Okay, it's a prose poem, so sue me.

Pictures of Infinitis


So, it’s like this. I started taking pictures of cars when they drove past me on the road. I seen photographers on TV at races and parades and they was always crouching down taking pictures as the cars drove by. I mean, I had a camera, and I lived in a town, right? There’s cars there. So, I took pictures.

I squatted down on Wynnton Rd and took a few shots and had ‘em developed. They was blurry. That was no good at all. Didn’t look like speed, looked like I was stupid. I tried moving as I took the pictures and I kept running into parked cars. One of ‘em was backing out and run over my foot. He was screaming at me and telling me to get outa his way he was backing up and I was screaming at him that I was an artist and he got back in the car and tried to back over me again. I learned that art, it don’t beat a Buick.

I hit on the idea of squatting down and just moving the camera. That worked better. I didn’t get run over and the photos, they turned out nice. Then some guy named Crud, that was his name, Danny Crud, he stopped and he wanted to know why I was taking pictures of him. I just took off running because I know Crud he’s not a nice guy. I watched him beat some kid’s nose off in the 6th grade. Danny, he was 17 then and stories go he wasn’t good in school, but nobody was gonna ask him if he was dumb, so we all just kept quiet until he got hauled off.

Then he showed up with a car. He drove all over the playground one morning and got everybody dirty. None of us we never said a word because Danny he might come back. He had a car and he was insane. We knew in the 6th grade what insane was, and that was Danny.

I started going around and taking pictures of cars in driveways. No one said I could, but ain’t no one said I couldn’t, neither. So, I did. I did that for awhile, and I must have 200 photos of Chevy’s and Fords. I got ‘em all out one time when I was fourteen and I spread ‘em all over my bed and I looked at them and they was dull. I tried rearranging ‘em and putting the red cars together and the blue cars together and then the four doors together and no matter what I did, they were dull. I looked at my camera and I looked at all my pictures and I put them all in a bag and shoved them in the back of the closet. There was no point, really. Wasn’t worth doing if it was gonna be dull, was it?

I gave up taking pictures and spent high school taking all the wood working shops I could get. I don’t know. Maybe I was fifteen when it hit me that I liked selling worms. I had got me a book out the library and it had a section on worms. I used to look at them worms and wonder how they got to be so weird looking, and what it was like to eat dirt for food. I tried eating dirt but it didn’t do nothing for me, so I give that up, but I still liked worms.

Ain’t no one in my family never done much fishing. My dad he used to claim he was fishing, but then mom she caught him with the neighbor lady and he didn’t fish no more. He just helped around the house a lot and looked miserable. So I didn’t know much about fishing.

I had a friend what lived in a whole other part a town and I visited him one day and there was this store near to his house called the Bait Shoppe. It smelled funny. They was a sign on it what said, Night crawlers and Red Wigglers. I asked Jimmy what that place was and he said a bait store, and I said, well, yeah I can read that, but bait for what and he said bait for fishing, and I said, oh. Then he said you know, worms and bugs. Dang. It was a store full a worms.

I forgot about going down to the creek to stop it up like me and Jimmy usually did, and walked in that store and just looked around. It was full a worms. Lots a different kinds a worms. Beautiful worms, all different colors and shapes and they was bugs, too. Some a them bugs had like 200 legs and they run all over the place. I just stood there and looked around. The man in there was smoking and he looked at me and he said, what you want, and I said, worms, and he said how many, and I said, no sir, it’s just they’re beautiful. He looked at me kinda strange and nodded and spit into some a the worms. Them worms, they like spit, he said. I just looked around some more and then Jimmy he pulled me outa there. That’s creepy old Mr. McGregor. Don’t go in there he’s crazy. He likes worms. I like worms I said, and Jimmy, he looked at me and shook his head. Not like him. My paw says he puts ‘em down his pants. Wow. I never thought of that.

It took me awhile to work up the guts to go over and see Mr. McGregor again. It took me until I could drive, to be exact. Then one day after school I had the car for awhile and I was just driving around like I did back then. Gas was cheap and my folks was paying for it anyways, so I drove around looking for weird stuff. Well, then one day I drove past the bait store and I just pulled over and sat there. I felt weird and my hands were all sweaty, but I got out and I walked in and there was Mr. McGregor reading the Sporting News and smoking a big cigar. The store still smelled weird, but I thought it smelled great. He looked up at me and said outa the corner of his mouth, yeah, and I didn’t know what to say. It took nearly all I had just to go in that place. Truth be told I drove around the block 5 times before I parked and got out. I didn’t have nothing to say, so I looked around a bit then I said, nice worms. He nodded. Then he spit in the worms again. He started to say, worms like spit, but I finished it for him. He just got out worms and I said, like spit. And he looked at me and said, how’d you know that? I just shrugged.
Then I said, you ever need help around here? I could sweep up, or put worms in bags. He turned a page in the Sporting News and considered. I took a step closer. I could see he was reading a story on Felix Milan, the Kitten. He played second base for the Braves. He tapped his finger on Felix’s head and said, sometimes. Then he turned the page again. I stood there another minute or two when he said, brooms back there. He pointed with his head and I walked behind the counter and got the broom. I had a job.

It was like that for more than five years. I finished high school and started work the next Monday full time at the bait store. For the next five years and a few months Mr. McGregor read the Sporting News and smoked cigars and said maybe 10 words a day. Pretty soon whenever anybody come in I helped them. I became an expert on worms and bugs. I never did see him put no worms down his pants. He was kind to the worms. He hated that people put hooks through them. Worms was his job, but a passion of his, too. He really cared about worms and he taught me to treat worms right. Bugs, he didn’t care too much about. If a bug got out of the box, he’d stomp on it. Worms, they didn’t escape too regular. But he wouldn’t have stomped on a worm, no matter what. I learned a lot.

