damn it.” He slammed his fist against the steering wheel. “This fucking sucks, man. I didn’t even see the damn deer.”

We pulled off at the King exit and looked for any sign of the cops. It was 1:30 a.m. and luckily the Food Lion was just a block off the highway.

“You know how to get to the airport right?” Darryl asked. “Just get off on Akron Drive and it goes right to the airport. Turn left on Liberty and the entrance is right there.” 

“I got it,” I said.

“I’ma follow you real close once we get off 52,” he said. “It won’t take but a couple minutes once we get off on Akron.”

I was more sleepy than high, but it wasn’t a 20 minute drive from King to downtown. Ten minutes from the airport to my house. We drove in the blankness of the night, bar traffic heading north out of town. A state trooper passed us near Rural Hall but got off on Hanes Mill Road, a crisis averted.

I was feeling good about things until we got off on Akron Drive. At the stoplight, the bass from the Camry rattled even the inside of my car.

‘Cause mic by mic, and stage by stage

Tape by tape, and page by page

When the crowd is moving I compete with the mix

The rougher the cuts, the rougher the rhyme gets

This idiot, I thought, has done lost his mind. Here we are, a block from the airport and he’s bumping the system without a care in the world.

I want you to hear this perfectly clear

Catch what I’m saying? You get the idea?

I hope you knowledge the beginning, ‘cause I’m finished this song

The rhyme gets rougher as the rhyme flows on.

I spoke to God and promised him that if I made it to Pfafftown without getting arrested that I would forget about Shelly Eller and ask Crystal to the prom. I would sleep with the calculus textbook on my face and hope Mrs. Outen was right about osmosis.