Satori on Skynyrd

Truth be told, I pretty much stopped eating meat about the same time I became truly committed to the concept of secular humanism. (Catchy opening, no?)

I think there’s more of a connection there than I first realized. When I stopped eating meat, people asked me how I “survived” without meat. What did I center my meals around? The same was true with humanism. “Don’t you feel a hole without God in your life? How do you get on without a moral compass?”

Well, I believe I do have a moral compass, of course (frankly, it's why I'm writing this in the first place.)

To boot, I believe in the m.o. that’s worked so well for the White Stripes, the whole Oulipo artists’ group and the free jazz-leaning Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, to name but a few examples: not lamenting such so-called “limitations,” but instead luxuriating in them.

Do I miss eating meat?

Sure.

“Sure” as in, even though it killed a part of my soul -- and maybe my marriage -- yes indeedy, I did enjoy those sweaty bouts of adulterous coitus. (Not speaking from experience here!) "Sure" in the same way that we relish telling stories about when we whipped someone but good, even as the thought of such violence secretly sickens us now. (We tend to not talk about when we got whipped, of course.)

So: sure. And he who says he doesn’t miss meat – he who’s tasted it, at least -- is probably lying. But righting (and writing) what you feel was probably a wrong in your life isn’t a subtraction, to my way of thinking, but rather the most admirable of additions.

* * * * * * *

My first brush with the concept of vegetarianism came long about 1982, if memory serves me. I’d gone over to a friend’s house, as had often been the case, to listen to records and watch a Showtime broadcast of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. My friend, Gary Helton, was a kid who had grown up fast. He grew up across the two-lane blacktop from my friends and I: a nascent neighborhood wholly apart from our own. There were tales of guys who drank beer and some that sold weed. One guy'd even dropped out of school, and it was said he bought condoms by the box. To our more Levitt-like burg, this land -- this "Brookfield"! seemed positively exotic.

Anyway, this friend, he had a ‘stache before the rest of us, drank before the rest of us, smoked before the rest of us, smoked pot before the rest of us. Perhaps predictably, he also dropped out of school before the rest of us.

One day, after dinner at his house – steak (bottle of A1), baked potato (butter, dabs of dour cream), iceberg salad (French dressing), dinner rolls (premade) and sweet tea (homemade, as I remember), we retired to his brother’s room to look at his records and to scarf, rather Tom and Huck-like, some stolen brownies.

More specifically, we went to look at his Lynyrd Skynyrd records. I can still name them in order today, as I used to do the planets, the better to impress my parents’ friends: pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd, Second Helping, Nuthin' Fancy, Gimme Back My Bullets, Street Survivors, and Skynyrds’s First…And Last, Gold and Platinum, Best of the Rest. (I don’t count any post-plane-crash stuff excepting the last three cleaning-the-vaults releases.)

So anyway, this friend, belly full of beef and butter and brownies, pulled out the holy grail of Skynyrd records, the out-for-three-days-only, pre-plane crash and too-close-for-comfort “flames cover” of Street Survivors, and, after making me wipe my hands on my jeans, allowed me to hold it. Holy damn. We stared at it for a bit, and I remember he would look at me, and I'd look back at him, and then we'd both look back down at the record, drawn in by the tractor beam that was forbidden music -- dirty music, cuss-friendly music, older kid's music -- back in the LP age. Guitarist Allen Collins, on the cover stage left, was wearing a Tom Wolfe-meets-Jimmy Page white linen suit with tails, along with what looks like a T-shirt sporting an iron-on decal of a striated, Japanese-style sun. Guitarist Gary Rossington rocked worn corduroys and a black and blue shirt, befitting the band’s rough-hewn image. Lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, in a thumbed nose to redneck literalists everywhere (see “Sweet Home Alabama”), sported a Neil Young T-shirt, circa Tonight’s The Night. Steve Gaines (who, along with Van Zant, perished in the crash), had on a plain red shirt tucked into a pair of Okie-befitting plain tan pants (eyes closed, he also boasted a spooky halo of fire). Bassist Leon Wilkeson sported a “My Grass is Blue” T-shirt and a top hat, which, being only ten years old, took me a few years to figure out.

But wildass, feral drummer Artimus Pyle? Ol’ Artie was sporting white-on-white tennis shoes, white blue and gold knee socks pulled high, cut-off jeans shorts, and, the piece de resistance, a blue T-shirt with a semi-circled “VEGETARIAN” written in white “Keep On Truckin’” style iron on letters.

I’m not even sure if I knew what Pyle was trying to get across at this time. What I know of now as a vegetarian was – well, it simply didn’t exist at that time, at least in my neighborhood. The crew I ran with thought of vegetarians as people who ate nothing but raw vegetables. Truly, people did not understand that you might not want to eat meat (or, conversally, you would choose all those raw vegetables). They thought of such folks much in the same way the thought of atheists: Lord have mercy -- they know not what they do.

(excerpted from larger work.)

ADDENDUM: Sonofabitch. As is just my luck -- and the luck of veg-friendly, Southern folk everywhere -- Pyle just got (re)arrested for failing to register as a sex offender, having pled guilty about a dozen years ago for indecent liberties on two young children (Pyle claims he was set up by an ex). File under: bad people wearing good T-shirts.