That time I almost met Harper Lee.

I take great pride in the Lee last name.

According to legend, and also my father who, among his many world travels, visited the “Lee place” in Ireland, etc. I think, from what I can gather, that it was hardly more than a couple of sticks stuck upright in a slab of mortar. 

A perfect potato.

I mean, that’s been centuries back; the only palpable evidence was that of the family crest, but don’t ask me what’s on that thing. I couldn’t tell you. What I do know is that there were only ever two Lee brothers who set out for the New World. Both made it, but on the way over, one lost everything except like a goat or two, a cow, and half a potato…oh, and of course his precious family. The other managed to hold onto all his money, though I think he lost a daughter.

I don’t know; it’s not important.

Point is, in a way, we’re all related. And, in that same way, I get to take all the credit for what everyone else in the family did, does, and has done. Even though, we don’t know each other. And probably never will. Because why should we.

However, following this by-now established logic in my made-up world of existence and family trees, that means, then that Harper Lee is related to me. And that means I’m a part of her great American novel. (Also, it means I’m related to Peggy Lee, Bruce Lee, Gypsy Rose Lee, Jason Lee, and probably Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Vivian Leigh, even though they tried to cleverly hide the fact by misspelling the Lee last name. But, I wasn’t fooled).

There are many more Lees/Leighs/even Lis (like Jet Li), in my family, but today’s focus is on Harper for the simple fact that I almost met her once.

My friend Lyle and I (several years ago, now, I guess it was) were taking a trip down to Pensacola. We have some good friends who live down there, still, and it makes me jealous to think about it since I too wish to live near the water but I still love them. Lyle had diligently (as he is wont to do) made all the travel arrangements. I try to always maintain great relationships with extremely orderly people.  I secretly wish I were, and every now and then, I can aggravate myself into becoming like them, but it’s ever so much, much easier just to find friends who already are like that, and then support them in their decision-making process. This I can do, in my sleep. (And that’s usually exactly where I do it).

Lyle had chosen a more scenic route, which if I recall correctly, actually ended up being a better route, anyway, and a portion of it wound its way through Monroeville, Alabama.  This was exciting news to me.

I knew of Monroeville; one of my favorite authors is Capote. Not so much for anything stylistically, but more because he was such a loudmouth, one-of-a-kind original. For me, that’s how I divide my favorites in literature: those who wrote well and those who lived well.  And though I personally think I’m nothing like him, I still blush at the comparison people often make between us. I think it has mostly to do with the fact that I, like him, am somewhat addicted to scarfs.

I've been to Paradise, and I've been to Me.

I also wear a Fedora, though, which puts me, perhaps, a little more in the category of Elvis Costello, someone else I’m often compared to, for some reason. I look nothing like him, and besides, I think he favors Bono. Who recently wrote a poem about Elvis Presley (not a good one, in my opinion – I’m supposing there’s musical accompaniment that I missed hearing). A few members of Presley’s family, a small tributary of it anyway still gurgling along in Mississippi, on his father’s side, are close family friends of U.L., so I don’t know, maybe it all comes full circle.

I’ve gotten off track, as usual. Sorry.

I was well familiar with Monroeville, like I said, because I often re-read and enmesh myself in one of my favorite autobiographies, Capote, written by one Gerald Clarke; it truly takes a good long look at this tiny town. It’s also well-written, I should point out.  Which is really all it could be, considering the stink Capote caused about his “invention” of creative nonfiction. I know, I know, he never really said, out loud, that he “invented” creative nonfiction, but so superior did he think his ability to cull a story from truth along the tenets of fiction that he, I’m sure, believed it his invention by proximity of mastery, if nothing else.

That’s what all geniuses do, you know.

So, I was elated when Lyle said we’d be passing through. I’d always wanted to drive through Monroeville. I mean, it couldn’t be that large. It wouldn’t take up much time.

We were stopping for gas anyway.