One day I went to lunch and when I come back he was sitting there reading the Sporting News and smoking his cigar, only he wasn’t really. He was dead. He was sitting there and the paper was open to a story on Willie Mays and the cigar was burning down, and he was just staring. But he was dead. It took me awhile to figure out he was dead and not just extra quiet. The ambulance took him away.

He didn’t have family. That’s sort of the way it goes for worm men. Not too many have a family. Maybe they got a brother, maybe a sister, but it takes a special woman to marry into the worm life and aren’t many a them around. I went to the funeral. Closed the store to do it, too. First time it’d been closed during regular hours since I’d been there. Now, you might think it’s winter, and they’s been an ice storm. Ain’t no one gonna be fishing today. Well, you’d be right, but Mr. McGregor would be there, just in case. Worms is all about public service.

Funeral was nice. He was old. Didn’t have a family, but he had a few friends who came and the preacher said Mr. McGregor was a friend of those who didn’t have friends. He’d been talking to Mr. McGregor, that’s for sure. He was always on about how no one cares about worms, that someone had to care, and that was what he did. He was passionate about worms.

I didn’t know what to do, so I kept the store open for a week or so and then the lawyer called me. I figured he was gonna tell me to close it down, but he told me the will said the store was mine. Mr. McGregor gave it to me. I went to the cemetery and carried a few worms to his grave and set them loose and said thank you for the worm store.

I started franchising the worm store a year or so later. I heard all about doing that on the TV and it made sense. Well, it made sense to me. No one else thought it made sense. But it did, and I made money off it. Now, sure, some worm store owners they didn’t have the passion for the worm business. They didn’t realize that worms understand. You can’t just treat a worm like a bug. Bugs, they don’t much care. The life of a bug isn’t all that good no matter what bug it is. But worms, they know more than you’d give ‘em credit for knowing. So, some failed and some did well, and I made more and more money.

I was going through his stuff – he left just about everything he had to me, but he didn’t have much except the store – one night just before closing the Bait Store. There was a diary in there. Turned out he was in the war. He was in the Pacific at some place called the Admiralty Islands. I looked for them, and you can’t find ‘em on a map. Not on most maps, at least. Six hundred of them landed and a week later two hundred was left. The rest was dead. I remembered that one time he told me worms saved his life. I was just a kid then, and didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I read how he was isolated and ate worms for three days. He told me that he was just making up to the worms for what they done for him. I asked him why he sold them to be eaten by fish if he felt like that and he sat there looking at the Sporting News and shaking his head. He said, you don’t understand the order of things yet. But you’re young. You’ll figure it out one day. I don’t know if I ever did. But I never had to eat worms to keep alive.

Bait made me rich. Pretty soon there were 500 McGregor Bait stores in Mississippi alone. I got a cut from every bug and worm sold. Then I was driving a Cadillac with a trunk full of worms when this car drove past me. It was like with worms when I was 14. I watched it go in my rearview mirror and thought, that’s just beautiful. I didn’t know what kind a car it was, but I saw it again, and turned around and followed it. I caught up by driving crazy. It was this thing called an Infiniti. I followed it for awhile, then went back to the store and sat there reading the Sporting News – Mr. McGregor he had a lifetime full paid up subscription and I just never told the Sporting News people he was dead – and thinking.

I was sitting there thinking about Infinitis and all of a sudden I remembered my camera and my photographs of cars. I wondered if my pictures were dull because I was taking pictures of dull cars? I went and bought a good camera after work and drove to the Infiniti dealer and took a roll of pictures and had them developed. They were beautiful. Sexy and special. If they’d been women they’d have been modeling crotchless panties for Fredericks or something.

Worms still meant a lot to me, but the bait business was down. People have been flushing toilets into lakes for so long that no one wants to eat fish any more. Plus, plastic worms have a larger share of the bait business than ever before. I hired this young boy to run Mr. McGregor’s store and then I sold off the bait franchises to some international bait conglomerate from Taiwan. I was richer than I figured possible. Women love me.

First, I bought an Infiniti. Then I got another one, and then I had to get a red one. Now, I got seventeen of them. But I’m rich, so what do I care? I got a big garage to keep them in. It holds thirty cars; I’ve just got seventeen. I stood there looking at my cars and thought, what can I do to give back? I’ve got mine, but I have to share my love of the only car with a soul. The Infiniti.

Starting small was nothing to me. I took a bait store and got rich off of it. I figured I could do that again for just about anything. I’ve been selling stuff for my whole life, near about.

I took out an ad in the paper. Now I’m taking pictures of Infinitis and writing ads for people who want to sell their used Infiniti. It’s like I joined up with the little boy in me. I’m finally taking pictures of cars that matter. I try not to buy them, but sometimes I do. A lot of times when I take the picture and then write the ad the people look at them and decide not to sell. One man he told me he had no idea his car was so wonderful until I took shots of it next to a big beautiful field full of cows. Another woman looked at the pictures and sold her house and now she lives in her Infiniti. I don’t charge much. Just for my time. I don’t need the money, but if I’m going to be away from my Infiniti I want to get money for doing that. My next plan is to sell worms and bugs out of traveling Infiniti bait shops. If you need a worm, I’ll be there.

If I die tomorrow I’ll be a happy man. I’ve had a good life. Just don’t tell the Sporting News people.