Near the end of last Tuesday’s tutoring session, he and I got a chance to shoot the breeze for a little while. I think Jim Bob was born with the used-car-salesman gene—you know, the innate ability to sell just about anything to just about anyone. I suspect that the right motivation could prompt most anyone to muster a sales pitch and the persistence to stay after someone until he or she has gotten the desired answer. But Jim Bob has that elusive quality that enables him to do so in a thoroughly likeable way. He can pester you and you’ll want to thank him for it.
In the span of about 15 minutes, he told me that a buddy of his—a fellow teenager, from the sound of it—had recently climbed Mt. Everest, and that his great-grandfather had been a good friend of Adolf Hitler. He was utterly unfazed by my lighthearted attempts at fact-checking his claims. (Jim Bob is an African-American. Was it likely his forebear would have been a chum of one of history’s most notorious proponents of “racial purity”? Well, to hear Jim Bob tell it, his great-granddad was a white German. And that mountain-climbing friend? He’s apparently rich, which explains why the challenges of even getting to the base of Everest were no big deal.)
When he perceived my continued incredulity at his tall tales, Jim Bob pulled out all the stops: “No, I mean for real for real,” he told me. I didn’t have an answer for the squaring of his claims, so we let them go.
I wish some of the other things Jim Bob and those close to him have shared with me were tall tales. Like the one about his getting jumped by five other boys for committing the transgression of being in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time—nevermind that he was there to visit his grandmother. Or the ones about broad-daylight street corner transactions just a block or two from his home and fistfights over careless missteps on new shoes.
Jim Bob’s is not a simple story.
I asked him whether he thought he could talk his way out of just about anything. He told me that he knows he can’t. Then he gave some supporting evidence. He said “Miss Kim doesn’t let me get away with that kind of stuff.” Then, as he glanced around the room, he remarked at the fact that Dottie and Clara and Gordon don’t, either. “And yet you’re here almost every week,” I said. “Why is that?” It’s a question Dottie’s asked him before. The answer? “I keep coming because I love y’all.”
Not a simple story, but a compelling one. The narrative of Jim Bob’s life is still being written. I can’t tell you how it ends, but I like the way it’s trending.
A real past yet also a real future. This is a narrative I want to keep reading.
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