The trouble was – the rain. It was pouring, open-spout, straight down, as rain tends to do. And, it was a little more off the beaten path of Highway 41, than it appeared to be on the map. Still, there’s no better motivation to take on an adventure quite like the need for gas. As we tentatively took the exit towards Monroeville, it dawned on Lyle that another great, literary giant lived here: Nell Harper Lee, who in the recent cinema had been portrayed on the big screen by both Catherine Keener and Sandra Bullock. The New Yorker had recently published a letter from Harper Lee in which she openly criticized Bullock’s version of her in the lesser Capote film (put out literally on the heels of the award-winning one). “I never wore penny loafers,” Lee said. Or something like that; it had to do with shoes, I believe.

Her curmudgeon is still thick as a pie crust. But that letter I read way after the fact of this trip, as you’re about to see.

We should track down her house, then, I said to Lyle. Let’s bite the bullet, and be those people, I said, let’s ask the locals where she’s buried. 

For shame, I know. But, we couldn’t help it. She’d not been heard of in ages, she might as well be dead, in a plot right along Capote, if indeed, he were buried here, as well. I found out and soon, though, that she wasn’t dead. As a matter of fact, she was very well alive, and living in Monroeville.

Let me back up first, a little.

So, we’d found ourselves, finally, under a tall awning at a Chevron. And not a moment too soon, I should add. I get nervous easily on road trips (having fun, of course) and was in need of a restroom break. It doesn’t take much, as anyone who knows me will gladly tell you. While in the Chevron, I did bite the bullet – I did the one thing I dislike others for doing, because truth be known, I don’t get starry-eyed. At least, not easily. I remember my Ya Ya saying once that no one was that important; we all have to shit, she said. (Forgive the imagery and language, but that’s fairly provocative, and it’s kept me in good stead for many years).

But, regardless, I did it: I became a tourist of wanderlust and asked the guy behind the cash register where her grave was. And also, Capote’s house, and her house, also. The guy behind me answered. She’s not dead, he said. And he should know; he was her mailman, and was on his way to deliver her mail, right then.

And for the record, Capote’s house was torn down years ago, and the mailman wasn’t sure if there was even a marker there, but maybe? Anyway, we could find Harper Lee on the second floor of the bank, in the middle of town. She kept her office there, and we could just get out and go upstairs, and on the right, knock at her door.

The real deal. No deal.

I hurried back to the car, told Lyle, and we immediately agreed that we should do this. We should just go further into the town and get lost and find her and well…let’s just get that part done, first, we said.

The town wasn’t, isn’t, large, but it doesn’t take a space much bigger than a living room to get lost in when you don’t know where you’re going. The rain was relentless. We took several wrong turns, and I believe, at the last minute, we were about to give up when a KFC roared into view and there behind it was a clunky, solid-brown brick building with an unobtrusive sign stating that this was indeed the First Bank of Monroeville.

We pulled into a parking space and stared at it. Here it was; here, she was, somewhere tucked away inside like the thousands and thousands of dollar bills. I imagined her wound as tightly into her own persona as a roll of quarters. Just as heavy, too, I thought, with her mystique and her bitten thumb attitude at the literary world. Who could blame her? Some critics don’t really believe she wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, anyway; others don’t give the fact that she had anything to do with In Cold Blood a leg to stand on, (I mean, Capote didn’t), so where do you go with that?

Poor thing.

However…she was still a giant, and more power to her if she’s fooled them all. (But I don’t believe that for a moment).

We took a deep breath, Lyle and I, and scared ourselves. What would we say to her? Hey, Harper, good job on that book and all?  Or, Atticus, cool name, where’d that come from? Or, are you Scout?

The rain kept on and on and on.

And, then…so did we.

We pulled out of the parking space, too intimidated to meet her. At least, this is what we said to ourselves, heading further south towards old friends who hadn’t written any works of “staggering genius” (yet), and a mile of sand that wouldn’t care what questions we asked. We told ourselves, Look at us – what we have on, we’re wearing traveling clothes (for me that was pair of exercise pants and a Golden Girls overshirt).

You couldn’t go meeting the First Lady of Fiction looking like we did.

Plus, the rain! We would have come across as obsessed fans, a couple of soaking rats. We’d probably have been arrested. Of course, I’d spit the fact of that mailman out as fast as I could, if that were the case. Aiding and abetting is a crime, too.

