Bootlegger County, State of Mississippi, is as dry as a sandpile in a Saudi Arabian back yard. Alcoholic beverages are verboten by edict of the governor.
What a piece of work is man to let the government tell us what we can drink, where we can drink, and how much of the proceeds should go into political pockets. It is an ominous precedent. If the bureaucratic mind can find a rationale for taxing beer, is mother’s milk, Coca Cola and lemonade far behind? But I shouldn’t complain solely about Mississippi. My state of Alabama is hardly enlightened. We boast state liquor stores. The state is in the booze business.
Illogic about the purchase and consumption of booze is everywhere. There’s more illegible legislation about booze in our state and county law books, than about those ten rules carved in Sinai granite. Illogic about the purchase and consumption of booze is everywhere. There’s more legislation about booze in our state and county law books, than about those ten rules carved in Sinai granite.
Take Bootlegger County (A pseudonym so they don’t lock me up.) Mississippi. Next door is Chugalug County (another pseudonym) Tennessee, awash in beer, wine, and more heavily fortified spirits. It’s as though Heaven and Hell were next door neighbors without the wide world in-between. Freedom on one side. Storm troopers on the other. Now, the boundary between the two counties is not marked by a guard house or border guards like you see in those newsreels of the early forties. The only way you know you’ve left the Sahara of Mississippi for the lush, watery swamps of Tennessee is the “Sportsman’s One Stop” on your right. An oasis on the fringe of the desert. It’s a filling station, as my generation describes it and sits a couple hundred yards on the Tennessee side of the border. It’s really more than a traditional filling station. You can fuel up yourself as well as the car.
They sell beer. Cold beer; in all its golden variations. You can sip an 8-ounce plastic cup of brew ($1) right there in the store while you’re admiring the yellow, red, and green fluorescent plastic worms. Or you can get yourself a 2-gallon plastic containerful to go. Some people claim they even deliver their merchandise. All this is very strange to a septuagenarian beer drinker, who marvels that legal restrictions on quenching your thirst with a malt-flavored beverage in these Southern United States are as spotty as a firehouse Dalmatian.
We spend a lot of summer weekends in Tishomingo, oops, I mean bootlegger County. It’s a restful, bucolic haven. But, since the great white way of Broadway, the museums and libraries of Manhattan, the art galleries of Paris, and even the gambling casinos of Tunica are not across the street, when I need entertainment I drive five miles down the road to the Sportsman’s One Stop — right over the state line to Tennessee. That “Single Stop” says it all; bait, beer, bologna sandwiches. Gas for the boat and entertainment, too. All under one roof.
I begin the entertainment with a question to the counter clerk. First I take a big swallow of my brew, look thoughtful and ask: “How come I can get me a beer here, but not across the river in Bootlegger County, mississippi? What’s going on here?”
“Well, most of them Mississippi folks is bootleggers and they keep on voting dry,” says my Tennessee counterman. A wide grin goes with this political analysis. “The bootleggers need the work, don’tya see.”
Yeah, I’ve heard that one before. It’s the streetwise answer 95% of the time. It assumes that the most popular occupation in bootlegger county is running whiskey, far outnumbering carpenters, engineers and accountants. Sometimes the reply includes gossip on the local sheriff’s moral purity. Big deal. He, like most voters, only gets ONE vote; or 5 or 6 if he’s got a big family. Still, there’s got to be more thirsty carpenters, vacationers, and accountants than greedy bootleggers and sheriffs with large families. You’d think the bootlegger/sheriff block would be overwhelmingly outvoted.
Answer No. 2 is what I call “the church folks” answer. That’s hard to understand, too. Having studied the demographics of South Central Mississippi, I know that church folks doesn’t mean Hindus or Buddhists. Furthermore, I know that the founder of the majority religious sect in South Central Mississippi once converted “six water pots of stone” into 18 gallons of joyous wine. It’s in the big black book, towards the end. The man who turned water into wine could not have detested this liquid that “gladdens the heart of man”.
The clerks at the Single Stop, when they’re not filling up 2-gallon plastic containers of beer and singing “Rocky Top”, like to talk about “the raid”. It happened last year. Like a chicken-eating turkey buzzard, federal and state lawmen swooped down on the nearby Tishomingo County marina. It sits on the Mississippi side of the border: that is, on the “wrong” side of the border — full of docked boats and open bottles of fire water sitting right out in the open. We landsmen find it strange, but there’s a whole social class of weird mariners who buy boats that never see the sea. They’re saloons that float on the bosom of the river. Their occupants like to wear sailor hats and drink beer in a deck chair.
In this case, we’re talking Tishomingo County boats on a Tishomingo County lake. And in Mississippi, by mandate of the legislature, even lakes are dry. And so are the boats that float on their surface. Well, these weren’t. Whereupon the cops arrested so many boozy admirals that they had to haul them off to court in a bus. All this, not 500 yards from the Tennessee filling station that’ll let you sip on the premises, carry it out in cases, fill up your car radiator with Bud Lite, or as some say, deliver it to your front door. If they knew how, they’d like to link every kitchen sink faucet in Tennessee to their Budlite spigot — kinda like your PC tapping into the internet. Go figure these mysteries