I know I missed a real opportunity that day. But, only in the flesh, in the literal, only in the very real chance of having met her, shaked her hand, thanked her, whatever would have happened. Everything else about that moment, though…pure gold, I must say. A great memory.

Just do it what it says.

We took our last exit in Alabama, just miles from the Florida state line, through a town so small I’m still not sure it was even there. Except for this sign. Spray-painted across an empty storefront.

I don’t know, but for me, this made the trip.

This sign was worth all the money in the First Bank of Monroeville.

Every gas station in Georgia is like a mini-casino.

I was ready to go the minute I woke up. For two reasons: I was ready for a road trip, first of all; also, I’m rather moody, and I am completely helpless about it.  One second I’m the life of the party, and the next, I want a small closet with no windows and a fur coat to roll around in, and a really filthy martini in an oversized glass without the garnish unless they stuff the olives with blue cheese.

I guess I get it from my mother’s side.

We were coming to Atlanta for a wedding.  Well, actually I was coming to Atlanta; I wasn’t attending the wedding, which was, at the last minute, occurring three hours north of Atlanta, in the tiny western corner of North Carolina, and three more hours was simply not on my list of Things I’d Like to Add To My Day On the Road.  I had elected to stay at the hotel, alone, despite the fact that the room is on the 5th floor and I don’t do heights well, not even 5th floor heights.

We’d decided the day before, during our “dialogue,” that we weren’t going to let time dictate this adventure, short as it was; no, we were going to simply let things unfold, play with several decks of cards, maybe even throw a hand of Skip Bo in there, you know, whatever – fill in with your favorite cliche, the point still holds.

And, immediately, we were denied this. 

We overslept, first of all, which I’m still having trouble wrapping my mind around as we had never set a definite departure time, but somehow, you can always manage to oversleep.  You know it, your mind knows it, your body knows, your uncle who’s already called fifteen times to find out “where on the road you are” knows it.

And, as is our way, the first item of business was correcting an oversight: Max.

He’d been completely overlooked; he had to be boarded which is about as close to his favorite thing on God’s green earth as having your tongue ironed, with a whole can of Faultless Starch sprayed on it first. Of course, you just don’t know the definition of chaos until you take an anxious White German Shepherd to a vet’s office, which was eerily like a normal doctor’s office with the exception of the magazine selection, and then you try and convince him to make nice with the other dogs as well as the thousand plus smells of previous dogs and other wildlife who had also been boarded, smells that permeate suspiciously unknown in that secret olfactory dog world (though believe me, there’s plenty your own nose can pick up)…suffice it to say, Max doesn’t do this well.  He doesn’t like change.  How Mississippian of him.

Sugar, the cat, on the other hand, couldn’t care less if you lived or breathed so long as she had food and you gave up and let her drink from the dog bowl, instead of her own.  I guess it’s her way of being mean. (She has more than one way, though – it’s especially fun when she eats his food, which he lets her do, because she’s allergic to it and her bottom lip swells out, pink and tender.  It even muffles her ability to meow, and so I laugh at her because she knows better, but I also help her as I’m not entirely heartless where animals are concerned).

The secretary at the vet’s, God bless her, was less than enthused with absolutely everyone who brought in an animal. I couldn’t imagine why she stayed at such a job if it made her miserable, and passive-aggressive. Then I remembered the enconomy and so naturally I had to create a long backstory about how her husband had left her for a younger man (I mean, let’s make it interesting, ok), and she was devastated and had only been a housewife all these years, and a good mother, to her three children, all of whom hated her because she was selfishly unstylish and too strict about church, and again, passive-aggressive. She drove a mint-green Geo Prism, a gift to herself after her husband left, and when she re-entered the workforce (one she’d never actually entered), it took her begging a friend to speak on her behalf to the veterinarian, which worked because the said friend was having an affair with the veterinarian, and so to keep the peace, and his marriage, he gave her the job. And she took a not-too-small delight in expanding her passive-agressiveness as a way of “getting back” at the cheating veterinarian, projecting her own anger about her husband’s infidelity onto each of his clients.

I mean, come on, a mint-green Geo Prism? 

She announced, more than once, to each person who came in that the wait was going to be long because some people had made appointments at the last minute (i.e., we did) and as they weren’t regularly scheduled, whatever that meant exactly, it had added to the backlog; also, all the vets were in a dental lab until noon, so only the vet techs were available to handle boarders.

It was at this point, that for the first time in my life, I found a need to read Cat Fancy, a magazine for the lonely and sexually frustrated if ever there was one. Max evenutally just had to be taken outside, so great was his angst and energy, specifically at the Brittany Spaniel, named Gus, who I think just really wanted a new pal. I bet if dogs were sent off to war, they’d return with greater compassion for each other. What dogs need, I think, is a good, long war story, a survival of the trenches sort of story.  That would really make them bond, I think. But, unfortunately, we’re Democrats now, so we may never know.

After waiting what felt like a day, we finally managed to hand Max over, much to his chagrin and whining, and get on the road.  The weather held. The ride wasn’t painful. And then we needed gas.

Every gas station in Georgia is like a mini-casino.

I’m not even a little bit kidding. I knew the lottery was offered in this heathen state but I wasn’t aware of how the gas stations were designed, per se.  I didn’t like the layout. My biggest reason for this is because when I go to the bathroom, I actually prefer, to the point of enjoying, my privacy there.

The men’s restroom at this particular Quik Jak, or whatever it was called, had a very unique design: first, there were no doors, just a large white bricked entranceway, with a sink smack-dab in the middle (if you didn’t wash your hands on your way out, Cigarette Sally and her fourth husband and everyone else in this less than green part of creation would know). That’s never a problem for me, as I am bit obessive about hand-washing especially with the you know what circling the globe. (It amuses me that they’ve changed the name H1N1 to save the pigs, as if we could forget the fact that we’ve called it swine flu 24-7 for a solid blame month. Amanda says it’s not for the pigs, but the people, and something about Egypt and the slaughter of the 300,000. She’s like a Mother Theresa/Arianna Huffington hybrid, that one).

I always find the bathroom first, when in gas stations, because I’m not there to talk to the people. But at this gas station, “talk to people” was all I wanted to do. In the back, there were ten or eleven long tables set up, and they were packed with people. I thought it was an extension of the restaurant, but no:  they were bingo tables, and they had squatters. I hadn’t fully understood it until I turned the corner at the end of the chips/chocolate/quick-fix tire foams/jewelry aisle and found myself in front of one of the three tv screens whose sole purpose in this world was to broadcase HDTV Bingo. Words were exchanged, I realized my costly mistake and then turned around and there was the open entrance to the bathroom. Twelve seconds tops; almost a record for urinal discovery…plus, the excitement of disrupting a Bingo game…and not a priest in sight of the lot of them, either.

Both her age and her Bingo.

On my way out, I quickly scooted past the Bingo-ers and found myself in the middle of this treacherous Gamble-Land, beside an elderly couple, and tall, bright orange and yellow booths.  Each of the aged couple had canes and a slight lean, a lean that I think was attached literally to a quarter slot game of some indeterminable skill: it involved dropping quarters into the machine, cursing, convincing themselves to do it “one more time,” and then stuttering on their loose legs out the front door.

Obviously, with such bells-and-whistles stimulation, I could hardly ignore the temptation. I bought several scratch-off cards and like a squirrel, twittered back to the car to find a lucky nickel. (Also, I just joined the actual Twitter online phenomenon, but I was using the above form of “twitter” as an actual verb).

I won $15. 

Gambling saved the morning, deep breaths were taken, the thrill of scratching anything off with a nickel was soundly recognized and appreciated and we took off to master the last 35 miles left to the city of Atlanta.

And, believe it or not, after several missed exits, our humors were restored completely and kept in check. We found the hotel and in our rooms, a deep sunken whirlpool tub plus an additional glassed-in shower, and a doorbell. (And of course, in the closets bathrobes for each guest). I was ecstatic. I’m wearing it right now. I love a bathrobe.

All that and my big win of $15…

…which is, ironically I discovered, the exact price of a martini here.

If I were looking at someone right now, I’d make my conspiracy eyes. As it is, I guess I’ll just go sink down into the tub and read some more.

Sigh.